Diane Ackerman

Diane Ackerman is a poet and author whose works include On Extended Wings, and A Natural History of the Senses. She was born in Waukegan, Illinois, received an M.A., M.F.A., and Ph.D. from Cornell University. Other poetry has been published in numerous literary periodicals and in the books The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral (1976), Wife of Light (1978), Lady Faustus (1988), and Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New and Selected Poems (1991). She has taught at several universities and writes for The New Yorker.

One of the things I like best about animals in the wild is that they're always off on some errand. They have appointments to keep. It's only we humans who wonder what we're here for. The Moon By Whale Light, 1991.

 

Bats eat so much food each evening that they have weighed in at as much as 50 percent heavier after one night's dining. Ibid.

 

Suddenly, smoke billowed from underneath the bridge. No, not smoke but a column of bats. Ibid.

 

Bats kept surging out, and soon four columns stretched miles across the sky. A few strays looped and fed near us, passing like shuttles through the weave of the trees. The night was noticeably free of insects, but that was no surprise. These bats would eat five thousand pounds of insects that one night alone. Ibid.

 

Nothing looks more contented than a resting alligator. The mouth falls naturally into a crumpled smile, the eyes half close in a sleepy sort of way . . . Ibid.

 

Whales navigate through a rich, complicated landscape at a stately pace, slow as zeppelins, majestic and alert. Ibid.

 

The ocean transmits sound in strange and unlikely ways. There is a layer of water, known as the deep sound channel, in which sound waves can be trapped and spread great distances because they bend back into the channel over and over, without losing much energy. Under those circumstances, whale sound can travel as much as five hundred miles before blending into background noise. Ibid.

 

As we flew down across the Canadian Arctic, we were beneath an arc of northern lights, which were pure green and bell-shaped. We and the plane were the clapper of this bell, with the green light over us. And for the first time in my life I felt that I was in the position of the whale that is singing to you when you're in the boat and just listening to it. Ibid.

 

We say dawn breaks, as if something were shattering, but what we mean is that waves of light crest over the earth. Ibid.

 

When a whale sleeps, it slowly tumbles in any-old-crazy, end-over-end, sideways fashion, and may even bonk its head on the bottom. Ibid.

 

Just because we have evolved minds that crave order doesn't mean that nature is orderly. Evolution is a sleeping watchdog. It is possible for us to disturb it, or it may wake on its own. Either way, expect commotion. The rarest of the Rare, 1995.

 

I love to sketch with words and try to make portraits of life in process, and to ponder things . . . But nature is also great fun. To pretend that nature isn't fun is to miss much of thejoy of being alive . . . Ibid.

 

A hundred million monarchs migrate each year. Gliding, flapping, hitching rides on thermals like any hawk or eagle, they fly as far as four thousand miles and as high as two thousand feet . rivaling the great animal migrations of Africa, the flocking of birds across North America. Ibid.

 

Although it may be a little odd to think of it as a form of armor, smell plays many crucial roles in an insect's life. It's similar to a telephone wire over which different kinds of messages can flow: threat, invitation, courtship; the whereabouts of food; a call to arms; a password; a death knell; the trail home. Ibid.

 

Part of the irony of of environmentalism is questing for solutions when you know you're part of the problem. Ibid.

 

Astronauts returning from orbit have marveled at how little of human life can be seen from space - not the wars or political boundaries, not the cities or farms, not the subtleties of custom, adolesence, or love. Ibid.