Peter Matthiessen
Peter Matthiessen was educated at Yale and the Sorbonne. He founded the Paris Review. He has written a number of novels, including At Play in the Fields of the Lord. A few of his non-fiction works include The Cloud Forest: A Chronicle of the South American Wilderness; Blue Meridian; The Tree Where Man Was Born; The Snow Leopard; Sand Rivers; In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, and Men's Lives.
The great auk, slaughtered indiscriminately across the centuries for its flesh, feathers, and oil, was vanishing, and the last birds, appearing now and then on lonely shores, were granted no protection. On the contrary, they were pursued more intensely than ever for their value as scientific specimens. Wildlife in America, 1959.
The auk, from a practical point of view, was doubtless a dim-witted inhabitant of Godforsaken places, a primitive and freakish thing, ill-favored and ungainly. Ibid.
. . . the great auk was the mightiest of its family, a highly evolved fisherman and swimmer, an ornament to the monotony of northern seas, and for centuries a crucial food source for the natives of the Atlantic coasts. Ibid.
. . . it (the auk) was a living creature which died needlessly, the first species native to North America to become extinct by the hand of man. Ibid.
The finality of extinction
is awesome,
and not unrelated
to the finality of eternity. Ibid.
No species but man, so far as is known, unaided by circumstance or climatic change, has ever extinguished another, and certainly no species has ever devoured itself, an accomplishment of which man appears quite capable. Ibid.
The concept of ecology&emdash;the relationships of living things to their environments&emdash;is important to an understanding of wildlife abundance. In nature, each creature has a niche or environment in which it finds the conditions necessary for survival and reproduction. Ibid.
. . . a creature is more or less "adaptable" according to its ability to adjust to alterations in its environment. Ibid.
It is no coincidence that the North American creatures in extreme peril of extinction, including the great majority of rare fishes, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals, and the rare birds without exception, share two consistent characteristics: they were localized or uncommon before the white man affected them, and they were unadaptable to change. Ibid.
The only doomed form of recent years which does not seem to fall into either category is the Eskimo curlew, and this species was, for all practical purposes, a victim of the great commercial slaughters which ended the nineteenth century. For the curlew, protection came too late. Ibid.
The famine induced in the Southern States by the aftermath of the Civil War was a further setback to the songbirds, and the widespread consumption of robins and others among the larger species was practiced among the poor well into the present century. Ibid.
The variety of life in nature can be compared to a vast library of unread books, and the plundering of nature is comparable to the random discarding of whole volumes without having opened them, and learned from them. Ibid.
The restlessness of shorebirds, their kinship with the distance and swift seasons, the wistful signal of their voices down the long coastlines of the world make them, for me, the most affecting of wild creatures. I think of them as birds of wind, as "wind birds." The Wind Birds, 1967.
They (birds) are high up on the pyramid, in the class Aves of our own phylum Chordata, sharing not only our vertebrae but our warm blood and central nervous system, and not a few behavioral traits besides. Ibid.
The great Zen Buddhist teacher Eihei Dogen said, "Why leave behind the seat that exists in your own home and go off aimlessly to the dusty realms of other lands? Do not be afraid of the true dragon." The dragon is the buddha nature, the essence of existence, which is everywhere. You don't have to go anywhere to find it, it's right here, right now. Once you have that sense of life, it doesn't matter where you are. You're always home. Talking on the Water, 1994.
When you're camping or trekking, certain places feel right for resting or spending the night, and others don't. It's not simply a matter of finding a level spot out of the wind or close to a stream. There are other intuitions that make a place feel right. Ibid.