Last month I spent three days at the Outer Banks in North Carolina. While there I read again Henry Beston'slyrical and classic book, The Outermost House, from which the following excerpt was edited:

 “No aspect of nature on this beach is more mysterious to me than the flights of these shore-bird constellations. The constellation forms in an instant of time, and in that same instant develops its own will. Birds which have been feeding yards away from each other, each one individually busy for his body’s sake, suddenly fuse into this new volition and, flying, rise as one, coast as one, tilt their dozen bodies as one, and as one wheel off on the course which the new group will has determined….My special interest is the instant and synchronous obedience of each speeding body to the new volition. By what means, by what methods of communication does this will to suffuse the living constellation that its dozen or more tiny brains know and obey it in such an instance of time? Schools of fish, I am told, make similar mass changes of direction….We need another wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by compli-cated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incomplete-ness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not our brethren, they are not our underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth. “ The Outermost House by Henry Beston –[edit acg]

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