Angst

First up, I am anxious that this dunnock has one of those horrid growths on his neck. See where the feathers open out on the right side in the right hand picture?

Still no sign of Lopsy - and I blame this.

Meantime, I also worry about squirrel violence. Leaving food caches out can unnaturally increase competition. Jane Goodall worried about that with the chimpanzees as she used to leave bananas. There's an ethologist, Teresa Rowley? Something like that... who believes that almost all interspecies aggression is a stress response - and that on the whole, we cause the stress.

And then there's the angst about our other well-intended interventions. "Management" in conservation. This is something that Cal Flynn addresses at the end of Islands of Abandonment. She says that we have an instinct to roll up our sleeves and act, but that may suggest a kind of hubris and be unnecessary if not counter-productive.

She writes, "[T]he absence of man is often all the stimulus required to start the resurrection. Time is, after all, the great healer. The question is, 'How long does it need?' Then, 'How long have we got?' It may not be long. This is the time of a confessional, the admission of sins. this is a time to pray, if you know how, to God, or to Gaia, or simply by throwing one's entreaties to the ether in a gesture of helplessness and hope. A time for faith, in other words."

On the book, one thing I noted was that she often expresses her nervousness, even fear. She experiences the uncanny. These places leave her with a sense of Unheimlich. These are, after all, described as "post-human" landscapes. But, as she says, "habitability is a matter of taste." The nimble and adaptable survive, even through extinctions, and found a new world of different, variably, wondrous critters.