Reminders to stop and notice nature

Last night at the Chicago Cultural Center, Stuart Dybek, a writer who will be remembered as a member of the Chicago canon, recalled growing up in Pilsen, then a gritty immigrant neighborhood on the South Side. In Dybek’s day, the Boys Clubs of America tried to send city kids to camp, he told us, but he couldn’t imagine leaving the natural wonders of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, the railway corridors where he spotted fox and racoon, or the abandoned factory lots where he went butterfly collecting (with a net he stashed to avoid getting a reputation).
In the city it’s easy to lose track of life in the human noise and traffic, and it might be one of the most important jobs of writers to remind us to stop, look, and listen.
Richard Conniff has the privilege of traveling to the most exotic corners of the world to write about wildlife, and perhaps because his eye is trained out there, he notices wildlife when he returns to his city, New York. In an essay published yesterday, “The Consolation of Animals,” he reminds us to pause wherever were are and do the same. It’s that old saw about stopping to smell the roses, but we need to hear it now and again:
Animals are built to watch other animals, and for animals like us, otherwise separated from the natural world, there’s consolation in it. Television is in truth a poor substitute.
You do not have to visit the Serengeti, or live near Long Island Sound, to experience it. In fact, I take back what I said earlier about having to go outside. A few paragraphs ago, I looked up to see a red-tailed hawk land in a tree 100 feet from where I’m sitting. It had its dinner, species unknown, stretched out on the branch between two feet, and it began to tread it to pieces with its sharp talons, a happy, abstracted expression on its face, which somehow brought to mind Julia Child in feathers working up a poulet sauté chasseur.
You can see the same thing any day in Prospect Park in Brooklyn, or Branch Brook Park in Newark, or with luck, in your own backyard, if you remember to look.”