WaterNotes

Interpreting Natural Signs

A bag of Squirrel Away warns, “if you cannot read this label, have someone read it to you.” The statement contains a hilarious paradox equivalent to the old Chicken-and-the-Egg quandary. Unless a person can already read they cannot heed the written warning. Unlike the Chicken-and-the-Egg riddle, we know literacy must come first. Reading enables us to build an appreciation of the world through knowledge.

Traditional reading entails interpreting human conventions, such as symbols, into ideas and concepts. The ability to comprehend hidden messages matures as the reader ages and gains experience. However, “reading” can mean more than gaining knowledge from texts and enjoying the escape of Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. Natural literacy involves reading, interpreting, and comprehending the signs and symbols in the natural world. Above all, it involves observing the wild.

Natural literacy, like traditional literacy, develops over a lifetime of experience gained during long afternoons spent outdoors. It serves as a classic example of learning by doing that exercises all the senses. Each organic symbol conceals information discernable by hearing, touch, sight, and smell. It can provide knowledge to the keen observer about animals and plants or it can provide an amusing distraction to a hiker as he trudges along a rough trail.

Since mainstream education currently ignores this kind of literacy students often learn the skill from family members and informal educators. Reading nature passes from father to son during hunting expeditions, from grandmother to granddaughter on a kayak paddle, and from field trip leaders to elementary school classes on a break from the monotony of desks and blackboards.

Reading nature poses a challenge similar to learning the signs and symbols of a new language. For the native English speaker, it compares to the effort of understanding Japanese, Greek or Russian. The difficulty lies in recognizing symbols from disruptions in the normal baseline patterns of sound, water, and earth. Yet even small children can recognize a disturbance in wild forest sounds.

Bird songs suddenly cut to silence issue a warning as obvious as any shriek. The slowing speed of a cricket’s chirp echoes the cooling of the air at night. A great splash of water points toward playing river otters or herons chasing tadpoles in nearby pools.

Recognizing symbols remains easier than interpreting them correctly to warn, to tell stories, and to indicate behavior and predict movement. This aspect of reading nature requires practice and experience. It also requires the observer’s awareness of their location in the world. Geographic knowledge assists trackers by narrowing a cast of thousands of animals on our planet down to a few suspects native to their location. To a hunter in Florida, a canid-like track could point towards a red wolf, a coyote, or a domestic dog on the loose. A man tracking similar prints in Africa might immediately consider a hyena or an African wild dog. A scientist in Australia may believe they belong to a dingo instead.

Time carries importance to the naturally literate since it influences the information contained in symbols. Just as adjectives shape verbs and nouns, organic signs upon other organic signs can put messages on a timeline and modify their meaning. The growth rings in tree cookies and on coral skeletons, and the pitting of arthritis on bone, document in hard tissue the lifespan of an organism. Overlapping footprints in the dirt reveal which animal came first along a single track. Judging the length between footfalls and imperfect edges of the prints reveals the relative speed of the animal’s movement. Smudges indicate a dash, a chase, and the wild instincts of a predator on the hunt.

Even heat and frost provide clues to an observer of the forest. Sudden drops in temperature and gusts of wind often signal the onset of a storm. Icy streams on a summer day offer a clue to the underground origin of the water. Reptiles make slow movements in the morning before their basking worship of the sun warms them up to a run. Some indications of temperature work backwards. Clutches of sea turtles and alligators that are all males point towards overly hot sand in their nests. Tadpoles that turn into frogs two weeks before time must have enjoyed warmer water than usual.

Smell in the human world often serves as a black and white signal of dirt. Our possessions either reek like sweaty gym socks or harbor scents that linger delightfully like freshly washed bed linens. Naturally literate people use smell to supply clues and observe animals’ use of scent that goes beyond the flight of bees to fragrant flowers. To an animal, odors carry more intricate messages that warn, signify ownership, and point them towards mates and meals. The pungent fragrance of an offended skunk warns and deters predators from pouncing on the black and white mammal. Gray foxes stake out territory in invisible fences of urine. Male Io moths, questing for a mate, use their antennae to seek out the infinitesimal waft of pheromones on the wind. Soaring turkey vultures on thermal winds smell carrion rotting in the sun and plummet to earth for a meal.

Even the scent of fresh scat can help a predator track prey. Scat provides so many clues in the natural world that most animals are fussy when it comes to their waste. Armadillos and cats bury it. Sloths descend from their perches in trees just once a week to do their business. Anteaters use puddles and rivers as toilets and let water dissolve the most concrete indication of their presence.

Observers of nature also conceal their presence. They can view undisturbed behaviors from ordinarily reclusive animals if they hide behind binoculars or blinds. To explore the natural world, the reader of nature must interpret and comprehend a foreign language, one full of riddles, juxtapositions, crime, and enigmas. Natural literacy develops through experience, practice, and immersion in the wild areas of the world. Above all, natural literacy requires the observer, his imagination, and the full use of his senses. It connects people to nature, to our ancestral past, and to the future.

In those that are highly skilled, natural literacy transforms from a weapon of survival into a capacity to escape the frustrations of everyday. Time spent in open meadows and along beaches provides solace and renewal. Natural experiences disconnect us from a frenetic culture that increasingly links us together through fiber optic cable. Eventually, natural literacy changes into a mechanism for coping with a busy human world. It reminds us that we inhabit a planet full of mystery and adventure superior to anything virtual. It prompts the understanding that our sanity and survival depends upon the existence, and preservation, of the wilderness just outside the door.