Why Do I Do Natural History? (my 3rd exercise, one night, when I had to teach myself to write an essay for an exam)

Each year I try to learn about a group of plants or animals that I haven't learned much about yet.  Last year it was aquatic plants, this year it's spiders.  

What I do is I get some books about the group, about how they live, how to find them, and some technical field guides which tell me how to identify them to species.  The latter part is often difficult and requires using tools like a dissecting kit, and microscope or at least hand lens and developing odd technical skills.  

Then I go outside and find, observe and (sometimes catch) and analyze the critters.  Why, you may ask, do I go through this each year?  It is not my profession!  Well, there are intellectual, aesthetic and ultimately spiritual reasons.


One of my main intellectual interests in life is how the universe keeps evolving to more and more complex forms.  I may even go back to school and study the mathematics and physics of this.  

Differentiating between this species and that, often involves counting and noting the positions of spines or looking at microscopic features of the beasts.  That activity really puts me in touch with how complex they really are and keeps me asking "How?".  "How does simple chemistry become living cells that can produce all these hairs?  How do all those cells arrange themselves to make a jumping spider that can find and catch another insect?"


The easy reason why I do this of course is that these plants and animals are absolutely beautiful once you take the time to look at them.  Jumping spiders?  those big puppy eyes and furry paws they have!  And then the sheer delight at watching one stalk and pounce on its prey.  

On a larger scale, the more kinds of plants and animals I learn to see, the more richly textured I see my landscape.  At one time I learned to identify over 500 different kinds of plants in my state and at first I thought this level of analyticity would destroy my gestalt sense of beauty, every time I took a walk, recognizing this plant, that plant, hundreds... But in the end, it just increased the depth of the texture of what I saw.

And then knowing how each critter lives helps me see how interconnected that dense texture is, how it functions like an organism itself.  This to me is beautiful.


Finally, I don't go to exotic lands to do this, I find these critters in my own landscape, around my house, in a seemingly ordinary crack in the sidewalk, or within walking distance or a bike ride.  It helps me feel connected to where I live.  It helps me feel that my home is alive.  And that it is wild, not concerned with the petty human rat race.  

When I get down with that jumping spider and watch it closely enough to count whether there are two or three pairs of spines on the "ventral side of its front metatarsi...", and begin to imagine how he uses them to capture his prey... and I've lost myself for an hour.  

I really immerse myself in the wild landscape and forget this petty human drama.  Ultimately in my natural history excursions I loose myself and become whole.