A Review

 

A Review

If you go to my website I lay out plainly that I see God’s presence in Nature.  One of the reasons that I write about Nature so much is that God’s fingerprints are all over it.  The order, the beauty, the complexity, the importance of relationship of creature to environment, and the super abundance of life all clearly point to a Creator.  But so many today make the mistake of thinking that humans are observers of Nature, when we are instead part of Nature.  We are participants.  That attitude leads to an appreciation for it all, and an awareness that Nature’s main purpose, as with humans, is to give glory to God.  I guess that’s why I have always had a critical eye when people make basic mistakes in reference to Nature.  Nowhere are mistakes about Nature so obvious as in the arts, and modern media.  For example, a national insurance company ran commercial ads for a couple of years using a catch phrase about “the buck stops here”.  They pointed to their own company’s decades-old logo.  The problem for people like me is that it becomes grating to the nerves to watch as they refer to “the buck” while showing an elk.  The male elk is called a bull, not a buck.  A male deer is called a buck, but that’s not the animal they showed.

This week Michelle and I attended a play at one of our favorite Door County theaters called, The Thing with Feathers.  Birds actually played significant roles in the play.  Now at the outset Michelle has many times cautioned me when I point out discrepancies about Nature that I am overly critical.  Sometimes she’s right.  She’s probably going to say that about this essay, but I can’t help it. 

When I say that birds play major roles in the cast, I mean that literally.  It’s always fascinating for me to watch how the ensemble uses props, and settings to support the storytelling.  In this case, they used bird puppets.  I think that was genius, especially the way they did it – actors moving with puppets had obviously studied important details like the flight of the bird they were.  For example, my favorite was the actor with the sandhill crane puppet.  He actually was a crowd extra if you will, meaning that he came on stage several times but didn’t have a speaking role.  But he used a long pole to work the puppet’s wings.  Just the morning before, on my walk, two sandhill cranes came flying directly at me; they were perhaps just twenty feet high.  I watched them move in unison; I could see their wing and chest muscles flexing with each  powerful wingbeat.  The actor worked the crane puppets wingbeats very like the two living birds I had just observed.

Another positive is that for the most part, the coloring of the puppets was accurate to the bird they portrayed.  I had no trouble recognizing the bobolink, for example, even before someone called out his name, Bobo.   

The author of the play had done her research as the main subject of the play was a Kirtland’s warbler.  The concern of the script was a desire amongst the bird actors, and a handful of well-meaning human characters to help ensure the survival of a Kirtland’s spotted in their home woods.  The real Kirtland’s has indeed struggled with low populations.  So far, so good.

It should be noted that the Kirtland’s prefers jackpine thickets.  This fact was correctly referenced in the play.  The jackpine, in my opinion, is the runt of the great northern pines.  The white pine stands strong and tall with thick trunks that endeared them to lumberjacks.  The Norway Pine can stand 100 or more feet tall and because they grow relatively quickly, they were the tree of preference when conservation groups reforested the north country.  Jackpines seldom grow half that high, most top out at just thirty feet, and the trunks can be bent and crooked.  Jacks also prefer acidic and sandy soils of northern Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan.  In my part of Wisconsin, the forests of Marinette County are predominantly jackpine and scrub oak.  Kirtland’s are limited mainly because jackpine forests are limited.     

So, the basic premise of the play should be complemented for its accuracy.  It’s in the storytelling that the play fell a bit short for me.  The avian storyline focused on three birds trying to help “Jackie”, the rare Kirtland’s warbler.  The human storyline focused on a small group of birders, some relationship struggles each had, but mainly they also wanted to verify sighting “Jackie” as a rare bird to win a bird count contest.  The humans, once all finding “Jackie” shift their focus to also helping “Jackie” survive. 

Despite the birds and the humans supposedly wanting to help “Jackie” they really don’t do anything concretely to actually help him survive.  In fact, they pretty much harass “Jackie” by constantly chasing him.  Eventually all of them do discover that “Jackie” without their help, had already found a mate and they had already successfully nested.  A noble thing the humans then do, is agree to not claim the Kirtland’s sighting that would win them the contest, to prevent others from coming to the area and harassing the bird to the point where its mating may not be successful.  I can live with that.

It is the helper birds near the end that bothered me.  First, a warbler of another species somehow teaches himself to sing like a Kirtland’s to communicate with “Jackie”.  Bird calls have specific meaning such as attracting a mate, or establishing a territory.  Birds, do not enter into conversation with each other.  But, OK, I can shake that off as a device by the author I guess. 

But it is the motives of the female cardinal character that I have a bigger issue with.  Several times she is wooed by male cardinals but rejects them all because doing things like being with her friends and helping “Jackie” are where the real excitement is.  Taking care of her own brood doesn’t interest her.  I wonder how many people attending the play questioned why the cardinal found raising her own brood unexciting, but took great delight in “Jackie” raising a family?  I have four adult children and eleven grandchildren; there has been a lot of interest, excitement and love along the way.  Even more concerning, if you turn the thought around it suggests that we miss out on our real purpose if we value family.    

All human elements aside, the purpose of animals is to ensure the propagation of the species.  All living things are driven to produce life of its own nature.  When we deny that, many more things in this life begin to unravel.

And, while in my own writing I may go into great detail in describing a natural element or a creature of Nature because the beauty, the motion, the essence of it demands intricacy of language, I will only attribute human thoughts and emotions to humans.  That’s how Nature is because that’s how He designed it.  

That said, "Places everybody!"                                    

His Peace <><

Deacon Dan

Photo by Pablo Hernández on Unsplash