David Barrie in the land of the bogong moth. Bogong moths fly a thousand or more kilometers in their annual nocturnal migration from their breeding grounds in southeastern Australia to high, mountain caves in the Australian Alps. Like migratory birds, these moths rely on the Earth’s magnetic field to guide their routes. New discoveries indicate that the moths also use the alignment of the Milky Way to navigate. Photo by Eric Warrant.
It has been said that the Sahara desert ant, Cataglyphis fortis, is a navigational miracle. These tiny insects live in the barren salt pans of North Africa, where ground temperatures soar to 145 F — too hot for almost any animal to survive. They live underground and leave their nests at the hottest time of day to avoid predators and to forage for food (typically other insects that have died of exposure). To avoid being burned to a crisp themselves, the ants must be as efficient as possible in returning to their nest. How does the desert ant find its way back, sometimes over distances of 100 meters, via the fastest route? The answer, our guest, award-winning author David Barrie writes, is astounding and flat-out humbling. So too is the ingenuity of the scientists who study them. Here, he writes, is “a small insect capable of performing navigational feats that we humans can only manage with the help of instruments.”
Barrie with a bogong moth on his right thumb in the snowy mountains of New South Wales. “Discoveries about animal navigation can help us recognize what is at risk…” he writes. “Even if our own lives did not depend on the health and vitality of the planet we inhabit, the preservation of the almost infinitely complex web of life from which such wonders emerge is surely an ethical imperative … We must plot a new course.” Photo by Eric Warrant.Continue reading Ep. 21 – David Barrie on the wonders of animal navigation
In eastern Greenland, Macfarlane descends a moulin, a smooth ice shaft cut into a glacier by meltwater. “When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert,” he writes. “New responsibilities declare themselves. A conviviality of being leaps to mind and eye. The world becomes eerily various and vibrant again. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless earth.” Photo by Helen Spenceley.
In 1994, three French cavers came upon the oldest human-painted images yet discovered. In his new book, Underland: A Deep Time Journey,the writer Robert Macfarlane describes the December day in which the trio descended into the chamber, passing stalactites that reached from floor to ceiling. Suddenly, the flashlight of one caver illuminated a mammoth, then a bear, then a lion with a mane speckled with blood. It was soon revealed that the gallery of Chauvet Cave, also known as the Cave of Forgotten Dreams, houses hundreds of animals — mammoths, rhinoceroses, lions, bison, owls, stags, panthers and bears — painted over 30,000 years old. Many of the creatures are now extinct or nearing extinction.
Macfarlane writes: “The art of the chamber has an astonishing liveliness to it. Despite the rudimentary materials and the lack — to our knowledge — of any kind of training or tradition on which the artists could draw, the animals of Chauvet seem ready to step from the stone that holds them. The horns and cloven hoofs of the bison are painted twice, the lines running close to one another, to give the impression of movement — a shake of the head, a stamp of the foot. The horses are painted with soft muzzles and lips, which one wishes to reach out and touch, feel, feed. Sixteen lions — muscles tensed, eyes fixed with hunting alertness on their quarry — pursue a herd of bison from right to left across a wall of stone. This is, you realize, an early version of stop-motion; a proto-cinema.” Macfarlane quotes John Berger: “Art is born like a foal that can walk straight away. The talent to make art accompanies the need for that art; they arrive together.”
In Andoya, Norway, Macfarlane visited off-shore oil fields with a local fisherman and activist, Bjornar Nicolaisen, as his friend and guide. “What Bjornar fears is a version of ‘solastalgia,’ the term coined by Glenn Albrecht in 2003 to mean a ‘form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change’ …” Macfarlane writes. “Solastalgia speaks of a modern uncanny, in which a familiar place is rendered unrecognizable by climate change or corporate action: the home becomes unhomely around its inhabitants.” Photo by Bjornar Nicolaisen. Continue reading Ep. 19 – Robert Macfarlane on being good ancestors across deep time
