![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Watching the migrations of the alewives, listening to the “harsh tenderness” in the cries of the common terns, Beston brought to his observations of the natural world all of his talents-not just his intellect, but his emotion and intuition as well. The discoveries about animals’ powers expand our consciousness, opening up to us the equally real, equally rich, and equally valuable sensory worlds that exist parallel to our own.īeston, of course, did not know about these scientific breakthroughs in the 1920s, but it is possible he could have envisioned them. Much of my work as a science writer and author has been spent considering these wonders. Bees see polarized light spiders and insects see ultraviolet bats and dolphins probe their world with sonar. Elephants and fin whales communicate over vast distances with infrasonic calls. More than fifty years after he wrote this passage, science has documented whole worlds of sensation we cannot perceive. His words have guided my writing life for the past 30 years.īeston’s insights were not only profound but prescient. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.” “For the animal shall not be measured by man. “We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals,” Henry Beston wrote in his 1928 classic, The Outermost House. ![]()
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