We have a cardinal nesting just outside our upstairs back door. Step out on the landing and there she is in a bush, not three feet away at eye level. She built it while we were on vacation, otherwise our constant coming and going surely would have discouraged her. It is a nest composed, I note, of eclectic materials but a good part looks like a plastic grocery bag. Recycling has reached the animal kingdom.
This is not a good place to put a nest, and she is skittish. Even a brief glance out the window will send her off. We have taken to skirting the door, sort of ducking below eye-level and slipping downstairs to the walk-out exit so we don’t disturb her. Seems like a stupidly sentimental thing to do, but we like our animals.
Our mated mourning doves on the patio next to the downstairs door, by contrast, aren’t the least edgy when we’re around. Their scraggly-looking nest is also at eye-level, perched on the top shelf of a garden cabinet in the middle of our traffic pattern. This is their fourth year with us, producing three to four broods, two eggs each from March through September. We use the cabinet daily getting things, putting things back, offering a pleasantry or two as we go by. We may be enjoying supper on the patio only a few feet from their nest, and the male and the female will switch off nesting duties without paying us any notice. 
I have given myself permission to stroke their tail feathers while they brood. I would like to say they look forward to my attentions, cooing at the approach of my touch, but they find my friendly overtures unaccountably irritating. This, in fact, is how I discovered a dove will growl low and insistently some little while before lashing out with its beak. Still, they will not budge from the nest. I have never read of growling as any part of a dove’s vocal repertoire. Perhaps I have discovered something new about mourning doves, or maybe my doves are just cranky with me. The annual return of our mourning doves isn’t the thrill of swallows returning to Capistrano, but they are cheery enough for me as winter wanes.
Our other back yard inhabitants have included a red-tailed hawk that stopped by time to time, looking for doves, I feared. Last year, with the nest covered with feathers and my doves nowhere in sight, I thought the hawk had taken the season’s last brood. But I have come to question our gray squirrels. Surprisingly, if other food supplies are short, squirrels will attack nests for eggs and chicks. I have a gained a more measured respect for squirrels.
Our back yard is slightly larger than a postage stamp, covered with seven trees, located square in an urban subdivision. This little domestic forest over the years has been home to rabbit warrens, countless squirrels, fifteen bird species and, for one summer a wood rat—a very well-mannered animal that played well with squirrels at the ground feeder. A possum has ambled through time to time. Around the neighborhood itself we see mobs of crows and, once, three turkey buzzards in the middle of the street devouring a fresh road killed rabbit. I was so startled I stopped the car, backed up the street to our house, and rousted the only kid I could find at home and safaried her to watch the buzzards on the asphalt savannah. The scene wasn’t quite the spectacle of vultures gobbling down the lion’s leftover antelope, but it was nature about as raw as we like around here.
You noticed, right? I call them “mine,” “ours.” Of course they are not mine at all, but when the wild calls we do not always respond well. We want to subject it, or romanticize it, or worship it, but in some way own it so it reflects our desires.
It is a fashion these days to regard animals as downsized versions of ourselves, complete with rich emotional lives, feelings, volition, and individuality. We anthropomorphize “our” animals to tame what is wild and to an extent therefore feared, a reversion to the days when shamans painted animals on the cave wall, calling wild prey to human submission.
But as I understand the Christian view, creation is anthropocentric: The wild, with everything else, was created for Man. But for what? Being God’s creation, the wild is not ours to exploit beyond excess, but neither is it to be worshiped. We are, I would suggest, meant to observe, enjoy, describe and, likely, give an account of what we’ve done with it.
We, says Genesis 1, are to “have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth,” but I’ve always thought the more affecting Biblical scene exploring the relationship between God, Man, and creation is the “second” creation story in Genesis. It has very little to do with dominion understood as domination. God brings the animals, domestic and wild, to the Man to see what he would name them. The story suggests God had no ready names. God entrusts the Man with co-creativity to discern the elements of creation and describe them.
In my sometimes whimsical take on Scripture, I can see Adam slowly, ever deliberately mulling over first this name or maybe that name and perhaps even another name, while God impatiently taps his foot with growing annoyance.
“Would you get on with it? It can’t be that hard.”
“Alright, hold your horses . . . say, how’s that name for something later?”
“Just tell me what this is.”
“Okay, okay. This is a Madagascar ring-tailed lemur.”
“Good enough,” says God. “Next.”
Point is, I guess, Genesis may have said “dominion,” but it works out more like “stewardship.” As we name creation so we equally bear the responsibility of being creation’s voice. Just as we are the only creatures on this planet with knowledge of God, so we also are the only ones who can describe the pain creation endures, the small and countless lives that live with no awareness of death but suffer it nonetheless, groaning—St. Paul’s word—in longing for redemption. As we engage creation, while yet a part of it, we may hope to portray the characteristics of that promised release from pointless entropy.
In which case, us dragging ourselves to the far exit so our female cardinal may nest in peace isn’t so silly, but I hope more like a gesture of esteem.
Russell E. Saltzman is the development pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church in Gothenburg, Nebraska.
RESOURCES
Genesis 2:19–20
Romans 8:19–23
Comments:
Love the animals. God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble it, don't harass them, don't deprive them of their happiness, don't work against God's intent. Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to the animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you -- alas, it is true of almost every one of us!
You know, God wants us to care for all in need, even cardinals and bishops.
Sorry.
“Chew, Chew, Chew, Baker, Baker, Baker” he sings. Or is it “Beaker, Beaker”? Or “Weaker, Weaker”? Or maybe “Boiker, Boiker, Boiker”. But of course it couldn’t be that. “Boiker” makes no sense.
As hard as I try, I know that no transliteration of mine can fill the bill.(Good one, eh?)
“Two-beer, Two-beer, Two-beer”, that I understand. Also “Wheat, Wheat, Wheat, Weaker, Chew, Chew, Chew.” But “Boiker”?
It reminds me of the whip-poor-will I used to hear in New Hampshire. That bird would sing so incessantly that rather than joining in, I thought about shooting him. If you’ve heard one, you know what I mean. It’s beautiful at first, but he doesn’t know when to stop. His song is actually more like “Poor-Will-Whip”, but of course that makes no more sense than “Boiker”.
In either case, trying to use our language to capture theirs just doesn’t seem to work. It is frustrating to hear such a beautiful song as the cardinal’s (or the first 10 verses of the WPW’s) but be unable to sing along.
It put me in mind of the descriptions that you read on wine bottles or in magazine reviews. “Fruity, with hints of cherry, walnut and cloves, but a strong finish of apple.” But of course there is no fruit except grape. No apple, no cherry, no walnut, no cloves. But what there is, the wine, we lack adequate language to describe. Maybe once we had it, but we lost it. Or maybe we never had it. So we borrow language from the world of non-wine foods. Like “Baker”, it appears to make more sense than “Boiker”. But it doesn’t really.
If we want to truly understand something, we need a language that fits it. Of course, we can simply enjoy birdsong for its music, and wine for its pleasant taste. But if we want to think about it, we need to be able to talk about it. And for that, we need appropriate language.
In the modernist corners of our modern world, human actions have become as unintelligible as birdsongs. We sense that they must have moral meanings, but we have lost our language for talking about morality. As with birdsongs, we know that there is an underlying meaning. The cardinal sings to attract a mate, or to warn off rivals. But why that particular song, and not another? We don’t know. We can’t even ask.
Alasdair Macintyre has written incisively about this problem in After Virtue. How can we re-invigorate our morality when we can’t even articulate the problem? All 12-step programs start at the same logical beginning: Admit that you have a problem. That implies that we can talk about the problem; that we have a language for it.
I have found that I do not. Yet in the past there was such a language, there was discussion that didn’t begin with “For me, personally, I believe that it is wrong to…”
Where to find such language?
Thomas Aquinas, perhaps? I have begun studying him, reading some parts of the Summa. Mostly, though, finding TA difficult, I read Thomist studies such as those by Ralph McInerny (I also enjoy Father Dowling, but that’s for another day).
I find there what is for me a remarkable phenomenon, the Christian philosopher willing to argue his way to God. I learn that an act’s object, its circumstances, and its purpose must all be good for the act to be judged good. In other words, not just what (object) and why (purpose), but how, where, and when (circumstance). TA’s reasoning on human action is reasonable and plausible. But I find it incomplete. I find lacking a sense of the innate drive to evil, above all that ultimate drive, the will to power. I do not find his work includes an active sense of sin.
That active sense is found in St. Augustine’s Confessions. Unlike TA, he argues psychologically rather than logically. But his understanding of our urge to sin is omnipresent, as is the urge itself. TA often seems to be arguing that we would all avoid sin if only we would recognize our true needs.
Anyway, thanks, Russell, for a beautiful meditation.
The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate.
As for the squirrels, they are ingenious when it comes to finding a way to the feeder. My feeder is attached to the window with suction cups. I have it up high so the squirrels get onto my roof and jump down onto the feeder. It's very funny to see them do this.
Are you sure?.The revelation pertains to man and thus is necessarily anthropocentric but it is far cry to say that animals were created for man. CS Lewis does not think so. Read the speech of the angelic beings at the end of Perelandra. Everything is made for everything else and for nothing else, both true simultaneously
Also see CS Lewis view of medieval earth-centred cosmology. Physically the planets and heavens rotate around earth but this is merely because the celestial spheres need a centre to rotate and dance around. Spiritually, man is at the outskirts and looking in at the heavenly dance.
However, I can't resist one pedantic little correction. There are no rabbit warrens in your woods, unless it is a population of domestic rabbits that have gone feral. European rabbits make communal warrens (e.g. Watership Down). North American cottontails don't dig burrows, and they're largely solitary.
We have a handful of beautiful "guests" outside...but some of the buggers just can't get along ;). When things are calm outside and nobody is arguing we love to sit out and watch!