I am a primatologist who spends twelve hours most days in the company of a thirteen year old chimpanzee named Bow. I am also an editor with Inverted-A Press.
During the week that I was away, the purple milkweed, along with the butterflies that used to frequent it, entirely disappeared. On the other hand, the common milkweed is blooming, albeit half-heartedly.
The common milkweed is pushed up against the fence by competing poison ivy plants, so it is not thriving
There are no butterflies or bumblebees attracted to the blossoms, but I did see a couple of Japanese beetles who found the leaves inviting.
Japanese Beetles on the Common Milkweed
They seemed to make the leaf they were on bounce up and down.
The tall phlox is just now starting to bloom.
Tall Phlox in Bloom
A ladybug I saw seemed very attracted by some of the unopened blossoms.
A Ladybug on the Tall Phlox
It struggled against the high wind to climb up to that spot.
Summer is in full swing and the grasshoppers are out.
The tree by the outer fence line that sports "service berries as big as cherries" has some ripening fruit on it now, turning a bright red color.
I suspect that these are neither service berries nor cherries, but I don't know what they actually are.
Some of my friends on Facebook think it is a jujube tree, but according to the Wikipedia, the distribution of jujube does not extend to the continental United States.
What do you think this fruit is? Leave a comment below.
Meanwhile, Bow continues to take an interest in YouTube music videos.
Watching Lee Ann Womack's "I Hope You Dance", Bow did not dance. He sat perfectly still and watched respectfully. He could tell this was family friendly material, so he was not excited, but happy and calm as he watched. He likes images of babies and young girls, and he responds very differently to them than to Lady Gaga, who clearly excites him.
Lawrence told me that while I was away, he kept trying to entice Bow to use his own computer, but Bow was only interested in what Lawrence was doing on Lawrence's computer. Finally, after a few days of Bow asking to use Lawrence's computer whenever Lawrence was using it, Lawrence realized that if he used Bow's computer instead of his own, then Bow would ask to use his computer.
Bow watched a lot of music videos. He preferred Lady Gaga to The Music Man. But he also was interested in reading Lawrence's email. He wants to do what he sees us doing.
Bow does not want to have a special computer just for chimpanzees. He wants to use the sort of computer all of us use. This is one of the reasons he has been resisting. I think this calls for a new strategy on my part. Maybe I should try to use the touchscreen more often myself.
Yesterday, the Great Spangled Fritillary butterflies returned to my purple milkweed. And there was much rejoicing!
Great Spangled Fritallary Butterflies on my Purple Milkweed
They were here last year at about this time, and now they were back.
I would have liked to get closer to get a better picture, but two factors were at play to keep me from doing so: the purple milkweed is surrounded by poison ivy plants, and butterflies -- even the Great Spangled Fritillary -- are flighty. They will seldom sit around posing for pictures if you insist on getting close. Not like bumblebees, who will let you come in for a tight shot and let you film them for hours.
In this rather long video starring a bumblebee, even a dragonfly makes a brief guest appearance. But no, that was not the guest I was longing to see.
Happy as I am to be reunited with the Great Spangled Fritillary butterflies, and to see the bumblebees and the honey bees and all the many other insects enjoying the milkweed, there was one guest that I especially longed to have take refreshment on the milkweed. But every time I went to check what was going on there, I saw many other insects, and not that special one.
I was able to stick my head in between the fence boards to get really close to the bumblebee.
But still there was no Monarch butterfly, the guest for whom all this milkweed is supposed to serve as a special incubator. I went for a walk after seeing the Great Spangled Fritillary butterflies, and I actually managed to locate the lost Common Milkweed that I thought had been eradicated. It was pushed up right against the fence, and its buds were looking underdeveloped.
My Common Milkweed Yesterday
Because it was surrounded by poison ivy and honeysuckle, the plant had somehow sprung up right against the wooden fence to the pasture.
The Common Milkweed is pushed up against the fence and late to bloom
But this could not account for the failure of the Monarch butterfly to show up. All these conservationists have been telling us for years: "Monarch butterflies only lay their eggs on milkweed, and the caterpillars only eat milkweed." (Source: http://www.monarch-butterfly.com/monarch-conservation.html) So whether the plant ever flowers or not should not be the issue for Monarch propagation, as long as the leaves and stems are there. Where had all the Monarch butterflies gone? Didn't they like my milkweed? I was disappointed.
And then, across the pasture, I spotted what looked remarkably like a Monarch butterfly. It flew in my direction, and I started filming it, but even though it was very close, it kept flying around, dancing circles around me at high speed, and when I looked at the video, all I could see was that I had been moving the camera erratically -- but no butterfly visible! It was as if the butterfly had been taunting me, offering evidence of its existence that only I could see! Watch the video above at normal speed, and you will probably come to the conclusion that I was imagining the whole thing!
If you stop the video at this spot, you can catch a glimpse of the Monarch butterfly
Just like the rabbits on my land, the Monarch butterfly was showing itself to me, while using highly evolved evasive maneuvers to ensure I could never catch it. To see how very fast it was going, we need to take account that in the above still from the video I had my camera pointed at an easterly angle. But a few seconds later, the Monarch appears in a shot aimed due south.
The Monarch by the ripened service berries
Even though I was facing south now and it had just come in from the east, already the Monarch had reversed its direction and was heading back the way it came.
A few seconds later, I caught a glimpse of it with my camera facing north, but the butterfly was already headed east. This is what flying around in circles at high speed looks like! In between these relatively clear shots, the butterfly was moving faster than my camera could follow. If I had not thought to pause the video on my computer and take screenshots, I would probably have ended up discarding this video, like many previous attempts to film fast moving butterflies.
So yes, there was a Monarch butterfly on my property all along, but it would not stop and pose for me on the purple milkweed, like my more cooperative guests, the Great Spangled Fritillary butterflies and the bumblebee. Sometimes the speed of a subject will prevent us from seeing what is going on right before our very eyes. We had the same problem with Bow before he started using our hands as a pointing device. Our intern Carrie Stengel discusses the problem in the video below.
I have been characterized by some people who read this blog as "an innocent" with a rich "inner life", implying that I imagine everything that goes on with Bow, and in particular his ability to spell words. But did you know that the first time Bow spelled out what he wanted, instead of pointing at lexigrams, it was not with me?
It was with our new Project Bow intern, Eden Michaelov.
It was Eden who decided to put the letters up on the glass that day. And it was with Eden that Bow first spelled.
When I realized that Bow would not point on his own, and that this was going to be characterized as a Clever Hans effect by anyone who saw it, I could have given up. It would have been the smart thing to do, because there is no profit in what I am doing now. I could just pretend I did not see the pretty butterfly, and all would be well with the social world. I could maybe have gotten a job doing something else. That's what Herbert Terrace did the moment his funding ran out. But the kind of madness that I suffer from is that when I see a butterfly that no one else can see, I keep trying to think of ways to make them see it. The facts do not change, just because people cannot see.(And in fact, others have seen what I saw: everyone who worked with Bow since 2007 has seen him spell.)
It is not a crime against society to fail to fall into line with the current consensus. The greater crime is to recant under pressure, like Joan of Arc or Galileo. Rather than being an innocent who sees visions that are not there, I am a scientist who has an open mind to the existence of uncooperative butterflies.
I was away for two and a half days, on a trip to St. Louis. Lawrence stayed with Bow. Did Bow miss me? Yes, and no. I told Bow when I would be back, and for the first two days of my absence, he was perfectly fine with that. It was not until the third day that he started asking Lawrence when I would return.
This morning, Bow saw that I was reading a book called "The Mainspring of Human Progress" and he immediately wanted to read it, too.
Then he noticed that the door between the two internal pens was ajar, so he decided to work on tightening the lock.
Then we went outside, and Bow was playful rather than aggressive. He invited Leo to play chase with him, and he tagged me a couple of times, wanting me to follow along.
A couple of things you may have noticed in the outer pen: one, the floor is perfectly clean, as Lawrence has swept away all the dead leaves and sprouting plants, and two, the pea plant is really on its way out of existence.
Other things that I noticed when I got back: the common milkweed has finally bloomed, and it seems to attract bees, rather than butterflies.
There was a single bee buzzing about there yesterday.
Also, the rabbits are back. On the day I left on the trip to St. Louis, I saw that someone had taken all the carrot sticks I had scattered, but I did not see any rabbits as I drove away. Last night, I went for a walk and I saw a rabbit close to the garage who led me on another of those slow chases.
There were two much smaller rabbits in the vicinity, and I am pretty sure this rabbit was trying to protect them, hence the circuitous path that it took to lead me away.
There are lots of very young rabbits in evidence on the side of the roads this time of year. They may seem as if they are all alone, but I think they have parents supervising their activities and making sure they don't get hurt.
It was nice to take a trip to the big city. I enjoyed my time away. But it is also very good to be back.
Last night was the night of the Strawberry Moon. No, I did not get a good picture of it with my cell phone camera. So I will leave that to your imagination -- or you could check the blog of somebody who has a real camera.
But I did have some interesting experiences, possibly due to the full moon, and also a few thoughts to share.
Yesterday I ran across an article in the Atlantic about how literacy improves empathy. It was full of platitudes: reading about another person's experiences in a literary work (as opposed to say, low brow lit) improves our ability to empathize with others, according to the article. Then they gave some reasons why they think that, among them: literacy is something that has to be taught. Because it's unnatural, it makes us think more. And thinking leads to empathy, and so we are getting better and better, and are more empathetic than pre-literate people.
If you have connections, you can write anything in a prestigious journal and get it published. But really! That argument is full of holes. First of all, literacy does not have to be taught, any more than language has to be taught. It can be picked up, but it requires exposure. Like language itself, literacy is something few people would come up with on their own, because most do not invent their own language or their own alphabet. But with exposure in a social setting, we pick up the ambient language. And many children, including Bow, have also picked up the ability to read, without explicit instruction. Literacy happens when people who are pre-wired to decode are exposed to writing and language in a social setting.
Secondly, high literature predates writing. Many great classical works of literature, including parts of the Old Testament and the Iliad, existed as oral tradition before they were ever set down in writing. Writing does not beget literature. It merely helps to preserve it. And empathy, if we have any, is something we bring to literature: not something we gain from reading it. People without empathy can't get it out of a book.
Take Bow, for instance. He has empathy, because he can feel what another person feels without getting under their skin. He brings this empathy to bear every time he grooms me.
Bow has surgical instruments at his fingertips, and yet his touch when he examines me is soft and gentle. He can remove a mole with a single flick of a finger, and yet he examines each blemish on the surface of my skin with care. Like a doctor, he examines ears, eyes and nose to determine any signs of ill health or disease. But unlike most of today's doctors, he does it without asking for a fee.
Can empathy be taught? I don't think so. No more than literacy can be. It can be demonstrated, but we cannot expect to teach it to an unwilling and unmindful pupil. My experience is the same with readers of my books. You can take them on the journey, but they will not suffer along with the characters, if their mind is closed. To feel for another, you have to have feelings for yourself. Today, many humans have shut themselves down. They are blind to the sights that surround them, and they feel nothing that they have not somehow been given permission to feel by the society they live in.
Walking alone yesterday evening, I stayed open to the world around me. A snake was lying across my path, so I stepped aside and walked around it. But then curiosity got the better of me, and I turned back and tried to film it. The snake, wanting to avoid a confrontation, seeing that I was not leaving, decided to go back into the overgrown pasture.
It was an eastern yellow-bellied racer, a friend later told me on Facebook. Racer is a good name for it, as once it made up its mind to leave, it wasted no time in executing that decision.
I peered into the pasture, where I spotted a beautiful flower, which a Facebook friend later identified as common milkweed.
I continued along my path all the way to the western edge of my property, then headed back. On the way back, I came across a turtle. The turtle, being slow, allowed me to take more time to observe it.
There was exposed dirt where the turtle's hind quarters were moving, and at first I thought it was trying to dig its way out of the shallow hole it was in.
But when I shared the footage I got of the turtle with a Facebook friend, she told me it was female three-toed box turtle who was digging a nest to lay her eggs in.
I left her alone, thinking that whatever she was up to, she did not need my help to do it.
My friend says that seeing a female box turtle dig a nest in the wild is quite rare, because they usually do this in private where no one can see. But it was the evening of the strawberry moon, and the animals were coming out. I was glad I was there to see it.
Does empathy come from a book? I don't think so. Empathy means being able to feel for others, even those quite different from us. Empathy prepares people to understand what they read. It makes us better readers and better people. But empathy is not found between the pages of a book. It is found within us -- or not at all.
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