In our oceans, there likely swims a shark that was alive when Shakespeare penned Macbeth - a creature reeking of urine, with worm-like copepods trailing from its eyes. In our clouds, there flits a bird that spends most of its life on the wing, flying the equivalent of five global circumnavigations each year. In our savannas, there lives a giant whose fifth limb holds 40,000 muscles and 2,000 olfactory receptors, communicating with its kin using ripples of infrasound from dozens of miles away.
Our world is populated by marvels, as much as any fairyland. The animals I mentioned above - the Greenland shark, the swift, and the elephant - are only three of the 23 species featured in Katherine Rundell’s modern bestiary, Vanishing Treasures.
As Rundell marvels at these creatures, she reflects that they “sound like fables we tell children,” when in reality, “it’s only that the real world is so startling that our capacity for wonder, huge as it is, can barely skim the edges of the truth” (Rundell 3-4). With each species she describes, from the wombat to the seahorse, bear, pangolin, tuna, lemur, and narwhal, it becomes clear that the more closely we inspect any part of this world, the more miraculous it becomes.
Wonder alone is reason enough to read Vanishing Treasures, but this book is also meant to inspire change. Every species Rundell describes is either endangered or has an endangered subspecies. For instance, along with her celebration of the pangolin’s scaly sphere of armor is her lament for its position as the world’s most trafficked animal, culled for its flesh and scales.
Often, such news will push us to paralyzed anxiety or flailing outrage, but Rundell insists that, if we’re to save these creatures, we must start by seeing them and learning to love them. “Fear and rage,” she claims, “will help galvanize us, but they will not suffice alone: our competent and furious love will have to be what fuels us” (188).
Some might dismiss this as sentimental. Yes, it’s incredible to imagine Atlantic bluefin tuna - which can grow to about twelve feet and over 1,400 pounds - charging “in vast shoals of five hundred and more” like “a migration of stampeding oceanic buffalo” (172-4), but do we really think that “loving” these tuna will stop restaurant chains like Nobu from selling them for an exorbitant profit?
It’s hard to say. Yet, at its root, overfishing represents a set of disordered loves, so reshaping our affections may be exactly what we need. If we really could teach the tuna barons to experience a deeper awe for the bluefin tuna, might they reconsider their actions? Might they be motivated to rearrange their passions so that they would prioritize long-term stability over short-term growth, and abundant life over mere profit?
If so, then maybe Rundell is right that reshaping our loves can save the world’s species. Her essays on creatures like the stork, seal, giraffe, and hermit crab are poignant ways to strive for that. Are there other ways to pursue this? What further tools do we have to cultivate empathetic awe, a wonder that seeks to understand and serve other creatures? Different practices may work for different people, but I’ll share some of the things I’ve tried over the years.
The first thing - and the most obvious - is to spend time outdoors with other species. When I go on walks, I try to practice awe among the little details that catch my eye: the mosaic of tree bark, a frill of orange fungus, a trill of birdsong.
It’s even better if I can recognize and name the species. With a name comes familiarity, and with familiarity comes greater love. Written tools like species identification guides, or digital apps like Seek, iNaturalist, or Merlin, can be excellent ways to learn these names.
Another way to cultivate awe is imagination. One day, during my time interning with A Rocha USA in Florida, my supervisor (Dr. Robert Sluka) took me and the other interns out to the shore of Merritt Island, on Playalinda Beach, where he urged us to enter the inner being of a mole crab.
For context, mole crabs are small, pill-shaped creatures with close-tucked legs and stalk eyes, which burrow backward in the swash zone of the beach. We were studying their population distributions along Cape Canaveral, and Dr. Sluka insisted that, if we were to truly honor these creatures in our work, we had to understand something of what it was like to be a mole crab.
So, taking one of these skittering shells in my palm, I tried to project myself into the mole crab’s body. I imagined myself pressing backward into the sand, nestling my bony legs and hunched back beneath the slush. The gritty weight of sand comforted me, but I still felt the water pounding overhead, my armor shuddering at its joints. With each blow, I wondered whether this one might be the claw of a sandpiper, the spearing of a beak to tear me from the silt.
What was the point of this exercise, aside from proving that I’m totally unhinged? The purpose may not be to gain an accurate knowledge of how mole crabs perceive the world. Rather, I’m creating a narrative - a fiction, if you like - about the lived experience of another creature, so that when I look at these tiny scuttlers, I’m more likely to respond with compassion.
This is another theme that Rundell touches on throughout her book: the stories we tell about the world’s creatures have a profound impact on how we feel about them, for better or worse. At one point, she relates a folkloric tale about how the Hawaiian crow (or ‘alalā) serves as a guide for human spirits, leaping with them from the cliffs of Ka Lae to enter the afterlife. She concludes the chapter by writing, “if the ‘alalā are not saved… there will be no guides awaiting the souls at Ka Lae” (91).
When she shares these myths, Rundell isn’t pursuing scientific accuracy, but love and awe. She interweaves the stories of humanity with those of the more-than-human world, so that we can’t imagine a reality where they’re apart. In light of this, both writing and reading about the world’s species are crucial ways of developing our sense of wonder.
Too many of our world’s species face severe peril. Yet, we have so many tools at our disposal, from the mythic to the scientific, to cultivate empathetic awe: our focused, tender attention for the fleshly marvels that surround us, the many books, classes, and apps that teach us these creatures’ names and needs, and the inexhaustible depths of artistry, stories that remind us that our world is just as astounding as any fairyland.
All of these tools help us to better love these creatures, and with warmer hearts, we’ll have stronger hands to fight, protect, and restore.
Feel free to order your own copy of Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures, by Katherine Rundell. Half of all author royalties go towards sea- and land-based charities fighting against environmental degradation.
Thanks for reading my piece! If you have any thoughts you’d like to share about animals, writing, or empathetic awe, feel free to email me at “noah.guthrie@arocha.org.”
For any who feel led to give, most of the funding for my role with A Rocha USA comes from my personal fundraising efforts. You can find my fundraising page at the following link: https://arocha.us/guthrie.
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