What Animals Know about Survival
In our rapidly transforming world, animals offer us vital lessons. They must adapt to their changing ecosystems, or they go extinct. By exploring animals’ extraordinary senses, culture, and adaptations, we can discover — or rediscover — different ways of knowing ourselves and our natural world. What survival skills can we learn from other species?
Many birds species world-wide are changing the timing and the paths of their migrations because of extreme weather, false springs, and warmer oceans. In response to milder winters, storks are altering their migratory patterns, breeding earlier, and staying on their home ranges. Migration is always a dangerous journey and demands that many birds double their body weight, use half their brain to sleep when flying, and risk increased exposure to predators. But while migrating birds are vulnerable, migration is still a “hugely successful strategy.”
Human migration is greater than ever now as people flee climate and political upheaval for survival. Around the world, environmental evacuees are desperately trying to adapt to growing threats. Why do we keep rebuilding on flood plains or high-risk habitats? Why not change our own home ranges and habitats when faced with wildfires, and floods? Plant more mangroves to buffer flood plains and curb vegetation in wildfire regions. plant more mangroves to buffer flood plains or cut back vegetation around wildfire regions. In wildfire areas, we can keep a vegetation-free perimeter around houses and in flood plains, we can plant mangroves to buffer rising seas.
Animals are increasingly adapting to climate change. In the Far North, caribou can smell the lichen buried deep under frozen snowfall to track temperatures and adjust their migratory routes. Brown bears move to more favorable altitudes and alter their spring wake-up in response to weather patterns; sometimes they even skip hibernation, unless they are pregnant. With shrinking arctic ice, the habitats of polar bears and brown bears are overlapping more frequently, and polar bear ancestry accounts for as much as 10% of the genomes of brown bears living today.
As we still debate climate change, animals are the first responders. They don’t have the luxury or illusion of denial. Cetaceans, wolves, or caribou don’t argue with their pods, their packs, or their herds over whether the hottest years on record are a “hoax.” They don’t dwell on some idealized past. To survive, they must live in the present and adjust to the future.
Like other social species, we need close alliances and strong emotional connections to thrive. The famous French pianist Helene Grimaud, who co-founded the Wolf Conservation Center in New Salem, New York, cites the howling of wolves as the “social glue” that bonds wolf families, like the way we might sing around a campfire with family or friends. But as our social fabric and alliances are fraying and we retreat into the closed sets of our polarized opinions, we cannot unite to face communal threats or loss.
I wonder, have we truly mourned the millions our own species has lost from the Covid pandemic? Or simply returned to our fractured, polarized, and attention-deficit lives? During the pandemic, one of the most obvious animal adaptations was the return of many species to more of their native habitats when we humans stayed home. As we isolated and sheltered separately, our natural world grew wild again, unburdened by our noisy, busy dominion.
On our highways, there was less roadkill; bird migrations were less affected by airplanes. There was less boat traffic and fewer collisions, and whale researchers could hear and record humpback lullabies over thousands of miles. What did we learn about co-existence with animals from our forced retreat. How about creating more wildlife corridors for animals to better navigate our freeways? Or realigning shipping and airplane routes during bird and whale migrations?
Looking to wild animals for lessons in survival is both instructive and valuable, especially when there is a real possibility that humans may go extinct. A 2016 Global Challenges Foundation study stated, “the average American is more than five times likelier to die during a human-extinction event than in a car crash.” This assessment is even more realistic as we endure renewed threat of world wars, the nuclear clock clicks closer to midnight, and our species’ “one-note-samba” of war, conquest, and destruction of our own habitats continues.
Why not turn to other animals, to their intelligence, skills, and perceptions, to learn to change ourselves rather than our natural world? We can pay more attention and learn from animals about how to survive what’s truly going on around us.No matter our political, religious, national, or age differences, we can all forge a new relationship with, and respect for, the other animals who might outlive us all.~
Bio: Brenda Peterson is the critically acclaimed author of over 20 books, including the novel Duck and Cover, a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year,” now in audiobook. Her memoir, I Want to Be Left Behind: Finding Rapture Here on Earth was chosen as an Indie Next “Best Top Read” and named among the “Top Ten Best Non-Fiction Books of the Year” by The Christian Science Monitor. Forbes chose Peterson’s Wolf Nation as a “Best Conservation Book of the Year. Library Journal gave Peterson’s new book, Wild Chorus: Finding Harmony with Whales, Wolves, and Other Animals a starred review. Peterson’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Orion, and Oprah magazine. She contributes commentary to NPR. She is at work on a new animal book. www.BrendaPetersonBooks.com
