It's a deer's life (urban park particulars)

wetland and surrounding park in north Grand Rapids, MI

What once was considered waste land too wet to drain and too thickly filled with plant and animal life for housebuilding is now seen by residents and other visitors as a jewel in the city landscape of streets, parking lots, residential, industrial, and commercial developments. In 30 to 40 minutes of easy walking a person can circle the park on a paved trail and its recently replaced boardwalk. Early in the morning the deer and birds have the place to themselves. On weekends and some evenings during the summer in the adjacent park area, converted into parking lot and multiple baseball fields, there can be a lot of commotion from shouts and cheers and the sound of pinging aluminum bats hitting softball or baseball pitches. But on this weekday around the time of sunrise, all is quiet except for songbirds and their predators.

Seeing this deer nibbling grass and another one elsewhere pulling down low-hanging leafy branches to eat, thoughts about the deer habitat and their Umwelt world of experience in the city comes to mind. Apart from residential lawns, school grounds, and a few golf courses around town, there are not too many woodlots and wetlands within the city limits. So basic needs of small, medium, and large wildlife is very much limited to these ecological islands of food, water, safety and shelter. In the space of one deer lifetime a fawn has to survive the springtime "starvation season" when weather can be cruel and food sources are limited. If the creature reaches adulthood, then the time of mating and reproducing the species is uppermost. Hunters with the appropriate license during fall and early winter may kill some bucks and does in the countryside, but in the city limits there is relatively little chance of death by arrow or bullet. Injury or death by car collision is not uncommon, though. Some animals may survive just one cycle of reproducing young, but others may last two or sometimes three seasons. Eventually, though, by disease or collision each deer will breathe its last breath. The carcass may feed scavengers or be hauled away by the city's parks and recreation workers who collect roadkill. There may be few deer that reach a ripe old age, but this pattern of reproducing and dying before too long does result in a steady population.

Seen from a human perspective, it may feel suffocating to live one's whole life in small islands of green, surrounded by pavement, fast-moving cars, and parking lots. From birth to death is just a matter of 30 or 40 months at most and in that time each deer needs to learn survival skills to find food, water, shelter and safety away from cars. Once an animal's replacement number is born and able to survive, then it is only a matter of time before accident or injury end the deer's life. 

In summary, measured relative to the "three-score and ten years" (70 years) that defines a full human life (at least in Biblical passages), the scope of travel and timeline for deer is much smaller. Of course, it is impossible to talk to deer about their perception of life's risks and rewards, but seeing this photo of a breakfasting deer and remembering the "big picture" for deer-dom of short lives and small circle of places to live in, there comes a twinge of melancholy since just one year from now the life in this (semi)wild creature may be ended one way or another as the next generation fills in the gaps in the herd.

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Coda: The handful of houses bordering the south end of the park is now being bought up by a developer to erode the greenspace of the park habitat that hosts so many forms of life. So this island of green in the city will be just a little more littered with humans. Some online residents are sharing details of the developer's plans and are creating an online petition against any degrading of the parkland. But all through colonization of this Indian land and up to the present #ClimateEmergency money and development tends to trump habitat and natural complexity. With housing development comes noise and disruption of waterflow and deafening the space for birds and other creatures to communicate in. Doubtless more human-deer collisions and interactions will also arise. Things do not look too good for the deer in this case.

Telecommunication by voice first and then all the rest

from about 1999 to 2024 voice calls seem now to be secondary

When cellphones began to reach ordinary people, not just high-powered government and business people who needed to be just a phone call away from their office or clients, it was imagined as a cordless phone of unlimited mobility, no longer limited to the device's cradle transmission distance. Physical shape ('candybar' and later 'flip' or slide-open design) and presence of dedicated keypad had some likeness to landline phones and cordless ones, too.

With the addition of a crude camera,  people were puzzled: why add a camera when film and even the start of point-and-shoot digital cameras give better results as a dedicated device. But as cellphone cameras became better and even offered short video with synchronized sound, more and more people started to see the device as equally important for visual recording as it was for making and receiving phone calls. One result was the rise of photo sharing sites, increasing use of pictures in online communication, news gathering, publication and other professional purposes, as well as hobby uses.

The processing power and improving screen display (size and resolution, too) ramped up and makers of dedicated specialty apps attracted more and more interest, too. So what started as a new form of telephoning on the go, now became a (video) camera with the secondary use to make voice calls. As more and more people experienced the convenience of SMS text messaging, they substituted short messages for what used to be open-ended, sometimes meandering voice calls. That way the interaction was brief and the timing of the question or comment was less intrusive and less all-demanding of the person's attention. Sometimes even people on a date could be seen texting across the table instead of looking eye to eye in spoken dialog. State governments began to acknowledge the attention stolen by texting while driving and the deaths caused as a result of driver and sometimes also the victim struck who were staring at the screen of their portable device - whether it was cellphone (or smartphone) or tablet.

Now in summer 2023, there are people from all walks of life and in all sorts of locations intently gazing into their screens. Sometimes they are swiping, scrolling, using navigation gestures. Other times they are putting in text by thumb-typing or by using the dictation feature that often works. A few people may plug their ears with bluetooth earbuds as they playback a podcast, or listen to streamed radio stations for music or talk shows. And very occasionally they seem to be talking to themselves, but in fact are engaged in an old-fashioned voice call. In summary, what began as new-fangled way to carry a phone far beyond the range of cordless phones, now has made telephoning almost incidental or insignificant on a daily basis or cumulatively in the life-time of a cellphone. 

People pay a heftier price every couple of years, sometimes spending more money than they do for a full-size laptop or desktop computer of much larger capacity. But when more and more of your business and pleasure is mediated by the battery-powered device in your pocket or purse, then such prices can be rationalized in various ways. It is worth considering what may come next in this shift away from landlines at fixed locations and the diminution of voice communication even as other forms gain more and more use and attention (and expectation).

Making meaning in mind or heart or in the world, indoors or outdoors

 

Boardwalk to wetlands of Meijer Gardens - berries on leaf

Many walking paths and forest hiking routes seem to pass by a cairn, usually less than 1-foot in height. Sometimes it is near a camp site, other times at a river crossing, or by a log where people sit to rest. How this began (from ancient times in mountains of Scotland, Korea, maybe also in Himalaya routes, too) and why it should spread far and wide lately is a puzzle to figure out another day. But when it comes to marking a place (Biblical description of 'ebenezer' stone pile to mark an important event) physically or with a name, people seem predisposed to do so. Attaching language with land makes it convenient to refer to in conversation when others know that name and that location, too. It is a way to make meaning: give it a name, leave a mark. These days with digital devices a person can mark a location with a map pin or by taking a photo. So the many forms of making meaning now expands with each new way of interacting with the surroundings and with each other electronically.

This photo just an arm's length from the boardwalk fencing near the wetland area of Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park shows one person's mark: it could be a bit of artistic expression (all-natural elements; contrasting colors of red+green on a brown background), an act of well-intended kindness to an unknown wild creature to feast upon (or bait for a hunting animal to seize whatever ventures there to dine, or it could be altogether a mystery --somehow the person felt like doing this. Singly or in some combination these and other meanings could be part of the actions leading to this result. Of course, even without imposing human intentions onto the environment, there is preexisting meaning in the cycle of the day and night, the annual pattern of seasons, and the circle of life. A careful observer can see these meanings play out or interpret them indirectly when signs are there, something like reading a book or decoding a riddle.

Whether it is inserting human meanings and purposes into a scene or working to read the preexisting logic and tensions of the natural world on its own terms, people are hungry to make meaning or find it already there for them to discern. The lack of meaning or having no point seems worse than meaning that is misguided or interpretations that are incomplete or simply wrong; at least there is some form of meaning, out of tune though it may be.