Love it or Lose it, Why Nature Matters

Sam, my youngest read this story and thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s a wonderful story about a boy growing up in rural Canada who experiences the wild side of nature at a very young age. Sam did however have a few questions about hunting.  So Sam and I talked for a while on the subject of hunting. Although I personally do not like the thought of hunting I do realize that there are families brought up with hunting as part of their culture and explained to Sam that for some cultures it is a necessity to hunt in order to survive just like the Hawk in this story.

Thanks to  Jorma Jyrkkanen, a zoologist and Naturalist living in the BC Mountains who wrote  “Love it or Lose it, Why Nature Matters“.

Why Nature Matters.

When I was a boy in Manitoba, 12 years old, I hiked a lot.

I used to go out ten miles away into the Fort White Nature Reserve
north of a big Cement Plant south of Winnipeg. I hiked along farm
roads til I got to the Bush. I recall it was a large forested area with
abundant poplar trees, wild crab apple, huckleberry and ponds.

Once while there I found a Marsh Hawk’s nest on the ground with 7 babies
in it. The parent’s were very angry that I was standing there and the male,
a Light Grey color, bashed me on top of the head. I learned that when he
dived, it I raised my hand at him, he would stop hitting. Well, I so loved the
babies I took one. They were little and covered with down and their
eyes were barely open and their heads wobbled.

I told my mom and dad I found it and needed to take care of it. I sensed
it was wrong to do what I was doing but I just loved it.

So I became a Marsh hawk’s step mom and step dad. Boy, what a chore.
I had a .22 Cooey rifle dad bought me and I hiked out to the prairie to
hunt gophers to feed it. I was busy every day looking for things to
feed my little baby and he grew. The local butcher gave me liver
and scraps of meat which I fed my baby, Marhsa.

Pretty soon he got his wings and was able to fly. That created problems.
Either I kept him in a box or he would follow me everywhere
screaming for food, even to school. I had to lock him up during the
day in a big box when I was gone. When I came home and opened the
door he would fly out and cruise the neighborhood. I practiced his hunting
skills by throwing him animals that weren’t dead and he would grab them
and kill them and eat them.

The sad day came when I let him out and he flew around and vanished.
I worried kids would throw rocks at him and kill him because he didn’t have
the normal fear of humans animals need to survive. They need that fear
because we are the most dangerous animal on the planet. People with guns
just clinking away, kill many animals just for fun because they can. Hawks
and owls are found dead all the time that have been shot for no other
reason than that they didn’t have enough fear.

I learned from Marsha and from a Coopers hawk and Red tailed hawk and
a Great horned owl I had, that nature is best left to nature. Happy
endings only come when animals are in their natural homes and we care for
and protect them. I went on to study zoology at university and learn all about
living things and found out from studies of DNA, our genetic material,
that all living things have the same code that makes us what we are.
That material, DNA is so similar in all creatures from plants to fish to birds
to humans, that there is only one explanation. We all came from common
ancestors long ago.

Other living things are our distant cousins so they are family. I sensed that
about my hawk. It had two wings like my two arms. Two feet like my two
feet. A head at one end and a tail at the other and I have a stub of a tail
bone. I know because I broke it while speed skating in a race at school.
I worked many years with nature and learned many of its secrets. I learned
that the most important thing is that we need nature to live. We need to care
it so that creatures like Marsha will have nesting places and places to hunt.

Most important, we humans have grown so big and powerful that we must
take special care not to destroy nature because it gives us life itself. I gives
us life through the other life that must live there too and each living thing
needs its special home and special place to find food, mates and nesting and
resting places. Our bodies are built from nature completely and so is every
other creatures. If we poison the land we poison other creatures and we
poison ourselves. If we destroy a woodlot or a pond or a lake or an ocean
imagine all the creatures that will have no place to live and be safe.

Children Can Make a Difference
I later found hawk’s nests with broken eggs in them and didn’t know at that
time that a pesticide, DDT was causing the destruction of the eggs. It made the
shells so thin they didn’t support a parent sitting on the eggs. The Prairie hawks
and owls were in serious danger. I gave a talk as a 13 year old boy to
the Winnipeg Natural History Society annual meeting, on my finding of
broken eggs.  That was in 1958. DDT was later banned because of the bad things
found out about it. It was wiping out hawks and owls and eagles and falcons
and all these things are needed for nature to be healthy.

Being a mother, father to a hawk is kind of like being an Avatar. I know
what it is to be an Avatar. I see humans from the same kind of eyes.
I urge all Children to learn about nature and when you do, you will love
it. When you love it you will care for it and all its little and large creatures
and they will reward you with a rich and beautiful world to live,
love and play and work in.

Photograph supplied by Jorma.

If you open Google Earth fly like an Avatar to Winnipeg and then scroll
south west to Fort White. You will find the Cement plant and the nature
reserve north of it where I found Marsha and a Coopers hawk’s nest and
a Red tailed hawk’s nest as a boy 52 years ago. We must love nature or
lose it and then we lose ourselves. Help nature and it will care for you and
your families for as long as we live on this planet.

Jorma Jyrkkanen, Naturalist, Zoologist (copyright Jorma Jykkanen)

A big thanks to Jorma for sharing his passion for nature. You can follow Jorma on Twitter @JormaJyrkkanen