An Immense World

A couple of weeks ago, watching TV one evening, I was startled by a huge bang at our back window. We're used to birds flying into the glass during the day, but it's never happened at night before. Flicking on the outdoor light, I was surprised to see a flying fox, seemingly stunned, lying on the ground. As I watched, it dragged itself across the ground to a nearby tree and began to crawl, rather creepily, up the trunk. When I last looked, it was hanging from a branch, presumably recovering; then it disappeared, so I suppose it was all right. 

Such a thing had never happened at our house before, but it turns out that bats flying into windows is not uncommon. Sheets of flat glass, non existent in nature, send back the same sonar signal as clear air, so the bats crash straight into them. It's just one of the myriad ways that we humans make life difficult for the animals with whom we share this world.

An Immense World is a fascinating, very readable exploration of animal senses and how they extend and differ from our own, something we rarely take into account. Birds and insects can see colours we can't see (charmingly, Yong christens these 'grurple' and 'yurple.') Animals can hear sounds that we can't hear, either above or below our normal range, and smell odours that we can't pick up. and they have senses that we find it difficult to imagine, like detecting electric fields or the Earth's magnetic compass.

Yong reminds us that other living creatures exist in a sensory world very different from our own, bounded by different parameters and consisting of an altogether different experience. Yet we are increasing shaping the environment for our own convenience, filling it with light and noise and pollution that is destroying the Umwelt (roughly, lived experience) of the planet's other inhabitants. I think An Immense World came from the same recommendation list that included Wilding, and similarly, it has given me much information and food for thought.