The other day I was watching a flock of terns diving into an inlet after sand eels. They would hover seven or eight feet in the air on whirring wings and fanned out tails, then drop like arrows beneath the fast-sliding currents, emerging a few seconds later with wriggling sand eels in their beaks.
Well, not always. Terns are not perfect hunters. For that matter, nothing is. The birds I watched took an average of three dives for each catch, which may say nothing definitive about their success rate, but their method and form have evolved towards perfection. It’s not surprising that these two organisms - tern and sand eel - locked in an elemental relationship for ages, have each become such sculpted, refined representatives of their respective mediums. Over the ages the sand eel's form has become less and less discernible in the water, the tern's eye keener, the eel more supple and elusive, the tern more adept and skillful in pursuit, and so on.
Still, I cannot help but wonder if anything else besides increasing competence and perfection of form has evolved between tern and sand eel in their long and mortal relationship. Do they, for instance, “recognize” each other as something more than a matrix of sensory signs, signaling respective automatic behavior - pursuit in the one, escape in the other. Is it possible that on some level they actually "talk" to one another?
The idea is not as absurdly anthropomorphic as it might sound. In one of Barry Lopez’ early essays entitled "The Conversation of Death," he suggests that wolves and moose engage in a complex ritual of communication in which a moose may “signal” to a wolf pack that it is "available" as prey. Though a seemingly far-fetched theory, it nonetheless helps explain certain anomalies in the process of pursuit and capture between these two animals. Most prey-predator relationships are, in fact, much more complex than the simple, straightforward flight-pursuit/escape-capture scenarios usually portrayed in wildlife films.
"Conversations of death." Can such an idea also be applied to terns and sand eels? Admittedly it seems a stretch, and yet, like many provocative speculations about animal behavior, it does not necessarily imply anthropomorphism as much as it demands an expansion of what we mean by such human conceptions as conversation, sacrifice, acceptance, and dignity.
Even if there is no “conversation” in the sense we understand it between terns and sand eels, there seems to be at least some implicit pact, some ritualized approach, chase, and final assent, as formal as the elaborate courtship rituals between the terns. Is it in fact possible to have a purely impulsive or instinctive act in the natural world? Isn’t ritual, as Henry Beston said, at the heart of the world?
What pact does the tern make with its prey to ensure its renewal? We seem to have no pact with anything, just unfettered exploitation. It is a utilitarian, anthropocentric approach which we impose on other creatures. Perhaps this is why we cannot catch anything without one-sided technological artifice. Perhaps this is the real draw of wild animals: we know we will never equal the cheetah, for there is much more to his competence than raw speed. It involves the cheetah’s understanding of his prey. We are the only creatures who regard all other creatures as either potential prey or potential enemy. From that perspective, what kind of conversation, of life or death, is possible?
