I’d like to start with a story that isn’t about me, though, the story of Grey Owl. If you’ve never heard of him, I’m not surprised. I hadn’t heard of him myself until very recently when I came across a social media post that mentioned him. I never just believe anything I see on Facebook so I was happy to find an old essay in The Atlantic Monthly about Grey Owl, a Canadian trapper turned wildlife defender thanks to a couple of Beaver kittens. From his name you might think he was indigenous, but he was an Englishman, a deceit that ultimately cost him his fame. The incident with the beavers is true though. In the early 1900s Grey Owl was trapping beaver for a living. One time when he was short on money, he killed a mother beaver he’d trapped even though he could hear her kittens crying. He went home but couldn’t shake the guilty feeling, so he went back the next day and found the little beavers and raised them. Gray Owl’s relationship with the young beavers ended his time as a trapper. He went on to start a restoration beaver colony and to advocate for beaver conservation. His work helped save beavers from extinction. He wrote and spoke about wilderness and wildlife conservation with the mystique of a native woodsman until he was found out. Nobody reads his books anymore, but the beaver are still here.
Grey Owl’s story caught my attention because I too have had the life changing experience of raising babies of another species. My license from the Department of Environmental Conservation permits me to care for injured and orphaned wildlife so they can be returned to the wild. My specialty is treating turtles injured by vehicles but my very first charges were three orphaned gray squirrels. The first time one fell asleep against my chest I became a staunch defender of squirrels. The more I learned the more I began too appreciate their squirrel-ness. I fell in love with the more-than-human world.
How does someone end up a minister and a wildlife rehabilitator? I like to say that I am a red eft. The red eft is the juvenile stage of the eastern newt, an amphibian abundant right here in New York. The eastern newt begins life as an aquatic brownish green larva. After about three months the baby newt sheds his gills and transforms into a bright orange teenager and leaves the water behind. The eft may wander for two or three years then he walks back into the water and transforms again into an aquatic being. The body of water the eft chooses will be his home as long as he lives – probably a decade. It’s no wonder he sees all he can before deciding. I’ve wandered through my spiritual life like a red eft. I have taught everything from Methodist Sunday school to yoga to Reiki and shamanism. I’ve been a wildlife rehabilitator since 2018. And I know a bit about amphibians like the red eft because I’m also a master herpetologist. That just means that I have learned about reptiles and amphibians the way some people learn about gardening. I graduated from seminary just last year – 2022. There’s a long story about why I was there but I won’t get into it. I will say that going to an interfaith seminary gave me the opportunity to learn about many religious and spiritual traditions. And midway through seminary I was sure I belonged in none of them. I was sitting outside meditating on that when a red eft walked past and I realized that I, too, was a spiritual nomad. Not fitting in was very freeing in the end. I found a personal eco spirituality informed by wildlife rehabilitation.
My first turtle patient was a broken painted turtle like Misty here. The rescuer who picked him up off the road handed him off to Jenna, a fellow newbie rehabber I’d met at the licensing exam. Jenna called me. You want to do turtles, right? I’ve got this one. I glued the shell but there’s a piece missing. Can you help?
Sure, I said. I sat through the turtle repair lecture at the conference. I knew what I was doing. A bit of the margin missing was no big deal. That’s not what this was. I held this broken turtle into the light and looked through the hole in his side and watched his lung expand and contract. Uh oh.
Years earlier I hosted a friend’s friend for a shamanic journeying workshop in my yoga studio. It was my first time journeying. I saw this turtle, a box turtle, dancing to the drum beat, rhythmically stepping in the night sky, proofs of stardust flying up with each footfall, leaving a sparkling wake. I heard the drum and between the beats: follow the turtle home.
That journey was the first of many as I deepened in shamanic practice. My helping spirits usually appeared as animals. I found myself interested in their natural history. I wanted to know how each animal lived, what it was afraid of, and what environmental challenges it was facing. That information helped me find meaning for the animals that were appearing.
It was during that natural history research that I stumbled across this thing called wildlife rehabilitation. I had to do it. I took the required exam, then interviewed with a DEC ranger who asked me what kind of animals I hope to work with. Of course I said turtles. There was never any question in my mind that I would honor the turtle of my first journey by helping her kind in the physical world.
So that’s how I came to be holding a turtle I named Eddie, staring into his side and rapidly realizing I didn’t know what I was doing. I scrambled to consult with turtle rehabbers who did in fact know what they were doing. They were kind but frank. The body cavity was open. That gave the turtle a 50/50 chance. I did what they said. I flushed it. I dressed it. I gave the turtle antibiotic injections. The turtle bit me. We all prayed. Eddie held on. The internal membrane grew back, then a layer of thick skin. Eddie was healing.
That first summer I stayed up late many nights stabilizing broken turtles. I cried over newly dug graves and I begged my family and friends for money to house and feed them because this gig doesn’t pay. I never once thought about quitting, though. Helping the turtles seemed natural and I did whatever I could to give them the best care possible. I felt as if I had come home like my turtle guide instructed. When I formed a nonprofit in 2021 we called it Dancing Turtle Rescue in my helping spirit’s honor.
The native turtles I assist range from commonplace, like Gordon here, to rare species, but a sad truth is that all their populations are declining.
Turtle DNA is over 200 million years old. Their anatomy is mostly the same as it was in the Triassic period. Dinosaurs came and went. Our human ancestors didn’t even show up until about 6 million years ago, and really it’s been less than 300,000 years that people who look sort of like us have been around, just a blip on the turtle timeline.
Yet we are breaking the turtles. Half the world’s 350 turtle species are threatened with extinction. Human activities are the leading cause of that decline. Turtles are harvested for food, poached for the pet trade, and their habitats are altered or destroyed. What’s most detrimental though is road mortality during nesting season. That’s what my rehabilitation efforts are trying to prevent. Most turtles don’t survive their first year. In fact, it is considered reproductive success if, out of all the eggs a turtle lays in her lifetime, one baby survives to replace her. When an adult dies on the road, her population may never recover.
That makes humans sound pretty bad. Deborah Bird Rose, who was an Aboriginal ecological philosopher and professor in Australia, wrote “when we highlight the pitiless and destructive qualities of humans, we see the desperate need to find ways to recuperate relational and mutually beneficial sides of the story about who we are and of what we are capable.” She told of care for flying foxes, a large bat species that is going extinct. The most intimate modes of care involve orphans. Just like my baby squirrels, the flying fox babies need to be fed and touched and feel like they are part of a family. She saw their care as an ethical response to human cruelty involving tenderness, generosity and compassion. That care is an ongoing assumption of responsibility in the face of human-caused peril.
Like Grey Owl’s beavers, Deborah Bird Rose’s flying foxes and my turtles and squirrels, wildlife rescue and rehabilitation is full of stories of compassion.
Right here in New York, we rehabbers talk of a hunter who carried an injured coyote on his shoulders for miles to reach his truck and veterinary care. We celebrate the firefighters who climbed their ladder into a tree to repair an owl’s nest and return her fallen owlets. We hear countless stories of less dramatic rescues, too.
We listen to the stories, even if we have heard them before, because we understand the profound impact of those tender encounters on a human’s relationship with the natural world.
I’ve been having those encounters all my life. I grew up on the south shore of Long Island, playing on quiet beaches. I held hermit crabs, shared lunch with sea gulls, and swam with jellyfish. My dad taught me reverence for these wild beings, which still informs my spirituality. It’s no wonder, really, that when I started my spiritual wandering back in the early 90s, I was drawn to the earth-based spirituality of neo-Paganism. I went from there to the UUs, to Buddhism and yoga. Right after I finished yoga teacher training, we moved to the Adirondacks. Although different than the ocean, the lake and surrounding mountains were also abundant with wildlife. I got into energy work and shamanism next. I was still wandering like a red eft when I found wildlife rehabilitation and more wonderful encounters.
And sad ones.
An encounter doesn’t have to have a happy ending to make an impact. Aldo Leopold, a champion of wildlife conservation, tells a sad tale of shooting a mother wolf and her pups. Leopold and his companions took aim from a mountainside as the family crossed a river. The mother wolf lay dying when Leopold got down to her. He describes her death as the green fire fading from her eyes. His experience with the wolf changed Leopold. Instead of hunting them, he fought to protect wolves and all wilderness ecosystems.
Leopold had shot many wolves before that day, so why did this one make a difference? I believe that, like Grey Owl’s experience with the beaver kittens and my own with baby squirrels and injured turtles, there was something compelling in Leopold’s close contact with vulnerability and suffering. Ecologist and philosopher David Abram describes the human organism’s “instinctive empathy with the living land.” Abram suggested that in insulating ourselves from the vulnerabilities of existence we cut our lives off from the necessary nourishment of contact and interchange with other shapes of life, from antlered and loop-tailed and amber-eyed beings whose resplendent weirdness loosens our imaginations.
Resplendent weirdness. Best description of a red eft I’ve ever come across.
Experiences of direct contact with weird otherness, especially when offering care to those rendered defenseless, may trigger feelings of awe, wonder, and connection. In his book The Spell of the Sensuous, Abram discusses “perceptual reciprocity.” When we touch another being we also feel ourselves being touched by that being. It’s powerful.
On a winter morning not long ago, I was trying to clear snow off the feeder while a red-breasted nuthatch flitted impatiently around my head. Without much thought, I poured some seed into my hand and held it up for the hungry bird. He landed on the edge of my palm for barely a second, just long enough to choose a seed and fly off. I was awed by that moment of feeling his feet on my hand and in recognizing that he had come to me and I had instinctually responded to meet his need. Not only had I picked up on what the nuthatch was communicating, but that tiny bird had trusted me with his safety. I felt deeply humbled.
Grey Owl and Aldo Leopold and my stories affirm that intimate encounters which allow for sensate experiences such as reciprocation of touch and eye contact may be the key to true ecological spirituality.
Ecology is the study of relationships. Arne Naess, considered the father of deep ecology, encouraged each person to develop their own ecological wisdom through observation and experience of nature. In his interpretation of Arne Naess’s work, behavioral scientist Stephan Harding comes closest to explaining the spiritual shift I experienced while holding a baby squirrel to my chest. He says ecological wisdom is developed through deep experience, deep questioning, and deep commitment. Most experiences I would consider to be deep have occurred in my work as a wildlife rehabilitator. Whether helpless babies or injured adults, intimate interaction with other-than-human life sparks the wonder and magic I associate with a deep experience. Like Aldo Leopold’s encounter with the wolf, I have been present at the moment of death for many turtles so badly injured all I can offer is hospice care. I’ve seen the light fade. I once nursed a mother opossum who had been hit by a car while she nursed the babies in her pouch. She died in my arms the day after her children went out on their own, her job done. I knew I had helped her hold on for them. Deep experience.
Due to Grey Owl’s deep experience of raising beaver kittens, he questioned both the ethics and sustainability of trapping beavers. Not only did Grey Owl stop trapping, he made a commitment, a deep commitment, to try to restore the beaver population and advocate for their protection. Leopold’s cycle from experience to commitment was similar, as was mine.
These kinds of interspecies encounters invoke the concept of animism, often thought of as primitive religion. Religious scholar Graham Harvey gives us a new definition of animism: “the understanding that the world is a community of persons, most of whom are not human, but all of whom are related, and all of whom deserve respect.” To recognize the personhood of all beings requires a transformation in how one sees others. David Abrams explains that the difficult magic of animistic perception, the utter weirdness and dark wonder, is the felt sense of being in contact with wakeful forms of sentience that are richly different from one’s own.
Once we accomplish the difficult magic and recognize our relatedness, the deep experience, then we can look at the deep question of what constitutes respect. Those who exist in a human world that they believe is separated from nature, who will walk by a baby squirrel that has fallen from her nest believing nature should take its course, who would turn away rather than watch the green fire fade from a wolf’s eyes, who will drive past a broken turtle, will never answer that for themselves. They will rely on external instruction for how to behave around nature and will adhere to the bare minimum of respect and the myth of separateness. Opportunities for direct contact with other-than-humans, particularly when the experience is one of vulnerability and trust, can dispel the myth. And a minister who is also wildlife rehabilitator starts to form.
Deborah Bird Rose, of the flying fox people, talked about the Aboriginal concept of shimmer, the visible ancestral power of life, that arises in encounters and relationships, and how that shimmer is fading. There’s lots of science I could share, but I’ll give you the nitty gritty. The Earth’s biodiversity is going downhill, fast. We are losing species at a rate at least a thousand times greater than the natural background rate. Extinctions don’t just take out one species. They cascade as ecosystems are thrown out of balance. As one hundred species a day disappear from our world, relationships unravel. The shimmer disappears with them.
We in this room may not know the names of all the species that are vanishing. We won’t miss most of them. But we will miss the shimmer. Biodiversity means we are always having encounters with beauty, wonder, and that weird otherness that lights up our souls. That’s shimmer.
So where have my spiritual wanderings through wildlife rehabilitation taken me? I’m still the red eft, but taking a long, hard look at the pond of Druid Revival. Contemporary Druidry draws on Welsh lore from the 17- and 1800s, which is an ancestral tie for me, but what really drew me in was the avenue it provides for people of European descent to reconsider their spiritual relationship with nature. The group I chose to join, the Ancient Order of Druids in America, emphasizes local ecology and environmental concerns. Their teachings lay out a spiritual foundation that can support all that I’ve experienced and learned.
To be honest, though, where I fit matters less than why I keep exploring and sharing the intersection of ecology and spirituality, and why I continue to help the turtles. When I took my personal vows of ministry, I promised to put my hands and my heart into compassionately caring for the Earth and all her beings and to deepen into interconnection And I vowed to always look for the magic – the shimmer.
When “follow the turtle home” sounded between the drumbeats, I wasn’t expecting home to be full of life and death, and celebration and grief. For every turtle I set down to scamper into the water and swim off, I’ve dug holes for others who didn’t survive. There are too many holes. The broken turtles and me are losing the battle. There’s always another road, another car tire. It’s too big unless enough of us start to miss the shimmer. That’s why I’m here talking to you.
Even if you don’t quite get it, you can help. Sometimes it’s as easy as stopping your car for a few minutes while a turtle, a family of geese, or anyone else is crossing the road. You can know who to call when you encounter injured or orphaned wildlife. There’s an app – Animal Help Now – that you can put on your phone to find a rehabber wherever you are in the U.S. And get to know your local rehabbers. We are always looking for someone willing to drive an animal from one place to another, or to help clean cages, or a hundred other things. We are all volunteers. We don’t get paid. We just do the work, the deep commitment.
I invite you to learn about the native wildlife around you and what they need to survive. Garden with native plants. Give time and support to habitat restoration projects. Advocate for wildlife protection. Lobby for green bridges and tunnels and anything that makes it safer for the wild beings to live alongside us humans.
Humans can indeed be destructive, but I believe in our capacity to care. When our relationships with the strange other-than-human beings are built on that caring, we are taking a stand for beauty and shimmer and life itself.