What's 'Endangered'?—You Have to Get Up Close and Personal With It to Get It

09/24/2009

The balding, nerdy-scientist guy on TV was doing a love dance with a whooping crane. He ran alongside it, chest puffed out, bobbing, weaving, throwing sticks, and well…whooping. The bird did the same back to him. If she'd had hair she would have been flipping it.

 

It was clear—this was chemistry. Frat guys across the country would be envious.

 

Watching it with my three-year-olds the other night, I had to ask, "What the ffff…I mean heck, is going on?"

Cut to the next clip, from 1982: Johnny Carson was asking this same scientist, the ornithologist George Archibald, pretty much the same question. Archibald answered that male whooping cranes did nothing for his crane-love, Tex. Only Archibald's mating dance could jangle her hormones intro producing eggs, one of which hatched into a male chick they called “Gee Whiz,” the first whooping crane ever born in captivity.

It was a victory that helped bring back the species from the brink of extinction, and the reason why Archibald was featured on this Science Channel program, "Jane Goodall’s Heroes."

Still, noted the narrator, though the whooping crane's numbers have grown to about 400 today, from 15 in the 1940s, the bird remains endangered.

One of my three-year-old twins, Punk, turned his head, looked at me. "Danger?" he asked.

"Not danger. Endangered." I was glad he was watching.

I've been putting on educational TV for grown-ups lately, trying to swap it in for some of the screaming kid TV that’s driving me and my husband up a tree. It's been hit or miss, so this was good.

But now Punk asked the killer question.

"What’s…N’dangered?"

Oh man. How do you define endangered to a three-year-old?

"Uh. Well. It's when a species of animals or plants that lives on Earth…gets in danger of…not existing anymore. Like it might be gone. Soon."

Response from Punk: Blank stare.

Well of course. Why would he get it? He has no context.

To Punk, "wildlife" is the sparrow or pigeon he sees on a city street during the walk to school. Luckily he hasn’t seen any of the alley rats. Yet.

As a kid, my context was different, rich. For one thing, I was born—and until age nine—raised in South Africa. For another, my dad is a wildlife nut, and were always road-tripping to one exotic African nature park or another. Half the wildlife documentaries I see on TV, I think, yeah, I was there.

And we lived in Cape Town, a city right on the tip of Africa that, with its jagged mountain peaks, cliff-side coastal drives, and sprawling white beaches, is arguably one of the most awe-inspiring places on the globe.

This is going to sound disgusting. But on an average weekend morning there my father would say, "So what should we do today? Go to the beach? Climb a mountain? Tour a vineyard? Drive to Cape Point and see the fynbos [indigenous South African plant life]? Go to Boulders and cavort with the penguins?"

Tough decision. Somehow we always managed to choose, and it was always an adventure.

But one day, the adventure was different, and for me, life-changing.

The night before, my father announced we are going on a quest to find…THE RED DISA. He had me right there. I mean, the name alone is right out of film noir.

What was it? A flower. But not any flower. A rare and endangered flower.A tri-petal orchid whose habitat was being depleted by agriculture and development, but that could still be found in the craggy crevices of Table Mountain, Cape Town’s flat-topped natural wonder.

The next day, by God, we were going to climb the mountain and capture ourselves a red disa—on film. I stepped out in our back garden, looked at the mountain jutting straight up to the sky, its sandstone edifice ghost-lit from below. Finding a tiny little flower up there seemed hands-down impossible. Which made it all the more exciting.

It’s about a four-hour haul to the top on rocky, crumbling trails, populated, as it turned out, by puff adders (grumpy, poisonous snakes), among other ominous creatures. Didn't matter. Aside from pausing every so often to swoon at the ridiculously gorgeous view of Table Bay below, we were focused.

And then one of us—don't remember who but it had to be my father; he would have known where to look—spotted it. A positively blemish-free specimen of The Pride of Table Mountain. Nodding in the breeze. Basking in a beam of sunlight that infiltrated the shadows.

We were quiet. Transfixed. We just stood there and watched as my father photographed it from every angle.

And I wondered, why has it come to this? That a flower gets so wiped out that it retreats to the crannies of a mountain too harsh and rugged too build on. It's about as pathetic as a middle-aged man doing gymnastics in hopes of coaxing a bird to reproduce.

Right in front of me was the definition of endangered. I didn't need any more explanation than that.

So now, I need to do the same for Punk. Can anyone tell me—where can I can take him on a quest to find a whooping crane in its natural habitat?

Questions, Questions, Questions—Curiosity Killed the Parents But Fed the Kid

09/10/2009

Remember the Volvo commercial from a couple of years back, where the little girl talks nonstop—from when dad straps her in to when he pulls onto the road? 

That’s my three-year-old T-Rex. Just yesterday, in the car, the conversation went like this: "Mommy, I like you because I'm bigger than you." To which I responded, "Actually, no you're not." And to which my husband added, "Yet."

There was the briefest of pauses, then, "Um. I'm a small boy. I can't play music like big people. I only play teeny-tiny musical instruments."

While I was puzzling over that one, he launched into a stream of logistical questions, delivered staccato. "Vere are we going mommy? Vy is it taking so long? Vy is the car moving?"

"Because…..because….because the wheels are going 'round and 'round."

To quote Bill the Cat, "Ack."

Another category of challenging is the abstract questions—the ones three-year-olds really aren't equipped to know the answers to because they don't have, well, life experience. A case in point. I was driving the kids back from daycare recently, relaxing to some Simon & Garfunkel after a punishing workday. "Kathy’s Song" was playing:

“And so you see I have come to doubt
All that I once held as true
I stand alone without beliefs
The only truth I know is you.

….And as I watch the drops of rain
Weave their weary paths and die
I know that I am like the rain
There but for the grace of you go I.”

T-Rex piped up from the back seat, “Vy is this man singing like that about rain mommy?”

“Uh. Because he’s sad, hon.”

“But vy is he sad?”

“Um. Because his lady love went away.”

“But vy did that lady go away from that man?”

Ack.

I related this incident to my parents, and my father’s response was, “You should have told him it’s because she went off and got [censored] with some other guy.” Strangely, I was reminded of the grandfather in the movie "Little Miss Sunshine."

Anyway. You get the idea. T-Rex asks a lot of questions, many of which I can't answer adequately. So, now I'm the one asking the questions:  Is all his questioning normal? And when he asks the same question over and over, am I supposed to be OK with that?

Of course, I went surfing the Internet for answers, and the resounding answer to both questions is, "Yes!" When kids ask questions it's a good thing, the experts say, because:

● It helps them think critically. Parents, of course, want to answer correctly. But not all questions have a definite answer, and discussing children's questions can help teach them that. They can learn that different ways of asking questions prompt different answers. And when answers aren't clear, they can learn to dig deeper.

● It fosters persistence. Endless questions can get irritating, especially when the same ones are repeated. But shutting them down can send a message that it's not good to keep asking. And in the adult world, pushiness often pays.

● It stems from curiosity, which is linked to good mental health. In the field of positive psychology—what makes life satisfying and meaningful to people—researchers say curiosity is a key indicator of people's success and well-being.

One of the leading researchers in the area, psychologist Todd Kashdan of George Mason University, maintains that curiosity is key to growth. His studies find that the more curious people are, the higher their levels of confidence, autonomy, and spiritual satisfaction.

Curiosity also acts as an antidote to anxiety – opening minds to new people and experiences and superseding self-doubt and fear. It can also keep addiction at bay. And it even helps stave off dementia, not that that's something T-Rex needs to worry about yet.

This all makes sense, but I'm not convinced that curiosity is always good. And Kashdan does acknowledge that it has its dark side. For example, you can be too curious about other people, intruding in their lives and gossiping relentlessly. Keep pressing them on private matters, and they may start making things up.

I think that's what Eugene O'Neill was getting at in the play "Diff'rent" through his character Benny, who said, "Curiosity killed a cat! Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies."

But when it comes to questions about the world—how it works, why the sky is blue, what a vacuum cleaner does, why airplanes leave vapor trails, why mommy paints her toenails, why our dog Simba is so smelly, and why the car is moving—apparently a kid can't ask too many of them.

So I'm bracing myself for many more question-and-answer sessions with T-Rex. But I'm ready to turn more of the questions around on him and to suggest doing research if I don't know the answers.

I'm also seeking a bottomless well of patience—and the energy to explain that some things just don't have answers. Like why did the lady in Kathy's Song go away? Unless Paul Simon is willing to take a call from a three-year-old, I don't think we'll ever know.