How the meek will be inheriting the Earth...

My partner and I have been looking after mostly domestic doves , also occasional wild doves who cannot be released, such as our Herkimer who is an American Common Ground Dove, and a tiny fellow, the size of a grown sparrow.
These doves teach us many lessons, every day. Even though they have no other defense except to be able to fly away (their beaks are soft, if you touch a young doves' beak, you feel soft, warm skin! They certainly don't have scary claws on their feet, for they're just enough to cling to a branch with, and even on the grown, older doves, when they trust you enough to roost on your hand, you can feel the skin on their feet is also soft and warm. And when you lift Mom or Dad dove to check their chicks, they bat and slap at you with their wings, but even on the largest ones ((the pigeons)), they simply don't generate enough force to hurt anyone, not even one another)...so how would they continue to survive when the bigger meaner critters (us human killers, the meanest over-all) go to kill all of them as well as one another?
Simple, they out-parent us.
Even the worst doves make better, more attentive parents than the smartest humans.
When eggs are made, each parent dove takes turns incubating it. If anything happens to one of the parent birds so that only the other is left, and the weather is too cold to safely be away off the nest, then the remaining parent will stay on those eggs until they hatch, even if it takes the whole 21 days, and stay close to the hatched chicks for the critical initial first five days after hatching until they at least have their own insulating feathers.
If both parent birds are able to stay involved with their chicks, then the father-bird will also take turns providing doves' "milk" for the babies, who push their skin-soft beaks down into their parents' crops to get this mashed seed plus a kind of milk that each parent bird will produce for their chicks. They will do this for about three weeks until their young fledgelings are well able to fly and get around on their own.
They will also raise chicks in any weather, and all year around. We have seen several successful pairs of breeding doves raise as many os 8 sets of chicks or more in a single year, this way.
Doves are known as seed-eaters, but did you know they will also take on insects, small worms and small grubs?
With the careful attention that each parent gives and their complete willingness to sacrifice anything for their young, even their very lives if that's what it takes, it's no wonder to me that the "meek" shall inherit the Earth.
They seem to have a tendency to out-parent us and most other species as an unbeatable survival technique.

Mighty mouses

Around the end of March, 2007, there was a lot of notice showing up about mice. One article turned in by the Associated Press for March 24th was just five paragraphs long, but its headline was a real attention-grabber..."Mouse Taunts man, makes off with his dentures" , about a husband and wife in Maine, reporting how the man caught a mouse three times, but that it escaped three times, and then stole his lower dentures right off his bedside table from whence, after their daughter's fiance helped crowbar apart a good section of the bedroom wall, the dentures were retrieved. They said that the mouse comes out and just looked at the man, wife stating "he's taunting him, I swear he's taunting him". (mouse taunts man! :)
This was a merry story about a mouse and humans actually entertaining each other in a snowed-in, otherwise dreary late winter.
And then along came our own teensy little charming mouse-entertainer. Early in the morning, while my husband/partner was giving the doves each a generous several handsful of seed mixed about 1/4 with breadcrumbs, Out from under the smallest doves' cage , and that perched high atop another much larger cage set on a slick round-legged stand, comes a tiny field mouse who must have been a new spring youngster, for its body spanned no more than half an inch long, not counting the fuzzy tail. My partner was thinking of cleaning out the seed from the catch-tray under that cage, but looking straight into the eyes of this tiny, tiny brave little mouse, he just didn't have the heart to take its found seed-food away from it, just then. (Said to me, later that it was just as though the mouse was asking almost aloud "Why can't I have this seed?, the bird didn't want it." So, he left it stay there. Changed and cleaned the tray out the next day, after, apparently, the little mouse had its little fill and went on its own little way.
What is there about these small, but spiritually indomitable creatures? Mice are vegetarians, given any choice. Not the occasional predators for meat that rats are. Among the most adaptable and resourceful creatures, there's just something appealing about them, especially their apparent bravery in coming out to face us, the way some of them do. First the little winter mouse in Maine, then the spring mouse near our own house. Yet even still they are eminently practical. After all why even try to get in to a house where there are 7 cats and 62 ferrets of whom both these species are hereditary predators of mice, even if the ferrets have long-ago forgotten how to kill (of American ferrets, specially bred by their distributing 'farms' for gentleness and docility, this is true), when the doves swish extra seed out of their bowls and seed-trays every day and this excess is then broom-swept into the yards' grounds.
We admire that bravery and resourcefulness, keeping in mind the tiny, mighty mouse when bigger, meaner entities (like the Internal Revenue Service for some folks) tend to try to loom over us. In the end, the little mighty mouse prevails. It survives. The meek little mouse "inherited" the Earth when the dinosaurs were nearly wiped out. I think they'll be around long after humans have done the same wiping-out of one another as they seem to be perpetually bent on doing.

Stranger than fiction is truth

As mentioned in my last post, we have one pair of ravens who live close by to us, nesting high in a very old oak tree. There are two more pairs of ravens who also live relatively close by and come to visit us every day, for we are faithful friends to our non-human neighbors. One of the most favored items we supply our non-human neighbors is bread and doughnuts. We did this at our former residence before we moved to our present one, and it appears that our raven friends followed us to our current residence where we've been for nearly nine years, now.
So, along with making sure we have adequate supplies for the ferrets, cats, dog, hamsters and doves within our home, we also see to it that there is seed, old catfood-kibble for the smaller birds (flycatchers, thrushes, woodpeckers and other protien-eating small birds go for the old cat food kibble in a big way! Every year we seem to be graced by more pairs of woodpeckers than the last, and this is good news for the elderly trees) and, of course, the ravens' so-much-favored doughnuts.
Donuts for the ravens!
Donuts for the birds!
They eat 'em, fly to heaven,
and drop 'em back as turds.
They fer-ti-lize the green-ery
and make the place a scene-ery
fit for a king and queen-ery
Donuts are for the Birds!

Yet here is the portion of our observation that is "stranger than fiction", for it is true. One day, a very grumpy person went stomping down our street, apparently mad at the world and without a vehicle to aim at it. As this person passed by our home, three ravens dive-bombed towards the fellow and let loose their donut-poops all over him. Not being able to return the favor and shaken from his angry reverie, the fellow turned and ran back up the street to his own house. This was only a first incident, however; over a year later, we put this puzzle-ing behavior together after the second incident...a person going door-to-door who was, apparently, already filled with an inner seething anger, was raven-poop-bombed just as she approached our house from our own next-door neighbor's and came to our door "anyway", begging a towel to help clean herself off with, which, of course, we supplied.
So the ravens have shown themselves our allies and/or friends, "marking" those who harbor hostilities if they appoach our home. We have shown ourselves to have been faithful friends to the ravens and all the other birds, and the ravens have found their own way to demonstrate a kind of reciprocation of demonstrated friendship.
Stranger, indeed, than any fiction is truth.

To see ourselves as others....

Here we are in our second technically inundated century, some of us scanning the skies for sounds or indications of non-human intelligent life.
How droll!, when, for many millennia, non-human intelligent life has been rife all around us. Some of these showing they have and employ complex languages which we still can not understand even a little of, whereas those who employ those languages display a ready comprehension of those of the humans.
Consider one of the species older than our own by many millions of years, the ravens and their near-kin, the crows. Every spring for the past nine years, a pair of nesting ravens who live in a nearby several-hundred-year-old oak near my husband and I sound as though they are teaching their newest fledgelings...something. Many and varied kinds of sounds do they use, occasionally mimicing other calls such as a dog's barking or a human calling-out. Are they teaching their language over three weeks' time? or are they telling teaching stories? outlining their philosophy, explaining what to look out for and when? How can we know?
Scientists have gone through the troubles of recording these "teaching" sessions of wild ravens in an attempt to decipher their language, the second most complex among non-humans which is vocalized (the dolphins' and whales being far more complex, utilizing sounds out of human hearing range...yet, can the ravens be employing some of those kinds of sounds as well? above and below humans' ranges?) . To date, no one has been able to decipher the least part of these non-human languages. The ravens' the dolphins' the whales' languages are all far beyond any translations of humans.
And what might they be saying about us to their youngsters? 'don't get to close to the mad almost furless apes, over there, they can be nice one day and try to kill you the next' ? How can we know? What unmitigated arrogance some of us have, to imagine we are somehow "superior" to non-humans when we can not even comprehend their languages, and they show they understand ours!
To see our selves as others see us.
And those others have been sharing livingspace with us for all the millions of years we have been here, and many more, before that we concocted relatively simple languages of our own...from listening to them?, such as the ravens in their trees, teaching their chicks, and we, still dragging all our knuckles, figuratively, (as naked apes who kill indiscriminately) still wonder what are they saying...