I finally made it out of the city last weekend. One grows tired of seeing only house sparrows, starlings, pigeons, and Canada geese. Even though the sparrows are flocking, and you catch little clumps of them, usually more than half clumsy orange-beaked juveniles, foraging through grass that’s just going to seed.

This was my first birding expedition on the eastern side of the Rockies, and I was ill-prepared, in spite of the novelty of seeing a bright red cardinal during my first weekend here, for just how different it would be. The first thing you notice, of course, are the songs. Birdsong is notoriously difficult to remember. Its spectral structure doesn’t correspond to anything humans have evolved to produce or process, so it tends to evade the storage mechanisms for speech and song. If you’ve ever tried to find your way through the streets of a Greek city (and you don’t have any familiarity with the alphabet) you’ll know what I mean: you look at a name in your guidebook, you may even manage to memorize it at a certain level, but when it comes to accessing that memory for recognizing whether you’re on the right street, you’re better off just following your nose. With time, of course, one learns to read Greek, or recognize what a chestnut-backed chickadee sounds like, but the knowledge is not (to use the technical term) declarative, and my immediate reaction was not unlike what happens when I’ve walked into a room and known something was missing, but not what.

The second strange thing was that in spite of several months of not looking through binoculars I found myself identifying birds with at least as much proficiency as when I left off, if not more. I don’t mean, of course, that I somehow knew the dusky gray birds peeking curiously out of the brush around a stream were gray catbirds, but I was able to form a detailed enough mental image of them that when I went to look through my Sibley guide it was relatively easy to identify them. I think some of this might be due to watching Arnie. He is admittedly crazy, and thus perhaps not the best example of bird psychology, but I’m learning to read some of his postures, like the little head tilt he does when he’s attending to something visual or auditory. So I can be fairly confident that the catbirds were looking curiously out from their brambles at me.

It’s the relationships between the bird’s sensory environment, its mental state, its postures, and its behavior, that form the basis for ethology. Brains, just like bodies, are tuned to the animal’s niche; to its place in the ecosystem. That’s the only way to understand them. It’s the only way to understand our own brains, too.

I also saw a pair of white-tailed deer. Out west I think I only saw mule deer, and the white-tails are a much grander sight. I saw the buck first, standing motionless about halfway up a hill (yes, Virginia, there are hills in the Midwest; can you guess where I was?). It was immediately obvious to me that I was looking at a male, and equally obvious that I had no good explanation for why that should be so apparant. The arrangement of his muscles, his posture, what looked like a scar or two? I can only say, analyzing my perceptions in retrospect, that I noticed his build first, but who can say to what extent I was predisposed to notice this by other, largely subconscious, perceptions? Or, even more strangely, how my mind so easily mapped the concept of maleness onto a completely different body – another mammal’s body, of course, but perfectly novel to my mind nonetheless. At one point the buck took his eyes off me to look over at the hill to my left. My first thought was that there were other people approaching, but eventually I saw the doe, and if there was any doubt about the first deer’s sex, it was completely obliterated by the contrast between the two. Where the buck was barely restrained energy, a catapult ready to fly off into the bushes, she was perfect grace, with wide, curved hips and none of the visible muscle definition.

I watched them for a while, and then advanced along the trail, which would have taken me between them, curious to see how they would react. When I reached a certain point the buck made a snorting noise and ran a few paces up the hill, while the doe ran off to my left, over the hill and out of sight. The buck stayed to watch me, and because my path curved slightly to the left I was a little concerned he would charge if he felt I was a threat to her. No doubt he would have been even more likely if he had been sporting antlers, and the various hormones that go with them. “It’s okay,” I said, walking slowly and keeping my eyes on him.

Many questions arise from this simple encounter, which was wonderful in a way that even the sight of birds, for all their breathtaking beauty, has never been. Birds are sufficiently alien to our minds that we apprehend them, if at all, through metaphor. We cannot imagine what it is like to have wings, or to see the world through their senses. The very element of space is an entirely different entity for us and them. Until I saw the deer I had been looking at things which were to my mamallian mind something akin to a winged flower or an animate leaf. In that world male and female is a matter of difference in color or size. There are general rules, but many exceptions (hawks, phalaropes), and most birders probably think of sex as simply a matter of attributes, and not, as it is generally considered among ourselves, as something completely integral to the creature. In the deer I saw the image of maleness and femaleness – as I consider it pertaining to myself and to other humans – presented in what, after several hours of birdwatching, I perceived as a foreign medium. It is as if I had only ever seen abstract paintings and one day came upon a representation of the human form.

Up until about four or five hundred years ago the interpretation of this encounter would have been that humans and deer share the duality of maleness and femaleness. They are expressed differently, but the form of maleness (or femaleness) is common to both species. Thus, what I perceived was the identity of form, just as I perceive that a chair made out of wood and a chair made out of metal are both chairs.

In contrast, the standard, or rather, currently prevalent, interpretation of this phenomenon is that my own mind inherits an ability which is also present in apes; that is, a capacity and indeed a tendency to form analogies. An analogy is a mapping of one relationship, in this case male and female, onto another pair of percepts. An obvious example would be the male and female ends of connectors for cables. In the case of the deer the mapping is more subtle, since the relationship is between certain qualities that I associate, in humans, with maleness, and which I have mapped onto the deer. I happened to guess correctly, but I might not have been so lucky with hyenas, lions, or any of the many other species for whom “traditional” gender roles are inverted.

Indeed, it would be a mistake to conclude from this encounter (and the millions of similar ones humans have had throughout history), that nature somehow decrees that maleness means strength and femaleness means docility. But the failure of nature to fit one particular notion of sexuality does not imply that the nominalist position I outlined above is necessarily correct. All it means is that we are not necessarily seeing the true forms, and I would like to suggest that the error begins with the notion that there are two forms to begin with. Maleness and femaleness only have meaning in relationship to each other. The buck’s physical strength and bravery only make sense in relationship to the needs of the doe, and the strengths of the doe only make sense in relationship to the needs of the buck. Male and female arenot two separate things, but a single duality. It is this complementarity that nature enforces. Our minds see it, if they see it, because they are tuned to recognize this complementarity, which pervades nature, most especially our own.

(cdm | NatureAndForm)