In 1813 John James Audubon returned to his family in Kentucky after a long trip finding and studying birds. Upon opening a trunk that had contained over two hundred drawings of birds, he found a pair of Norway rats had been raising a family inside, turning most of his artwork into urine-soaked tatters. More often than the uncomplimentary--and not always apt--analogy of rats in a trunk, the condition of human beings in the universe has been compared to that of cats in a library. Creatures of many admirable traits, cats nevertheless can have only a very primitive understanding of a library. Given only an hour or two, they'll wander among the bookshelves, completely oblivious of their contents. My own cats loved to sniff a stack of borrowed library books I brought home, with all their intriguing mixed scents of food and sweat and tobacco. Patrons of my local library have been known to leave a slice of ham, presumably used as a bookmark, in a returned volume. Given the run of a library over a longer period however, cats will eventually knock all the books to the floor and use them as litter. Not unlike the rats, in the final analysis. A being of broader and more complex understanding might look at mankind in a similar way. We seem to poke curiously around, interested mostly in personal gratification, often with only a vague notion of the meaning of the things we find and disturb. Like Audubon's rats, we have been able to prosper and reproduce our kind--and hence succeed by many biological criteria--based on the destruction of things we have not understood. All too often we behave like rats in the environment we inherit, and often enough like cats with regard to the great works of nature. Cats may keep rats under control, and we can govern them to some extent, but it seems only we can keep ourselves in check. Bill Whan ______________________________________________________________________ Ohio-birds mailing list, a service of the Ohio Ornithological Society. Please consider joining our Society, at www.ohiobirds.org/site/membership.php. Our thanks to Miami University for hosting this mailing list. You can join or leave the list, or change your options, at: listserv.miamioh.edu/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=OHIO-BIRDS Send questions or comments about the list to: [log in to unmask]