Rats Transfiguring

Oh, that sinking ship!

Surviving cold and stormy seas

Flotsam, clinging on

And one day will hitch

An amazing ride through space

To brave new, desperate worlds 

Just like our forebears

Scrabbling round the feet of giants

Took the human path

So they already

Skipping past the prototype 

Tenaciously begin

The night climb up the ropes

Onto the welcoming ship,

The plenteous hold

144.

Axolotl

A salamander

That never grows up and stays

An aqueous creature 

Lives in deepest caves

Fades to pale transparency

Too perfect to live?

145.

Snow 44.

Fleas

Antifreeze, spring-tails!

Life writ on winter paper

Peppering blind faith

Hopping meteorites

Landed on the pristine snows

Messages from space

Who could imagine

Such harmless innocence

Pure optimism!

146.

Jumping spider - Maevia Inclemens

Tiny predator's

Complex behaviour reveals

Worlds in grains of sand

Thousands of species

Perfecting micro kingdoms

Jostled territories

147.

Vicuna

Up in the high cold

The winds demand perfection

For bare survival

The thinnest of hair

On the delicate body

Traps the frigid air

Smells disappear

On the swept altiplano

Hearing dulls, founders -

Sight remains vital

Sharp, cutting, clears the miles

For camelid speed

Effortless grace

Defies the deadly harshness,

Beauty triumphant

.

148.

Bee Hummingbird (For Esther)

In a minute nest

On a branch of a tall tree

On the Isle of Pines

Lie two tiny eggs:

Inside them babies smaller

Than your fingernails.

They will crack open

Their world, cared for by mother

As superpowers grow:

Magnificent wings

Driven by musculature

That blurs their movement

And can fly backwards,

Hover, thrust their beaks deep, deep

In a thousand flowers,

Drinking the nectar

Through custom hollow tongues  -

Life in the afat lane -

149.

Leopard Seal

Long, thin, fast, lethal

Less blubber, honed for speed

Tearing, rending mouth -

Perfect predator!

Patrols the southern seas

Fate-wielding beauty

150.

Screech Owls

Screech owls rarely screech

Even voicing Halloween 

They live shy, ferocious

Huge eyes drink darkness

Their razor gripping talons  

Slice the lives of prey

A terrible beauty

Their plumage subtly mimics

The woods around them

Quietly disappears

This coat of many colours

Perfect incognito

Fingering the night

Coasting through silence

Harbingers of death

151.

Golden Eagles, Isle of Mull, Scotland

Rising, spiralling

From a tall, untidy nest

Into realms of air

Is there joy there,

The soaring exultation

Beyond necessity?

The flight's a meeting

Of four eyes locked, ferocious

Scanning the state of the world

152.

The White Bulls of Rome

(Roman cattle were mostly red/brown, but a strain of huge white cattle was reserved for important sacrifice)

The haunting white bulls

Thousands of sacrifices

A river of blood

Their mournful lowing

Echoes down the corridors

Of stubborn meaning

Down through the centuries

Stolen from generations

They migrate the sky

153.

Dung Beetles

Strongest of insects!

If we could roll Jupiter

Along dusty paths

We might find the pride

To rival this Sisyphus

Whose endless labours

Recycle the shit

Dropped by us other creatures,

Humbly clean up 

Take thoughtless leavings

Transform them into caches, 

Survival palaces

154.

Bactrian Camel

Great ship of the  steppes!

Whose gait oscillates the sea

Links worlds, continents.

Patient in extremes!

Your slow conquest of distance

Masters time itself

 135. 

Ruby-throated hummingbird

A challenging epic -

Feeding the high metabolism

The struggles, the fights for turf -

Life in the fast lane

The costs of panache,

The brilliant precision,

Stunning survival -

--

 T-Rex

Oh, TR!

The best of the TRs

As you prance and you bounce

Like a little kitten

Prancing

By Esther

Great Auk

Once there were millions,

Thrived in the cold latitudes:

We called them penguins.

Richard Whitmore, 1622:

"God made the innocency

Of so poor a creature

To become such an

Admirable instrument

For the sustenance of Man."

1785: George Cartwright, explorer:

(Of the slaughter)

If

A stop is not soon put

The  whole breed will be diminished

To almost nothing."

1840: Sailors on St.Kilda:

Captured, stoned to death

"Prophet-like that lone one stood"

"Maelstrom-conjuring witch."

Two centuries gone

The millions crowd the rocks

Haunt the lonely seas.

Tree Frog - Costa Rica

Its ocean swaying

High in  the misty forest

The world in a leaf

Toads are poisonous

Warty, squat, prone to orgies

Dry-skinned secretive

Insectivorous frogs

With a little less elegance -

Don't become princes. 

Tsetse Fly

This most mighty fly

Drew a line across Africa

Beyond which no Whites

Pushing  wagons North

With their exotic cattle

Could conquer, survive

Each  baby bloodsucker

Born live, a single darling

Deadly pride and joy

Emperor Scorpion

Terrifying?

In its world a predator 

To be reckoned with

It protects live young

Ancient, glows blue in UV light

Dances the night away

Luna Moth

By the time she's born

Much of life's fuss is over:

A paramount job 

Remains. Glorious

She rises, settles to lay her eggs,

Fasts for ten days, dies.  

Stag Beetles

Stag beetles jousting:

Enlarged to the human scale

Arthurian phantasms

Evolved for battle:

The romance of derring-do

Evolved, incarnate

Damselflies

Oh! the amazing

Impossibly long fuselages

Powering wings so delicafe, so perfected!

The profligate diversity, the careless rapture!

Can we still find across the world

The common blue, the narrow-winged,

And yes, the "Beautiful Demoiselle",

The Banded, the Broadwinged, the Spreadwinged

The Siberian Winter (Yes! again)

The Pond, the White-legged,

Hundreds more, finely distinguished

And into the thickets of Latin and Greek,

The Lestordeidae, the Pseudostigmata

The Deradatta the Diphlebia

The Epallage, the Jumix

The :Palademnerna Chriquita?

The grudging counters, overachieving  taxonomists

Pronounce the verdict:  2942 species

And I assert the freedom to quibble

To fervently believe that out there in the swamps

All the outlands, wetlandish realms of Gaia

The 2943rd and all its cousins

Are fluttering and settling

In the fair country beyond death 

And all the dwindling,

The diminishment of all our lives.

Barred Owls Calling

Now, young raised and flown  

Neighbours tell faithful spouses

True states of affairs

--







River Otters

The joy of living

Is perfectly on display

Mammalian quintessence 

Pouring down muddy 

Slopes - evolution at play,

Each moment perfected

 Locust

Mildly reclusive, 

A quiet green grasshopper

Chewing in the wings

Like desert flowers

Blooms profusion after rains

A sudden orgy

Plague or bonanza?

Depends on your point of view

Human or locust

Moving plenitude

Devastating whole landscapes

Only fools obstruct

A  natural cycle

Ancient, older than the Bible's

Visitation from an interfering God.

Condor

Sailing the updraughts

Sky-fingerer, mountain comber

Lord of carrion

--

Anaconda

Nothing seems beyond

The sinuous reach of a giant

Anaconda's coils

Basking in the warm

Torpor of a tropical downpour

As streams flow under

The richly festooned branches

Of the ancient rain forest

Flourishing life high into the canopy

Where light and air conspire,

Surpass the realm of snakes

Weighing five hundred pounds

 Sandhill Crane

Clan fidelity!

The family groups migrating

Stay close together

In the great tribal

Sweep of thousands over time,

Grandeurs of landscape,

Long generations

Of finely balanced kindred

Centuries in order

Saw-Whet  Owl

Tiny, ferocious

Fierce recluses of the woods

Scimitar talons

Cutting through flesh, bone

Dissecting modest creatures

Less emphatic lives

Mountain  Lion

This lion has been seen

To leap impossibly high,

A deer in its mouth

And has roamed the land

Thousands of miles West to East

Ignoring boundaries

Houses, roads, power lines

Civilization's clutter -

Died in Connecticut

Carrying its own

Vast particular wildness

Through hidden pathways

Stealthy, nocturnal,

Crepuscular, glimpsed seldom .

And what of its prey?

Fleet of foot, wide-eyed

The calculus of energy

To bone and sinew

Long, low and lean

Greyhound-shaped, fiercely enhanced -

Feline of splendours

Climbing Mouse

In the deep forest

Secretive, climbing at night

The highest branches

Burrows in tree roots

Finds its labyrinthine path

Surviving edges

Mountain Sheep

The magnificence

Of those splendid horns belies

Quite a modest creature.   

And yet on its cliffs

It has mastered gravity

To reach specks of grass  

Firelfies

It's complicated!

Bioluminescence may

Signify fireflies

But other beetles

Know the same trick, to dazzle

Their mates with glory

And show the dull world

The  brilliant constellations

Of themselves, the stars.

Puffin

Evolving penguins!

Their flight a frantic scramble

Swimming a delight

 

Northern Ghost Bat

Why so different?

Solitary, white, all others

Dark, clouds, colonies?

Life against the grain?

Deeply temperamental?

An individual?

We The Primates

How many primates

From scurriers and scampers

Swingers and clingers

In  mountains and jungles

Cloud forest denizens

Wide-eyed nocturnals

Hangers-on barely

The counts dwindling scarily

The numerable endangered

Even our order

A darkening mystery

We don’t know the half

Close or remote

Or too close for comfort

An uneven family

Whose seats at  the table

We argue the membership

We swarm of bouncers:

So:  mouse-lemurs, lemurs, aye-aye and Lorises

Tarsiers and marmosets. Tamarins, sakis,

Capuchins, ouakis, douroucouli, titis

Squirrel monkeys, howlers, spider monkeys, woolies,

Barbary apes and macaques, mangabeys, baboons, 

Mandrills and geladas, vervets and dianas

Red-bellies, talapoins

De brazzas, allen’s and parades,

Colobus, proboscis, langur, gibbon, hoolock

Siamang, orangutan, chimpanzee, gorilla

Bonobos, humans, no, wait, do we belong here,

Looking round the relatives,

Gods of decision, environmental rulers

Unable to distinguish, let alone control

In charge of the ticketing

Who clambers on the bus

The one-way express with people on the roof

Hanging on the windows, running by the side

Heading for metropolis, concrete canyons, cells in zoos

Labs of fancy DNA staffed by people with the blues ?

Hawk Moth and Orange-kneed Tarantula

Sometimes the wasp wins

Sometimes the spider: balanced

Combat for ever

Sometimes the spider dies

Sometimes the wasp nurtures all

The baby spiders

And round and round They

Dance the minuet of death

As long as the cloud forest lives, and the Earth turns.