Changing POV

Puddock Hill Journal #90: Let’s look at it from the perspective of the creatures we’re trying to save.

Jun 06, 2025

The other day, I was out in the yard conducting my usual war with invasives by hand and machine when I had a passing thought for a new post with some tips that (in my head) began, “In my experience…”

I don’t remember what that post would have been about because my brain immediately segued to the idea that my experience is quite limited, so is yours, and so is every gardener’s, even the most expert. This is because we only experience the world as humans, while there are between eight and nine million species of living things on earth seeing things their own way.

The ecological crisis we have promulgated all around us is a crisis of empathy. If every living nonhuman thing is only an afterthought—only something in our way or considered of no consequence—we are conducting ourselves with great arrogance: aka hubris. And we know hubris eventually leads to tragedy that engulfs the perpetrator.

While out walking yesterday by the big pond, I disturbed a green heron. They are shy creatures. Undoubtedly it was fishing but couldn’t tolerate the disruption of my sudden presence and took flight.

I have inadvertently disturbed green herons before—perhaps even the same one. I watched it fly back across the pond, not ready to abandon the whole place, and I knew exactly where it would settle.

On the north side of the pond stands an old red maple. For some reason, the tree is not doing well. If you set out seeking beauty, you would not choose it. On a casual walk, you might not notice its condition at all. But if you bother to look, you see that the leaves on its branches are sparser than one might observe in a thriving tree. In a neighborhood, near a house, the arborists would keep an eye on it for safety—human safety. Here in the semi-wild, the best that can be said from an aesthetic perspective is that the tree is doing no harm.

To the green heron, however, it is a refuge. I knew this heron would fly to it and settle on one of its open limbs because I’ve seen them do so many times before—even heard one quacking to a mate from there a few years ago. From the heron’s point of view, the limb is an easy landing spot to grip with webbed feet, and it affords a clear view of the water below, a source both of sustenance and danger.

When sensing a threat, where would the green heron have gone without that tree? Perhaps it would have found a less ideal spot, making it more uncomfortable, more vulnerable. Perhaps it would have needlessly expended energy departing the area completely, deprived of the meal it could only harvest by wading in a pond.

As backyard stewards, it behooves us to consider the world from the perspective of those creatures we’re working to save. To a woodpecker, an unsightly dead tree is a potential nesting sight and the source of many meals. Inconvenient holes in the ground of various sizes are doors into dens or nests for ants, termites, bumblebees, foxes, and groundhogs. Blemishes on the leaves of our cherished plants are signs that an arthropod landed a meal or a caterpillar found the right plant to support its future existence as a moth or butterfly. Pond water that is not perfectly clear provides everything to the fish, frogs, turtles and invertebrates that rarely abandon it, if at all.

When we dig, what are we disturbing? When we spray, what are we poisoning? When we cut—as we invariably must do to combat invasives—what else are we harming? When we mow, what dies in the grass?

A couple weeks ago, I set out across the lawn with an arborist to take a look at a tree that had half fallen. I’d concluded it would have to come down to protect the other trees around it. We were only a few weeks into no-mow season, and the grass had so far grown only a foot or two high. Suddenly, the arborist jumped. He’d almost stepped on a large garter snake.

Where does that snake go when the mowers come through? Does it have the ability to see them from far enough off to make an escape? Or does it often meet a gory fate, unnoticed by any human?

This week, the first fireflies of summer made an appearance at Puddock Hill. Elsewhere, they are threatened by light pollution and pesticides. Did they show up where people spray needlessly for mosquitoes, killing unnumbered benign arthropods along the way? Did they fail to breed under the glaring lights along Route 1, just a mile from here?

At the very least, we should pause to consider the harm we might do to wildlife before we act—reframe our view of the world not from our own experience, but from another creature’s.

This morning, I watched a spider crawl across the marble floor of our bathroom. Though I’ll never know its exact purpose, it was clearly on a mission. I decided to let it be.

Native foxglove beardtongue (Penstemon digitalis) grows wild on the dry side of the wet meadow: