Little Packages

The first time that I ever held an African pygmy goose in my hand, my only thought was, "Where's the rest of it?"   This was followed by the exasperated suspicion that the zoo which had sent us the birds had botched things up and sent us chicks instead of adults, like we were supposed to get.

It didn't matter that I knew that these were the world's smallest waterfowl species.  It didn't matter that the weights that were listed on their incoming paperwork matched those that the books listed as being typical for an adult of the species.  My brain refused to believe it all.  It just looked at the little bird in my hand and thought, "That can't be right."

An ongoing source of amazement, amusement, and bemusement for me in working with animals is that nothing is ever as big, or as small, as it's supposed to be in my mind.  Usually, things are bigger than I expect them to be.  The first day that I worked with Amur tigers, or polar bears, or white rhinos, I felt dwarfed by the size and power of the animal that I was standing in front of.    As a very young child, my grandfather, knowing how much I loved animals, took me to a local fair to ride a pony - only for me to be unexpectedly terrified of just how huge it was (to three-year-old me).  It's that same feeling that I had the first time I walked up to an ostrich, and noticed that it was literally looking down at me.

Other animals struck me as smaller than I'd expect.  Sometimes, it's the case of an animal that is just really tiny, and I just didn't appreciate how tiny - like the pygmy geese.

Some animals only seem small in comparison to bigger animals that I already worked with.  I once unpacked a shipping box holding a pair of spiny-tailed monitor lizards, diminutive cousins of the Komodo dragon and crocodile monitor.  I knew that they were pygmy monitors, but I thought that they were "pygmies" in comparison to their giant relatives.  It never dawned on me that they'd be so small, so fragile, and so delicate as one sat comfortably in the palm of each hand.

Similarly, the first jaguar that I worked with seemed so tiny to me, compared to the lions and tigers that I'd worked with.  The first Andean bear that I cared for was dwarfed by the big bears that I was used to - and when sun bears came later, it was even more pronounced.  The reverse can be true too, of course.  I thought I was perfectly comfortable catching and handling cranes, having worked with sandhills and grey-crowned cranes for years... then I saw my first whooping crane, and changed my mind real fast.

What's funny to me is that some people I know outside of the field have gotten the majorly wrong idea of how big some animals are based on their own imagination.  I remember one college classmate who was disappointed to learn that giraffes were "only" 16-18 feet tall - he was expecting something in the 50 foot range.  

On a smaller scale, I can relate - when I first met a giant otter up close on a behind-the-scenes tour, I saw at once that it was much bigger than the North American river otters I was used to - but still not as big as I imagined.  Not that it wasn't still a cool experience.  In fact, one of my favorite parts of meeting a new species for the first time is discovering for the first time just how big - or small - the animal really is.