Spoiled by the Zoo

This year, I decided that I was going to take more time to engage in wildlife watching.  Every trip I take, especially outside of my state, I try to tack on a little time for birdwatching or over chances to see wildlife.  I set myself up a little travel bag with my binoculars, camera, field guide, and notebook.  I was all set to enjoy my reentry into the world of amateur nature study.

My one take away - man, working in a zoo has left me spoiled.

I spend a lot of time looking and fields or patches of woodland and not finding anything.  Or, even more frustrating, getting quick glimpses of wildlife (sometimes just a sound) that vanishes before I can get more than a glimpse, let alone an ID.  When I do see wildlife, it really is the same handful of species over and over again - my life-list is largely untouched since I began.  It makes me feel a little dumb sometimes, because, duh, this is the wild.  That's how it works.  In a society that is often geared towards instant satisfaction, I can perhaps understand why so many folks don't have the patience for this sort of thing.

Zoos aren't the only thing which skews perspective.  Nature documentaries are full of wildlife encounters - seldom showing how many hundreds of hours those filmmakers spent filming nothing while waiting for that brief burst of drama that David Attenborough will narrate.  Natural history museum dioramas have have dozens of species crammed together shoulder-to-shoulder to a degree that they wouldn't tolerate in a zoo, certainly not in the wild.

None of this is really a complaint, per se - just a reflection on how much working in a zoo has, to a degree, skewed my thought process as to what seeing animals in the wild is like.  They aren't just *there* waiting for you, all easy to see and observe.  They're unpredictable, cryptic, and constantly on the move.  And there sure as heck aren't any identification plaques.

The natural world is real, and that's what makes it beautiful.  I sometimes worry that when we create media that manages people's expectations in a way that makes it look much busier and more diverse than it realistically ever would be, we can do it a disservice.  I would worry about it resulting in people looking at the real, natural world and thinking that there's no wildlife there, nothing to save, and therefore not worthy of attention and protection.