Hunter in Nature - Autobiography of Biologist Wilson

Author: Wilson
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-07-01
Features: Hope for "Big" Animals
One evening, a young man passed by me on the beach, playing with a revolver in his hand, and I followed him for a while. He said he was coming to shoot porpoises. In those days, many young people (including my father) often carried guns (usually .22 caliber revolvers or rifles, but occasionally larger handguns or shotguns) around the countryside, shooting whatever they wanted, except for humans and livestock. While following him, I thought of this porpoise hunter as my peer, a companion for exploration, full of hope that he would find some animals I had never seen before, perhaps even larger ones. After he rounded a bend at the beach and disappeared from my sight, I heard two quick consecutive gunshots. Could the bullets from a small revolver penetrate the porpoises underwater? I guessed they probably could, but I had never tried. And I never saw this marksman again, never got the chance to ask him in person. How I longed to catch something bigger each time than the last. Finally, after much effort, I finally got to see what true "big" was! I knew there were large animals in the deep sea. Occasionally, a pod of bottlenose dolphins would swim past the shore, very close to where I stood, so close that it might be possible to hit them with a thrown stone. I watched them leap in groups, breaking the surface with their dorsal or ventral fins, making beautiful arcs, diving, and then disappearing, only to rise again a few dozen meters away. Their movements were highly rhythmic, so I could accurately predict where they would surface next. On clear days, sometimes I would spend several hours scanning the smooth, mirror-like surface of Bodega Bay, hoping to accidentally spot some colossal creature surfacing. I hoped at least to see a shark, to witness firsthand how its legendary dorsal fin would break the surface; I knew that although it looked like a dolphin from a distance, the intervals between its sounds and surfacing were irregular. Additionally, I hoped to find something even more spectacular than a shark, but what it was, I couldn’t quite say. Whatever it was, it had to be something that would be unforgettable for life. Almost everything I saw were dolphins, but I was not disappointed. Before I tell you about the only exception, let me first discuss the psychology of hunting for these monsters. The sizes of these monsters are not defined by actual dimensions but by relative proportions. According to my estimation, when I was seven years old, the sizes of animals in my eyes were about twice as large as what I see now. For example, the bell of the jellyfish I described earlier is now known to have an average diameter of about 25 centimeters; but the one I saw seemed to be half a meter wide—the equivalent of half a meter in an adult’s eyes. Therefore, there might truly be such colossal monsters, even if they are not considered large in an adult’s eyes. Finally, I finally saw such an animal. P6-7