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Does watching the private habits of wildlife really provide relief from stress?
Afriend who was visiting was keen to see the giant pandas at the National Zoo in Washington, DC. I used to be unsure what the fuss was about until I was told that giant pandas spend 10-16 hours a day foraging and eating. On learning that, I felt a sudden affinity with them and visited the zoo where, sure enough, the first one I saw was gnawing away on large sticks of bamboo, which is all that pandas eat.
It seems a monotonous diet but I suppose it takes the angst out of what to have for dinner. And bamboo offers the bonus of not running away when you want to eat it, which must be such a pain with the preferred food choices of so many other wild animals.
My friend asked if there were bears at the zoo, and when I said I didn’t think so, she said it didn’t matter because she was quite familiar with them from watching them via live webcams. “You do what?” “Oh, yes,” she said, “I find it very calming, especially if it’s stressful at work, to take five minutes watching bears in Alaska catching salmon in a river.”
Personally, being scared of bears, I would have to have some very stressful work before I found relief watching a bear do anything, but the conversation introduced me to explore.org. If you have access to the internet, you too can spend 24 hours a day watching various animals live in the wild and some in captivity.
As I type, I am flicking over to live footage from up a tree in Decorah, Iowa, where a bald eagle is sitting on a nest, which I thought looked very cosy until I realised that the grey fluffy underlay was, doh, three baby eagles. In the 90 minutes since I started watching, the mother or father eagle has not moved.
Unlike my friend, who finds this stuff soothing, I am anxious that if that damned eagle does not get off those babies soon, they will end up with indented heads. I have to take a break now because it’s quite windy up there in Decorah today and that nest is swaying so much I am beginning to feel carsick.
Never mind, I can switch to a chipmunk log in Lake Dillon, Colorado, where … nothing is happening. I think the chipmunks have checked out. All I see are leaves. Excuse me, please, while I switch to the stall of a donkey in Ipswich, Massachusetts. I am not finding this soothing at all.
At a maritime museum on Chesapeake Bay, my friend, my husband and I got talking to the volunteer guide, a youthful 84-yearold who about 15 years ago sailed his own boat to Central America. He was a wonderful guy and had given more than 2000 hours of his time to the museum.
When he was not there, he was volunteering at the local hospital. A salt-of-the-earth citizen, but he potentially has a US$30,000 fine hanging over him because, on his trip home from Central America, he stopped in at Cuba. That was considered an “act of war”, not by the Cubans, who were happy to see him, but by the US Government.
He is banking on there being about 400 people ahead of him on the list for the same prosecution, and there is just one judge handling such cases. “I’ve given them the address of the cemetery,” he told us.
My work would have to be very stressful before I found relief watching a bear do anything.