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The sky quarreled with itself about whether to glow blue or glimmer gray, and that indecision matched my own situation. Intellect argued I do one thing; emotion insisted I do something altogether different, something virtually unheard of.
This situation began in 1991 when I answered a telephone call. A professor recently retired from the university offered me a collection of bird and mammal specimens used for decades as teaching aids in wildlife biology courses. Anything I didn’t take would go to the county landfill.
For 25 years I used those specimens to teach people the differences between ruminants and ungulates, between antlers and horns and so many other distinctions that reveal what we know about the actual character of Life on Earth.
The passing years imposed many changes, one of which was acknowledging my turn had come to pass the specimens to someone else.
I contacted museums and outdoor learning centers, environmental education programs, public schools and colleges. All shared the common mission of teaching people about wildlife. A few skulls went here, even fewer skins went elsewhere.
The various thanks-but-no-thanks rejections all focused one way or another on a major pedagogical shift. Why bother using actual wildlife specimens when you can use PowerPoint to show pictures of that wildlife?
So 32 years after that phone call, I loaded some skins and tails and wings, some skulls and leg bones and teeth into my car and drove to a place in the mountains, a place special to me.
My intellect had argued for the last year to take the unwanted specimens to the county landfill. My emotion argued that I could not in any ethical conscience dispose of those wildlife specimens as if they were just trash.
I parked the car and with a bag full of specimens in hand walked off-road into a treeland where I knew every pine and spruce and aspen on a first-name basis. A half mile from the road and far, far away from any trail, I began to return the specimens to a place where Nature would process them back into the cycles of Life.
Rather than just tossing them, I removed each specimen one at a time and placed it gently on the ground. A detached foot here; a wing there; a tooth farther along. Two hours and two miles later I got back to my car with an empty bag.
The clouds wept tiny fragile snowflakes that danced gracefully from sky to ground, and a few fragile tears gracefully danced down my cheeks. And for good reason.
My intellect and my emotion finally agreed to work together as partners, not by disposing of the specimens but by returning them. Completing the task infused me with a sensation, part intellect and part emotion, for which I have no defining word. I can only describe it.
The experience was too happy to be sad, too joyful to be sorrowful. It hinted at contributing to fulfilling the cycle of life. It was about respecting Life.
Perhaps my action was excessive and made no ecological contribution to the specimens and that treeland. But placing those artifacts of life back out there contributed enormously to the ecology of my mind and spirit. For a single reason I have no doubts or regrets about doing it.
It is never wrong to do the right thing.
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