The best place for helping hands may be in your pockets

On my nature-trail bike ride not long ago, I passed an older man poking a turtle with his cane.

It was a snapping turtle—not a big one by snapper standards, but probably newly mature. And it took the poking with grim determination, rather than with a hiss and gaping jaws as you would think a snapper might.

“Why are you poking that turtle?” I asked.

“I’m trying to help him find the lake,” he said. The lake was no more than four or five paces away, and the turtle was trying to head in the other direction, to higher ground. Its shell was wet from having recently been in the lake.

“It’s not the lake he’s looking for,” I said. “And he’s not a he, for that matter—he’s a she. She’s looking for higher ground to lay her eggs. You’re not helping her. You’re getting in her way.”

The man looked at me but said nothing. He had a grim turtlish scowl of determination on his face, as if to ask, “Well, who are you to say what the turtle wants? Or to tell me what to do?” He gave the turtle another poke.

I rode on.

I suppose his unspoken points have some merit. After all, I am not a biologist, or even a conversation officer with the legal power to restrict his misguided encounters with wildlife.

But I do know that pathway better than he does, because while he is an infrequent visitor on mild days, I have been out there in all kinds of weather—in rain, heat, fog, or blistering cold. I miss a day here or there these days because of other obligations, but a few years back I made a point of traveling that three-mile path every single day of the year, just to see how the plants and wildlife behave in their natural home when most of us aren’t around.

And the result is that I have seen animals behaving as you would never expect them to behave at any other day of the year—like an otherwise-ornery snapping turtle trudging across your path with no sign that it is even aware of your presence.

If you stand and watch instead of poke them, you’ll see why they’re acting that way. It may take a bit of rain down the collar, or mosquito bites on your ankles, or even toes numb from the cold, but in time you’ll come to see that animals in their natural home have a reason for their behavior, even if their behavior seems strange on a certain day. Especially if it seems strange.

Of course, if you don’t want to brave the elements, you could open a book written by people who have spent their lives in the rain, heat fog or cold, watching the animals so you wouldn’t have to: Annie Dillard, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Rachel Carson, Carson McCullers.

And every one of them, all the way back to Henry David Thoreau and beyond, will tell you to leave it alone when in doubt.

My favorite nature writer, Loren Eiseley, tells the tale of walking in winter along the Missouri River and finding a catfish frozen solid in a shallow isolated pool of ice, separate from the river. There had been a rise of the river following a late-season storm, and when the waters receded the fish had been stranded in a puddle, where it froze solid.

Eiseley chopped the fish from the ice and took it home to study it, for he was a scientist. He put it in a bucket in the basement to thaw, and then he went off to work.

When he returned in the late afternoon, he heard a noise from the basement, and there he found the catfish thrashing around in the bucket, fully alive. Astounded, Eiseley filled a large aquarium in the basement, where he kept the fish throughout the winter. Awed by the tenacity of life, he planned to return it to the river once the spring thaw came.

And on the day that the river ice broke up, he went down to the basement to finish the job—where he found that the catfish had leaped from the fish tank and lay dead on the floor.

On the very day that the river broke free of ice.

While it seemed an ironic coincidence to Eiseley at first, he came to see that it was all part of the plan.

Had he left it in the frozen puddle where he found it, he realized, the spring thaw would have melted the fish free of the grip of ice, and it would have flopped from puddle to puddle until it found the river. Instead, not knowing that it was in a basement fish tank rather than in a thawing puddle, the fish followed a biological imperative that took millions of years to be imprinted in its genes. Somehow—even in the safety of a basement fish tank—it had heard the call to start flopping.

But Eiseley, in his benevolent human ignorance, had interrupted the natural cycle and killed the fish with his kindness.

In his essays, Eiseley discusses other examples of human interference—rescuing young birds found out of their nests, or fox pups seemingly abandoned by their mother, or frogs seized by snakes—but his point was always the same: Our interference, though prompted by kindly intentions, is often more harmful to nature than inaction would be. We may sleep better at night believing that we have “helped” nature this day, but sometimes a restless night is better for all concerned.

When it comes to offering aid, physicians have a guiding principle: “First, do no harm.” When it comes to “aiding” nature in doing its job, it is a principle that should guide our actions, too.

And more often than not, that means doing nothing at all.

Words to live by.

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