4. Eco-Narrative

Breaking Trust

Trust is a strange thing. It takes years to build trust in someone or something, but it can be broken in a few seconds. In my life, I often begin to build trust in a new home or in humans, only to have that trust ripped away in seconds. It doesn’t matter if I live in an unused barn or stay silently in a tree, as soon as humans see a black snake near them, they get rid of “it”, without emotion or kindness. I clean up rats and mice, and am not venomous, but the humans still judge me based off what they presume rather than reality. Homes I build for years are often destroyed by humans, in their ever-evolving aim of owning more, and giving other species less. This has forced me to move from home to home throughout my life, always looking for a new tree, barn, or somewhere else to go.

Black Rat Snake

I’d recently found a quiet forest but getting there had been troublesome. The humans had placed flat, grey strips of land, attracting strange toxic creatures that moved quickly and screeched often. The small oak saplings close to the ground made for a good home, as I wasn’t quite large enough yet to make it high in the roosting trees. There was a large array of mice and other food available, along with few humans passing through. The woods themselves were surrounded by humanity, but the inside was relatively peaceful. That was, until the herd came. A group of humans, carrying a dumber of strange devices, trudged their way through the woods and began to talk to the devices around a particular grove of trees. Later that night, I met the resident of those trees, an Indiana bat.

Indiana Bat

Indiana Bat with White-Nose Syndrome

The bat had been migrating from several forests and had made its way here after being forced to move several times. It’s close family and other bets had been affected by a disease, turning its nose white and spreading quickly among other bats, killing them off. This, in combination with humans pushing them out, had gotten rid of nearly all its kind. However, it had been in this forest for a few years and trusted the humans that lived around it. Over the next weeks, I had attempted to warn the bat of how humans treat us, but the bat showed me how the area he resided in was a “protected space” by the humans, to protect the bat. This puzzled me. How could some humans protect other species when other humans push them out at every turn? But, as I watched the bat remain in peace, and my own small tree began to grow without interruption, I began to see the possibility of remaining somewhere without interruption. However, soon enough I would understand the incorrectness of my thinking.

A few days later, the humans apparently had another structure they needed to build. The humans came with their tools and cruelty, endangering the bat’s home by cutting down some of the trees. They left some, but the damage hadn’t been done to the forest itself, it had been done to the bat’s trust. The next time I saw the bat, it was preparing to move on to a new forest. I asked it to stay, since I had never had much stability until this forest, but the bat no longer felt safe there. The humans had only removed a few trees from the bat’s preserve, but it was enough to scare it away to a new forest. Years of progress that the humans had built in establishing trust with the bat, myself, and the other species of the forest disappeared in an instant, as one action from some humans ruined our trust in the other humans. As the bat decided to relocate to a new forest, I myself debated on leaving the forest as well, as if the humans took down places that they had sworn to protect, what would they do with the other places, like the trees that I lived in? After the bat left, I felt lost, wondering if being forced to leave would cause the bat to contract the disease that had taken so many of his species recently, or if he would ever find a home that he could be safe in.

I had wanted to leave for a while but could never find a better place to go to, so always returned to the now young tree alongside a path in the forest. I hoped my fate could be kind, able to grow and hunt in peace. But, as I one day saw a group of humans walk by me, spot me, and begin to point, I knew that I would be shooed away, or forced to move again. But this group of humans seemed a bit different than all the others that had walked by in the past. These humans were younger and didn’t seem scared of me at all. They seemed to understand that I wasn’t dangerous to them, and they seemed even interested in a way. As I watched the students walk, they didn’t look at the woods the same way that others did. While other humans looked at how nice the trees looked or the beauty of the forests, this group looked at their environment like I looked at it, with a desire to understand it, or a desire to treat it like it is worth something.

I may never trust humans again with my home, but I don’t have much of a choice with who has control of the forests I choose to live in. As I navigate the betrayal and migration of the bat, and other species that have trusted humans in the past, it continues to give me the idea of the different ways that some humans treat species that are beneath them. Some humans look to take what they can with disregard for the forests, where others seem to want to protect the forests, but is that what they really want? Are they just like the others, or can they bring something different, and work to build back the trust of other species and myself that have been scorned so many times? Only time will tell whether trust will be built or broken.

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