Out Into Presence
A Review of Laurel Dykstra’s Wildlife Congregations: A Priest’s Year of Gaggles, Colonies, and Murders by the Salish Sea
Dystra, Laurel. Wildlife Congregations: A Priest’s Year of Gaggles, Colonies, and Murders by the Salish Sea. Hancock House Publishers, 2023. 233 pp. $ 19.95
I can still recall my astonishment upon discovering that the Tinker Creek in Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was not located deep in the wilds of Virginia, but rather in a suburban waterway. The revelation reoriented my walks through the golf course that split my neighborhood, helping me to see that space as a kind of wildland, even if a manicured one. Unlike Dillard, Laurel Dykstra, in their book Wildlife Congregations: A Priest’s Year of Gaggles, Colonies, and Murders by the Salish Sea, makes clear both their location in Vancouver and the proximity of the creatures they highlight to this urban center. Their year of, at times, sublime encounters with the fauna that gather in the Cascadia bioregion takes place in parking lots, on soccer fields and along the edges of construction sites, and their aims for their reader are plainly stated: “that this journey through a year—wild, sacred, and profane—will inspire similar pilgrimages in your own watershed.” (34)
Dykstra is an Anglican priest for Salal + Cedar (a Wild Church in British Columbia), an activist, an avid naturalist and, by their own admission, a mediocre birder. Wildlife Congregations is the author’s reflection on a year spent intentionally seeking out aggregations of creatures. It is a book that both relates the experience of encountering “the wild up close and personal, roaring in my face…splashing and thrashing at my feet” (148) and ruminates theologically on how such moments might be deeply sacred. There is also a grieving sort of wondering that runs through the text, one inspired by the great losses in both biodiversity and biomass we are experiencing in the Anthropocene. Dykstra writes, “I had begun with a loosely held question about interspecies loneliness: Am I different? Or how am I different because I do not have regular encounters or casual proximity to large numbers of creatures?” (211).
Their year takes Dykstra near bats, sea lions, eagles, toads and other creatures, which requires a great deal of careful tromping and quiet staring. It also opens up experiences that at times seem almost mystical. On seeing salmon and geese, Dykstra “felt humbled, or perhaps willingly diminished” (157), and later “obliterated just a little by the vastness of something else” (174). They write, “I simply gloried in the overwhelm” (148). The blur of wings and flashing of scales is a moment of sacred encounter, they argue, “No allegory or a moralizing object lesson is required; there is miracle enough right there. Creation, like scripture, is a word of God, and the Divine cannot be threatened by our knowing it better” (34). Like the mystics whose visions and experiences eschewed—even if carefully and subtly—the interpretive gate-keeping of church authority, Dykstra proffers an unmediated spiritual encounter, and while the author does not seek to pin down “the Mystery or the Sacred that shows up remains profoundly free and unharnassable” (214), they reflect on how, once you have set yourself down among a big group of animals, you might see God.
While Dykstra’s aims are never overtly pedagogical, their reflections on moments of “wordless awareness” (119) do invite the reader into the spiritual practice of paying attention, a practice that requires time, awareness and openness. Dykstra is a forgiving guide who instructs by example: Get close. Be still. Look carefully. And then? Wait for the unexpected. They draw a parallel between the act of quiet observation and participating in the sacraments of the church, spiritual exercises that are not “means of making the sacred happen or coercing the Divine, but rather a kind of curated and reliable way to place ourselves in the way of divine encounter” (213-14). Wildlife Congregations invites its reader out into the presence of the more than human world, into Presence itself.
I fear I have given you a lopsided impression that the book is overall theological with an occasional and humorous wildlife adventure; in truth, most of its pages are an exuberant naturalist’s accounts of stunning and mundane moments with some dozen species, as well as writing enriched with biological, ecological and historical information about the animals’ lives and worlds. Dykstra’s enthusiasm for all of these creatures is infectious. My own family was regaled with information I deemed too fascinating not to share. Only a partial list of occasions includes our breakfast table—the difference between moth and butterfly metamorphoses; a date night—tail shapes as a means of distinguishing ravens and crows– and a car ride to school—the natural but unfortunate consequences of failing to heed “no stopping” signs under heron nests. Dykstra situates the book in the stream of Christian naturalists who “loved the infinite by loving the very particular” (34). These included particulars in the evolution of wing structures and the differences in the life-phases of Sockeye and Chum salmon are not mere minutiae. They are honorable details in the biographies of the more-than-human world.
There is a generous hospitality in these pages that seems aimed at smoothing the way for the reader’s participation in both the observation of and activism on behalf of animal species. Each chapter closes with a list of resources, including ones that allow an adult reader to share what they are learning with children and ones that encourage a deeper engagement with efforts to protect the ecosystems and creatures they have described. Dykstra consistently points to the people who have seeded their own wisdom and experience with a particular eye to the Indigenous individuals and communities that have shaped and continue to shape their work so that we, as readers, can seek out their expertise.
Dykstra is refreshingly frank about how the project of the book was an evolving one. What began as the “Big Numbers Project” and on paper was a neatly scheduled monthly field trip, had to change by necessity due to the patterns and whims of the gatherings they sought. Across the chapters they identify how their own questions had to evolve and how some remain unanswered. This willingness to acknowledge their constant revision and its frustrations acts as a gracious invitation to the reader. If even Dykstra sometimes has to muddle through, then surely we too could encounter the wild and the something more that is alive within it.
In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Dillard wrote that in the wilderness “beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.” Fifty years later Wildlife Congregations calls us to be there, to witness the creatures just down the road from us and to be responsible towards them.
