Nature as an alien world

I’m still reading The Peregrine, very slowly because the lack of narrative drive makes it a bit hard to get into. But it is starting to draw me in with the eerie feeling of looking into an alien world, even though all he is describing is perfectly natural Earth.

Seeing the lives of animals without any human involvement gives me a feeling of otherworldlyness, of being somewhere I don’t belong and couldn’t live. The amount of detail and care he puts into the descriptions makes me feel I’m really standing there observing these hawks and crows and ducks and pigeons and starlings and sparrows and all the dozens of other birds he describes. To be there, watching them live their lives and die their deaths, completely uninfluencing and uninfluenced by anything human, has a very alien feeling to it.

The animals of this planet live in their own world, in their own ways, and their lives go on whether we watch them or not.