This Red-tailed hawk has been keeping an eye on my chickens.

I don't have much to share these days...the new year has gotten off to a bit of a rough start for my family, but I know that only means there are brighter days ahead.  Hope and love, and all that stuff, you know?

Here is a passage from a novel that I'm reading, that I thought was interesting. What do you think?

"The tree's an acacia.  The bird?  I have no idea."

"I thought you knew everything about the wild world," I teased, and watched him bridle.  

"Our people don't share the European mania for naming and categorizing," he chided me.  "You think that just because you can give something a name you know something about it; but if I told you its name, what more would you know about it?  Nothing essential about its nature, nothing important at all: just an artificial word some man has randomly attached to the creature that won't make it fly any better or produce more young.  It is another form of colonialsim, this naming of our world."  

~from The Salt Road, by Jane Johnson

This passage brought to mind so many things for me about how I experience nature (especially bird watching), but also about people, and what it means to know something.  These days, we confuse information with knowledge.  We think that our ever advancing technology has opened a treasure trove for us. Has it?