For the season of Lent this year, we are releasing some bonus podcast episodes on Mondays.
This Lent we’re reading reflections from Wild Hope:Stories for Lent from the Vanishing , by Gayle Boss. We’ll end with an interview with Gayle Boss in the last week of Lent. The reflections from Wild Hope are grouped into five different weeks, with four creatures in each week, through the season of lent and four more during Holy Week.
Week one is “The Hungry” and the story is about the red knot.
Just to let you know that people are listening to these… I listened to this one today.
Whales are amazing animals. I am reading about their sense of hearing in “An Immense World”, by Ed Yong. My respect and admiration go to the people that are trying to save them from extinction. I wondered if a “whale whisperer” type of person could swim up to a whale like Kleenex and cut the rope around her mouth. I know dealing with an animal in the wild is extremely challenging without sedating it.
All right, these podcasts are fitting in well with my reading of “An Immense World” .
I listened to this one, then read about the magnetic sense of the Loggerhead Turtle (Loggerhead sea turtle - Wikipedia). The Hawksbill Turtle is a close cousin (up to Family) on the evolutionary tree. Scientists have shown that these turtles can sense the earth’s geomagnetic field, and that they complete grand migrations over oceans based on this sense. Furthermore, they appear to have an innate “geomagnetic map” since they can do this starting as hatchlings.
For any young people, thinking of studying Biology, I highly recommend “An Immense World”. It contains many hints of open research problems. One is to figure out exactly how this biological sensing of magnetic fields works. There are some promising hypotheses, but it isn’t fully understood.
And, of course, I recommend “Wild Hope” by Gayle Boss for why we should care about wildlife from a Christian ecological perspective.
Thank you to BioLogos and Gayle Boss for promoting understanding of the natural world. I find that it is reinforcing my built-in desire to care for God’s Creation.