Not disturbing nature is a gentle way to respect and treat nature kindly.
This should be an utterly familiar everyday occurrence for the natural world. Yet for me, just beginning to relearn how to interact with nature, the novelty of the experience deserves a little more reflection.
A while ago I visited the Guantian Water Caltrop Organic Farm with a few companions. Strolling through the vibrant organic water caltrop fields beside a clear breeze and the slanting sun is a high-class pleasure far from the noise of the city. Suddenly, far off by the ridge on the opposite side, I saw a brightly colored object moving. Look, it is a pheasant-tailed jacana! Worried that a clumsy outburst of delight would scare off this beautiful little creature, we were extra deliberate about even telling one another, then crept toward it on tiptoe.
Perhaps out of an instinctive guard, when we had walked halfway, an elegant figure suddenly leaped into the air, then nimbly landed on a water caltrop leaf several meters away. Though the wish for a close encounter with the jacana had been dashed, I remembered that Brother Conggui of the water caltrop farm had once said the jacana is quite wary of people, so viewing it often requires keeping a "safe distance" of more than 50 m. Compared with Brother Conggui's reminder, our distance from the jacana at that moment, by eye, was no more than 10 m, which ought to count as a major breakthrough in a human-bird encounter! So, pleased with ourselves, we took it as the jacana's friendly response to strangers, and the few of us squatted at the field edge waiting for the jacana to dance again, and that wait lasted ten or twenty minutes.
Even though during the standoff the jacana kept uttering low calls, my self-satisfied self always optimistically took this as a display of friendliness. Only when I noticed traces of several chicks moving about by the ridge where the jacana had first perched did I become alert that perhaps this was the jacana's strategy of luring the tiger away from the mountain - a male bird brooding chicks, upon spotting danger, immediately flies off the nest to draw our attention and keep the young from harm. Upon realizing this, the group that had been foolishly waiting decided to retreat at once, ending this beautiful misunderstanding of "blundering into the bird's home."
Was our guess actually correct? In less than half a minute after we walked from the field back to the industrial road, the jacana once again spread its wings in a dance-like way and returned to the ridge where it had first stopped, giving us a self-evident answer. Perhaps humans have left nature too long; though the yearning factor still flows in our bodies, when we again face the vast, solemn realms of heaven and earth, we discover we are strangers so nearly ignorant. Learning from nature with a humble heart is the lesson I am studying now. If next time you have the chance to come to the jacana's hometown and admire the beautiful results of many people's restoration efforts, please also remember: not disturbing is both respect and the gentleness of treating nature well!