From the New York Times: Sept. 11, 2005

The Rural Life
The Real Inventory
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: September 11, 2005
Earlier this summer, I e-mailed my brother a list of the animals we're raising on this farm. I called it an inventory, but it was really a way of acknowledging that perhaps my wife and I have gone too far. There are now five pigs in various stages of growth, and a large, comic parade of ducks and geese that settle onto the lawn like so many ships in a green sea. There are chicks in the basement and chickens in the mulch. And there are the longtime partners in this enterprise, the horses, dogs and cats. My brother - who has three pigs and four goats himself - wrote back and said, "Wouldn't it be great to know the real inventory?"
That phrase has stuck in my head for the past few weeks. What I had sent my brother was a list of the animals that Lindy and I are responsible for - the ones we need to feed and water every day. But I hadn't even begun to count the creatures here that are responsible for themselves. Even among those, the animals I think of first are the ones that, from my perspective at least, have a direct relationship with us: the phoebes that nest above the kitchen door, the fox that steals hens from our coop from time to time, the wild turkeys that troop down out of the woods and into the pasture in winter, the red-tailed hawks that screech overhead, driving the poultry to cover. There are others, of course: hummingbirds in the bee balm and hollyhocks, pileated woodpeckers in the deep woods, catbirds in the elderberry. But these too belong to a circle of animals that seem scaled to human powers of observation.
What makes the real inventory interesting is all the rest of the organisms that live on this place, whether I notice them or they notice me. There are times when I get a vague sense of how vast that inventory might be - nights when the crickets sound like a ringing in my ears, evenings when the low sun is refracted in the wings of the thousands of insects in flight over the pasture. But it is still only a vague sense, a catalog of life forms whose numbers I have to guess at. Somehow I instinctively imagine the abundance of life here in the shape of a pyramid - the kind of illustration that might appear in a schoolbook - with a pair of humans at the peak and the legions of soil bacteria at the base.
But one of the things I've learned from living in the country is that life is not a pyramid with humans at the peak. It's an interrelationship that is far too complex to diagram so anthropocentrically and so simply. There is a map of need here that I cannot read but that governs me as well. I go about the endless tasks, the chores, the feeding and grooming of animals, and I pretend that somehow I'm separate and in charge, though the pigs and geese remind me that that is not exactly true. I have to remember that if I wrote up the real inventory, it would include myself as well.