Small fliers like birds and butterflies might likelier interbreed, in theory, since most at the mercy of the winds, they can blow into each others' nesting range. Habitats blending and becoming more generic through our heavy use of the land generate new incentives for birds or insects of species whose numbers are declining to settle for what they can get, including mates from species other than their own.
But some of the news was startling: grizzly bears in the Arctic are breeding with polar bears? In the midst of all the other documented hybrids in Ms. Bagley's article--assorted kinds of whales, seals and porpoises less than familiar to landlocked natural history buffs like me--the bears especially stood out. I have heard of North American timber wolves interbreeding with coyotes. But a white female polar bear getting bred by a hump-backed brown grizzly early out of his den. Custom and part of the bedrock of my imagination are being eroded here, even if I accept the evolutionary process known as speciation and reject fundamentalist religion's creationism in which everything is sacrosanct with fixed name, form, repute and coloration.
Studying the wild plants and animals over time we realize that their taxonomy, or very identity as species, is loosely set and fluid. Extinctions occur, traditionally over long reaches of time, and new species come of cross-fertilization and of local populations, isolated from others, morphing into new sub-species and eventually, cut off from the habitat of distant cousins, becoming recognized as separate species. As per the article, when animals hybridize, results can vary from sterility in the hybrid offspring to a hastened rate of extinction in an ancestral species that's faring poorly in its ability to compete so it can eat and reproduce. The author grants that speciation has gone on as long as the animal kingdom itself existed. The article stresses that hybridization in the wild animal kingdom today, like the escalating rate of extinctions, is driven by the take-over of earth by ourselves and by our chemical overflow into air, freshwater and oceans.
We're of course each of us free to consider the issue of cross-breeding, as well as the disappearance of species, however we like. People who are emotionally removed from wild parts of earth where they might encounter uncommon animals will ask what is the loss if one kind of creature goes away to be replaced by another that's faster, bulkier, hardier, etc.
Lately I was introduced by good friends to a fictional work, The Place of the Lion, by the British theologian, poet and novelist Charles Williams. Animal archetypes figure into that narrative in ways that must have so many parallels in the New and Old Testaments and other Judeo-Christian writing that I could search and list for weeks if I wanted examples to cite. Archetypes are defined as symbols, images of our human nature and the experiences that we share universally as human beings, in the sense of a 'collective unconsciousness.' The Place of the Lion in Biblical and pre-Biblical tradition uses animals like the lion, the serpent and the unicorn to express lofty principles and virtues.
Here is a quote from page 53: "that this world is created, and all men and women are created, by the entrance of certain great principles into aboriginal matter. We call them by cold names; wisdom and courage and beauty and strength and so on, but actually they are very great and mighty Powers. It may be they are the angels and archangels of which the Christian Church talks... And when That which is behind them intends to put a new soul into matter it disposes them as it will, and by a peculiar mingling of them a child is born; and this is their concern with us, but what is their concern and business among themselves we cannot know.... In the animals they are less mingled, for there each is shown to us in his own becoming shape; those Powers are the archetypes of the beasts, and very much more..."
That each creature stands for a principle or virtue, while each new person represents a commingled recipe of these same powers, deserves pondering. I think there will always be room in my imagination for angels in winged or other guise, personalized or vague and faceless. But if, in ancient human collective consciousness, the lion stands for strength, the lamb for innocence, the serpent for subtlety, or even if not, I'd still like to recognize the animals according to species as I've confronted them from my own beginnings with the help of the books that named and differentiated them. The books or today the apps are known to all of us who have referred to them. Each species stands for a place whose conditions gave rise to it, and the place was also recognizable as a realm of certain principles or virtues re-characterized in each animal, also in each plant. In that sense they are nature's works of art, which we can stand in front of to admire or emulate.
These distinctive creatures crossbreeding will cause varying reactions in each of us according to our values. For me any species diminished by the expedience of blending its identity with a neighboring species will represent a loss of something sacred. It was sanctified by the place it came from, that place itself likely in danger of transformation to something less. For someone else, the new hybrid form is the new species. For some other people species doesn't matter, it's all an illusion, and what matters is the energy, divine if they allow for divinity, that drives the creature across the field of vision in the dramas that figure in all our lives.
This all adds up to a myriad of creatures for the artist to conceive and work with. For me, the time I have lived within has its huge spread of fauna, named and classified, which we all ought not to dare diminishing by our actions. In my home region there are coyotes, foxes and wolves, who follow their own paths of advantage. In the spring when warblers come back to the woods maybe at long last I'll get more than a glimpse at the Connecticut, out in one of the swamps, in spring dress on nesting territory true to its kind. But any other human being may prefer, ultimately, to skip over the losses implicit in die-offs of scientifically, historically documented species, and entertain oneself with fabulous cross-bred beasts much newer conceived than the unicorn, the manticore and griffon of Europe's Middle Ages, and then, as in another dimension, chosen beasts of fantasy will come to populate a page or a screen--or a note card:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/122474637/whimsical-bird-art-quail-mixed-media?
