Beasts at Bedtime_ Revealing the Environmental Wisdom in Children’s Literature

Newly arrived in the United States and setting foot on the red soils of Georgia for the very first time, Fiacha, our eldest and then a threeyear-old, perched himself on top of a fire ant mound. It’s a rare child who makes that mistake a second time since fire ants sting ferociously.1 We had moved into a small ranch house a few miles from the campus of the University of Georgia in Athens, where I was to work for four years. The house was aesthetically unremarkable. There were parched lawns to the front and rear, both of which hosted innumerable fire ant mounds. In the front yard, right outside the door, grew two desiccated shrubs. What that neighborhood lacked in conventional wildlife it made up for with feral dogs. They howled all night and packed together in the morning, leisurely roaming the neighborhood hunting for those who, like me, were foolish enough to go walking in the early hours. It was in this unpromising location that Fiacha—an Irish name that means “raven,” and whose second name is Daedalus, the father of Icarus—became a bird.

The care and feeding of a bird who is morphologically and physiologically human, though psychologically somewhat avian, is not an entirely trivial undertaking. While he was in motion, there was little inconvenience to us—he simply flapped his featherless wings as he migrated from place to place.