Salamander Rescue Society -- Sad News

I love happy endings, but alas, it was not to be this time. Poor Sal is now in that great redwood grove in the sky.
I called Wildlife Rescue this afternoon, and they told me initially things looked promising. Sal even add a few meal worms yesterday, surely a good sign. But late in the evening, he stopped moving. The cause of death was poisoning by a herbicide or pesticide that was washed out of the ground by the rain.
E.O. Wilson's Bibliophilia hypothesis suggests that an instinctive bond exists between human beings and other living systems. I've been very touched by how I experienced that bond in the last few days, and how other told me they felt it as well.
To celebrate this bond, I'm including a poem by Mary Oliver in this post. She's my favorite poet, and I often read one of her poems before going to sleep. My dreams are happy and peaceful afterwards.
The poem is from New and Selected Poems, Volume One.

The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshoper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enourmous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die ant last, and too son?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

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No flowers ;->. If you like, make a donation to Wildlife Rescue or another organization with similar goals.