Sketching Birds

by Janet Flinn

1.  If birds are moving do many small quick sketches.

2.  Focus on an area e.g. head Return to a pose as the bird does . (Pencil)

Banksia Pod. (Pen & Watercolour)

About the Author:      Janet Flinn is one of Australia's finest Wildlife Artists. Janet's paintings  reflect the character  of the Australian birds that visit her garden and nearby bushland in Melbourne.  Janet's paintings have received numerous awards including 'Artist of the Year' in 2005.  Her work has been published in many  calendars, magazines, books and reproduced as cards and prints. To view some of Janet's paintings and contact the artist, click here.

Before I knew much about animal communication, I once asked a question so ridiculous it made a parrot laugh.

What I wanted to know wasn't all that ridiculous; perhaps it was the way I phrased it. What's it like for animals to communicate telepathically? I asked. Can every animal hear the thoughts of every other animal? Surely that would be awfully noisy. Maybe it's more like how humans use the telephone, I conjectured. Is it like dialing up a certain person's number in order to make contact with that individual?

That's when the bird laughed. That's when I knew I was in way over my head...

A Single Language

In the time before we started worrying about such things as time or inventing such things as telephones, there was a single language. It was a language of being and feeling, a silent language that worked equally well for fish and bird, bear and whale. It was a language of universal connection in which all were free to share.

The growing field of animal communication – or, the ability to telepathically converse with an animal – is simply a remembering of this, our earliest natural language. Professional animal communicators are consulted for a wide variety of reasons – from resolving behavioral problems to finding lost pets to answering questions about animal health, illness, death, even the afterlife. Many communicators offer classes to help humans learn to quiet the mind and "tune in" to the animal channel. Leaders in the field maintain that by rediscovering our innate abilities to commune in this way with other species, we can learn a great deal of information – not only about animals, but also about ourselves.

Indeed, how might our lives change if we shared conversation with our cats or dogs on a daily basis? What news of the world might we learn from the traveling songbirds who visit our feeders? Would we be more caring of the earth if we took time to share thoughts with insects and worms, the earth's greatest ecologists? How is it that at some point in time we removed ourselves from this spontaneous, informative and joyous connection with all life?

Penelope Smith, one of the leading teachers in the animal communication field, notes that the underlying focus of all her teachings is to restore this communion, "this ability to be at one with and communicate with all life, whether it's animals, plants, rocks, the earth, the air, all the elements, and realizing that everything is alive and we are all in kinship."

While talking to animals may at first seem strange or glamorous or mystical (depending upon your perspective), opening to animals is ultimately an opening to our own inner mystery. In a mind-to-mind, heart-to-heart connection with an animal, we expand our very being. As Smith puts it, "Another part of the universe is experienced; another part of ourselves is recovered. We are closer to the true divine nature, present in us all." We begin to remember who we really are.

So, How Does It Work?

Carol Gurney, author of a how-to book on animal telepathy, feels that people talk with their animals all the time. "What happens is people have forgotten to see that it really is the animal sending them the message," Gurney told me. "The thought of an animal blends with our consciousness. Then we judge it as ours. We don't know how to tell the difference sometimes. We're not giving ourselves credit that we're getting it, nor are we giving the animals credit that they do communicate."

Communicators point out that telepathic communication is much like verbal communication. "It merely includes other senses, like hearing, feeling, sensing, seeing pictures, and so on," notes communicator Morgine Jurdan. "It is not a gift. It is something anyone with a desire can learn how to do."

How is it, then, that some humans are able to tune into animals and make sense of what they want to communicate? Gurney believes we're like magnets, drawing to us the mode of communication that is most comfortable for us to receive. 'It can come in images, like a slide show," she explained. "It can come as feeling. You might get a new thought, for that's also how animals communicate. Some people hear words. Some people just "know." Some people hear a sound; others get odors, things that the animals smell. That is basically how we receive: no limitations. Where we are within ourselves is what we will draw in."

Receiving information from animals may also be dependent upon the particular species with which one is communicating. Animals that are primarily visual, for example, may be more likely to send pictures or images since that is their dominant sense.

Naturalist and communicator Mary Getten notes differences in speaking to domestic animals as opposed to wild animals. While our cats and dogs are familiar with our routines and basically understand our world, wild animals do not. "Communicating with wild animals is a little different because they have a natural instinct to avoid people," said Getten. "They're not used to having the experience of communicating with a person.'

So, too, many animals have different sensing abilities than humans. For example, when Getten communicates with Orcas near her home in Washington state, she notes "a real down-shift into a totally different energy level. One of the problems in working with whales is that their world is so completely different that we don't even have the words to explain it. I've had the experience of a whale showing me what it feels like to echolocate. It's almost indescribable."

This is part of the challenge – as well as the fascination – of what various aspects of animal communication bring forth. For how can we conceive of something, such as echolocation, that we don't have a human sensing mechanism for? The obvious would be to adapt the senses we do have.

It is precisely this translation of feelings, images, thoughts and words that lies at the core of successful animal communication. If we don't understand that commun-ication between species is based on translating one mode of understanding into another, we may ask ourselves all sorts of silly questions, such as how is it that whales know English? Getten agrees, "The only way we can speak for the animals is to interpret their images and information in the language that we have."

Animal communication is thus a bit of a balancing act. In addition to finding the best possible words for translating animal to human thoughts, we must constantly be open to what an animal is saying – not to what we think the animal is saying or what we want the animal to say. In this sense, learning animal communication is about learning to get out of our own way. It is also about moving past our limited perceptions of what we believe the world is like.

Healing The World,  One Village At A Time

Penelope Smith was once asked to help with a situation in Costa Rica, where jaguars ventured too close to a village. Smith saw the situation from the jaguar's point of view: loss of habitat was crowding their environment, causing them to infringe upon human life in the village. There was also the villager's side of the problem: the jaguars were prowling dangerously close to the village, occasionally eating the village animals and engendering fear.

Rather than communicate with an individual jaguar, Smith chose to communicate in a shamanistic manner, connecting not only with the jaguars and the people of the village, but with the spirits of the land. "This wasn't me doing anything," she said. "It was spirit working by request. I acted as a shaman, as somebody who is aware and asking spirit to move. I saw that all could be handled harmoniously with the jaguars and the people. I appealed to the consciousness of the people and the consciousness of the forest, and it appeared that a solution was being created. I am a part of the web, so I just tuned in to my ability and spirit seemed to move.

"There then appeared to be a raising of the consciousness and a blending of all so that solutions would come to people without me having to communicate anything. The solutions would come to them as to how they could operate harmoniously. I saw a lot of people changing and it was quite powerful. It will be interesting to see how this situation plays out in the physical because sometimes there's a time delay. There are all kinds of human gyrations that people go through because sometimes they don't totally accept what is given to them. But, I saw that when beings of consciousness are called, great changes can happen without having to hit people over the head.'

Where Do We Go From Here?

Those who have opened to a two-way exchange of feelings, thoughts and ideas with the natural world maintain there are incredible riches to be found in sharing with and learning from other species, especially as we move beyond our own self-limiting expectations.

What discoveries would we find by going to the source, asking the animals them-selves what they think? On a practical level, there is the prospect of highly useful information, animals sharing insights on why or how they do the things they do. In her capacity as a naturalist and biologist, communicator Marta Williams suggests that asking animals about their living habits might be a first step towards seeing a larger aspect of the world. In the beginning, answers could be compared with biological data already collected, though animal communication could "be used in place of much of the invasive and damaging field study practices that are employed today by modern biologists."

As teacher and communicator Carole Devereux notes, animals may represent a last chance for humans. "Sometimes people can't talk to another human being, but they will talk to a horse. Why? Because a horse is nonjudgmental. Unconditional love flows very naturally between animals and people who are somewhat jaded about the human race. Humans have judged each other for so long that we don't trust each other any-more. When people are with an animal, their barriers come down. That's why I'm working with animals in therapy, because it's a door, an entryway. Animals are the gateway to a higher awareness of spirituality."   

"This is about the consciousness raising of all beings," Penelope Smith agreed. "More and more, the species are being raised up. And all it means is that people are looking at themselves in the mirror. They're recognizing themselves in the web of life. So, when you look at a manatee and see yourself, and when you look at a wolf and see yourself, and when you look at a cockroach and see yourself, that's when we'll be making it. And we are making it!"

In reconnecting with animal wisdom, we see the world in a way we have too long forgotten. We are reminded of the inherent spiritual connection between all living beings. We are awakened, for in moving to that deeper place of trust, relationship and communion with animals, nature, and all the world, we also find ourselves.

About the Author: Dawn Baumann Brunke is the author of  Animal Voices and Awakening to Animal Voices and also  Who Lives Here?, a series of animal and nature books for children.  Dawn has also published short stories in LadyBug (for children), Leviathan (anthology), and Rosebud (literary quarterly), and has won both Grand Prize and Editor’s Choice in the Alaska Daily News/University of Anchorage creative writing contest.  Dawn has published over three dozen interviews, including talks with natural medicine writer Dr. Andrew Weil; former NASA consultant Richard Hoagland; noted speakers Gregg Braden, Patricia Sun and Caroline Myss; and many animal communicators.

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