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| American and European badgers |
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| American and European robins |
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| American and European red squirrels |
This is just a gestalt impression that I can't begin to quantify or explain, so I'm hoping I'm not the only one who sees it -- but, doesn't there seem to be a common "style" underlying the three American species (on the left), and another, quite different style manifested in the European ones (on the right)? It's as if two artists with very different souls had each been commissioned to paint a badger, a robin, and a red squirrel. Seeing the "Americanness" of the one set and the "Europeanness" of the other is as easy -- and as hard to explain -- as distinguishing a Titian from a Rembrandt.
(I remember once looking at a brochure from a local museum, advertising a Chagall exhibition. Of the pictures featured in the brochure, one immediately stood out as vastly superior to the others and made me think that maybe Chagall wasn't as crappy an artist as I had always thought. It turned out to be a Picasso.)
Something similar can be said for the "Africanness" of African animals, the "Asianness" of Asian ones, and so on. On a smaller geographic scale, I am continually amazed at how consistently Japanese birds look Japanese; observing a new-to-me bird in Taiwan, I can almost always accurately guess whether or not it is also found in Japan.
Although comparisons, like the American-European ones above, make regional styles easier to see, they can also be recognized without comparison. My first sense that there was something ineffably American about American animals came from looking at a picture similar to this one.
Just as Rembrandt and Titian, and even Picasso and Chagall, are all part of a larger style called "European art," which is quite distinct from, say, Chinese art -- so I sometimes feel that I can sense a common "Earth" style underlying all the animals in the world, even though I obviously have no other set of animals to compare them too. The planetary spirit of Earth may be harder to see, for lack of contrast, than the regional spirits of various countries and continents, but it is no less real.
