Wildlife - and humans - walk in the "landscape of fear".

Walking alone in familiar woods on a winter night, I’m startled by an eruption of yips and guttural howls from a mere hundred yards away. Hair rises on the back of my neck and I instinctively tense, freeze in place and peer nervously into the dark. I fight the urge to flee. I wheel around, heart pounding.

The howls establish an instant “landscape of fear,” a term used by biologists studying bison and elk living in Yellowstone National Park after the reintroduction wolves in 2001.

In a September New York Times article, Olivia Judson reminds that predators remain a powerful force in the daily lives of many creatures, profoundly changing prey behavior in a landscape of fear she describes being as real as the physical landscape but rather comprised of smells, sounds and adrenaline.

My coyote pack retreated. In the silence which followed I suddenly ached for companionship - a herd - for my own safety. Evolutionary biologist W.D. Hamilton described the phenomenon of “the selfish herd” that forms when an animal tries to put itself in the middle of a group to improve the chance that someone else will get eaten. Animals living in herds, flocks or schools spend more time eating, sleeping and mating and less time worrying about the local food chain because other animals share their burden.

The human race inhabits a landscape removed from constant fear of wild predators. Large people-eating- predators are relegated to the stuff of horror movies. One might assume our primal instincts are forgotten … until a wild mewling chorus awakens the hard-wired, innate fear response. That uncomfortable, ancient quickening of my pulse was NOT obscured by the ease with which I have grown accustomed to perusing a supermarket meat department!