homunculus-argument:

Hey to whom it may concern:

If you’re likely to find yourself in a situation where you’ll be hosting/guiding/otherwise spending a lot of time with international visitors of any sort, I recommend brushing up on your skills in identifying your most common local flora and fauna. Even if you’ve never given another thought to all the random birds and weeds that have grown around your neighbourhood forever, they’re still going to be something novel and completely new for someone who’s never seen them before.

While the chances of being asked about them are low, you’ll be doing yourself a favour nonetheless by getting to know your environment a little bit better. And in the unlikely event that your guest might point at a tree you’ve seen a thousand times before and ask you “what is that tree?” you’ll save yourself a lot of embarrassment by having a better answer than just “uh, I don’t know.”

And it’s good to keep your “lucky 10,000” mindset in practice, and not jump to the assumption that someone else should be mocked for not knowing a thing. There’s all sorts of reasons knowledge you assumed to be universal might not be known to someone else. And a person coming from a different place is one very common reason for this.

This is in my mind because i very recently had a conversation with a coworker who was born in Ethiopia, and has been in the Midwestern USA for quite a while but hasn’t yet gotten to learning all the nature facts that I take for granted.

He asked where our animals go when it’s this cold. I got to explain birds migrating south, and mammals that hide and sleep through the winter, like bears. And I realized I still have stuff to learn about deer. (Was able to answer that they are still around in the winter, and that this is when they’re pregnant – since i knew that rutting season is fall and that fawns are born in spring– but I didn’t have a clear explanation for how the pregnant does are surviving these godawful subzero temperatures. Research time for me, i guess!)