“Peaceable kingdom”? Not in the real, often violent world of
nature. This story is featured in Montana Outdoors Some of my
most vivid memories of wild creatures come from having seen
their most aggressive behaviors. Two red squirrels, locked
together tooth and claw, tumbling through dried leaves in a
fight over territory. The flash of hummingbirds dueling over who
gets the nectar from the first flowers of spring. Rival bull elk
twisting and smashing their antlers into each other in a contest
over mates. The bellow and stomp of a cow moose defending her
calf (and sending me scrambling up a tree one afternoon). There
is no lack of warriors among the ranks of wild animals. There is
also no lack of purpose behind their aggressive natures, whether
they’re on the offensive or the defensive. I’m not talking about
the kind of aggression shown by a predator toward its prey. As
Konrad Lorenz points out in On Aggression, “the fight between
predator and prey is not a fight in the real sense of the word:
the stroke of the