The fog was so strong this morning that I couldn’t see anything at all 50 feet away. Trees were buried in it, houses disappeared, there was no sky, and everything was colored a vague gray.

But it was lovely. Unusual and a bit eerie. Then, slowly, fog faded, the blue sky came out, the green trees revealed themselves, the flowers glowed, and it became a regular morning.

Not before, however, I’d heard an owl hooting, and sat as still as I could while a hummingbird — probably female, given the bright green on her back — decided it could trust me and continued to suck at the sugar-water my wife had hung about 3 feet away from my seat. It grasped the thin plastic ledge rather than just hovering and zipping its wings so it could make a quick escape. It turned to look at me from time to time before going back for more nutrient. I sat still while it sucked the sweetness for more than a minute. Apparently satisfied, it finally flew away.

It takes a month or so every summer for the hummingbirds to begin to trust us as we sit reading beneath the jar full of sugar-water. But every summer the birds’ visits become longer as their trust in us grows.

Trust. That’s what holds husbands and wives together. That’s what makes diplomatic agreements keep the peace. And, apparently, that’s what hummingbirds (and probably most birds) develop in attractive but potentially dangerous settings.

It’s so interesting how long it has taken Western civilization to realize that most of those emotions and that knowledge that human beings rely on for safety and such are the same knowledge and emotions that keep lots and lots of other life forms on our planet alive. We Westerners sure hate giving up Human Exceptionalism, though, don’t we? We wanted so badly to be the only ones to do any thinking or even any range of feelings.

We were wrong. Just about the time human beings’ activities are on the verge of doing in many species and, at least, many members of most species, we begin to become smart enough to recognize what terribly devastating impacts our lust for speed and noise, along with most of the things we like to do and to have done to us have had on other creatures. Others that think and feel and make and raise offspring to keep their species going.

Just as the doe that found itself in the far-end of Andy’s property when the kids showed up in the trampoline 10 yards away stood absolutely still for several minutes. Not a motion. Then it turned and leapt across the brook into the thick woods. Or the bear that shows up to see what John and Maracelle have put into their garbage cans from time to time. It knocks the cans over, digs around to see what might be edible and — others who’ve seen them at work tell us — just hang around for a while chewing whatever they think chewable.

I’m sure that among hummingbirds and deer and bears there are those who don’t really get it. Surely there are those whose genes just don’t align with what their species need or their offspring, sort of the overly hungry and proprietary libertarians of their species, as our species has. But one assumes that those can’t last, and the fragile, wary ones who run away at the right time or at best keep their heads down until the worst is over will be around when the bad guys overdo it all.

At least, that’s what I guess we have to hope.

So some day regular people (whatever that means) will find a way to get the others under some degree of control. Some day the people who make our cars will make them less dangerous — from the ever-growing size of our pickup trucks to the ways we power them — while the people who sell us our food will think for just a minute or two about what should actually be put in what we eat, and, more broadly, those who sell us anything will find a way to make a living without convincing us to buy lots and lots of things that make no sense, no matter how cool they make us look.

And that those who have too much will find their inner Mister Rogers, and realize that empathy is better than greed and all the rest of Fred’s humane suggestions that humans should adhere to in order to do what they were brought here to do.

You know, learning to trust like a hummingbird, hoot like an owl if others might be in harm’s way, and love others as fondly as dogs love their human owners, no matter how flawed those may be.

Nichols Boke, a former Providence resident who now lives in Vermont, is an occasional ecoRI News contributor.