Observer or Participant?

I find that Dillard focuses more on the crueler experiences or the other side of nature, she has come across in these chapters compared with the first two. At one point she even stated herself, “I’ll kill it. I’ll hit the thing with a snowball, I really will; I’ll make a mudden hash” (Dillard 47). I know this was just a thought and she did not do anything but the fact that she wrote it at all changed the tone of the chapter for me. As well, stories about the starlings and the gulls were quite gruesome to imagine and she illustrates the scenes quite vividly.
It is interesting to contemplate Dillard’s role within nature because sometimes she acts as a mere observer and other times she actively participates in nature. I find this interesting because when she does act it is not always in the way that I perceived she would. Such as with the coot when she waved at it to see if it would move and thought about throwing something at it, or when she cut the mantis cocoons off. On one hand she seems to be at peace with nature and at other times I feel like she tries to change its natural flow. Trying to comprehend her feelings about nature and her place in it make me think about whether I am an observer or an active member in the environment.