"Huh. What happened then?"

"Overfishing for decades, and then massive waves destroying all the coastal towns, and storms over the whole area for months."

"How do nature spirits define overfishing?"

"When species start going extinct or nearly-so, though I don't talk to ocean spirits as much."

"Just in the area, or do they have the finesse to tell how salmon populations are doing worldwide?"

"Just in their area, I think. Though they do understand migration and how low populations might be a problem somewhere else."

"Be awkward if they freaked out whenever everything went south for the winter."

"Yeah. They know their domains though. Nature spirits are considered the best quality primary source for ecology and so on."

"I bet. You mentioned earlier they can do things like tell beavers to stop, how's that work?"

"To hear Borbados tell it, a combination of subtle cues like making something smell bad or look scary, and 'speaking to them' - some kind of telepathy that enables coherent communication with things only as intelligent as flying squirrels."

"So no telling, like, bugs to stop."

"Naw, just lots of squishing, or telling spiders and bats 'food here'."

"Ha. Do they ever help people out? Shoo swarms of locusts, deplague some rats?"

"Anuket keeps the Nile regular, and dutifully warns when there will be a drought or a flood. Spirits will give advice for living off the land without depleting it. They'll directly fight monsters sometimes, especially if they like whoever they're defending. Regular diseases are part of the natural order of things, apparently, but plagues are not and one can be deplagued by most spirits."

"Do you still have dodo birds?"

"Bar?"

Yes.

"Wooly mammoths?"

"That one I know is a 'no'. They're called Northern Elephants now, and they're reasonably different than mammoths."

"Now? What happened?"

"Evolution, is all. No more tusks, thinner fur."

"Ours're extinct."

"Overhunting? Bet it was overhunting."

"Yeah. Long, long time ago."

"Yeah, spirits don't like that much. Wonder what else we have that you don't? Or maybe you have and we don't. A lot of the touchstone animals seem the same..."

"Some things like pandas and tigers are endangered but not gone yet."