Swimming with my Fears
I’m grateful that it is only on the third day that Paul tells me that the Las Piedras River, where we have been boating, floating and swimming, my clothes perpetually wet from the afternoon plunges, is swimming with Piranhas. I knew about the Caiman, Spectacled and Yellow, that I’ve seen lounging on the banks, and scoot off whenever the boat comes near. I’ve tamed my response to snakes—an embarrassing nerve-jangling recoil—by understanding that every snake is more afraid of me than I am of it. But Piranhas, that’s news. I laugh and say: cool.
I’m grateful that it is only on the third day that Paul tells me that the Las Piedras River, where we have been boating, floating and swimming, my clothes perpetually wet from the afternoon plunges, is swimming with Piranhas. I knew about the Caiman, Spectacled and Yellow, that I’ve seen lounging on the banks, and scoot off whenever the boat comes near. I’ve tamed my response to snakes—an embarrassing nerve jangling recoil—by understanding that every snake is more afraid of me than I am of it. But Piranhas, that’s news. I laugh and say: cool.
This is the jungle me response, one that I never could have anticipated as I planned for this trip to the Amazon. I prepared for this trip as I always do: I read (Oh, and I also fretted over yellow fever shots and hep A and typhoid vaccines). I read books like Tree of Rivers and The Lost City of Z. Both of these wonderful works fed the images I had of the jungle: a dangerous place. If the Bot Flies didn’t take up residence in my flesh, then for sure a Candiru fish was going to swim up my vagina. And then I read Paul’s book Mother of God.
Paul is a smart, passionate man who needs room to move, think, be. He walks barefoot through the jungle, eats with his hands, and enjoys his bug bites. He runs towards snakes and caimans with the love of a teenage boy and the intelligence of a man who wants nothing more than for all of us to love these creatures as he does. Underneath his muscled jungle-man bravado is someone who is wounded every time a tree is cut in the jungle. To protect this world he loves he has formed an ecotourism company with his wife Gowri (one of my former students at Bard College) and others called Tamandua. And he has also formed a nonprofit to protect land in the jungle: Junglekeepers. Before spending intense time in the jungle with him I am already in admiration of the work he’s done and am worried he’s also sort of an asshole, like most focused, driven men who are confident they are right.
Roy serving me more coffee!
The more you know about a place, the safer it becomes. At Paul’s side is JJ, a man who knows the jungle because he grew up there. The two walk with machetes in hand as they take us—a group of eleven family and friends—on walks near the station where we sleep and are fed delicious meals prepared by Roy, who greets me every morning with excellent coffee and a warm hug. Having such comforts in such a remote place feels like a forbidden pleasure. I drink way too much coffee.
Knowing the jungle as he does—fourteen years of spending months here since he was eighteen—Paul makes the jungle not a play ground, but a place where we can play. I climb a massive Kapok tree, hugging the vines that strangle up the tree and pressing my bare feet against the solid smooth bark. My feet are cut, my legs bruised, but is that not a small price to pay to sit in the crown of an ancient tree, to see the world as the birds do and to feel from a different vantage the massive power and fragility of this ecosystem?
And, I swim in the ever-silty Las Piedras River that carves around the station and leads downstream to Puerto Maldonado, eventually joining the Madre de Dios and much further on the Amazon. Almost every day heat, sweat, sore muscles are washed away by jumping into the water and floating downstream. With Piranhas.
Everyone on this trip was challenged in one way or another and I think about how rare that is, especially as we get older. I watched as Paul took his mother-in-law by the hand and offered her the caiman he caught, asks her to bundle up her recoil and touch the beautiful creature. One by one he explicitly or implicitly pushed us to take one step more than we thought we were capable of to walk or swim into this rich, amazing land. I smile through it all, allowing that Paul is right.
I didn’t swim into my fears; I’ve swum with them. And how intoxicating that is, a kind of freedom found in few places, in few moments. By the end of the trip I am covered in bug bites—sand flies, ticks, mosquitoes, I’ve succumbed to jungle fever, my legs are bruised. This, of course, is Paul’s goal. Not that I get sick but rather that I get sick and not really care. Nothing matters—not politics, work, or the line of bites that march up my groin. What mattered was being there, seeing the Trogon, the Sunbittern, the Tapir swimming toward shore; what mattered was being overwhelmed by green. While my body is marked, my spirit is soaring higher than it has in a long time.
Enjoying the Spectacle
I wasn’t ready for the mass of screaming gulls, or for the piles of Horseshoe Crabs along the shoreline, the males riding tight to the females, tails spiked toward the overcast sky. With each wave, another batch of horseshoe crabs washed up on Reed's Beach near Cape May, NJ, and what ensued was a wave of screams and hollers, whistles and hoots, a frenzy of the Laughing Gulls and Herring Gulls, and those remarkable little shorebirds, the Red Knots, fresh in from Tierra del Fuego.
Cape May is always good birding. On my few visits there, I’ve always left a bit dazzled by the sights. Once was a flock of hundreds of Sanderlings swooping the shore, landing, then circling out to the ocean in a choreographed movement that took my breath. Now here I had stumbled onto one of the great events of migration, witness to more feeding gulls and shorebirds than I had ever seen on one slim beach.
I wasn’t ready for the mass of screaming gulls, or for the piles of Horseshoe Crabs along the shoreline, the males riding tight to the females, tails spiked toward the overcast sky. With each wave another batch of horseshoe crabs washed up on Reed's Beach near Cape May, NJ, and what ensued was a wave of screams and hollers, whistles and hoots, a frenzy of the Laughing Gulls and Herring Gulls, and those remarkable little shorebirds, the Red Knots, fresh in from Tierra del Fuego.
Cape May is always good birding. On my few visits there, I’ve always left a bit dazzled by the sights. Once was a flock of hundreds of Sanderlings swooping the shore, landing, then circling out to the ocean in a choreographed movement that took my breath. Now here I had stumbled onto one of the great events of migration, witness to more feeding gulls and shorebirds than I had ever seen on one slim beach.
I felt lucky to be witness to this as I had read about, heard about how the Horseshoe Crabs come to shore for a few weeks in May, lay thousands of eggs—up to 80,000 each— enough for the shorebirds and enough so that the horseshoe crab continues is prehistoric life. Unless. Unless the horseshoe crab is taken to extract its blue blood—which is used to produce a remarkable healing agent, Limulus amoebocyte lysate (LAL). These Horseshoe Crabs are returned to the waters, most surviving. But many others are gathered by fishermen and cut up to use as bait for fishing in the Delaware Bay. Mature female crab populations dropped by 86 percent between 2001 and 2003 due to this take. The correlation in Red Knot populations was quick and evident. Between 2000 and 2002 the populations of Red Knots dropped by 50%. How was it that the spectacle of such abundance in front of me was, in fact, a story of loss? Of decline? Unaware of all of this at the time, I let the sounds and smells of all the birds wash over me. I just enjoyed the spectacle.
Red Knots are an extraordinary shorebird. In Moonbird, the writer Phillip Hoose describes the migration of this little shorebird with a red chest that makes its way with "luck, navigational skill, and physical toughness" from southern Argentina to the Arctic every year. The bird of his story—B95—is banded in Tierra del Fuego in 1995, and was most recently sighted in March of 2015. This little bird flies 20,000 miles a year—so in its nineteen plus years of life has flown the equivalent of flying to the moon—and back.
When B95 was banded, scientists estimated about 150,000 Red Knots existed. Now, 25,000 fly the globe. This means that in this one bird’s lifetime, populations have dropped 80%, making its long life even more exceptional.
I did not look for B95 as the birds swept the beach. I stood, slightly dazed by the raucous, as the gulls hovered over the water, then plummeted, wings raised as they hushed to the ground and began foraging between the Horseshoe Crabs. A flock of Red Knots raced by without stopping, little bullets with red chests on a mission to somewhere. The Horseshoe Crabs looked liked war-torn soldiers, barnacles clinging to the base of the domed shell, spikey tails pointed high as they tumbled in with the waves. Some of the Horseshoe Crabs flipped over, spindly legs helplessly clawing the air. I wanted to run out and right them, but the beach was cordoned off, protected by a volunteer. “At night, we go out and flip them back over,” she explained. For now, the beach was for the birds. All of those birds.
Malheur is for the Birds
I love the word malheur, the way my neighbor in France sighs over the weather or a chicken that is ill: Quel Malheur. It’s impossible to translate the woe of the world, the adversity of life woven into those two words. Quel Malheur. But the Malheur in the news these days is the 187,000 acre Refuge in Eastern Oregon where a group of armed men are staked out, and not planning to leave.
In three days, I will slide into my Subaru wagon, loaded with skis and snowshoes, and head west, for Oregon. I’ve chosen a northerly route, through North Dakota and Montana, two states I have never visited. I’ll stop along the way, in search of northerly birds, hoping for such treats as a Great Gray Owl, but also less glamorous but still wondrous species for this Eastern girl, like Gray-crowned Rosy finch, or Evening Grosbeaks.
I love the word malheur, the way my neighbor in France sighs over the weather or a chicken that is ill: Quel Malheur. It’s impossible to translate the woe of the world, the adversity of life woven into those two words. Quel Malheur. But the Malheur in the news these days is the 187,000 acre Refuge in Eastern Oregon where a group of armed men are staked out, and not planning to leave.
In three days, I will slide into my Subaru wagon, loaded with skis and snowshoes, and head west, for Oregon. I’ve chosen a route through North Dakota and Montana, two states I have never visited. I’ll stop along the way, in search of northerly birds, hoping for such treats as a Great Gray Owl, but also less glamorous but still wondrous species for this Eastern girl, like Gray-crowned Rosy finch, or Evening Grosbeaks.
At the end of the journey I will be at Playa, a residency for artists and writers in Eastern Oregon. There, I intend to finish (ahem) writing my book, which chronicles the first two years of my bird-obsessed life. (Two chapters have been published online, here, and here.) I’m having a great time poking around in the past of bird watching history, learning about murders and murderers, adventures and misadventures, saints and sinners. The bird world is as complex and rich as any writer could hope for. Malheur certainly fits the definition of complex.
Malheur is not far from Playa, and I was hoping that it would be a stop on my route West, or a day trip away from writing. But the refuge is closed, the workers gone, many scared for themselves and their families. It is hard, for those of us in the East, to understand the Western relationship to land; the conflict between Dwight and Steven Hammond and the National Wildlife Preserve is decades old. So I don’t feel in any way qualified to speak on the situation—should these guys be in jail? I don’t know. What I do know, is that Ammon and Cliven Bundy have taken over the Refuge without support of locals, or the Hammonds. And, according to a writer in the National Law Journal, the standoff is legally untenable and many have written that the Bundy’s understanding of history and the constitution is poor at best. We all want them gone. More importantly: the birds want them gone.
The story that moved me is of the Malheur Field station director leaving the refuge (where birders and others can spend the night—the loss in revenue will be substantial). Before heading out, he spread seed for the wild Quail that count on him through the winter. What will happen to these and other birds, like the Great Horned Owls who have historically nested in the tower where the Bundy’s are staked out?
What I’m interested in is how birders—let’s call us a more peaceful group—have responded to this situation. Birders watch—and we are watching Malheur.
Renée Thompson, a birder and Oregon-based writer, has a terrific—that is historically based and reasonable—blog post on the history of the Refuge. Malheur was first protected in 1908 by Theodore Roosevelt (who created the first National Wildlife Refuge, Pelican Island off Florida in 1903, with a snap of the two fingers). The goal was to protect birds. So let’s remember that. But some birders are using the same inflamed language as those who have taken the land, issuing warnings and declarations of “we will get you.” Maybe this is the way to go: fight fire with fire (which is a bad joke, as the at the heart of this stand off is that the Hammonds started a backfire to stop a fire ignited by lightening).
Kenn Kaufman is tweeting on the subject while Andy Revkin in his dot earth blog post for the New York Times analyzes the solutions to the standoff and ends with the intriguing idea of flooding the refuge in the spring with birders. It’s great idea. And then there are suggestions that “old lady birders” (you know, those of us in floppy hats) should stage a sit in. Why not? Is it possible to organize the estimated millions of birders in this country to peacefully win this standoff?
Closed or not, I’m stopping at Malheur to see this land, home to over three hundred species of bird. And for now, what I have to say about the Bundy men taking over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge: Quel Malheur.
A Small Difference
Ucross, Wyoming, population 25, is situated just east of the Bighorn Mountains, on the western edge of the Powder River Basin. It’s 20,000 acres of high desert sagebrush, rubbing up against wetlands, grasslands, and riparian habitat where the Clear and Piney Creeks run. It’s ranchland, dotted with cows and emptiness, studded with boulders tossed from space; there are pockets of petrified wood and lots of cool birds. And the news this fall is that all of this land is now designated an IBA— Important Bird Area—a designation made after careful review by the Audubon Society and the American Bird Conservancy. 20,000 acres of protected land where birds can breed or migrate through unmolested, is not much in the grand scheme of this planet. But for a few key species—the Greater Sage Grouse and the Long-billed Curlew —these 20,000 acres is a big difference, perhaps the difference of survival.
Ucross, Wyoming, population 25, is situated just east of the Bighorn Mountains, on the western edge of the Powder River Basin. It’s 20,000 acres of high desert sagebrush, rubbing up against wetlands, grasslands, and riparian habitat where the Clear and Piney Creeks run. It’s ranchland, dotted with cows and emptiness, studded with boulders tossed from space; there are pockets of petrified wood and lots of cool birds. And the news this fall is that all of this land is now designated an IBA— Important Bird Area—a designation made after careful review by the Audubon Society and the American Bird Conservancy. 20,000 acres of protected land where birds can breed or can stop on migration, is not much in the grand scheme of this planet. But for a few key species—the Greater Sage Grouse and the Long-billed Curlew —these 20,000 acres is a big difference.
Fall of 2010 I had my first leave from teaching at Bard College and in that marvelous expanse of time, was able to finish my book, My Reach, while in residency at Ucross. Ucross isn’t a town—there’s no deli or saloon or even a post office. It’s really just the residency, run by energetic, smart people who have created their lives wedged between the vast empty silence of Wyoming and the busy neurosis of grateful creative people who flow through.
While at Ucross, I confess it was hard to push myself indoors to write in my clean, cosy cabin. There was so much outside that I wanted to see—the proghorn and rattlesnakes, but especially the birds. When I arrived, I was but four months into a bird-obsessed life (which continues without slackening). I hardly knew a sparrow from that Loggerhead Shrike but I was out every day getting to know my Vesper Sparrows and Townsend’s Solitaire. One evening I made a trip to a nearby reservoir and in front of my car strolled four birds that looked like goofy chickens with black bellies. Sage Grouse! The landscape I hiked and explored seemed to be filled with unexpected treasures. Soon enough, the Grouse vanished into the sage brush.
Ucross is the child of a visionary oil man from Minnesota, Raymond Plank, who bought the land and refurbished historic homes and schoolhouses to provide a place where artists and writers could realize their potential. Now, he’s providing land where birds can reach their full potential. He tells his story in his memoir, A Small Difference. His relationship to the land, both drilling for oil and protecting it, reveals the complexity of our relationship to land. These two things can co-exist. And it is exactly such moves of protection by Wyoming landowners that we are counting on to save the Greater Sage Grouse.
This fall, the Sage Grouse was under consideration for Endangered Species status. This was hotly debated because to protect the bird would mean to limit all kinds of activity on the land, especially drilling. Trying to avoid a blanket of restrictions that comes with the Endangered listing, landowners and conservation organizations have been working together—just like at Ucross—to provide habitat for the bird to breed. According to data compiled by the U.S. Fish and wildlife Service the species is doing well enough—a breeding population of 432,000— that it was not listed. Usually this failure to list would put me in a funk, but the work of Ucross makes me believe that “do it yourself” land protection might in fact work. I suspend my skepticism because Ucross, after all, is a place where an oilman believes in artists and in birds.
I know that some will remain skeptical that our government fell short. They may have. But Ucross—they’ve made a small difference. Let’s keep adding up those small differences all across the country. For birds. For all of us.