Liberating Wings

Ten Things You Can Do To Promote Avian Conservation

 

1. Join or support an avian conservation team or project

Avian veterinary medical skills are not the only offering for avian conservation. If you have skills in fundraising, publicity, graphic design, translation, photography and video recording, editing and writing, website design, biology, climbing, or handling birds you may find a spot in the field, or working remotely as part of the support staff. If you do not have a lot of time, expertise, or mobility you can also participate in local bird counts such as the Great Backyard Bird Count or the Audubon Annual Christmas Bird Count. 

2. Donate resources to avian conservation

There are a plethora of worthwhile avian conservation projects to which you can donate supplies, equipment, and funds. You can donate to a metaconservation group, such as Bird Life International, the National Audubon Society, or the American Bird Conservancy or familiarize yourself with smaller specialty groups such as Parrots International and World Parrot Trust. Whatever you decide to do, check the organization’s website for its mission, objectives, and financial reports.

  3.  Know the origin, ecology and behavior of any bird you work with or wish to acquire.

Use books, articles, videos, interviews, and the Internet. See the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) for their global list of endangered and threatened birds as well as the North American list of endangered and threatened birds published by the Cornell Ornithology Laboratory.

The well being of birds and the environments in which they live is directly related to the health of human communities. For instance, poverty and loss of biodiversity are intimately linked. Avian conservation efforts increasingly include human health in their research objectives. It is more difficult to procure information about human communities in relation to birds, but start with Bird Life International and RARE Conservation.

4. Promote education and awareness in others

Offer information about avian conservation in your clinic. Play videos from youtube.com or bird conservation sites. Provide brochures and handouts about avian conservation at home and abroad, and frame posters on conservation.  Have a computer available to search for and display conservation projects. Sell books and other items that support avian conservation projects. Share with others what you know about the status of birds in the wild. Engage in social and informational networks like Twitter and Facebook, and offer presentations to local civic and community groups, including bird clubs and veterinary associations.

  5.  Care for birds in captivity while questioning their existence in captivity

One of the best ways to “conserve birds” is to care adequately for those already in our midst.  To do so we need to understand their complex natures as best we can so we can provide them with an enriching and healthy environment.  In reality, there is no way an artificially constructed environment can match the evolved adaptations of a bird to a complex ecological and social niche. 

     For this reason, one must consider carefully the moral obligations humans have whenever they consider having a wild animal in captivity.  For many, the question is not how to provide the good life for a bird, but whether most bird species should be in captivity in the first place.  Understanding how birds come into captivity or into your homes (often through conditions that cause suffering, death, extinction, and environmental and biodiversity degradation) deters many from keeping birds in captivity.  If birds are to come into captivity, basically they should be fair trade, organic, sustainable, humanely reared, and experience rich lives as a companion in your life.  This means that the people who work with the birds earn a living wage, that the environment and the bird is not harmed in the process, and that the bird and her or his parents have a wonderful life throughout their time spent with humans.

   6.  Strive for a low carbon footprint, making your home and work environments as “green” as possible

The more we consume of the earth’s resources, the less there is for other life forms.  We may not see the devastation that our consumer choices cause, however, much of what we have comes from other peoples and birds losing their habitats if not their very lives. For instance, the habitat of the Yellow-billed parrot (Amazona collaria) in Jamaica is threatened by zinc mining, so the more we recycle, the less environmental impact there is for this species. There are many other small steps that can positively impact lives. To learn more, go to the New American Dream (www.newdream.org)..

   7.  Support organizations that promote avian conservation

Visit or vacation at a sanctuary, park, or avitourist destination.  Your dollars help sustain the viability of programs that seek to protect and nurture birds and people.  Reducing consumption of natural resources near and far means there is more for the birds and the habitats in which they live.  By targeting your spending for goods that support people and their efforts to live sustainably, you are helping birds.  In turn, as we nurture humans, we nurture the environments in which they live.  Learn more by visiting the International Ecotourism, Sustainable Travel International, and the agencies listed in “Ten Things Every Avian Veterinarian Should Know About Conservation Medicine” (www.LafeberVet.com)

    8.  Support an advocacy group

Though there is greater public awareness about choices that reflect compassionate care for life and environmental values, human societies need not just education, but public policy to provide in-depth, timely, and far reaching guidelines for change. There is always work to be done on the local and international level for legislation and policy. Find out more through the American Bird Conservancy, Avian Welfare Coalition, Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Audubon Society.

    9.  Support students wishing to study avian conservation at home and overseas

Individuals native to a particular region bring longevity, embodied understanding, and commitment to any avian conservation project. Therefore one of the best ways to support avian conservation is to provide educational support for students in conservation biology, wildlife management, and veterinary medicine. You can also support international student and veterinarian travel. For instance, the Association of Avian Veterinarians provides scholarships for student externships. You may also contact Dr. Dennis Guerro Centeno at the San Carlos School of Veterinary Medicine and Zoology in Guatemala who seeks scholarship support for graduate students studying psittacine conservation in Guatemala (msc.dennisguerra@gmail.com).

  10.  Grow your enjoyment of birds and encourage others to do the same

“The experience of beauty has a built-in consequence: fairness.

(It) refers both to loveliness and to the ethical requirement to be

fair, play fair, or distribute fairly.  Beauty issues a call to symmetry

and equality, a call to be just.”  --Elaine Scarry

Birds are beautiful and bring much pleasure and enjoyment.  When watching them we grow in our sense of their beauty, which calls us to greater care and compassion of our natural world. Bird watching is avian conservation in the making, and estimates of American birdwatchers range from 46 million to over 60 million.  Carry binoculars when you go walking or keep a pair in your car.  Take time to slow down and observe birds.  They’ll surprise you with their behavior and beauty.  While at work and at home ask others if they had any interactions with birds and what they thought and felt.  In their relationships with birds, were there aspects that brought them joy and peace, understanding and clarity, sadness and loss?  If we can take time to celebrate, mourn, and express gratitude with others about our lives with birds we grow our capacity to care, and renew ourselves so that we may work diligently and consistently over the many years it will take to save even one species.

To find out more about bird watching go to birding.com and the National Audubon Society. Go to Wings of Compassion (www.lafeberwingsofcompassion.com) for information on avian loss.

You can celebrate birds on National Bird Day, January 5 (www.nationalbirdday.com)

For a copy of this handout and others on conservation, go to www.LafeberVet.com

Life of the Skies

  Étienne-Jules Marey around 1882

 

Is there a bird inside of you?  Yearning for freedom, for meaning?  DH Lawrence wrote, “Birds are the life of the skies, and when they fly – they reveal the thoughts of the skies”.

 

There’s more to bird watching than meets the eyes.  I’m probably preaching to the choir here, but now and then the choir likes to hear a song it knows.

 

Do you know the song of a bird?  Well then, maybe a story like this has happened to you.

 

A Buddhist master is walking with the disciple and accuses the master of hiding the secret of Zen from him.

Just then a bird called from the riverside.

The master asked, do you hear the bird.

Yes said the disciple.

Well then you know I have hidden nothing from you.

Yes said the disciple.

And then he was enlightened.

 

In watching birds not just a lightening of the spirit is possible, but something fiercer and not all that comfortable to behold.  For when birds tell us of meaning, they tell us not just of life, but also of death.  And it’s in that crucible held by feathered wings that we can be held in both beauty and tragedy, and make meaning of our lives.

 

Jonathan Rose, author of the ministers’ book of the month, The Life of the Skies – Birding at the End of Nature, says the reason why there are some 50 million bird watchers in this country is because birds are the last remaining wild animals that are abundantly visible to us.  They are the windows into all of wild nature, our own wild nature as well.

 

Birds link us back in time to evolution, where creative life constantly arises out of death.  Each year it’s increasingly clearer that birds evolved from dinosaurs.  If the movie Jurassic Park were made today, Tyrannosaurus Rex and all the velociraptors would have feathers.  It’d be great to see such a dinosaur, but I’m glad it’s a goldfinch that comes to the feeders and not a T.Rex.

 

 Photo by Aarong Gustafason

 

So we lost dinosaurs along the way for the dynamite soaring birds of today, and now we are losing them too, at our own hands, and it’s not clear what new life might arise.  It’s hard as a bird watcher to not be aware of their dwindling numbers, and to despair.  How amazing that there are 5,000 Sandhill cranes, but imagine 50,000 here in Florida, hundreds of thousands of Carolina Parakeets, and 2 billion Passenger Pigeons in the U.S.  The Parakeet and Pigeon went extinct for many reasons, and tragically the last birds succumbed to collectors.  The only nest of Carolina Parakeet eggs, long dead, is housed here at the Florida Museum of Natural History. They were turned in by a poacher who would not reveal the location of this last nest until long after the parents died, and subsequently the entire species.

 

In our primate minds, the urge to kill and the urge to conserve are so closely linked, death never far from life, as experienced so acutely with a flying bird of life easily dead due to the fragility of their hollow bones, air sacs, and paper thin feathers.  John James Audubon saw a monkey kill his parrot.  He mused that it is this image that caused him to study and paint birds with pleasure, and to do so he killed thousands of birds.

 

The wild primate lives inside of us all.  We hunt as we look for birds through our binoculars, and we are haunted by a lifestyle that leaves ¼ of Florida’s birds in danger.

 

In the early 20^th Century, President Teddy Roosevelt heard reports about plume hunters wiping out bird populations in Florida, and made Pelican Island the first time the federal government set aside land for the sake of wildlife.  Roosevelt was a great conservationist, not “in spite of the fact that he was a hunter, but because he was one.  He never discounted the human urge to destroy, since he indulged in that urge so zealously himself.  Rather accepting it as a given of human nature, he allowed that knowledge to inform his understanding of the necessity of check and balances of human rapacity.” (Jonathan Rosen).

 

Knowing who we are and what we might do based on our understanding of our place in communities of mixed species are key religious questions.  Birds help us know of our sacred reality, our divine possibility, and how we must arise out of the ashes of our burning human greed.

 

    Harold Bloom who studied American Religious Poetry found in Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Adams, Frost, and Dickinson the image that the risen Jesus is in each of us – that each of us as individual can bring salvation to this world through the blessing of our very being.  John James Audubon paintings captured this in his anthropomorphized birds.  They don’t look like birds as much as they look like humans with feathers.  He melds birds with humans – wild nature, beauty without end, amen.

 

    Walt Whitman perhaps best portrayed nature and birds as lived religion.  As a boy Whitman listened to a pair of mockingbirds one summer.  Then one of the pair died, and the remaining bird sang throughout the night. The young Whitman went out into the night to listen to this song, and was changed forever.  Later he said, “Now in a moment I know what I am for.” 

 

He wrote about this episode in his famous poem, Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.  “It’s fusion of the human and the animal, and in its depiction of an entire country through animal symbols is a kind of poetic extension of Audubon’s paintings” (Rosen, pg. 59).

 

Emerson too melds human experience with birds.  Drawn to Sufism, Emerson writes of the Conference of the Birds, one of the most central of all Sufi texts. In this text, birds undertake a spiritual journey and show us the way of Emerson’s Transcendentalism, a kind of homegrown American Sufism.  We are the image of God, and divinity reflects from our souls ever more brightly as we work to polish our inner mirror.

 

    Colleague to Emerson, Emily Dickinson compared birding to church, and preferred birding.  It’s a tough call.  The point is birds and church-like activities are just some of the ways to grow more connected, more aware, and more whole, which is the eternal light ever shining in the darkness.

 

Robert Frost wrote in the 20^th century, a time of darkness, death and extinction. His poem, The Ovenbird poses this:  The question that he (the bird) frames in all but words is what to make of a diminished thing.

 

What are we to make of our diminishing lives through age, illness, death, and the loss of biodiversity?  Hope isn’t the thing with feathers – it’s us.  We are the ones who can learn to know ourselves and the world around us, and take intentional steps forward into a future of abundant life.

 

In the U.S. there is a unique chance to know who we are through birds and to respond accordingly because of our long history with birds and nature religion.  We’re the Republic of Feathers.  We could also probably call our congregation the Unitarian Universalist Feathership of Gainesville because so much of our country’s nature/bird traditions come from those with UU ties.  Whitman, Dickinson, Thoreau, and Frost had strong Unitarian Universalist connections.  Unitarians clearly claim as their own Emerson, the two Adam Presidents and Thomas Jefferson who kept a pet mockingbird in the White House Study.

 

So here we descendants are today, helping one another face the darkness around us and in us, seeking to free ourselves from senseless suffering through joy.  Birding is but one way to take up an intentional practice that asks us to look within at our inner demons and look outward in acknowledgement that though we may be alone or feel it, we are interconnected to all of life.

 

Thoreau, the patron saint of backyard birders, exhibited the paradox of birding and our kind by loving isolation and craving connection. He wrote:  

Each new year is a surprise to us.

We find that we had virtually forgotten the note of each bird, and when we hear it again, it is remembered like a dream, reminding us of a previous sate of existence.

The voice of nature is always encouraging.

In a bird we meld the past with the dream of the future.

 

Birding is the synthesis of individuals and communities, of art and science, and of secularism and religion.  Watching birds allows us to live in a symbolic world that is also scientific.  We do not lose our rational mind, but find our wondrous mind in seeing wonder around us.  Birding perhaps seems such a small thing to do, but small gestures can save the world, as can small groups upon wooded or sandy trail.  For it is there on the path where beauty is all around us, as is death, that we can let loose our joy. Joy does not lead us to “escape the world, but to fly free in it, to embrace it with all its suffering and all its wonder and creative powers.” (David Spangler).

 

It’s not an easy path.  In the middle of preparing this sermon yesterday I went for a short walk to get my mail.  There flew across me a Cooper’s hawk carrying a red-bellied woodpecker screaming it’s final song.  The hawk could barely fly so burdened was it with the crying pitiful bird.  I wanted to run after it and tear the beautiful dying thing from its talons, and yet was also mesmerized by the beauty of the successful hunt.  In me was a turning of the gut, a heart-wrenching glimpse of reality where all moments consist of inseparable life and death.  In that one moment, I knew what I am for.

 

We all are burdened with dying things.  For a good part of my life I have been a bird veterinarian and I know the stark truth that that the desire to have bird beauty in our homes is killing off the wild birds, and causing much suffering to those held captive.  I’ve handled Spix Macaws, which are now extinct in the wild, due largely to collectors who desired these startlingly blue beings. In my career as a bird veterinarian, I worked for 3 of the four largest bird collections in the world. I did this so I could be close to beauty and hence I captured my joy, binding the world to my desires with resulting loss and suffering.  I am the monkey with parrot blood on her hands, the hawk with a dying bird in its talons, the dove with a rising spirit of joy that cannot be caged.

 

 In the movie The Thin Red Line based on John James novel the hero says, “One man looks at a dying bird and sees nothing but unanswerable pain, and another looks at the same bird and feels the glory, feels something smiling through it.”

  

Before Christmas I was in Puerto Rico where I reunited with the Puerto Rican Parrot Recovery Project.  Once there was nearly a million of this parrot species on the island and by the 1970s, only 15.  Two weeks ago there were 40 in the wild and I witnessed 20 more captive raised birds released into the wild, increasing their numbers by 50%.  To see those birds fly free, prone yes to hawks and the ravaging reaches of humankind, death ever before them, creates a smile that did not end that day and I believe echoes the eternal smile in each of us that is born in each sunrise.

 

I wish I knew how to live more constantly like that, to free and feed the bird within and the bird without.

 

Do you know how?

 

Please let me know. Let us share this life of the skies together.

 

LoraKim

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

California Condor Dreaming

California Condor in the Southwest. Picture by Dan Kunkel

 

I have longed dreamed of seeing California Condors. They call to me nearly as strongly as Ivory-billed Woodpeckers.  Both elicit the response of “Lord God, what a bird!” in many people’s hearts.  For me they also speak about “staying the course” and never giving up, even when all hope appears lost.

 

 

I was active in avian conservation in California when the few remaining condors were rounded up from the wild. The only surviving condors lived in captive propagation centers.  This change devastated me, for I had lost the chance to see those enormous wings throw shadows along a canyon wall, and in so doing, cast out the shadows that lurk in the human heart.  Their wild beauty would never be mine to know, only their death.  For in those years of extinction, I had been called upon to transport a condor egg from one site to another after the chick inside had died.  That was the closest I ever got to a wild condor, until this past week.

 

 

While hiking in Zion National Park in Utah, I rested on a mountain saddle when a great wind came up threatening to blow me off the ridge.  I grabbed onto a pine tree, holding on to dear life.  In that blast of sand and rain, a California Condor soared on an updraft that took her mighty wings almost within my reach.  She seemed impervious to the steep cliffs and powerful winds, as if she knew she belonged to this land.  It was our species who didn’t always know who belonged.  In the past decades the attitudes of hunters, ranchers, farmers, and the general public did not offer much hope that we could change who we were as a species to make room for this endangered bird.  The biologists and wildlife managers though did not give up.  They kept to the course for over two decades and now the Condor soars freely over several Western states. It is still frightfully endangered and with the uncertainty of climate change and diminishing earth resources, there is no guarantee that this species or others shall continue to exist, let alone thrive.  But we know more and more that we humans belong to this land and all beings are our kin.

 

 

We may not be assured of the outcome, but we know that we belong to one another too.  If we promise to one another to walk and work together in all the ways of love, we may yet, like the Condor, soar over the deserts of the hard trodden paths of our longings to live in a world abundant in biodiversity and compassion.  Let this not just be a dream, but a liberating reality.  May the sightings of condors, woodpeckers, and other avian beauty take hold of our hearts and cast out the shadows of despair and sorrow.  My dear readers, join me as we grasp the vision of a beloved community of all species. 

 

Take hold of this future; never give up, never say die,

So that the birds we know and love may always fly!

Guatemala Scarlet Macaw Chick Exam

Examining Avian and Human Virtue

At long last I have up a video in three parts that shows the Wildlife Conservation Society team of veterinarians and biologists examining wild Scarlet Macaw nest in Guatemala. It depicts a fairly thorough physical examination of wild parrots that is possible under field conditions. We learned so much about the birds, and about ourselves while doing this work in April of 2009. As you watch these videos perhaps you too can learn about what it means to be human in a community of mixed species, for me a primary religious, ethical, and hence scientific question. Like us, birds have the virtues of caring, compassion, protection, prudence, and nurturance. The parents care for their young, feed them, protect them, treat them with kindness, while also keeping a safe distance from we humans climbing the trees. You can hear the parents calling out in warning while we handle the chicks.

 

Like us, birds are anxious for the well being of other birds.  The calling of the parents echoes our own anxiety about what will happen to the younger chick, and what can we possibly do to save this one bird, let alone an entire species that is under threat from poaching, forest fires, and habitat loss that results from an economic system that is based on addiction – to consumerism, to drugs, to satisfying one’s own needs, now, at the costs of meeting others basic needs.

 

Like us, birds demonstrate perseverance, strength, and adaptability.  The youngest chick in this nest (the second one to be examined) is frightfully thin and over the next several weeks falls further and further behind in weight as her/his sibling thrives. Yet the bird lives for several more weeks as one or both parents still feed the ailing chick.

 

 

Like us, birds are beautiful, defiantly so as it seems against all odds that such a rainbow of colors and social complexity survives from egg to the powerful, gliding adults circling over us during the examination. How did such beauty come into existence and how shall it survive we ask? To answer this question we continue to examine our own lives, our own complicity in a system fraught with harm for ourselves and others, and we continue to examine these birds and their chicks, for the hope of understanding what is ours to do in this world. How shall we liberate ourselves as we liberate the birds, and love ourselves as all our neighbors?

A Bird's Eye View on Earth Day

                                                                   

                       

  Scarlet Macaw Parents Flying During Chick Exam (photo by Marcial Alvarez, WCS)

 

I arrive back to the USA on Earth Day, a fitting point of reflection to capture my month in Guatemala.  I recall an editorial in the Prensa Libre on April 21 about “Día de la Tierra.”  The author said that the earth like our body can regenerate and that it has mechanisms to break out of the ashes of a crushed forest, but only to a certain point. I wonder if we are getting close that point as I recall my month of fire and ashes in a country that loses more trees per year than Brazil, losing about 1% of its natural resources every year. When asked who is responsible for this I heard such anger, shame, and remorse come from the hearts and mouth of Guatemaltecos. Blame was placed on themselves, other biologists and conservationists, the narcotraficantes, the government, the wealthy, the indigenous people, the land invaders, and internationals.  One conservationist described people as porquería (garbage) and others said that their hope for the future comes from the possibility that the human species to go extinct.  It was rare that I heard praises sung of our kind.  If we cannot have faith in humankind’s good, I wonder if we might turn to the birds to see what they see in us and what they might say…..

 

               You ask me what I see in you when I look down on you from a high.  I see such caring and compassion.  You are spending so much effort and resources to save my kind from annihilation.  There is kindness in your voice when you speak to my chicks below during your exams and when one of our chicks is sick I can feel your heart carry the concern with you as you walk from my home to yours.  And still you find a way to laugh, play, and care for one another in your conservation projects.  We share so much – we too care, protect, and prudently care for others and ourselves.

 

                

              

            I worry though about how you see yourselves.  There is blame in your voice and disgust of your own species.  We don’t experience this as parrots.  Perhaps it is because you don’t have the over view vista that we have.  Blame isn’t even in our behavioral repertoire.  What we see is that we all are beings interacting in complex ways trying to meet our individual and collective needs.  There is no bad or good, just the process of ecology.

 

               This doesn’t mean that I don’t get angry with you.  You’ve heard my voice call out when you take my chicks’ temporarily from the nest. It is hard to trust your kind in general for from up here I see my forest burning, my food trees being cut down, and those who do not replace my chicks once they are roughly taken from by beloved nest cavity.

 

 

               Even still I wish your kind no harm. I wish you well for my heart aches for you.  There is such addiction in you, for I’m guessing you wish to still the pain.  If only you could see what I see and know in my being.  We are all inextricably interrelated, we are one.  If I could give you anything it would be this knowing that I have; that happiness isn’t what life is about.  The best that we can is to rise in love and in awareness of beauty out of the ashes of death.

 

               We have a legend of our kind that we share with you – the Phoenix Bird as some call her.  From her far up view as she circles the earth she can spot the fires over Guatemala and her heart breaks as she sees life disappear and suffer. 

 

Guatemalan Fires 2005

 

But from that view she sees too the beauty of the whole, so she flies on and on, tail dipping in ashes and feathers burning with fiery loss.  Though sometimes she falls to the earth under the burden of awareness, always she rises again with lightness in her heart. There is no other path for her. To hold the love and light she must also hold the darkness and the despair.  As the witness for mother earth she holds us all in love, compassion, and kindness, no matter the harm we experience or cause.  Hers is not an easy path, nor is yours, or ours.  But we are not alone.

 

 

We travel together, helping each other fly above the mess of our daily lives to see the long perspective – that we are here to love another, love the earth, and love ourselves.  Even though there is pain, there is always love.  Love may not be enough to quench the fire of human desire, in this moment, in this decade, but I see it rising in you ever stronger throughout the years. 

 

I want so desperately for my chicks to grow up and fly free.  This too I wish for you and all your kind that your hearts soar like the Phoenix.   May we all fly free together, forever.

 

Vuele juntos y vuele libre, para siempre!

 

             Wearing the "Fly Free" wristbands during a chick exam    

Bearing Fire in Love

For the last 5 days we have been at several areas climbing nests, El Peru, El Burral, and La Corona.  These are the same three areas that the Prensa Libre newspaper states on April 14^th have out-of-control forest fires threatening.  Indeed air around the nests is getting increasingly hazy and one cannot escape the smell of smoke in the air.   There are biological stations (rustic camp sites) at all three areas which serve as staging points for biologists, the army, CONAP (those in charge of protected areas in Guatemala), and us.

(El Peru Station)

La Corona is the farthest, a 6-hour drive from Flores.  It is also possibly my favorite because it seems that the deeper we go into the forest, we enter not the heart of darkness, but the heart of light and love.  Flora and fauna abound, and this permeates into our own beings.  With every gut wrenching jolt in the road it seems clearer and clearer to me that I am not separate from jaguar, macaw, tree, monkey, and ape (that would be we humans). 

If I am one both with forest and fire starter, then it seems that I too am on fire, and am killing what I love.  This is not an easy truth to hold but the beauty and tragedy call to my soul to be a chalice that can hold fire and light, and forest and darkness together.  Every tree climbed may show us sick or dying chicks, nests emptied from predators both human and nonhuman, or bright rainbow splashes of bird being that are displayed as the chicks grow into their feathers for their first flight.

 

 (Scarlet Macaw chick in nest - photo by Marcial Cordova Alvarez, WCS)

We never know what the news will be, or what each day will hold for us.  On Saturday, April 18 we got up at 3:30 a.m. to leave at  5 a.m. for El Burral, a two-hour drive into the forest with 4 macaw nests along the way.  We don’t get very far before the air changes with a sense of warmth too early for the sun’s position, and then around the next curve, fire erupts along the side of the road.  We get out to calm the flames down and ride on, only to find the fire and burned areas becoming increasingly more abundant on both sides of the road.  We grow concerned because the fire is close to macaw nest trees. 

 Soon we find the road blocked with burning trees, but we are four with two machetes and we clear the way.  With us this day are Melvin Merida (veterinarian WCS), Alejandro Morales (veterinarian ARCAS) and Kender -tut Rodriguez, climber and tortilla maker par excellence.  Further on there are more downed trees and if we can’t cut up the trees and pass on the road, we make a path through the forest and go around. 

(Kender fighting forest fire with machete)

Atop a hill we find telephone reception and call WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society) headquarters to let them know of the threat and they send their biologists to the field for the next several days to clear out brush around the nest trees so they won’t burn.  Over the weekend it seems that WCS personnel are alone in fighting the fire and saving what life they can.  There is a tremendous shortage of resources, and perhaps coordination and will as well.  We leave the last nest unclimbed because it would mean we would be driving at night and this could be dangerous if we encounter more fires and blocks in the road, which we in fact do. It’s a long drive out from the fire area as every kilometer or so we disembark with machetes to find a way forward.

 

 (Burning tree blocking road)

 

(Melvin and Kender glad to get truck around block in road)

What is the way forward?  How do we look at a dying bird and see a smile shining through it, feel the glory? (see previous post "Preying and Praying for Life") How do we determine what is killing our planet and what is ours to do?  

(A female Masked Tityra found on side of road as we come out of the fire. She has just died and we cannot fathom why)

How do we have faith that our attempts will be enough?  That love is enough?  How do we go on knowing that our work or our love may never be enough to build the world we wish to live in?

(Melvin fighting fire with our drinking water)

I leave these questions unanswered for now for I leave tonight for Guatemala City on an overnight bus, to catch a flight on Tuesday, April 21.  Suggestions for which bus to take are abundant, and part of this discussion includes which ones are most likely to get robbed.  This is mentioned as casually as the other considerations such as likelihood that the air conditioner will work, that the bus will be late, and that I will be able to get any sleep. I experience confusion as well as gratitude that I have privileges and can afford safe transportation, when others ride in terror.  Since January 1, 2009, 43 drivers and driver assistants have been murdered in Guatemala.  This happens during robberies and when a particular driver refuses to pay the extortion fees to the gangs that roam the streets. It is perplexing to me that we live in a world where violence and harm are taken for granted, where we allow forests to burn with little intervention and people to be murdered in the streets. 

 

Not everyone is passive. Every week in the paper there are reports of towns that hunt down those committing violence or robbery, and hang them, burn them, or both.  My path does not lie in that direction, of using more violence to end violence.  The world and my heart have experienced enough of that.  Instead I look to the work of WCS and ARCAS.  They yield machetes, hammers, syringes, binoculars, cameras, and computers as they fight, sweat, and toil for what they love, with their love.  Their hearts lead the way through the darkness as shing chalices of hope.  In the forest my eyes burn from the smoke, my tears mix with the ashes of the beloved forest, and I lend what moisture I can to a world on fire as my heart fills with joy for knowing these people and their land.

 (ARCAS Veterinarians Fernandez Martinez and Alejandro Morales, WCS Volunteer Merlina Barnes, and me at ARCAS)

Around the year 500 CE “Fire is Born” came from Tenochuacan (current Mexico City) conquering Mayan cities, including Tikal.  The first evidence of him entering the Mundo Maya (the Mayan World) is on a stella in El Peru, where I spend my last night in the forest.

 

(Stella at El Peru)

I go to sleep, my dreams dancing with moon and stars and wonder what shall be born from this experience of fire.  My dear people, what sparks in you that we might turn to one another with the hope of love, and a prayer of forgiveness and peace in our hearts?

 

(Flag placed atop hill of town Paso Caballos right outside the Mayan Biosphere Reserve.  It indicates that today is dangerous to use fire to clear land)

Sounds Along the Ages

 Slaty Tailed Trogon

 (Listen to some bird songs in the early morning)

 

We are back in Flores for one night before heading off to other nest areas in the opposite direction of where we were yesterday.  Entering the Mayan Biosphere Reserve is as if we were suddenly transported to a place where animals magically appear for us to view.  There is a cheerfulness in the arriving.  When we leave the reserve, we don’t see or hear nearly as many beings in the midst of smoke and ash, and there is a sense of loss.  It is as if we go forward in time when we enter the world of devastation when the world is more and more like this every day, and it is as if we go backwards in time when we enter the forest, and hear the sounds along the ages.

(Listen to Howler Monkeys in the Reserve)

(Listen to a Scarlet Macaw parent call during our examination of his or her chick - Dr. Melvin Merida presiding)

Ruined for Life

I’d been in the field for nine days and we come out with a car full of people to return to the city of Flores and to the other cities nearby where the biologists live.

 

While staying in Flores I learn the history of this island, once known as Tayasal. It was the last stronghold of the Mayan people before being entirely conquered by the Spanish with their military and missionary tactics.  We too retreat to it as a stronghold of conservationists, for it is the home of the Wildlife Conservation Society, Guatemala and ARCAS (Asociación de Rescate y Conservación de Vida Silvestre – Wildlife Rescue and Conservation Association).  They both have toiled for over 15 years to keep birds free in their natural homes, and to liberate those imprisoned, including the human heart.

 

 (Captive raised Scarlet Macaws getting ready to produce the second generation - ARCAS)

It is Semana Santa (Holy Week) and a time when the country basically stops for vacation, going to the playa (beach), eating fish, and watching the processiones. (parades).  Each day here and in towns all around the country people walk around their cities carrying large platforms of carved characters that play out the Easter story according to Christianity.

 

Here we see vestiges of more ancient rites as the streets are adorned with artwork (alfombras) made up of painted sawdust, fruits and vegetables, and plant material.  When asked, one Mayan woman told me her art was an offering of gratitude to God.  These are walked over by parade participants, ruined perhaps as a sign of the transitory nature of life and an offering of God’s gift of life in the presence of so much death and decay.

 

 (Before the parade - photo by Merlina Barnes, WCS Volunteer)

 

(Same art after the parade)

I spend my Easter morning traveling out to the Yaxhá Mayan Ruins.  I am seeing parrots everywhere, in symbol if not in reality for one guide tells us that the parrot chicks are stolen from the nests here.  The symbol of the park is Mayan art of a macaw and we spend time puzzling over the Stela de Pájaros, a huge stone monolith with carvings of birds all over it. I ask our guide what this means and what birds meant to the Mayans, and he cannot say.

 

 (Bird Stela)

As we scramble up and down pyramids, I cannot help but wonder how the Mayans loved over the millennia and if their lives had joy and meaning, and how they translated this into their treatment of each other and the mundo (world) around them.  We see evidence of the rise, fall, and rise again of these people who built city states in the forest, warred with one another, and over populated their environment beyond sustainability.  This doesn’t seem so far removed from the reality today with the drug cartel strongholds sprinkled throughout the forest which is reported to be 50% to 80% desparacidos (disappeared) depending on with whom you talk.

 

 

We have rested up during our four days here, considered alternative strategies, and return today to my last week here where I hope we can climb as many Scarlet Macaw nests as possible in a relative small area where they have retreated. Still it will take us hours to get to some nests and the weather promises to be over 100 throughout the week. 

I wonder if some time in the future those who inherit the ever hotter winds of this forest will walk along paths of our ruins, marveling at conservation stations, artificial nest boxes, and engraved signs with scarlet macaws on them.  What stella do we leave behind for others to puzzle over what birds and bosque (forest) meant to us and why we warred so much only to lose what was most precious to us?  Will they find evidence of how we loved and discover a pattern of how we connected our values to our treatment of all species, especially the ones that are the hardest to love, those of our own species?

Let this part of the Reserve not be the last of its kind, but a flowering that gives seed to the birth not of nations, competing drug cartels, or fortressed family homes, but of a home for all beings.  May our desires fall like ruins about our feet, for the sake of all life.

 

(I’ll be gone to the field, so catch updates on the nest climbing on Twitter – you can sign up here on this site)

Preying and Praying for Life

(Riding up to the nests with journalists from National Geographic, family members, volunteers, and biologists - all eager to see beauty)

We come to our last nest of the second week of macaw chick observation here with a near fiesta atmosphere.  Our ailing chicks from last week that we treated are improved, and the one failing chick has food in his crop this morning.  His hunger cries do not disturb our mornings, though the calls of his aggrieved circling parents haunt my soul, as do those ghosts of all birds I have known and lost.  There is something primal, emotionally deep and so very real in their voices that speak of threat and unanswerable pain.  Indeed there will be losses this morning. 

The very last nest we climb that contained two relatively healthy chicks last week is now empty, their rainbow visions now only for cameras, never to soar over this earth. 

(Beloved chicks captured forever on film and in hearts - photo by Merlina Barnes, WCS Volunteer)

Evidence points to the nest being predated by a Collared Forest Falcon, who in feeding its own must kill another’s.  It seems a final statement on all the tragedies of a country beset by poverty, violence, and genocide.  Human beings must harm to survive, but desmasiado (too much).

We walk back from the nest through Mayan ruins and we hear above us a Forest Falcon calling.  It’s voice taunting us from above echoes through the forest and in our hearts.  Melvin climbs over covered ruins in pursuit of a closer view and picture of this wondrous predator.  Now he is the one stalking beauty that beats within the same breast as does tragedy and death.  If we forgive the falcon in a matter of minutes, might we learn somehow to forgive our own species?

I recall a quote from the movie, The Thin Red Line.  The hero caught up in the destruction of World War II in the Pacific looks down and sees a parrot chick struggling in ashes, bombed out of it’s nest from the shelling on the enemy line. The soldier muses, “One man looks at a dying bird and thinks there’s nothing but unanswerable pain.   Another man sees that same bird and feels the glory – feels something smiling through it.” 

In my return to parrot conservation in Guatemala I recall the pain of loss and death, for it is with me always, but I also cannot, and will not be separated from the beauty of falcon, forest, and fires, for they are in me too.  We humans come out of the ashes of dead stars, out of earth, out of Africa, and to ashes and dust we return.  Our foot prints on this world need not mark our days with thoughts of only harm, for in the history and evolution of our past is the story of wholeness, and though this web of life catches us with messy interconnection, I pray we can answer the ravaging ways of our kind with love and with forgiveness.  Kindness and earth first, for there is never a second chance for this moment again, no matter what it brings.

 Praying Together With Life

(baby Howler Monkey at ARCAS Rescue Center near Flores, Peten, Guatemala)

A Work of Love

 

If you have this world a place for sleep,

Burn it! and pass what merely seems;

You can’t deceive the Truth with sleepy dreams.

Let fear persuade you, and the fire is lit;

Burn your bed now if you would rise from it.

                - Farid Ud-Din Attar (Conference of the Birds – A Sufi Text)

 

My first morning at El Estacion comes before sunrise, like all the other days to come, and we head east on a road deeper into the forest over an hour on a 4-wheel drive road.  Calling it bumpy would be to under describe  it. We can drive up and park the truck, and then it is a short walk up to each nest, about a kilometer or so at the maximum.  We have five nests to climb before Friday at noon, and we’re learning that for our own sake and the birds’ you better be done long before the day reaches that level of heat.

 (Climber up a Macaw Nest Tree - A Cantemo Tree)

My veterinary role here is clear. I am to consult with and train the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS Guatemala) ) veterinarian, Melvin Merida, as well as any other workers on the climbing teams.  It has been nearly 14 years since I did this work and it’s as if not a day has passed.  I know this work, I love it; it was a gift to me then to be able to do it and it is now a gift I can offer others. 

 

They seem deeply appreciative and our climbs are full of awe and wonder, as well as worry and concern as we find some chicks shining with their rainbow colors in undeniable health, while others are thin with mites and fly strike, and one is in poor condition and I think it will not survive.

 

 

I also have a few other sombreros I wear here as well, including that of conducting a pilot ethno-ornithological study (this is great fun for me try to pronounce this in Spanish, let alone explain it).  I ask a lot of questions as we ride, hike, and share meals together.  One question stands out in particular because I am surprised with the consistency of the answer.  What do you make of your work and of the Scarlet Macaw conservation effort, including our work this year with the parrot chicks?  Across the board at all levels, from technician to administrator, I hear something like this;  I work with the birds because I love them, or I am encantado (charmed, delighted, bewitched).   I ask where does the love come from and they say it is because they work with them. Through their work comes their love as they grow in understanding of the lives of these birds over the long, hard years of front line conservation.  For others the love comes instantly as one tells me that he had always been a reptile and amphibian man, and then he climbed his first Scarlet Macaw nest and in the moment when he saw the chicks in the nest he had a conversion experience.  It was love that he says grows stronger every day.   

A number of them also answer they have a love of the birds because it supplies a paying job, and this is important to them and their families.   Some move their hands in a sign eating food while they tell me this.  Indeed, I wonder how one can love anything when one is in the position of having to destroy it to merely eat each day. 

An ever bigger unknown that I hear throughout the ranks here is why are people who are in the position of abundant wealth destroying the bosque (forest)?   One biologist told me that the survival of the bosque depends entirely on how much private land owners love the birds and another said it is difficult for them to save their land from burning it when they do not live on their ranches and have not grown to love it, to work with it and the people day in and day out.  So many of these land owners manage from afar, it being too dangerous or too difficult to live where you work. 

It is difficult here, but there is also glory and joy.

 

(Melvin getting a climbing lesson)

Some find a way to love what also through their hands has set this place on fire with human desire.  These desires though are not just for survival or wealth, but for beauty, awe, wonder, love, and the chance for meaningful work.  I see this in Melvin and young Sandra, a Mayan young girl from the neighboring village of Paso Caballos as she scrambles around the station barefoot with her three younger siblings. 

 

Shyly she finally comes up to me and we talk as the sun sets into the smoky haze, made worse this day because a fire from a milpa in her village has gotten out of control and threatens the reserve.  I ask her what she wants to do when she grows up and she looks confused (there are three languages at work here – English, Spanish, and her Mayan dialect).  So I rephrase it, “What do you like to do most in the world?”  She answers, “I like to walk in the monte (country).”

I fear though that by the time she is my age there will not be enough country for her children to walk in.  For a variety of reasons too many of we humans have become strangers on this planet and are destroying what we love.  We have made our bed and now must sleep in it.  What though if we don’t sleep in it? We wake instead from our dreams and greet each day with the wisdom of reality and then get to work with the birds, with the forest, with the oceans, and with each other.  Then love may come and this nightmare may end.

 

(Hazy sunrise from fires nearby)