Liberating Wings

Owls Get a Kick Out of Soccer

 

There is nothing as liberating as a good soccer game.  It can also be dangerous in parts of the world as soccer has been the inciting stimulus for riots, death threats, murder, and in one case, a war between Honduras and El Salvador. Recently this harm extended to an owl.  A tame barn owl, the mascot of a Columbian soccer team, flew down to the field during a game and was hit by the ball.  While still stunned, Panamanian footballer Luis Moreno kicked the bird off the field.  The bird died two days later, suffering a broken wing and shock. The crowd yelled "murderer," and Moreno had to leave the game under police escort.  Since then he has received threats.  He won't be prosecuted because Columbia has no laws against animal cruelty, although the soccer league penalized him by requiring a fine and banning him from the next two games. 

 

 

This is a painful reminder of how humans in their worst moments do not have the capacity for compassion and care, even when beauty of game and bird surrounds them.  But sometimes we do.

In a 2008 soccer game between Finland and Belgium, a great-horned owl visits the game, flying around the stadium and landing on the goal posts. The officials stopped the game and the crowd cheers and applauds the owl. Smiles and laughter abound.

 

 

 

In another instance, rescuers remove another Great-horned Owl that had become entangled in a soccer net.

 

 

 

There is beauty all around us, and there is nothing as liberating as people responding by loving and saving the birds of our world.  How though do we make sense of our complicated natures where we both get a kick out of birds and kick them?

Sufi poet Rumi writes, "There is a field out beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing. I'll meet you there."

On that soccer field, great apes and owls are neither wrong or right. Instead  we are caught up in our goal directed lives, and make tragic choices that harm ourselves and others. 

May we this day see the beauty within and without, and in our gratitude, not penalize the beings of this earth.

 

 

Owl Ethics - Spotted Owl Versus the Barred Owl

 Spotted Owl (photo by USFWS)

 

The northern spotted owl is in the news again, this time as linked to the death of 1200-1500 barred owls.  This summer, the USFWS may release in an environemental impact statement their reccomendation to kill barred owls. This is in response to the increasing range of the native barred owl who pushes out the the endangered spotted owl. 

"It's a wrenching decision that splits wildlife biologists and environmentalists. Killing one native animal to benefit another is such a leap that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hired an environmental ethicist to guide its discussions."

"There's no winner in that debate," says Bob Sallinger, conservation director with the Portland Audubon Society. 

Making difficult decisions is not new in wildlife management and conservation.  Federal workers have killed comorants, terns, and seals to protect salmon and in Puerto Rico, Red-tailed Hawks are killed to reduce their predation on the endangered Puerto Rican Parrot.

As a wildlife veterinarian I have been faced with the moral dilemmas present in this work and have been severely challenged as I wade with others through the ethical morass of wildlife care and management.

For this reason I recently finished a chapter, Wandering Through the Wilderness of Ethical Discourse, in the book Topics in Wildlife Medicine: Ethical Considerations in Wildlife Medicine. This book will be published by the National Wildlife Rehabilitators Association (NWRA).  In it I suggest that our lives are full of tragic decisions and that to care for ourselves and others we must improve our skills in ethical deliberation, and we need to do it together.

 For this aim I am traveling to the NWRA 2011 Symposium in Albany, NY next week to give a seminar on Compassionate Rehabilitation.  My hope is that we can learn and practice together how to talk to one another so that we use our community resources to arrive at the best decisions to help the most species and individuals.

One way I suggest we do this is to practice Needs Based Ethics.  In this approach we do not say that one species or individual is of more worth than another.  Instead we bring to the table a deep appreciation of the worth and dignity of all of life.  What guides our discussion is discerning and empathizing with the needs of all species and individuals within a given situation.  By keeping our hearts and minds open, which I admit is difficult given the loss of life resulting from our daily activities, choices, and conservation management decisions, we can come up with creative solutions. 

In the end, not all beauty may be preserved in the way we'd like.  We may howl over owls, but not at each other through the tactics of shame and blame.  In the end, we will have one another with which to mourn and can claim that at least we did not turn from the splendor that is ever present to us in owl, human, tree, and fish.   

 

Compassionate Communication with All Beings

Dr. Ursula Aragunde Kohl, me and participants at the CC Workshop in Puerto Rico

 

 

Last weekend I was in Puerto Rico offering two separate workshops on Compassionate Communication. One was to the Puerto Rican Parrot Recovery Project and the other to a conglomeration of animal welfare, social services, and faith organizations in San Juan. This was the first time I had chosen to concentrate on organizations that deal with nonhuman animals. My goal in so doing was to support and nourish the humans so that they in turn could help all beings flourish.

In my home faith tradition, Unitarian Universalism I am also gearing up to offer workshops in Compassionate Communication to those interested in the interweaving justice issues that include nonhuman animals. I will do this as part of the Reverence for Life Program that the Unitarian Universalist Animal Ministry is offering our congregations. Now is the time to struggle with how we covenant with earth and her beings as our association of congregations deals with the Study Action Item: Ethical Eating and Environmental Justice. In the last few weeks congregations and list serves have been abuzz with commenting on the Draft Statement of Conscience that deals with this compelling and complex topic. Comments on the draft are due February 1st and we as an association will vote on the final draft at General Assembly in June, 2011.

How shall we come up with a statement that includes the wide diversity of who we are and yet challenges us to hold the needs of all species ever more tenderly?

My response to this question, at both the workshops and to my fellow Unitarian Universalists is this:

It’s important to think of how animals feel and suffer, how their evolution has brought them to where they are , and what they are thinking as we research how their brains work. Yet, we can never know what is “best” in the morass of ethical vagueness that cloaks humanity. Let this complexity be not a death shroud for any. Instead, let us lift up the few things we can know:

    All beings have needs that connect us in an interdependent web of inherent worth and dignity.

    We can bring kindness to every moment.

    Everything is a practice ground for the skills of compassion.

 

May this be our prayer in intention, word, and action in the months to come.

National Bird Day

 It's the turning of the year, and perhaps like me you are thinking of taxes coming due and all that paperwork. Here's a poem by Mary Oliver - "Percy Speaks While I am Doing Taxes."

First of all, I do not want to be doing this.

Second of all, Percy does not want me

  to be doing this.

hanging over my desk like a besieged person

  with a dull pencil and innumerable lists

    of numbers.

 

Outside the water is blue, the sky is clear,

  the tide rising.

Percy, I say, this has to be done. This is

  essential. I'll be finished eventually.

 

Keep me in your thoughts, he replies. Just because

  I can't count to ten doesn't mean

I don't remember yesterday, or anticipate today.

  I give you one more hour, then we step out

into the beautiful, money-deaf gift of the world

and run.

 

Just this last month I read about language research with a dog who knew more than 1000 words.  They do understand a lot.

Currently I am reading the book, "Parrot Behavior" and just yesterday read about parrots that that understand not just hundreds of words, but can combine words into sentences.  They do understand a lot.

All of this reminds me of the movie, "Forest Gump" where Forest says, "I may not be smart, but I know what love is."

No matter how we see the intelligence of another being, whether it is comparable to humans or to other species or not, I do believe that we share with the other social vertebrates a common neural structure of emotional responses that evolved out of this beautiful earth.

Baby, we were born to run, to love, and feel deep gratitude for the gifts around us.

And in light of it being National Bird Day, I offer deep bows of gratitude those who were born to fly!

 

What were you born to do?

 

 

 

 

 

The Year of the Sparrow

 Savannah Sparrow (Passerculus sandwichensis)

 

I have never really thought much about sparrows, but this seems to be changing.  In my other blog reflecting on Mary Oliver's poetry, sparrows have come up frequently in her poems and my writing.  Then on Sunday, as part of the local Christmas Bird Count, I was a member of a counting circle that emphasized sparrows. We formed "sparrow lines" to flush out and identify the birds. Okay, I was more of flusher than an identifier.  Only two days later I received in the mail rather serendipitously a promotional nature calendar whose subject  was...wait for it....sparrows!

Then yesterday this story was brought to  my attention:

"Tell me, how much is a snowflake in weight?" asked a sparrow a wild pigeon.
"Not more than nothing" was the answer. 

"Then", the sparrow says, "I want to tell you a wonderful story: I was
sitting on a branch of a pine tree, close to the trunk when it started to
snow. Not much, not like in a storm. No, it was like in a dream, without
any touch of intensity. Because I did not have anything else to do I started
to count those snowflakes which fell on my branch and the needles. Their
number was 3 741 952. When the next snowflake fell on the branch - not
more than a nothing as you said - the branch broke." 

The sparrow did not say more, he took off. 

The pigeon, which is supposed to be an authority since Noah in this topic,
thought a while about this story and then said to itself: May be there is
only one voice missing on our earth that peace will be in our world. 

Is yours the missing voice?

Is it the sparrows?

Is it mine?

What I am learning, oh Lord, ever so slowly, is that all beings matter, for each sings a song of life, and of death. 

So to affirm this knowing I plan to embody this song.  I shall learn more about sparrows this year.  Let them no longer be unidentifiable "little-brown'jobs" but daily miracles to discern.

May I in this year come to know the voices in the field as I add my song to theirs.

Whose voice shall you join this year?

 

The Lama of Birds

Tashi Sange. Photo: Geng Dong

 

Tibetan Buddhism produces much for us to admire, including now a lama of birds.  Tashi Sange, also known as the Bird Whisperer, dedicates his life to protecting the environment and birds of his homeland of Tibet.

Sange always loved birds, even before he moved to a Temple at 13 years of age.  Sange spent much of his free time at the temple observing birds, whom he imagined were his father and mother.  When he reached 15,  he began recording his observations, later to draw and paint his subjects, and thus his hobby turned into a lifetime passion.

One interviewer, Geng Dong, said "He regards birds as his friends. I remembered he once whispered to a Tibetan Bunting just like he was speaking to close friends."  Geng adds,  "I think he got a lot from Tibetan Buddhism, such as the equal rights of human beings with other life and the harmonious coexistence between nature and humans."

I wonder if his love of birds came before his path of Buddhism, a path he uses to sustain research and conservation for over 25 years.

This is the order at which I came to religion, birds, and conservation.  As a child I spent my days with birds, talking and singing to them as I wandered the fields and woods of my childhood.  Their songs led me to conservation and my religious calling as a Unitarian Universalist minister.   I came to Unitarian Universalism and my spiritual practices sprinkled with Sufism, Buddhism, and nature spirituality only 13 years ago. What if, instead, I had entered on this path at age 13 as did Sange.  Perhaps I could have given so much more in return for the company of birds.

No matter the past, the question now is how to sustain ourselves into the future.  

What do you do to sustain your efforts?  

 

Counting Wild Parrots – Counting on Wild Hope

 

 Pillar Canyon

 

Though it’s just now 6 a.m. on November 14, it is already light when Fernando Aldana comes to the door of my temporary home in Antigua.  He greets me with warm enthusiasm and apologizes for his sleeping son, David, in the back seat. We quickly plan our day and then head off to Finca Pillar for some early morning bird watching.  Fernando is a biologist and bird guide and has given his day to showing me birds and then helping to conduct a count of the parrots sleeping at the roost site used by the Yellow-naped Amazons in our study area 15 years ago.  The goal is to see how the population of parrots has changed over the years.

 

Leaning on Fernando for a Good Bird Sighting

 

We walk up a canyon trail, bundled up against the cold weather, and stop to identify the many versions of humming birds and warblers around us.  Fernando is a wonderful guide, gracious and welcoming in manner.  A real treat is his son David who has a great eye for noticing objects and animals in the environment. He helped us see many wonders, including himself who was bright, engaging, and fun to watch as he explored the trail sides.  

 

Fernando and David in Pillar Canyon

 

After midday we head down from the highlands to meet Colum Muccio and his wife Silvia Ruiz de Muccio. Colum is the director of ARCAS and Silvia is an artist whose projects and breadth of creations is astounding. Over lunch we began to talk of plans for the parrot projects of the south coast and possible grants to fund these projects.  We then drove around Escuintla and entered the study area that comprised the three fincas, Caobanal, El Trebol, and Ilusiones.  We have permission to enter Ilusiones to count the birds who roost there.

The scene is quite different than when I was here the last time in April 2009. Then the sugar cane was being harvested and loud trucks roared day and night, throwing up dust and fumes to add to the snowing ash of the burning cane fields.  This evening it is quiet as the sugar cane still grows tall  around the roost trees.  We place ourselves in locations so that we can see the birds as they fly in and then sit quietly for over an hour. 

 

Silvia and Colum Counting Parrots

 

I began to worry as it is almost dark and there is only one pair of Yellow-naped Amazons in the tree.  Three more pairs fly in for a total of 8 birds. Last year we counted 12.  Fifteen years ago we counted 250.  Though we have only 2 counts so far, I fear that we know enough – the population has crashed. We will conduct a year’s worth of counts in this area to confirm what the preliminary results show.

I admit to having a heavy heart as we drive away in the dark back into the high lands.  Still, I am grateful that I have these biologists and this young man David to witness the loss, and to share in plans of what might yet be done.  I asked David if he had hope and he said, yes, because something could still be done.  This is great wisdom – to go on working because we can. He also added via email a few days later; “There are few animals left in our big world but we have to remember not to lose the HOPE. We are responsible for the animals but (it) is very hard to make all the job so we should remember that God is there for us and in this time he is very important to help us  to conserve parrots  like the  Yellow naped  and other animals.”  His father, Fernando answered similarly. He said that his hope came from God , for what humans destroyed, God will restore. 

During the count at the roost site a lone parrot sat on top of the tall Ceiba tree acting as a sentinel.  Though I was under the sugar cane stalks, I felt as if the bird was looking directly into my soul.  She was like a bright light atop the darkly foliaged tree that once held so many of her kind.  We, the counters, are the holders of the light of love in the darkness.  As Fernando says and I agree, we can save a little bit of it at a time.

 

Looking up at Roost Tree Where Lone Parrot Perches

 

Question to all of us:

How might we save even a little bit in the face of such devastation and darkness? 

Answer to consider:

By loving a little bit at a time: even if we feel like just one lone parrot on top of a tree when there used to be hundreds.  From that beauty and rededicated observation, I believe we must count on ourselves to love ourselves as our neighbors of all species.

Thank you David, Fernando, Colum, and Sylvia for sharing this day and adding hope to our shared work a little bit at a time with every word uttered and parrot counted.

 

Of the Empire

  Of the Empire

Mary Oliver

We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many. We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness. 

 

 
John Myers and Lucrecia Masaya Arias (with the wedding party)

 

Two nights ago I officiated at a wedding in Antigua, Guatemala.  The couple, John Myers (Nature Conservancy) and Lucrecia Masaya Arias (Jaguar specialist), are conservationists whose lives are dedicated to serving the life around them.  The ceremony took place in the circular tower of El Convento de las Capuchinas.  This is the room where the stone block cells of the nuns fed into a central round chamber that in this day and time was open to the sky because the roof had long crumbled.  In those times, as in now, the culture brought much insecurity to the many, and only a few had the power to perceive safety. Yet in the midst of colonialism that ,oh dear heart, please bear this pain, ruined the world were my beloved parrots and people are disappearing, there was also the commitment to build a new world based on love.  In the ruins, we find evidence that the heart is quite large.  It’s just that the last chamber that pumps blood to the body, has constricted and lets little light out to the world.

 

By candle light the couple marrying one another stood in this ancient chamber as I asked them to look to the sky, to the garden of the earth, and to the friends and family around them.  In their promises to one another, I heard all hearts there come together, letting the roof of their ego-protecting shells crumble for one moment so that we could take in the power of love around us. 

  View from one of the Nun's Cells

 

In this ruined land of the south coast of Guatemala, industrial production of sugar cane threatens to finish off what colonialism and other forms of agriculture already did to the original inhabitants here.

 May we live today looking to love so that those who come afterwards know that the Empire was not a monolith of fear and corruption, but contained an underground counter insurgency whose ranks fill with those who promise fidelity to jaguars, people, and parrots. 

 Thank you John and Lucrecia for showing all those who gathered how to open the chambers of the heart.

Mary Oliver Helps Us Mourn

 

From This River, When I Was a Child, I Used to Drink

 

But when I came back I found

That the body of the river was dying.

 

“Did it speak?”

 

Yes, it sang out the old songs, but faintly.

 

“What will you do?

 

I will grieve of course, but that’s nothing.

 

“What, precisely, will you grieve for?”

 

For the river.  For myself, my lost

Joyfulness. For the children who will not

Know what a river can be – a friend, a

Companion, a hint of heaven.

 

“Isn’t this somewhat overplayed?”

 

I said: it can be a friend.  Companion.  A hint of heaven.

 Mary Oliver

 

 

Here I am back in Guatemala after a 6 month absence. When last here I posted my blogs in the form of tweets. Somehow this seemed appropriate to use a medium of communication that relates to the diminishing bird song.  The calls of Scarlet Macaws are long gone from nearly all of Guatemala, and the Yellow-naped Amazon calls are fainter each time I come.  I mourn.

 

There was a time when I was unsure of my mourning. It was if I was the only one who knew how abundant the harmony of multiple species of parrot calls here was in the south coast of Guatemala.  People who would see my tears and read my words wondered if I was overplaying the loss. They hadn’t looked into the regretful eyes of older campesinos who tell stories of macaws, amazons, and parakeets all nesting in one giant tree.  Now it’s hard to find even the trees, let alone the birds.

 

In this poem Mary repeats to the skeptic about her friendship with the river. Perhaps she too has felt isolated with the rivers going with no one on the shores to grieve with her, as if the river song was nothing of importance.  But it is.  Mary, you, and I have company now as the rivers leave us high and dry.

In the book, Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind, I read yesterday how psychologists, counselors, therapists, and scientists are increasingly aware of the illness and woundedness of humans who witness ecological devastation and extinction.  Writes Mary Watkins in the chapter, Creating Restorative Ecotherapuetic Practices, “I grasped and acknowledged that the plant and animal worlds were a source of primary attachment, a significant contributor to their (her patients) resilience in the face of great difficulties and disappointments in human life, and a wellspring of faith in beauty and goodness.”  Rivers, trees, birds, mountains, oceans, and flowers all befriend our kind.  So I am glad that it is more mainstream to grieve together as a community of mixed species.  That’s step one and it is hardly nothing.  We must hear and sing death songs, as Mary describes in my blog of two days go.  But what next?

 

 

On my part,  I will go in two days to the place we called "Parrot Paradise" where once there were hundreds of parrots and see if any songs remain.  In scientific terms, |will be doing a quarterly count of a parrot roost site so we can document the falling numbers of parrots in this area.  In heart terms mixed with the science, I shall grieve and tell the world about it in journal, conference, presentation, and wail.

 

What will you do?

 

 

 

Small Bodies

Wood Duck Hen With Chicks

 

 

Small Bodies

 

It is almost summer. In the pond
the pickerel leap,
and the delicate teal have brought forth
their many charming young,
and the turtle is ravenous.
It is hard sometimes, oh Lord,
to be faithful.
I am more boldly made
than the little ducks, paddling and laughing.
But not so bold
as the turtle
with his greasy mouth.
I know you know everything—
I rely on this.
Still, there are so many small bodies in the world,
for which I am afraid.

- Mary Oliver

 

Buddhist teachings say we may rely on this, "There is suffering."  Little bodies will get trashed, and even the fierce tortoise with her protective shell, gets  mashed in our roads.  Now, tell me again, how might we rely on this truth?  Perhaps because death and tragedy is reality, and there is much of which to be afraid.  But who wants to go through the day embodying this knowing?

 Instead of living a life based on  the suffering before us, the left hemisphere of our brain gains dominance.  The processes there do not wish to give into the emotions that the right side of our  brain is processing from our fear center - the amygdala in the limbic system.  Instead we tell stories that there "should not be suffering" and do our best to end the suffering, or perhaps more often, end our discomfort over witnessing it.  We might say that it must be someone's fault that baby ducks get eaten by voracious fish and tortured by kids at the city pond.  Or we forget that ducks fear, feel, and know pain and loneliness, and don't recall how hard their lives are in the brutal farms in which we as a species cage them until slaughter. 

 

Foie Gras Duck Farm

 

Don't get me wrong.  I make tragic choices all the time that result in suffering - mine and others.  I forget the beauty that gets swept away by the disdainful and painful, or I forget the hurt in favor of beauty.  How can I know everything and hold both poles of this tension?

I don't have an answer, but I do believe that I have a choice; we can lived based on the fear that won't go away, or live based on the beauty and love, that too, won't go away.