Birding and Birders: A Few Books (part I)

Speaking of lists, here's one of books about birders and birdwatching that I think I'll try to pick up when I get home:

Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding, by Scott Widensaul
The evolution of an eccentric hobby into a popular pastime, including biographies of key luminaries.

Birding on Borrowed Time, by Phoebe Snetsinger
The memoir of a woman who, upon receiving a cancer diagnosis in 1981 at age 49, set off to see as many birds as she could before she died. She ended up living 17 more years and became the first person to see more than 8,000 species.

Life List: A Woman's Quest for the World's Most Amazing Birds, by Olivia Gentile
A biography of Phoebe Snetsinger.

John James Audubon: The Making of an American, by Richard Rhodes
The man, the myth, the legend.

Birdwatcher: The Life of Roger Tory Peterson, by Elizabeth Rosenthal
The author of landmark field guides, Peterson helped to make birding what it is today.

The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession, by Mark Obmascik
The story of three men vying to see the most North American birds in a year. It's a very entertaining book, and movie too.

To See Every Bird on Earth: A Father, A Son, and a Lifelong Obsession, by Dan Koeppel
As told by the son of a man who traveled to sixty countries in his pursuit of "every bird on earth."

Kingbird Highway: The Biggest Year in the Life of an Extreme Birder, by Kenn Kaufman
A memoir chronicling a sixteen-year-old's big year in the 1970s, considered a classic in the birding literature by someone who is now revered as one of America's top birders.

Lost among the Birds: Accidentally Finding Myself in One Very Big Year, by Neil Hayward
At age 39, having quit his high-paying job and being on the other side of a failed relationship, Hayward, almost on a lark, decided to try for a big year in 2013.

Birding without Borders: An Obsession, a Quest, and the Biggest Year in the World, by Noah Stryker
Traveling to 41 countries in 2015 with a backpack and binoculars, Stryker became the first person to see more than half the world's ten thousand birds in a single year.

Birding Vietnam (part I)

I am not a birder. But last autumn when I missed the date for signing up for a Sierra Club trip to Vietnam—a place that for some unknown reason I decided I really had to visit—I needed to find an alternate avenue into the country. I've long admired Frans de Waal's Facebook posts of various and sundry fauna, including some spectacular images of Southeast Asian birds. I thought, okay, I'll go bird watching in Vietnam! That'll be fun! So I googled. And up popped a company called, promisingly enough, Wings. It just so happened they had one spot free for a trip in March. I applied.

And so now, here I am in Vietnam, three days into a three-week trip. We are currently at Cuc Phuong National Park, a hundred or so miles south of Hanoi. We've spent two days birding.

Turns out, Vietnam is one of the more challenging countries to bird in. It seems that centuries of local people roasting birds on skewers or sticking them in cages to enjoy their melodious song has made the local avian population a tad skittish. And the chaos of dark jungles doesn't help the viewing.

So we've spent long moments trying to lure birds out into the open, by playing their calls out to them. Birds such as the bar-bellied pitta (Hydrornis elliottii), which looks like this:

Its sounds can be heard here. Although this lovely little bird called back to us, it did not reveal itself.

Here's another, the scaly-breasted partridge (Arborophila chloropus)—which, same outcome:

Here's its call.

And there's the red-headed trogon (Harpactes erythrocephalus):

Beautiful, no? I caught just a glimpse of its red breast hidden behind a branch in the (did I mention this already?) dark jungle foliage. It's really difficult for me to "count" this as a sighting. But I saw more than most of the folks in my group. Here's its call.

I've been quizzing my ten fellow travelers about their "life lists." Dixie is, I believe, the most accomplished, with some 5,500 bird species under her belt. (As one fellow pointed out, she must be in the top ten of women life listers in the United States.) Everyone in the group has some sort of a life list, most in the several thousands. One woman has been on sixty (sixty!) birding trips. These people have some serious time and money, it seems. And a real passion: to see as many birds as possible. Whatever that really means.

Me, I saw several birds today very well, either through my "bins" or through the spotting scope that our local sub-leader, Luan, carries after us. A whole lot of birds I "sort of" saw—flitting around in the greenery. Many we only heard.

Before my trip, I'd joke to friends that I was going on a three-week walking meditation. That is not far off the mark. We walk very slowly, scanning for birdsong and movement. And when someone spots something interesting, we may stand in one place for fifteen, twenty minutes staring into the forest, watching, watching—sometimes with ultimate victory, sometimes not. It's up to the birds.

Today, I simply enjoyed being here, in Vietnam, in the jungle, enjoying this beautiful, delicate, and fairly endangered spot on the planet. And whenever I managed to capture a bird really well in my binoculars and study it: I was in a momentary state of bird bliss. It's not a bad place to be.

And no, I have no intention of starting a life list. I may love lists, but that sort of a birder I will never be.

Book Report: Manhattan Beach

2. Jennifer Egan, Manhattan Beach (2017) (3/12/18)

My glacial reading pace continues, but I hope to shake that up and accomplish my goal of fifty books this year. Now that I'm semi-retired (i.e., finally coming to my senses?).

I picked up Manhattan Beach having greatly enjoyed Jennifer Egan's last book, A Visit from the Goon Squad—and as various other reviewers experienced, I found myself puzzled by the difference between the two books but also, equally, impressed by the stylish, elegant, versatile prose. And oh my, the research, which was exhaustive (if at times also exhausting). I learned about all sorts of things: industrial diving, civilian life in WWII New York, gangsterism, the merchant marine and surviving a shipwreck, caring for an invalid, the posh ways of the upper class, and much much more.

I also enjoyed the complexity of the characters, as well as of the plot, which involves the protagonist, Anna, whose father disappears when she's young. As she reaches adulthood, she gains employment in the war effort, ultimately becoming one of the first female divers, working to repair ships. The book is difficult to summarize because it's not especially plot driven, and the timeline and POV switch up frequently.

As a result, it took me until about halfway in to really feel engaged. It's a slow-moving story, with a lot of interiority. That's not a bad thing at all, but I needed to slow into it myself. I was frequently on the verge of quitting in order to take up a fast-paced mystery, but the beauty of the writing kept me going.

Here are a couple of passages I flagged as I went, but really every page has some gem or other:

Anna laughed. In fact, her dress—hidden under her coat—was not all that bad. When she'd told her mother that a girlfriend from the Naval Yard had invited her to the pictures but presumed her clothes would be dreadful, her mother had plunged into a frenzy of outraged alteration, adding shoulder pads and a peplum to a plain blue dress Anna had bought at S. Klein for Lydia's upcoming doctor visit. At the same time Anna had stitched a spray of turquoise beads onto the collar, hands flying alongside her mother's as if they were playing a duet. No one who really knew clothes would be fooled by these enhancements, but their sewing wasn't meant for scrutiny. As Pearl Gratzky liked to say, rather grandly, "We work in the realm of the impression."

*   *   *   *

After midnight, when Eddie was relieved by Farmingdale . . . , he found Wyckoff, the naval ensign, waiting outside his stateroom with a bottle of wine. "We'll drink it outdoors," he said. "It's a perfect night. Where you drink wine matters as much as the wine itself."
  They sat on the number two hatch cover. The night was cool and clear, a rolling sea just visible under a paring of moon. Eddie couldn't see the ships around them, but he perceived their density, five hundred feet away fore and aft, a thousand feet abeam, all nosing together through the swells like a spectral herd. Eddie heard the cork leaving Wyckoff's bottle, caught a tart, woody smell of the wine. The ensign poured a modest amount into two enameled cups. "Don't drink it yet," he cautioned as Eddie lifted his. "Let it breathe."
  The Southern Cross hung near the horizon. Eddie preferred the southern sky; it was brighter, denser with planets.
  "All right. Now," Wyckoff said after several minutes. "Take a sip and move it around your mouth before you swallow."
  It sounded loopy, but Eddie did as instructed. At first there was just the ashy pucker he'd always disliked in wine, but that flavor yielded to an appealing overripeness, even a suggestion of decay. "Better," he said with surprise.
  They drank and looked at the stars. After the war, Wyckoff said, he hoped to find a job planing grapes in the valleys north of San Francisco. There had been vineyards there, but the dry agents had burned them during Prohibition.
  "What about you, Third?" he asked. "What will you do after the war?"
  Eddie knew what he wanted to say, but waited several moments to be sure. "I'll go back home to New York," he said. "I've a daughter there."
  "What's her name?"
  "Anna."
  These syllables, which Eddie hadn't uttered aloud in years, seemed to crash together like a pair of cymbals, leaving behind a ringing echo. Abashed, he looked away. But as the seconds passed without reaction from Wyckoff, Eddie realized how unremarkable his disclosure was. Nowadays, most men on ships had left other lives behind. The war had made him ordinary.

Homelessness

Today we went to hear a wonderful concert by the local choral group Camerata Singers. Their showcase piece was Beatitude Mass (for the Homeless), by Henry Mollicone. Here's a video of a performance from a few years ago.

Before the concert, information was projected on the front wall about a local project called Gathering for Women. The proceeds of the concert were to go to this group, which helps homeless women specifically, and to a Salinas organization, Dorothy's Place, that provides food and a generally safe environment for homeless with their own makeshift shelters. Five hundred people attended the two concerts. I hope many thousands of dollars were raised.

Unfortunately, I did not take notes on the statistics that were displayed on the wall, but the upshot is, there are a couple thousand homeless women on the Monterey Peninsula alone, half of whom are over fifty years of age, mostly living out of their vehicles. And yet they are basically invisible.

A couple of weeks ago, I was following up with Red Cross (I'm a caseworker for the Disaster Action Team, which mostly means house fires) on a 43-year-old non-citizen with two adolescent US-born children. They had lost their home to fire and were bouncing from friend to shelter to I'm not sure where. I made a lot of calls trying to find information, and it was mind-boggling how uncentralized everything was.

What if you really need help? Shouldn't there be one place you could go?

Every year now from November to May, there is a shelter in Salinas that people without a place to stay can seek out, no questions asked, at 111 W. Alisal. County Supervisor Jane Parker has gained permission for homeless people with vehicles to park outside her office overnight (they used to park along a rural road, but that was getting out of hand). There are moving shelters sponsored by churches, though I am not finding a website that describes this program. There is Monterey Shelter Directory: Helping the Needy of America. There is the Coalition of Homeless Services Providers. There is the Salvation Army. San Benito County apparently has an awesome new shelter, with permanent housing being arranged in 1 of 3 cases—but that doesn't help my client, whose kids are in school in Salinas.

I am on the verge of traveling throughout this county, to the various places I've mentioned here, to the churches, to the homeless shelters, to the food banks, to the thrift stores, to try to find out just what this county actually offers in the way of food and shelter for people in need. Because I sure am not finding that information online. And I don't even need it. But people I represent and care about do. And I'd like to be able to give them some useful information.

You'd think homelessness would be better addressed. It's all around us. And . . . it doesn't need to be. No it doesn't.

SAR

Last weekend my Search & Rescue team had its advanced ropes training. I went, for a change. (The past few years, I've pretty much avoided the multi-day trainings. Scared to commit? Maybe a little.)

My conflicted feelings on this front come because in the twelve-plus years I've been on the team, I've never had occasion to actually use any advanced ropes skills—not that such skills haven't been called on, even when I was on scene, but . . . it was easy enough for me to duck out and "go do something else." And as with so many skills that don't come naturally . . . use it or lose it. I tend to lose it within twenty-four hours. So when the annual training rolls around, I'm definitely at ground zero. And yeah, I don't like feeling stupid.

So this time, I decided to go and just participate in the teamwork. And not worry about the advanced skills—someone else would take care of that (that's the "teamwork" part of the equation)—but instead focus on the basics: mainline and belay.

I confess, I am not especially analytical or physics-minded. If I can master mainline and belay, I will die happy. There are plenty of men, and no doubt a few women, on the team who actually enjoy thinking about forces and kilonewtons and vectors and where and when and how to pass knots in the system. Me: if I can reliably, and quickly, rig up a mainline (bearclaw, radium release hitch, short and long prusiks, pulley, and friction device—ladder rack or scarab), then man it—I will feel like I'm an asset to the team.

Here are some photos I took over the weekend, which ended up being super enjoyable. I love my team!

At our campsite, gearing up for the first day of exercises

Arriving at the worksite involved a little climbing

Matt and Jesse, our instructors at the guiding-line station

Z on the guiding line

Z ready to protect ropes as edge attendant

Ken overseeing the pick-off station

General scenery from our campsite on a snowy morning

Sam Owen on his bike

CHP's H-70 dropping in for an intro to helos

The rig for lifting a patient in a litter

Officers Bainbridge and Ontiveros describing
the helicopter's safety rigging

This is what you look like if you forget to bring sunscreen

Obama Official Portraits—and Their Artists

On Monday, the Obamas' official contributions to the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery were unveiled. I saw them on Facebook (of course) and thought they were striking, interesting, unusual—especially for official presidential portraits—and kept scrolling. Until I got to Garrison Keillor's pronouncement:

It's a tough assignment, but still. The portraits of Barack and Michelle were such a disappointment. The leafy background was like a department-store ad, not art but decor. And that vast dress with a woman trapped in it who did not resemble the First Lady --- Michelle without the smile is somebody else. The problem with bad art is storage. Bad poems you can recycle; enormous bad paintings require a warehouse. These things cannot ever be thrown out the door. Washington is awash in official art. There ought to be a Bonfire Day, maybe July 4, when it's okay to destroy the stuff.

Well, okay, Garrison: you don't like them. But this attitude rubbed me very much the wrong way. I responded (amid a stream of comments both supporting his statement and pushing back), "When it comes to art, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. Whether that makes a work of art good or not is a different matter. I rather enjoy fresh takes on portraiture, especially when seen within the body of the artist's work." Not to mention, Barack and Michelle surely made very (very) careful choices when they selected their official portraitists. They knew the artists, and they knew what sort of legacy they wanted to leave. "Bad" art? I think not.

Anyway, that got me wondering about those "bodies of work" and the artists behind them. I had never heard of Kehinde Wiley (b. 1977) or Amy Sherald (b. 1973). As always, a quick Google search got me an array of colorful examples of their work and plenty of information. Here's a couple of statements by the artists about their portraits (clipped from the Huff Post):

Sherald describe[s] her painting practice as a conceptual one, founded not upon accuracy but imagination. “Once my paintings are complete, the models no longer live in the paintings as themselves,” she told the crowd [at the National Portrait Gallery]. “I see something bigger in them, something more symbolic, an archetype. I paint things I want to see. I paint as a way of looking for myself in the world.” 

And Wiley, who painted a thoughtful-looking Obama against a wall of lush plants—blue lilies for Kenya, jasmine for Hawaii, and chrysanthemums for Chicago:

“There’s a fight going on between him and the plants in the foreground that are trying to announce themselves,” Wiley said of the work. “Who gets to be the star of the show? The story or the man who inhabits the story?” In other words, who will history remember, the man or the myth? The subject or the painting?

(Fuller accounts of Wiley and Sherald, both from the New Yorker, can be found here and here. See also below, following the images, for a statement that Wiley sent to Obama supporters by email.)

There's plenty of commentary out there on the Obama portraits. So I'll leave you with other examples of the artists' work, interleaved. You'll be able to tell who's who. (The Wiley titles, needless to say, are parodic.) I am left feeling impressed both by the artistry and by the deeper metaphors, meanings, and feelings informing these artists' work. I'm glad I now know a little more about them. (Click on the images to view them large on black.)

Willem van Heythuysen (2005)

“Painting is about the world we live in.
Black people live in the world.
My choice is to include them.
This is my way of saying yes to us.” —Kehinde Wiley

Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance) (2016)

“I’m depicting the many people who existed in history
but whose presence was never documented.” —Amy Sherald

Jean de Carondellet III (2013)

Puppet Master (2008)

Mrs. Waldorf Astoria (2012)

Fact was she knew more about them than she knew about herself,
having never had the map to discover what she was like (2015)

Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps (2016)

The Boy with the Big Fish (2016)

Venus at Paphos (The World Stage: Haiti) (2014)

Pilgrimage of the Chameleon (2016)

Triple Portrait of Charles I (2007)

The Make Believer (Monet's Garden) (2016)

A few days after the unveiling, I received the following statement from Kehinde Wiley (by email via obama.org) about his portrait. I thought I'd share it.

Over the course of the past year, I have had the life-changing honor of painting President Obama's portrait for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.

On Monday, we unveiled it to the world.

I'd like to tell you a bit about it.

In choosing the composition and colors for this painting, I sought to create an allegorical index to President Obama's life story—using key botanicals that reference his personal presence in the world. Jasmine from Hawaii. Chrysanthemums from Chicago. Blue African Lilies from Kenya.

And the nature of the president's pose is not sword-wielding or swashbuckling. It's contemplative. Humble. Open to the world in its possibilities. A man of the people.

As an artist, my practice is the contemporary reinterpretation of painting. I'm inspired by its history, by its mechanical act, and the human stories that can unfold on a physical plane. And what drives me is this notion of a history that is at once welcoming of those human stories—while being dismissive of those that don't correspond to some accepted notion of respectability.

And my aim was to use the universal language of painting to arrive at a much more inclusive commentary of our own collective potential.

The particular honor of being the first African-American painter to paint the first African-American president has been, for me, beyond any individual recognition.

It is bigger than me, and anything I could gain out of this. It presents a whole field of potential for young people—particularly young black and brown kids who might see these paintings on museum walls and see their own potential.

Art can function in practical, descriptive ways—but it can also inspire in so many resounding multiplicities.

That is my hope for this painting.

Thank you.

—Kehinde Wiley

Tragedy of the Commons

I'm thinking today about the tragedy of the commons, a term coined in 1833 by a Victorian economist, William Forster Lloyd, in reference to unregulated grazing on common lands, and further developed in a 1968 paper by American ecologist and philosopher Garrett Hardin. The abstract for Hardin's paper (available here) goes like this: "The population problem has no technical solution; it requires a fundamental extension in morality." Hear blinking hear. (He is also known for Hardin's First Law of Human Ecology: "We can never do merely one thing. Any intrusion into nature has numerous effects, many of which are unpredictable." Amen.)

I'm thinking about this because on April 16 of this year (or maybe May 11), some 4 million people in the West Cape (think Capetown), South Africa—75 percent of the local population—will no longer receive piped-in water, but instead will have to queue up each day to receive water (25 liters guaranteed—about one-twelfth of what the average American uses) from any of 200 collection points around the area. You can bet that those people are already praying, hard, that the rainy season, which typically begins in May and runs to September, will be a healthy one. But there are no guarantees, especially after three years, so far, of protracted drought. It's a complicated story, which I invite you to read about in the Guardian or National Geographic.

This is NOT the tragedy of the commons:
this is me-me-me ideology
(I found it on a right-wing Austrian website)

Part of the problem has been that for decades water (up to 6,000 liters a month per person) in Capetown was free, so there was no real incentive to use less. Even once the drought hit and the reservoirs started shrinking. That is the tragedy of the commons. As Wikipedia puts it, it is "an economic theory of a situation within a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling that resource through their collective action." Call it hubris, short-sightedness, greed. Call it human nature. Sadly. And yes, often tragically.

I googled for other examples of the tragedy of the commons, and here's what I came up with (from Dummies.com): 

Grand Banks Fisheries

For centuries, these fishing grounds off the coast of Newfoundland were home to an "endless" supply of cod fish. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, advances in fishing technology allowed huge catches. This in turn caused fish populations to drop, forcing fishermen each season to sail ever farther offshore to maintain their large catch sizes. By the 1990s, the Grand Banks fishing industry had collapsed. And by then, it was too late for regulation and management. Today, some scientists doubt the ecosystem will ever recover.

Bluefin Tuna

The bluefin tuna populations in the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean today face a similar fate as that of the Grand Banks cod (and of bluefin tuna in the Black and Caspian seas, which have already been fished to extinction). In the 1960s, fishermen realized the tuna populations were in danger, and an International Convention for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT) was formed in an effort to manage fish harvesting more sustainably. However, not every nation is a member of the ICCAT or follows the convention’s guidelines; many nations continue to seek profit from large bluefin tuna catches every year without regard for conservation.

Ocean Gyres

"The ocean is an excellent example of a shared resource that can easily be abused and degraded because it’s shared by many different nations. No single authority has the power to pass laws that protect the entire ocean. Instead, each nation manages and protects the ocean resources along its coastlines, leaving the shared common space beyond any particular jurisdiction vulnerable to pollution.

  "Throughout the world’s oceans, garbage has begun to accumulate in the center of circular currents, or gyres. . . . Destruction of ocean ecosystems because of garbage, especially plastic pollutants, is likely to affect every person on the planet as these pollutants cycle through the food chain."

Earth's Atmosphere

"Earth’s atmosphere is another resource that everyone on the planet uses and abuses. Air pollution and greenhouse gases from various industries and transportation increasingly damage this valuable, shared resource.

  "As an example of a tragedy of the commons, the atmosphere offers some hope for a solution: More than once, international agreements have recognized the importance of taking care of the atmosphere. One example is the [1992] Kyoto Protocol, which attempted to bring nations together in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and slowing global climate warming. [And yeah, no, the U.S. never ratified.]

Population Growth

Estimates of population evolution on
different continents between 1950 and 2050
according to the United Nations.
The vertical axis is logarithmic and is
in millions of people.

"Some scientists consider the exponential growth of the human population to be an example of a tragedy of the commons. In this case, the common resource is the planet Earth and all its shared resources. The world’s population has reached a whopping 7 billion individuals.

  "Examining population growth as a tragedy of the commons illustrates that the depletion of common resources isn’t always the result of greed. Just by existing, each person uses water, air, land, and food resources [these qualify as the 'global commons']; splitting those resources among 7 billion people (and counting) tends to stretch them pretty thin."

The rest of the Dummies top ten are

• the Gulf of Mexico dead zone
• traffic congestion
• passenger pigeons
• groundwater in Los Angeles
• unregulated logging

Here's that link again, if you'd like to read about them.

As I think about these various problems, I once again condemn our current administration—so-called "government"—for slashing regulations and commitments that protect all of us. We 7 billion earthlings—or even we 325 million Americans—aren't going to be able to make for a healthy planet/country individually: it requires collective intelligence, moral deliberation, action, oversight, and ever ongoing care. Instead, currently, we seem to have a free-for-all based mainly on greed and power. I can't stand it . . .

In any case, I wish all best to Capetown as May 11 approaches. And I wish for a drenching good rainy season. I wish that, metaphorically, for all of us on this earth. But I also, to the depths of my heart, wish for good leadership.

1/30/2020: Here is a story about how the crisis was averted. May that always be an option.