The End of the End of the Earth

by Jonathan Franzen

  Lyndon also heard, close to the road, one of the country’s most elusive endemics, the Jamaican Lizard-Cuckoo, and we stood for a long time and stared into dense forest, hoping for a glimpse. The weather was deliciously unhot, the stillness broken only rarely by trucks carrying groups of coffee-berry pickers. Berries were ripening to red on the slopes below us, which were gouged with mountain-bike trails to which a local entrepreneur had given names like “Ants in the Pants.” When it became clear that the cuckoo was in no mood to be seen, we headed to a different forest, closer to Lime Tree, and I had a sense of foreboding about the cuckoo. As in a football game, where you’re likewise playing against the clock and an early missed field goal so often comes back to haunt you, early misses of a key endemic can be costly.

  By two in the afternoon, when the sun became too hot for the birds to be active, I’d seen eighteen endemics—so many that I’d begun to review them in my mind, consciously connecting each species with the place where I’d seen it. My friend Todd Newberry, author of The Ardent Birder, believes that you should list only the species that you can specifically remember encountering: if there’s a bird on your list with no memory attached to it, you have to remove it. I personally am not so radical (if my trip list from Ecuador says I saw an Opal-rumped Tanager, then, by God, I must have seen it), but I do believe, with Todd, that birding should be a way of experiencing the place you’re in, not just an exercise in making marks on a checklist. The numbers should matter only the way the score of any kind of game matters, as an abstract goal, a way of energizing yourself for an experience that often entails unpleasantnesses—getting up at 4:30 a.m., standing around until your legs ache, being attacked by chiggers or mosquitoes—which you might be inclined to forgo if you didn’t have that goal.

  That said, I was feeling good about my chances of a sweep: I still had three days and only ten endemics left to find. But it’s always a mistake to feel good about your chances. The next morning, when Lyndon and I went walking through beautiful Blue Mountain forest habitat, in perfect cool weather, we found zero new endemics in our first five hours of searching. It was eleven o’clock before Lyndon miraculously spied a black Jamaican Becard in thick foliage that had looked to me devoid of birds. Farther down the road, he spotted a different black bird lurking in a tangle of vines and epiphytes. Although I never saw all of it at once, I was able to piece together its various parts and feel confident that I’d seen a Jamaican Blackbird, the country’s rarest endemic. It’s found only in undisturbed native forest, which is becoming ever scarcer. I felt bad about its plight but good, in a selfish birdwatcher way, about having added the island’s most difficult species to my list. I was now twenty for twenty-eight in just over a day.

  * * *

  At an inn near the northeast corner of the island, I had dinner with my next guide, Ricardo Miller, a government bird specialist and the president of Jamaica’s national bird club. Ricardo is handsome, bespectacled, and acute. When he was a boy, growing up in humble circumstances, his ambition was to be a pilot. He joined the Jamaica Combined Cadet Force, and when he was fifteen he secured one of the country’s two annual scholarships to train for a pilot’s license, on a single-engine Cessna 150. He then applied for the air force and aced the written entrance exam but failed the physical, because he has scoliosis. His plan B was to be a mathematician, but this didn’t seem very practical, and so he went with his plan C, which was to study environmental science. “I’d always been an outdoor type,” he told me, “and I’d seen the beaches of my childhood turned into hotels. Where I’d taken paths through the bush, there was no bush anymore. At the rate things are going, I figured, this country is going to need environmentalists.”

  “And were your parents okay with that?” I asked.

  “Of course not. They wanted me to become a doctor or something.”

  The particular problem for bird conservation in Jamaica is a lack of education. Although some NGOs are doing good work in this regard, there’s not enough funding to introduce many schoolchildren to the country’s natural heritage, and the university herpetologist and birdwatcher who once steered graduate students like Ricardo into ornithology has died. As a result, nobody except foreigners is studying birds now, and Ricardo, at thirty, is the youngest active member of the bird club.

  The larger problems for Jamaican conservation are demographic, cultural, and economic. “I think our population is just getting out of hand,” Ricardo said. “And that means more pressure on the environment. I always thought of our population as being two million, but suddenly I’m hearing that it’s three million. It seemed to happen overnight.”

  “I heard it’s three and a half million,” I said.

  “You see! Overnight!”

  According to Ricardo, Jamaicans tend to be squeamish about wildlife. “They don’t like anything creepy-crawly,” he said. “Any snake will be chopped on sight. If they see a house lizard, they spray it with insect spray. They think the crocodiles are after them.” Ricardo also believes that the recent influx of Chinese businessmen has aggravated this Jamaican mind-set. “Where Jamaicans formerly just killed crocodiles,” he said, “now they’re eating them. I know a research biologist who was studying a plat of tidal pool, and one day she got there and found a Chinese man with a knife, picking everything off the rocks and eating it. She was crying—she had to start a new plat.”

  I mentioned that South American countries with strong indigenous populations do a better job of protecting nature than those, like Chile, that are mostly populated by immigrants, and Ricardo agreed that Jamaica is more like Chile. “Jamaicans were brought here as slaves,” he said. “The connection with nature seems to have been lost in the Middle Passage. They’re all just looking for an easy buck. You get less than a hundred U.S. dollars if you poach a parrot. The parrot has much greater value if you leave it in the forest and bring guests to see it. But poachers will sometimes take the entire tree down to get the parrot nest, which is terrible for the parrots’ population, because they’re really dependent on old forest with natural nest holes. It’s the same thing with sea turtles: Why kill a female that is coming in to lay hundreds of eggs? The same thing with lobsters: Why kill a gravid female?”

  As part of his day job, Ricardo works with the island’s hunters, who in late summer are permitted to shoot limited numbers of four dove and pigeon species. Hunters are natural allies of conservationists, but here, too, the country is haunted by its past. “Jamaicans look down on hunting,” Ricardo said, “because colonialism left us with a hunting culture that’s for rich people who have expensive weapons, with the poor people resenting them. There’s a feeling that hunting is encouraged by the government while ordinary people can’t have birds in cages—it’s another way of sticking it to the poor people.”

  The best way past the economic obstacles to conservation is ecotourism. The Jamaica Tourist Board is now actively promoting Jamaica as a birdwatching destination and taking tour operators on informational trips, but a lot of money is needed to create a serious ecotouristic infrastructure, and without an infrastructure ecotourism can’t generate a lot of money. And so the government itself continues to push for the development of all-inclusive mega-hotels, because these hotels generate jobs not by the handful but by the several hundred. “These mega-hotels are empty much of the time,” Ricardo said, “and when a new hotel goes up it means an old one is going under. I personally think that permits for new hotels should be issued only if one hundred percent of existing hotels are one hundred percent full one hundred percent of the time.”

  I asked Ricardo if he kept his own bird list.

  “I list,” he said, with a guilty smile. “I confess that I list. I have something like one hundred eighty-eight species.”

  “Approximately one hundred eighty-eight.”

  He laughed and told me about an exhausted migrant warbler he’d found in September, on an early-morning beach walk. It was too tired to flee, so he’d photographed it with his cell phone. Later, a
t home, with the help of friends, he identified it as a Mourning Warbler. “So maybe,” he said, “it’s one eighty-nine now.”

  * * *

  I was ready to go at five thirty the next morning, and when Ricardo failed to meet me in the hotel lobby I wondered if he was flakier than he’d seemed. But then he came running out of the darkness on the driveway and reported that he’d heard a Jamaican Owl and seen it fly into a tree. I hurried to get my flashlight. We couldn’t find the telltale reflection of the owl’s eyes in the foliage, but when the bird launched itself from the back of the tree I saw it well enough, with flashlight and binoculars, to identify it by its size and cinnamon plumage and general owliness before it disappeared.

  Our destination was Ecclesdown Road, a narrow strip of pavement that winds up through the forested foothills of the John Crow Mountains. (“John Crow,” the local name for the Turkey Vulture—a stoop-shouldered, red-faced, black-feathered bird—is said to derive from a stoop-shouldered preacher named John who once scoured the countryside for converts, wearing a long black coat, his face sunburned red.) Between intense rain showers, Ricardo and I walked for several miles and saw Jamaica’s two endemic parrot species, three huge Chestnut-bellied Cuckoos, a group of Jamaican Crows (known locally as the Jabbering Crow, for its distinctive babbling voice), and, at the top of a tree, flashing its magenta underparts, a hummingbird called the Jamaican Mango.

  Our top priority was the Crested Quail-Dove, a furtive ground dweller that Jamaicans call the Mountain Witch. It is threatened by habitat destruction and predation by the mongoose, an introduced mammal species, and is nearly as rare as the blackbird. When Ricardo finally heard one call, I got a useless, silhouetted glimpse of it flying low across the road. No sooner had we run to the spot where we’d seen it than the idyllic quiet of Ecclesdown Road was disrupted by a car, one of the first we’d seen all morning, honking its horn repeatedly. Two men appeared from the other direction, one carrying a heavy-duty chainsaw and the other a jug of gasoline. Almost immediately, the chainsaw started up in the woods downslope from us, followed soon by the crash of a large tree. We might not have spotted the quail-dove anyway, but the moment felt like a parable of conservation in a country with a dense population and little money. Although the land around us belonged to the government, much of it was under long-term private lease, and the forestry department lacks the resources to police illegal logging effectively. And so the Mountain Witch continues its retreat.

  * * *

  By the time Ricardo headed back to Kingston, I was missing only two endemics, the quail-dove and the lizard-cuckoo. I got up early again the next morning and walked Ecclesdown Road again, but rain was falling, harder and harder, and I saw nothing new before I had to leave for the airport. It was tempting to count my hearing of the cuckoo and my bad glimpse of the quail-dove and declare a sweep, but I followed the rules of the game and settled for having seen all but two of Jamaica’s endemics. The standard consolation for failing to sweep is to tell yourself, “Oh, well, now I have a reason to come back to Jamaica,” but realistically I knew that the next time I birded the Caribbean I’d want to go to islands with more unseen endemics to offer. Part of the appeal of the birding game is that failure is inevitable, since nobody will ever see every species on the planet; and games in which success can be assured are not worth playing. I’ll probably never see the cuckoo or the quail-dove.

  In Saint Lucia I was met at the airport by a retired firefighter, Olson Peter, who pointed out several firehouses on our drive from Castries to a bed-and-breakfast called A Peace of Paradise, on the Atlantic side of the island. Mindful of the mistake I’d made in Jamaica, I gave Peter a twenty-dollar tip and was surprised by the strange expression with which he pocketed it. Inside the bed-and-breakfast, my host, Lorraine Royall, explained that my fifty-dollar fare had not been prepaid, as I’d assumed from my Jamaican experience that it would be. She promised to get Peter his fifty dollars later, but my mistake was another ominous sign.

  My guide the next morning was a young man named Melvin who materialized out of the pre-dawn twilight, like a genie, in a puff of cannabis smoke, while I was eating breakfast on Lorraine’s back porch. Melvin was wearing rubber boots, rolled-up jeans, a thigh-length fishnet top, and a watch cap. Up the road from Lorraine’s, he took me through a banana farm to a single Asian ornamental tree, a pomme d’amour, that was exploding in hot-pink flower and dripping with hummingbirds. Standing beneath its branches, on a thick carpet of hot pink, I didn’t even need binoculars to identify the birds. Melvin and I then went down to the main coastal road and parked by an opening in the “dry” forest, which was dry only in comparison with the higher-altitude rain forest. Melvin put his thumb to his lips and did some rhythmic squeaking that instantly summoned up a pair of White-breasted Thrashers. They hopped around inquisitively in a tree above us, ascertained that we weren’t thrashers, and disappeared again. True to their name, thrashers have an energetic presence and a lot of personality, and I was sorry to see them go.

  The definition of a species—the category that bird listers depend on for their tabulations—is the subject of ongoing scientific debate. To divide the world of birdlife into discrete, Latin-named species is to impose a somewhat arbitrary grid on a fluid and supremely complex system of genes, crossbreeding, and evolution. Many of the Caribbean’s endemics are nearly identical to more common mainland species but have evolved just enough, in their island isolation, to develop slightly different voices, plumages, structures, or habits. (The Jamaican Crow, for example, looked to me indistinguishable from the crows outside my window in Manhattan.) The Ornithologists’ Union is forever revising its official taxonomy, “lumping” multiple species into a single species or “splitting” a single species into one or more new ones. Splitting can create what birders call an armchair lifer: you get a new life bird for your list without leaving your house. It’s as if the definitions of a field goal and a touchdown were subject to indefinite revision, altering the outcomes of football games already played.

  The White-breasted Thrasher, however, is not a gray-area species. With its dark back and its bright white front, it was like no other thrasher I’d seen. The bird was once common in both Martinique and Saint Lucia, but its range has shrunk dramatically as its habitat has been disturbed. There are now perhaps two hundred of them in Martinique, and the thousand or so individuals in Saint Lucia are concentrated in a small area of dry forest on the Atlantic coast. Seven years ago, the owners of a 554-acre property in the heart of the thrasher’s range began to clear the land for a resort with the unfortunate (from a thrasher perspective) name of Le Paradis. The developers have since run into financial trouble, but not before driving most of the endangered thrashers off the property, carving out a golf course, and starting to erect several large building complexes. The unfinished buildings can be seen from the main road, falling apart, collecting rainwater, and looking like something military from a former war.

  Later, when I flew back to New York, the plane would take me directly over Le Paradis and afford a view of the golf course, which is reverting to dense scrub—good habitat for many birds but not the forest-dwelling thrashers. I confess to feeling less than sorry for the developers. The JetBlue captain, speaking to us passengers, kept referring, annoyingly, to the “paradise” that we were leaving, and the first thing he said when we arrived in New York was “Welcome back to reality.” It seemed to me that the captain had it exactly backward. Even in a deep recession, Americans enjoy fantastic luxuries that most West Indians do not, and despite strong political opposition we still do a good job of ensuring that the situation of our own endangered species is, if not paradisial, at least reasonably secure. Reality, in the form of unsustainable rates of population growth and tourist mega-development, is what lies to the south.

  * * *

  Melvin worked as a bird guide to supplement his income as a finder and researcher of plants for Saint Lucia’s forestry department. He was likable and skilled at detecting birds in
dense forest and luring them into view—we saw the lovely Saint Lucia Warbler and many other Lesser Antillean specialties, including the aptly named Gray Trembler—but he was hazy on the actual names of some of the species, and I thought it would be good, on my second full day in Saint Lucia, to pursue the remaining three endemics with a serious local birder whom Lorraine had arranged to guide me. The problem, Lorraine said, was that this birdwatcher was a Seventh Day Adventist and had not responded to her requests for confirmation and, indeed, since this was a Saturday, might not respond until nightfall.

  Late in the afternoon, when the weather began to cool, I tried to drive to the Descartiers Nature Trail and see another endemic or two. Several roads ended abruptly in chasms created by landslides during Hurricane Tomas, and I got badly lost while searching for alternate routes, but I managed to reach the trailhead with forty-five minutes of daylight remaining. I ran down a trail with my binoculars and paused to look and listen at several clearings; but the rain forest, though well preserved, seemed empty of birds. Belatedly, I recalled one of the Fundamental Laws of Birding: The best birds are always by the parking lot. As I hurried back to my vehicle, I began to hear the cries of parrots returning to their roost, and, sure enough, in the parking lot, in failing light, I got a good look at a Saint Lucia Parrot flying over.