A Piping Plover chick tugs at a worm, hungry after the hurricane in 2014 in Nova Scotia.
That put them at their ease, because Dad took off flying to the far eastern end of the beach to feed, while Mom stayed put on the stones. Then the tiniest of heads peeked over the cobble next to her and a sweet fluffy little body emerged and made a beeline for the water’s edge. Then a second one a bit smaller took off like a windup toy after the first, which caused Mom to take after them with cautionary piping. I was so relieved they were all right, snapping pictures with my long lens, that I didn’t at first see the even tinier third chick appear on the cobble as if no one had woken her up. She spun her little stilt legs toward the shore and joined her siblings slurping up slim black marine worms like spaghetti while Mom stood her ground, a terrier between us.
The female left by July 16, off to mate and try to nest again, leaving Dad to bring up the chicks. When you’ve got only a few thousand of your species left you grab every opportunity you can to procreate. I think these chicks survived because she and the father were so attentive together for so long. They never resorted to distractive behavior to divert attention from the chicks, but rather hunkered the chicks down and observed my intrusion until it was safe. Very smart. Predators such as gulls, owls, and crows were not alerted to the chicks’ presence.
I walked up over the cobble and gazed at the grasses as far as the eye could see, extending to the lake and to Ram Island offshore where a little colony of Puffins breed. It was a perfect day, and here I was all alone with the birds. Then down the path came Russel, a birding friend, with his big 400mm lens.
We birders are so predictable! We think alike and can be found congregating in the most remote places at odd times. It is comforting. I suppose every subculture has a similar agenda. We talk shop: What have you seen? Where? When? What’s coming up? Want to go on the pelagic trip in August?
As Russel and I chatted, a pair of Gull-billed Terns circled the small pond, fallouts from the storm, their pure white bodies contrasting with a cap of jet black and a big black beak. I told Russel where the plover chicks were if he wanted to get some good shots with his big lens, but he demurred, saying he didn’t want to disturb them when they were so young. Now that’s a true bird lover.
The chicks fledged and took off for the South some time after August 3. All Piping Plovers, abbreviated as PIPLs, were banded in Nova Scotia in 2014 by Fish and Wildlife. Nova Scotia was doing a great job keeping the plover count high but fewer were returning the following spring from their wintering grounds, and we needed to know why. The dad of my pair had a gray flag band with the letters “HE” on it. He took off in early August and was reported at North Brigantine Natural Area in New Jersey on August 6. He’s a winner. We call him HEmeon.
There are guardians or “stewards” of these birds almost everywhere plovers are found these days. On the West Coast they monitor Snowy Plovers, which are also in danger. It makes a difference. The public has responded to signs educating about the plovers and asking that they walk at the low-tide line with their dogs leashed. Most people do not mind that portions of the beach are closed during nesting season, although there is an ongoing ugly war in North Carolina and other southern states, with jeep owners wanting beach access at all times.
We know a lot about these birds now, and just when we think they might not make it, we are surprised by their tenacity and the enduring generosity of the public, who want to see them make it. A popular spot in southwest Nova Scotia, Louis Head Beach, had two nesting pairs a few years ago. The beach was frequented by folks in rental cottages and in a nearby trailer park. There were many dogs frolicking in the water and over the beach grass. We didn’t think the plovers had a chance.
The guardians of that beach took it upon themselves to talk to everyone, pointing out the nests and how fragile the situation was. The dog walkers were asked to take special responsibility—a rope marking the nesting area was no deterrent to a roaming dog. One nest was right at the end of a short boardwalk from cottage to sand. The guardians showed the vacationers the nest and the four eggs and explained the timeline of incubation to fledging, about two months. They lent the family a pair of binoculars and encouraged them to be on the lookout for crows, seagulls, and mammals seeking a meal. The little children were awed by the nesting birds they had somehow missed when building sand castles, and vowed to protect them. I watched from a distance one afternoon as the seven-year-old boy made a wide arc around them on his way to the cottage, never using the boardwalk at all. His pride in aiding these small lovely creatures said it all. The family became the best guardians we had ever had, proud of the four fledglings they protected. They became dedicated bird lovers from that time on.
There is a story of two fellows walking a New Jersey beach strewn with plate-sized Horseshoe Crabs that had washed in on a high tide and been flipped on their backs, leaving them immobile. One of the fellows begins to turn them over, giving the crabs the chance to inch toward the water. “What are you doing, Mike? There are hundreds of them, what difference does it make?” And Mike replies, “It makes a difference to this one.” That is how things change: one by one by one.
Piping Plovers spend only a few months on their breeding grounds before they start their journey back to their winter homes, stopping at known fueling spots along the way, just as we might stop for a meal. If there is degradation of the sites or depletion of food sources the birds will not be able to double their weight as they need to for trips over water. Every stop counts, and the juveniles are most vulnerable, learning as they go.
Fully 10 percent of the Piping Plovers make it to two remote cays in the Bahamas. This was only discovered in 2011 by scientists doing a survey; they counted 350 of the endangered birds hunkered down on the white sand among thousands of other shorebirds.
In March 2014, a few of us on the board and staff of the National Audubon Society and the Bahamas National Trust hopped on a bonefisherman’s boat and arrived an hour later on one of the cays to witness the birds. There they were, sweet Piping Plovers bunched together under the warm trade winds like sunbathers on Coney Island. For those of us who had never seen more than a few birds at a time, this was a deeply rewarding sight. Some of them were likely the very birds we had monitored up north.
In the United States we call them our plovers, but the Bahamians rightly have more claim, since the birds spend as much as eight months with them. In any case it takes all of us along the flyway to usher them safely back and forth. And this is what we on the Audubon board were there to ensure. David Yarnold, CEO of Audubon, and Kenred Dorsett, Bahamian minister of the environment, signed a memorandum of understanding to protect the shorebirds wintering in the Bahamas, in hopes that these particular cays would become part of the park system of the country, safeguarded from development.
The Bahamas are particularly vulnerable to development, since there are so many beautiful islands and so few people. They have managed to keep big popular resorts like Atlantis close to the city of Nassau on the island of New Providence, and most tourists disembark there from planes or one of the huge cruise ships that arrive daily in port.
The Chinese discovered the islands and started to build an extensive resort near Nassau with enough hotel rooms to house as many as twenty thousand future Chinese tourists until they ran into financial difficulties in 2015. The Bahamas National Trust, the environmental arm of the government, preempted the Chinese desire for shark fin soup by banning all shark fishing in the Bahamas in perpetuity. Sharks are to the Bahamas as House Sparrows are to New York City, so this was a wise move. We all know what happened to the most plentiful bird in North America a hundred years ago: the Passenger Pigeon was hunted recklessly to provide the upper class with “squab” for dinner.
Most tourists are happy to stay on the lovely beaches of New Providence, while away the hours in the casinos, see the aquatic shows, and frolic in the pools. They do not feel the tug that fishermen, divers, and birders do to explore the natural resour
ces of the islands. And this intrinsic balance in human interests is what will keep places like the Bahamas from being degraded, as long as the government regulates where and what kind of development takes place, and as long as the youth of the country are taught to cherish the wildlife of their remarkable islands. For now, the hardy Piping Plovers, snowbirds escaping the cold North just as we do, are safe on Bahamian sands.
In 2015, HEmeon, the plover dad I monitored, returned to the same area on Hemeon’s Head, mated with a new female, and sat on four eggs until predators took them. The mom of 2014 found another mate on a beach farther south. We still do not know the fate of the three chicks they successfully fledged from the summer of 2014, but I like to believe they made their inaugural voyage over the ocean to the white sands of the Bahamas and back again to some secluded beach somewhere in the Maritimes, where they are raising their own chicks.
22
Ecuador
Wavy blobs of color permeated my feverish sleep. It was hard to tell what they were or if there was any substantive story to be told, and I was helpless to form a story if there was one. By the time the taxi dropped us at the little Quito hotel, I knew I was ill. Although I would have liked to ascribe my fatigue to one of the tropical fevers I invariably got when I traveled near the equator, I knew I had brought this one from New York. I collapsed in my narrow bed and woke only once in the next twenty-four hours.
My traveling companion, Julie, had hardly ever been out of Nova Scotia in her life. She was, fortunately, resourceful and ventured out to the plaza on her own to see the people in the fading evening light, the small sturdy women in their porkpie hats and musicians with their ethereal panpipes. But within the hour the altitude got her. At nine thousand feet Quito can be a shock to the system of someone who has always lived at sea level.
By dawn the next day my fever had broken and cup after cup of mate tea had quelled Julie’s headache and queasy stomach. We boarded a small van with two Norwegian medical students and began our trip south through the volcanoes to the little town of Shell, founded by the oil company in the 1930s before exploration was abandoned. Then an hour flight in a single-engine Cessna across unbroken forest terrain over veins and oxbows of the great Pastaza River, making its way to join the Amazon. The airstrip was a short mudpack of a runway. A few children with their mothers rested under a thatch of shade and watched as we slipped into motorized canoes for the thirty-minute ride to Kapawi. We arrived at the clan’s eco-lodge in time for lunch, a trip that would have taken ten days had we walked from Shell. There are no roads to Kapawi except those by water.
The Achuar were making enormous changes in their lives. As one of the fiercest of the Amazon Basin tribes they had never allowed the Spanish near, earning a reputation as “savages” who speared, decapitated, and shrunk the heads of their enemies. They fought other clans as well, their linguistic relatives the Shuar to the west, and those to the north, each side taking enemy heads. The Shuar were greater in numbers and pushed the Achuar out of the higher elevations and into the fluvial lowlands surrounding the Pastaza. When the oil companies arrived to explore four hundred years later, their welcome was much the same. Shell retreated in 1948, considering the Achuar too dangerous, and things were quiet for the clans straddling the Peruvian border until 1964, when Big Oil returned with a vengeance. This time it had the law on its side.
Julie and I were given a spacious palm-thatched hut on stilts, screened against tiny intruders but open to the shallow wetland underneath that was called a lake because it rose with the rains. It was brisk with birds, the perky Blue-gray Tanager, the whooping call of Oropendolas, yellow and black Caciques, and a pair of Horned Screamers courting underneath the boardwalk, an endangered species according to Ecuador birding guru Robert Ridgley. Although there were enough huts to accommodate forty or so we had the place to ourselves except for a family from Oregon. It was quiet, only the natural sounds of birds, frogs, katydids, and a troop of Red Howler Monkeys filled the air. The howlers have a disconcerting roar that sounds like an approaching freight train. There was no vehicular traffic, no human voices, no machines. It was one of the remotest places I have ever been.
There was a bird I had always wanted to see and missed on prior trips to the Amazon. The Hoatzin is a strange one indeed: the jury is still out on how to categorize it. The size of a pheasant, the bird congregates in trees over water, looking like a throwback to earliest species of the Miocene or even the Eocene eras, which it may well be. It eats a diet of leaves, and Hoatzin chicks have claws on their wings so they can climb up branches. No creature eats the Hoatzin, as its flesh tastes terrible from all that leaf fermentation. Natives call it the stinky bird…not a bad survival skill.
A Hoatzin, a puzzlement in science
We were cruising down the river in our open canoe that first afternoon when many of these fascinating birds squawked and grunted above us in the overhang. Their facial coloration was beautiful: bright red eyes, encircled by electric-blue skin down to the beak and a spiky chestnut mohawk on top. On a tree across the river a large Three-Toed Sloth wobbled in the highest branches seeking a place to rest for the next twenty-four or forty-eight hours. They don’t get around much. A pink Amazon River Dolphin surfaced and then another, tumbling over each other in courtship. Julie spotted a Lesser Anteater, with its prehensile tail, on the river’s edge taking a drink. And a pair of sweet little Saddle-backed Tamarin peeked out at us from a log, while Squirrel Monkeys, Black-faced Monkeys, and Night Monkeys looked on from above. We threw lines in the water, but our catch of piranha was too small to keep.
After my marathon fever sleep in Quito I was awake most of the night, happy to listen to the creatures and look though the screen at a million stars. There was Orion’s belt and the Seven Pleiades as in our Nova Scotia sky, but the Southern Cross, never seen up north, had not yet made her rounds of the Amazon Basin.
We had come to this place because Julie wanted to experience the mind-altering drug called ayahuasca. She read extensively about the ceremony and knew there were indigenous people for whom it was sacred. My experience with mind-altering drugs was limited to LSD back in the 1960s, and the trip I had taken had not been good. I had no wish to repeat that night. Hallucinogens, marijuana, opiates, and amphetamines were present throughout my college years and twenties, as they were for many of my era. Mostly I just took amphetamines, or “speed,” as we called it, to get through a paper-writing night.
One of my best friends at Harvard volunteered to be a guinea pig for Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert in some of the first LSD experiments in the early 1960s and would report to me on the fascinating visions he had. One winter day I found myself skiing with Dr. Leary and some friends in Aspen, Colorado. Leary claimed never to have skied before. He certainly was not dressed for it—a weird pair of boots, an old pair of jeans, and a cloth jacket were not suitable at eleven thousand feet on Ajax Mountain, but he was doped up, and as we all stood together before takeoff, Leary looked around at the snow-clad peaks and the sun bouncing off them and proclaimed, “I have never been so high.” Then he just went lickety-split down the long run without stopping or even falling until he hit bottom. “Turn on, tune in, and drop out” took on new meaning. I was impressed with his stamina, if not the nature of his mind, which got him down the mountain in one piece.
Drugs were not a big part of my life. I did not like the hangover, nor did I crave them. And I found I could not inhale and act or drop acid and go onstage as some of my colleagues were able to do. As I turned more and more to birding and the great outdoors, I found my high in wilderness and wild things. I was more than content to wander the jungle and canoe down the rivers accompanying Julie on her vision quest.
My friend Julie Balish from Nova Scotia goes native in the rainforest of Ecuador, 2014
The Achuar were totally connected to the forest. It was alive for them and everything had its name and sacred essence—the trees, the water, the vines, the rocks, and all the creatures. Some were more powerf
ul than others: the Jaguar, the eagle, and the Anaconda. Like all the clans in this part of the world and two thousand miles north, where the Lacandon lived, and on into Native North America, dreams and visions were as important as waking life.
Dreams were interpreted in the predawn hours as Achuar families rose to begin their day, their dreams telling them what might happen and what to avoid. The Indians of the Amazon Basin have a rich spirit world. The Achuar each have their own anents, or magical songs, which they sing to spirits they wish to reach. A woman might sing to the garden spirit for a good crop, or her husband to the spirit of peccary to ensure a successful hunt. There are also spirit protectors that will avenge any disrespect of animals or the forest or when a person is greedy or mistreats animals. When a Jaguar calls, it is believed that someone in the family will die. The clan believes in many superstitions and myths, and nothing in the natural world occurs without note. This animism, uniting the spiritual and temporal worlds, used to be found in most Indian cultures of the Americas. It is deeply part of the Achuar still. Missionaries even wrapped Christian stories into the existing cosmology of the Achuar, although the balance of animism and Christianity is uneasy. Arutam is the sacred source, the life force of the forest, rocks, the sky, the plants, and the animals. It is everything, and there are sacred places where Arutam resides. One must seek Arutam through a vision, and the guidance and wisdom one receives is then with a person for life.
Wild Things, Wild Places Page 26
