A Week Amongst Birds

During the peak of the pandemic whenever I got Zoom fatigue I would take a break by checking out the livestreamed Feedercams set up by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. One such feeder was from the Canopy Lodge in Panama. So while we were tossing around the idea of actually traveling for thanksgiving I proposed the Lodge and my daughter jumped at it. My husband is game for anything and although he can't tell Bird A from Bird B he is always happy to tag along. 

Canopy Lodge

The famous Panama Cam Feeder - this time in person!

Birding trips are not relaxing in the traditional sense of a holiday and this was no exception. Breakfast was usually at 6 or 6:30 and we were off to the woods by 7/7:30 am. Come back for lunch around 12:30. Head out again at 2:30 and back by 6 pm. Checklist at 6:30 pm, dinner at 7 and bed at 8:30/9. Rinse and repeat 5 times. That summed up our week in Panama. It involved a lot of standing, quietly at that, sometimes I daresay with full bladders, and staring into bushes trying to detect movement. Our guides were magicians who seemed to possess superhuman abilities to differentiate between the 50 shades of brown/green all hiding within another 50 shades of brown/green and within milliseconds of spotting - recognizing the bird! By Day 3 some of that magic started rubbing on us a teensy bit and my daughter and I picked up a few skills and were able to recognize the bigger species and a few commonly occurring thrushes, kingbirds and other flycatchers.

Besides the birds, the birders are also an interesting bunch. There are many types of birders and one is bound to encounter a few specimens in such a trip. The photographers, who along with their equipment look like Arnold from the poster for the movie The Predator-sin muscles of course. To these folks a bird is not seen unless it has been captured through their lens. There are the hardcore lifelisters who have a goal of increasing their lifelist of species and will be willing to wait for any amount of time for the manakin or warbler to show up so they can check it off their lifelist. It is a numbers game for them and some actually feel that we should be out by 5am as after all the early bird gets, well, the bird.  Then there are those who have converted to birding recently and have the zeal of the convert which can be a little irritating especially as they hog the spotting scope. And some are simply there to see what they can see and that's that. They are more naturalists than birders and enjoy all the nature around them.

Where do we (my daughter and I) fall? Well, we do keep an ebird list, but we don't have a lifelist goal - we just wanted to stumble upon the birds, see some new species, if possible see their behaviors in their natural environment and in that process learn something about the birds and ourselves. So at times, we wanted to move on when the manakin didn't show up or didn't care if we couldn't tell if the warbler we saw was the chestnut-capped or chestnut-sided. My husband was totally having fun as he didn't care about eBird, lifelist, bird id - if he saw a cool bird that was great, and if he managed to get a picture that was even better! He just enjoyed being out there listening to the bird song, the noises of the forest and the changes in weather. No FOMO, no pressure!

In Birding Uniform and Gear :)

I was asking the guides about the local birding scene and they told me that it was not much, although now there is an effort to introduce school kids to the bountiful wildlife in their country. By now the locals are very familiar with the migrant birders who swoop down to the lodge during the birding season, all clad in drab grays and greens, sporting rain gear, their binoculars around their necks, and standing sometimes on the roadside peering up among the trees. We must seem like a weird cult to them.

Spectacled Owl

Overall it was a fabulous trip! While it is true that we saw 140 species of which a 100 were lifers for us, it was not the quantity but the quality of the experience that made it memorable for us. Walking into the woods to see the spectacled and mottled owl was an unforgettable experience. As we stood in the slush in complete silence peering at these magnificent birds we felt like we were invited into their world for a brief moment.  A Rufous-Vented Ground Cuckoo became the star of the week. This bird is so shy that it has one of the fewest observations on eBird and we were lucky to bump into a pair that stood in front of us for 10 long minutes foraging, or as the guides say "working in those bushes." 

Rufous-Vented Ground Cuckoo

We had tried to see manakins in the past in other countries but finally saw the Golden-Collared in Panama. These guys are legendary dancers and although we didn't see him dance we heard his clicking rhythm and saw him and his mate in the forest floor. We followed antbirds just like they follow army ants and although they were too quick for the scope or the camera we managed to catch a glimpse with our eyes. For the first four days we saw one lonely keel billed toucan fly above and then stumbled into a dozen on our last day! 

Keel Billed Toucans

One day when we had wrapped up the day's birding and were walking back to the van, my husband the straggler, who is always taking pano shots on his Blackberry (yes, he still has one of those!), came across a bird which had eluded all of us. The rest of us who went ahead were ready to leave so my daughter went back to get him and saw him photographing a mystery bird. When she alerted all of us, there was a mad rush to go back and sure enough he had stumbled upon the Long-Tailed Tyrant which made the life list for everyone in the group! He was beaming as everyone thanked him for the "nice find."

Long-Tailed Tyrant

Another time after an all day birding session we were returning to our rooms, ready to dash through the last 100 yards from the parking lot all swearing that we will not stop for another bird and sure enough my daughter spotted a Rufous-Crowned Motmot which was the first time we saw one and once again we stopped. How could you not when you see this being appear suddenly in your field of view!

Rufous Crowned Motmot

This basically is the joy of birding - just walking into a space not knowing who is out there and finding someone "working".

 I am normally a walking clock, I have everything timed and am always on a schedule getting from point A to point B. Birding is the only activity that has made me slow down and pause and take notice of things around me. I don't have to go to Panama to experience this. On our nightly walks there have been many times when an owl has surprised us. Just hearing the great horned would make my daughter and I pause and look around and occasionally he/she would grace us with their presence by flying past us. Those are magical moments! Birding has not only given me a renewed sense of why conservation is important and why habitats need to be protected but has also made me more aware of the everyday happiness hidden among trees and bushes in these uncertain times.

Ponniyin Selvan - Immediate Impressions

Watched PS-1 last night with the family and a whole lot of other Indians. My thanks to all the others who showed up as they gave my daughter (whose first Indian movie was last night) a tease of what it means to watch an Indian movie with Indians in the theater and she had so much fun with the random whistles and cheers all around!

If you had read my preview you know two things 1) I am a fan of the book 2) I am not a fan of Maniratnam. But with PS-1, I am happy to say that Maniratnam delivered what he intended to! The movie gets a B+ / A- from me.

For fans of the book:

If you went looking for the book, just note that it is there as a backbone in terms of overall plot but keep in mind the movie is trying to achieve the impossible - condensing 5 volumes into 2 movies - and therefore has made a few character / script choices. However, those who read the books are at an advantage because they understand what's happening with all the fast transitions. I overheard a few people at the end of the movie saying they didn't quite follow what happened in the second half - hopefully this will lead them to the books in which case it is a win-win!

What I liked:

• Screenplay  - Jeyamohan triumphs in distilling the essence of the first two volumes to one movie
• Production values - set design, costumes were excellent
• Acting - almost all of these actors did their parts well! There were one or two weak performances but overall I was not disappointed with Vanthiyadevan, Nandini, Aditya Karikalan, and Azhwarkadiyaan. I have never seen any Karthi movies and he gets full points for capturing the essence of Vanthiyadevan's comedic sensibilities and the chemistry with Jeyaram works!
  
• Opening number - I was not a fan of the Ponni Nadhi song because I didn't like the enunciation choices ARR made, but seeing it on screen overlaid with visuals was much better.
• Graphics choices - nothing unnecessary or too artificial. The ships were well done (maybe modeled after Borbudur) and battle scenes were choreographed really well!
  
• Song incorporation - they didn't have all the songs full length and were quite neatly incorporated in the background.
• Srilanka scenes were well done visually! 
  

Misses:

• Rapid transitions - there was no room for character development given the pace of the movie. I understand that they had to make certain cuts to condense the 2 books into 1 movie, still scenes with Kudandai Josiyar, Kandanamaaran, Idumbankaari helped us get to know Vanthiyadevan, Azhwarkadiyaan better in the books. There was no room for that in the movie. Poonghuzali was a disappointment. Vanthiyadevan's encounter with Poonghuzali and asking her about Senthan Amuthan is out of the blue if you've not read the book! I compare it to LOTR where the movies still allowed us to see the multi-dimensional character of Frodo, Samwise and Aragorn - that was lacking. Also because of the pace and transitions some viewers felt lost in the second half
  
• BGM - I know people are going to say that i am just a fan of Illayaraja and will not accept ARR's score, but this was a weak link IMO. With the focus on making a pan-Indian adventure movie, there was a lack of local feel in the background score. Fight scenes were just standard orchestrations with loud score. 
• Sound quality - why was everything so loud!!! Just blasting the sound straight on for 3 hours hurt my ears!
  
• Some key characters are missing or minimized - Kandanmaaran comes to mind. I was expecting a lot more from the secret tunnel scenes and while Devralan aattam did not disappoint, the tunnel scenes did - both in terms of content and the set. This makes me wonder if Manimegalai will show in part 2
• The beauty of the land was not fully captured. They could have done something simple like using Kamal's voice over to show us the land in addition to the history
• Unnecessary departures from the book which can irritate fans of the book - but I can forgive some of those choices.

Final Thoughts:

My daughter said it best when she described the movie as an epic fantasy and not a piece of historic fiction. If you went in with that mindset then the choices made make more sense and the appeal to a pan-indian audience is justified. Ideally I would have loved it if they hadn't strayed from the book, but I am OK with most of the departures except a few critical ones, but I will reserve judgement until I see PS-2. The BGM could have elevated the movie to a different level but it made easy choices by going for epic orchestrations and severed itself from the land on which the history is based.  

Having said all these, hats off to Maniratnam for having pulled this off! As a fan of the books I was waiting for an adaptation and he delivers his take on it and manages to appeal to a wide range of people. Ideally the only way the books can be brought to life at the pace we want is if Netflix or Amazon commissioned a 10 part series with each part running for 90 mins. But last night for about 3 hours I was happy to share my favorite book with countless others who had never read it and are now curious about it. That is perhaps the main achievement of the movie!

The Long Awaited Ponniyin Selvan Spectacle

 I come from a family of readers and when I say that most people who know me think I am referring mainly to my dad. But my mom and my paternal grandmom were equally voracious, except they read Tamil literature whereas my dad read mainly in English. Growing up one of the hardest things I had to do in school was to learn Tamil all the way through till my 12th grade. With all the effort one was forced to put in one would barely scrape a 50% in the exam. So reading in Tamil was in my mind never a fun activity despite the fact that we had a writer (Sandilyan) in the family. Leaving TN behind and gaining a few years changes all that. About 20 years back a friend of mine told me he was engrossed in Kalki's Ponniyin Selvan. Now this is a guy I really respect and who I thought shared similar literary interests with me and not a regular Tamil reader. I rarely pass on anything he recommends and so I picked it up and as they say - the rest is history or in my case an obsession.

Since then I've read the books multiple times. I've read them aloud to my nursing daughter, read them over her shoulder when she was being kept upright for burping, even read them at work when I was taking a break. My mom would read them every time she came to the US and we would talk about it. We used to talk about how many people wanted to make a movie out of the novels but never succeeded. We wanted to see it as a a TV series and we would often say who would do it though. I always wished Manohar would have done a stage play out of it. I was also proposing to her that we should do a Ponniyin Selvan roadtrip when I came to India but I would come for such a short time and my daughter was still very young that I didn't want to subject her to it.

Ponniyin Selvan led me to other books by Kalki (Sivagamiyin Sabadam, Parthiban Kanavu) and then I finally picked up my own relative Sandilyan's Kadal Pura, Yavana Rani and Kanni Maadam. I was now hungry for the real history. So I turned to Nilakanta Sastri as I wanted to learn more about the Cholas. From there I became obsessed. Of late, I am devouring Kudavayil Balasubramiam's books and Youtube lectures. I watched a 6-part, 6 hour lecture by Vidya Dehejia on the Chola Bronzes and I am finding more things to read/watch.

So like millions of other fans across many generations I eagerly await the movie by Maniratnam tomorrow. He was the last person I imagined would bring this book to life. He is known for bringing modern, urban, contemporary topics to Tamil cinema and is famous for his (so-called) natural dialogues. I've enjoyed only a few movies of his - Mouna Ragam, Nayagan and Anjali are the only ones I like. I thought Roja and Bombay were too contrived. Agni Natchatram was a product of its time and could have used a great editor. Never saw any of his new movies after Alaipaayudhe. Didn't see Gitanjali, Thiruda Thiruda or Iruvar (I know I sound like Kanchan & Nirmal from Kadhalika Neramillai - "we don't see Tamil pictures, only English pictures") Anyway as you can tell, I am not a Maniratnam fangirl. My favorite Tamil Director was Mahendran. But I am definitely a Ponniyin Selvan devotee. 

Tomorrow's movie is as big as the release of Lord of the Rings or Dune or more accurately (because of the genre) Wolf Hall for me. So I am rooting for its success as I want this story to get the audience it deserves and I cannot deny that Maniratnam and ARR are the only two who can achieve that in this day and age. I know they insist that the majority of the people who come to the movie would have never read the book. But I hope they know that a significant chunk of the population are those who have read it multiple times. It is a Tamil classic that has never been out of print since the 1950s and is probably the only thing that unites many generations of readers. Maniratnam has said he himself is a huge fan of the book which he had first encountered in his teenage years and so I hope he will do justice to it.

I am beyond excited as my daughter who has only heard the story from me and who thinks it is one of the best plots ever is also going to be with me watching it. My husband (who is not a reader) has read only one novel in the 24 years we've been together and that was Ponniyin Selvan. So our family is going to be there tomorrow with my mom watching it in Chennai at the same time. 

Fingers crossed!

Longtermism - What We Owe the Future

 William MacAskill's book What We Owe the Future is a book to be savored and ruminated over. I can't claim to have fully done that, but am hoping that writing about it here will get me closer to digesting the philosophical concepts. As someone involved in climate change advocacy, thinking about future generations or having a hundred-year time horizon is not new to me, but MacAskill's definition of longtermism is not a roadmap till 2100. He wants us to think in terms of millennia. After all, most mammals survive for a million years and Homo Sapiens is not your run-of-the mill box standard mammal. So we can expect our species to last more than a million years provided those of us alive today plan for such a future.

Why Longtermism?

He makes a moral argument that future people matter and they will be more numerous than the current 8 billion of us. However, they are disenfranchised because they cannot vote/sue/plead/bargain with us and so it is imperative as moral beings that we keep them in mind and know that we can positively impact their future.

Threats to Longtermism

So if you bought into the why, then you are now faced with potential threats to the future. How does he identify these threats or problems? He uses a three-pronged framework with significance, persistence, and contingency as the three parts. One of the examples he uses in the book is that of slavery. It was a significant problem affecting millions of people worldwide, it lasted for several hundred years demonstrating it was persistent, but was it contingent - could it have gone away on its own or did it depend on a particular event/ person in the abolitionist movement? Here he introduces us to Benjamin Lay, a person I had never heard of, who kickstarted the abolitionist beliefs amongst Quakers by being a demonstrative moral force. He makes a case that without that turning point in the western world it would have been much harder to get rid of slavery. With this background he goes on to identify the following threats.

1. Climate Change 

This is pretty obvious but it is not just the loss of biodiversity, coral reefs, ice sheets that he is concerned about. A bigger threat because of climate change would be the impact on economic growth rate which in turn can lead to the second threat

2. Civilizational Collapse

In the past many civilizations have collapsed (Rome being the obvious one) but it did not threaten humanity as a whole because at any given time there was a diversity of cultures and political systems around the world. However if the species as a whole is threatened to extinction then we reach a point of no return. What can cause an extinction event - pandemics, wars, and AGI are his potential candidates. To recover from a collapse we will need some foundational technologies and exhausting all the fossil fuel is not a great idea as we might have to rely on them for restarting civilization. Preserving seeds, preserving knowledge are all actions we can take now anticipating this threat.

3. Values Lock-In

Here he talks about the persistence of values in society. Some values get locked in and become harder to change over time. If certain values get locked in early then it becomes very hard to dislodge them in the future. On the cultural side he brings up values of colonialism, fascism and a number of extreme ideologies which appeared to lock up humanity's fate for good over many many years. A recent example of a value lock-in he provides is the global pandemic response. While some countries were a bit more authoritarian than the others and Sweden did its own thing, the rest of the world quickly locked onto one way of handling the pandemic and the vaccine trials. By adopting a more diverse set of approaches he believes that a vaccine would have arrived much earlier and we would have learned more about the disease.

In the sphere of technology he is worried that some lock-in is happening a bit too fast - AGI and synthetic biology are two areas where he is advocating for more ethical research to happen before the tech goes out of control. Although space travel is part of his larger vision he thinks it is too early to lock-in the tech now and believes we first need a framework for cosmos governance etc before billionaires start escaping into space. 

What kind of values are better for the future? He lists a few - cosmpolitanism, concern for non-human animals, liberalism, and consequentialism. Please read the book for more details on each value.

What Can We Do?

Given that our predictions for the future are so unreliable are there steps we can take today to produce a positive change hundreds or thousands of years from now? MacAskill provides a simple three rule guiding principle

1. Take steps that we can be comparatively confident that are good (e.g. invest in clean energy and leave fossil fuels in the ground)
   
2. Keep options open (e.g. encourage diverse cultures/ thoughts/ political systems)
3. Continue to learn more

How to choose the problems to work on?

• Use the significant, persistent, contingent framework
• Focus on neglected problems (he thinks there is a lot of momentum towards addressing climate change but not enough around AI/ Bioethics or even nuclear power)

Finally what is it that an individual can do?

Here he rightly argues that very often the focus quickly comes down to personal consumption - fly less, become vegetarian, recycle. While these are entry points and maybe are important to an individual's life as a moral being and can shield them from accusations of hypocrisy, they are insignificant compared to other things we can do

1. Donate to the right groups: For e.g. becoming vegetarian saves 6 tonnes of CO2 over a 80 year life span. However, he argues donating $3000 to Clean Air Task Force can reduce 3000 tonnes per year
2. Political activism
3. Spread good ideas - talk to friends, family and co-workers about longtermism and what's at stake
4. Have children - this needs a whole lot of discussion; he is not recommending that anyone dictate what a woman should/shouldn't do; but he is arguing against the idea proposed by some environmental activists that not having children reduces our carbon footprint. He makes some compelling arguments for why it is good for the species to have children. Read his book to learn more. He has a lot of info on population ethics.
   

This book has left me with so many questions and I am still thinking through all the points he has raised. I also finished Cixin Liu's Remembrances of the Earth's Past trilogy (Three Body Problem). This dystopia offers a very different view of longtermism. Spanning over hundreds of years this sci-fi trilogy allows us to grapple with many of the philosophical concepts that MacAskill raises but not in an optimistic way. I was so affected by this trilogy for many weeks after finishing it. But that's for another day.

MacAskill provides us with a right dose of optimism and I recommend this book to everyone. Am posting below a few resources

Resources

• Interview with William MacAskill
• Giving What We Can
• Global Priorities Institute
•  80,000 Hours
  

 

Maine Woods

On the 31st of August 1846, Thoreau left Concord for Bangor and the backwoods of Maine, in what would become the first of his three famous journeys. His three essays talk about the natural almost primeval beauty of Maine's backwoods and its glorious Mount Ktaadn. He wrote

It is a country full of evergreen trees, of mossy silver birches and watery maples, the ground dotted with insipid small, red berries, and strewn with damp and moss-grown rocks,—a country diversified with innumerable lakes and rapid streams, peopled with trout and various species of leucisci, with salmon, shad, and pickerel, and other fishes; the forest resounding at rare intervals with the note of the chickadee, the blue jay, and the woodpecker, the scream of the fish hawk and the eagle, the laugh of the loon, and the whistle of ducks along the solitary streams; at night, with the hooting of owls and howling of wolves; in summer, swarming with myriads of black flies and mosquitoes, more formidable than wolves to the white man. Such is the home of the moose, the bear, the caribou, the wolf, the beaver, and the Indian. Who shall describe the inexpressible tenderness and immortal life of the grim forest, where Nature, though it be midwinter, is ever in her spring, where the moss-grown and decaying trees are not old, but seem to enjoy a perpetual youth; and blissful, innocent Nature, like a serene infant, is too happy to make a noise, except by a few tinkling, lisping birds and trickling rills? What a place to live, what a place to die and be buried in.

These  essays inspired the Hudson school painters to travel, see their country and capture the beauty for posterity.

Edwin Church's Ktaadn and Maine Woods (1853)

I have been reading and re-reading Thoreau for more than a decade now and seeing this painting last thanksgiving gave me a gentle nudge to plan a trip to Maine, although I knew fully well that a lot has changed in the 150 years since Thoreau's trips. However, I didn't follow his footsteps and retrace his journey - I will not put myself in a canoe of my own volition! (Watch this video from the Penobscot Indians who retraced this journey and set the record straight). Instead, I decided Acadia National Park could give me a taste of Maine's beauty, so that's where we went.

Acadia is famous for a lot of things:

• Only national park in New England
• Has the tallest mountain on the Atlantic Coast (Cadillac Mountain)
• Is the first place in the US to see sunrise
• The park was created entirely from private donations of land and it is still the case - all land that comes under the park has to be donated
• The lighthouses 
• Puffins!

The place was packed and so we made full use of the shuttle system. We didn't do the two popular hikes - the precipice and beehive, both famous for their ladders. One was closed for the peregrine falcon nesting season and even if it was open we decided not to do it because of my crippling fear of heights and my daughter is also not too crazy about heights.

We spent 4 days in Acadia and couldn't get a reservation for the sunrise drive to Cadillac mountain for any of these days. These are so popular and are sold out faster than tickets to a Radiohead concert! Instead we did a drive up to Cadillac Mountain the first afternoon and the vistas were breathtaking. Reminded us of Torrey Pines/ Ocean Beach except this was the Atlantic and not the Pacific.

View from Cadillac Mountain

We did the Great Head trail from Sand Beach which is probably the most popular spot in the park because of the access to the beach. The hike hugged the coastline giving us more views of the ocean and brought us back to the beach. We heard nuthatches, green-throated black warblers and saw downy woodpeckers on the way down.

 

We wrapped up the day with a walk along the coast but it was not very pleasant as it was packed with people and we saw more cars than the coast.

The next day our plan was to hike to Bubble Rock and connect to Jordan pond, but a mix up led us to be dropped off by the shuttle at the Pemetic Mountain trail head. But this turned out to be the best thing that happened to us! Until we did this hike we didn't feel like we were in a national park as the crowds were a bit much. As we hiked up the Pemetic mountain from Bubble pond we did not meet any other hiker until we reached the summit. Apparently this route was not a popular one as it involved a lot of scrambling in the woods, a steady ascent with not many views. Perfect for us! We didn't really know where we were going or have a specific plan other than - let's reach the summit and see if it connects us to another trail.

Bubble Pond - start of Pemetic trail

One of the few views on the trail coming up from Bubble Pond

 When we reached the summit we were in for a treat as the view was just breathtaking! We've hiked up Mount San Jacinto three times and while the hike itself was the most challenging I've ever done I didn't care much for the views from the top. Pemetic Mountain was the opposite, the hike was not nearly as challenging but the views were spectacular.

Summit

Here we met other hikers who came up from Jordan pond. They told us that it was a gradual ascent with a lot of views of the coastline and no scrambling. So we decided we will go down that trail as we didn't want to scramble on the way down. This was a very rewarding hike down and the views exceeded expectations.

Going down from Pemetic Mt. summit to Jordan Pond

Jordan pond was popular with the crowds but we still managed to find peace and quiet thanks to our hike, except for frequent interruptions from the Bullfrog

Jordan Pond

Bullfrogs

I know they are pests everywhere else and harm many indigenous species, but here in the Eastern US they were a sight to behold. Until then we had only heard his booming voice, we finally caught sight of him in Jordan pond.

The Hudson school had revealed the beauty of Mount Desert Island (on which stands Acadia NP) that during the 1850s it became very popular with folks from New England and after the civil war many more started pouring into these locations to take in the natural beauty. Soon enough the wealthy built mansions along the coast of Maine and started throwing their famous parties which also included walking tours of the woods. Now most of the mansions are gone and many of the wealthy donated their land to form the basis of the national park. A lot of the original woods are gone except for one pocket of old growth forest, but since the creation of the park there are no longer any sheep on the islands and the forests are slowly recovering.

For our last day in Maine our daughter recommended we do a Pelagic birding tour and so that's what we did. We got on a boat and went looking for puffins, murres, and razorbills off the coast of Maine. This turned out to be a terrific idea! The guides on the boat were locals, born and raised near Bar Harbor and knew so much about the park - both the natural and cultural history. They also talked a lot about the lobster fisheries in Maine and how tightly regulated they were. The lobstermen took a lot of care to make sure the lobsters were not driven to extinction and managed the fishing quotas and regulations collectively to ensure the health of the ocean and its inhabitants. This was very heartening to hear.

We saw a lot of wildlife off the coast of Maine. The puffins were well known to us thanks to the Audubon webcam - Project Puffin so I was thrilled to see them in person.
 

Mola Mola or Sunfish

Atlantic Puffins

Lighthouse on Eggrock

Murre

That afternoon we drove out to Schoodic point to see the mainland side of Acadia and that wrapped up our trip to Maine! When I look back on the trip, the theme seems to be regeneration. As a family we needed this trip to rejuvenate our spirits after the pandemic. But I was also heartened to see how much progress has been made since the 1900s in terms of preserving nature through our national park system. Many of the islands that were once grazed down by sheep are now sporting hundred year old trees and hosting bald eagles and other creatures. Thoreau bemoaned the fact that our needs meant that the value of a pine was estimated by its "use." In The Maine Woods he says

There is a higher law affecting our relation to pines as well as to men. A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man. Can he who has discovered only some of the values of whalebone and whale oil be said to have discovered the true use of the whale? Can he who slays the elephant for his ivory be said to have “seen the elephant”? These are petty and accidental uses; just as if a stronger race were to kill us in order to make buttons and flageolets of our bones; for everything may serve a lower as well as a higher use. Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.

I hope to walk away from the woods of Maine keeping in mind the "higher uses" of all forms of life even when walking in my own backyard.

NY State: Niagara, Ithaca/ Finger Lakes

Our trip to the East coast started off with a visit to the Niagara which surprisingly wasn't crowded. I was expecting to be standing in hour long lines but it looks like we missed the holiday crowd by a day and it was much more pleasant than I expected. I was eagerly waiting to see my daughter's reactions and she summed it up in one phrase "it doesn't feel real." A falls of this magnitude, according to her, should demand more from the visitor. She believes that one had to earn the falls by hiking through woods and mountains and not just walk into it by standing in line or riding a boat as though it was a ride in Disneyland. Niagara felt too commercial and left her wanting although she was glad to have seen it and experienced the force of the Cave of the Winds but we were all itching to hit the Finger lakes region of upstate NY.

 

 It took Odysseus ten years to return to Ithaca. It took me a little over twenty to get there.The names of the places takes you back in time and one cannot help but think about the Haudenosaunee who have lent their names to these lands and the lakes specifically the Cayugas and Seneca - the two lakes around which we spent most of our time. I don't want to sound like I am placing the Iroquois in the past, as they are a living breathing civilization very much alive amidst us and to whom we owe not just a land acknowledgement but also the concept of American liberty/ justice/ constitution. Reading books like Braiding Sweetgrass, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, Covered with Night, and the oldie Crucible of War gave me a bit of a background and I am still learning more. However, I am not remotely qualified to write about Native America other than saying that as I walked along these trails and gorges I was more mindful of where I was treading and tried to do it lightly with gratitude in my heart. 

Watkins Glen:

This is considered the most beautiful state park in all of NY. I don't dispute that. You hit 19 waterfalls in  1.5 miles and the gorges carved by water are just spectacular. July meant that the water flow was not at its peak, however for those coming from drought-stricken SoCal this was heaven! We parked in an upper parking lot and so took the Indian trail down and climbed back up the Gorge Trail so that we could always face the water on our way up.

 

Taughanock Falls:

The highest falls in the US (higher than even Niagara), the Taughanock was high on my list, but very low on water unfortunately. Still the hike was completely worth it and we did both the Gorge trail and the Rim trail (up the South, down the North). By doing the rim trail we beat the crowds and also got a terrific view of the upper falls which had a bit more water.

                                                                            

The Upper Falls

View from the North Rim Trail

 

I saw Turkey Vultures everywhere roosting at the top of the cliffs and even heard Peregrines but as I didn't trust my ears I didn't look for them. Later, my daughter who was birding around this area with the Cornell Lab told me that they saw Peregrines in this region! However, the bird that captured my heart in this entire trip was the Red-Eyed Vireo - did not see it once but the woods were ringing with its song and by the end of the trip this was the one bird song I learned to identify with confidence.

Buttermilk Falls:

Once again the water in the falls was just a trickle and therefore did not do justice to the name. However, the hike was still beautiful and walking in the woods with just bird song from the elusive vireo was enough to fill my cup.

That wrapped up the upstate NY leg of our trip. We made one stop at New Paltz to visit family and went on a walk along the historic Huguenot Street. We only got a glimpse of the Catskills from a distance.

 

There is so much beauty and history in NY state and I came away refreshed with all the time spent in the woods. I can only imagine how beautiful it would be during other seasons and I hope that unlike Odysseus I will be back someday real soon.

Cornell's Lab of Ornithology

 This July our daughter was picked for the Lab of Ornithology's Young Birder Event. She was first notified that she was selected as a young birder back in 2019 when she was still in Middle school, only to receive an email an hour later that it was an error and she was only on the wait list as an 'alternate'. Needless to say we were a bit disappointed. The next time around the pandemic intervened and the lab had to postpone its event for a couple of years. Third time was the charm and she finally attended the event this year and it was fabulous! This also gave me an opportunity to visit Sapsucker woods which I've only watched on feedercam for many years!

 

The lab is an amazing resource for anyone interested in birds and 8 years back my daughter and i got started on our birding by watching many of their educational videos. One thing led to another and we were doing feederwatch regularly, taking lessons from the lab, participating in Backyard Bird counts, and Merlin and eBird have become our favorite app on our smartphones.

As part of the event, parents were invited to attend the keynote by the lab's director Ian Owens. I hope the Lab actually recorded his keynote and will publish it widely as it was truly inspirational! I was so glad my daughter got to hear him and I wish more people will hear his message as it was filled with realism and optimism. There were two key messages that I heard that resonated with me and hopefully with my daughter

1) The problems of the world are too big that they cannot be solved by one person or even one type of person. At the lab they bring together people with a wide range of skills - birders of course, but more than that they needed biologists, conservationists, computer scientists, story tellers, educators, and communicators. There is a role for everyone and the best ideas come from working together across disciplines.

2) Bending the curve - this was his most important message to the youth in attendance. There is still time to reverse the loss of biodiversity! Very often we hear in the news that it is already too late w.r.t climate change. While it is important to raise the alarm call it is also important to show that there is a path forward and not all is lost. If there is no hope for the future why do we bother telling our kids that they can make a difference! We need to get more people excited about the future and bring them into the fold so we can figure out solutions for the planet. Ian Owens and the Lab offered that vision. In a time when the world seems to be polarized between climate apathy and climate anxiety, even I needed to hear this talk to feel hopeful about the future.

 

 

As I walked through Sapsucker woods I thought of the past 8 years when my daughter's forays into birding got me hooked as her co-traveler. I know it is time for our paths to diverge and I don't know what lies ahead for her as she starts thinking about college this year, but coming here at this time was a timely boost of confidence and enthusiasm for her. She said that holding the snowy owl specimen in her hand was deeply moving and exhilarating at the same time. 

 

The famous woods around Ithaca were once leveled down completely as farmlands but have now become wild again in the past 100 years. It's not too late... yet and I hope she keeps this note of optimism and hope in her heart as she looks ahead to the future.

A Day at the Huntington

 The Huntington Library and Gardens recently traded their famous Gainsborough's Blue Boy for a painting by Joseph Wright of Derby called An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump and I had been meaning to go and see it. Time was running out for the bird (and me) as the painting was returning to UK end of May so I decided to get out there for the Memorial Day weekend. The painting didn't disappoint. 

 

I first heard about Wright when my daughter studied Art History in high school. His pictures combined Baroque techniques with enlightenment ideas and depicted science in action. In this one we see an eager audience around a lecturer demonstrating the importance of air to life as he slowly sucks out air from a glass jar housing a cockatoo. I would like to think he will not kill the bird and will actually revive it. It is a riveting scene and you can see the anguish on the little girl to the right although I don't know what the two lovers on the left are doing at a science demo gazing at each other!

I loved this painting much more than the Blue Boy and felt this was more fitting for the Huntington which also houses a number of rare manuscripts and books. When I see the Ellesmere Chaucer, the Gutenberg Bible, the Tyndale Bible, Newton's Principia a Shakespeare's First Folio, Thoreau's Walden drafts, Whitman's hospital notes, Audubon's unbelievable bird sketches all under one roof, I get goosebumps. In an era where we are seeing ridiculous book bans some of these books remind us of the revolutionary power of the printed (or handwritten) word.

Ellesmere Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

Newton's Principia

Gutenberg Bible -only 48 survive of which 12 were made from vellum including this one

Tyndale's Bible - god's words in your own language!

First Folio opened to Midsummer Night's Dream

 

Thoreau's Walden draft

Audubon's larger than life book of bird drawings

The great thing about the Huntington is that it houses samples of extraordinary writing by women too. All my heroes are here - Mary Shelley, Revolution printed by Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, works of Octavia Butler and Hilary Mantel. I don't know if it is simply a matter of coincidence or whether my interests drive me towards certain things, but each manuscript here held a special place in my heart.

Mary Shelley's cross-written letter to her friend Marianne Hunt

One of my favorite biographies was "Romantic Outlaws" which was about the mom/daughter pair of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley told in alternate chapters. So I am a bit familiar with what Mary Shelley is writing about in this letter - an account of her personal tragedies.

Butler's notes for Parable of Sower

Here is a writer I came to late - maybe about a decade ago when I first read Kindred. Following that I read both Parable of the Sower and Talent followed by Lilth's Brood. It is only fitting that all her papers are in the Huntington as she was a Pasadena native.

Mantel's research for her Wolf Hall trilogy

The books that marked the last decade for me are absolutely Mantel's trilogy about the rise and fall of Cromwell. I loved the books so much that I am now reading Diarmaid MacCulloch's biography of Cromwell. This was a nice surprise as I didn't recall seeing Mantel's manuscript at the Huntington before. This wasn't the only surprise for me. 

From a distance I saw this bird on the grounds and for a second thought it was a Phainopepla but as I took a closer look it was unlike anything I had seen before. Merlin to the rescue and with both photo and sound id the bird was identified as a Red-Whiskered Bulbul, a native of India that had first found it way to Florida. Along the way some birds escaped the aviary and seem to have established themselves in places with exotic fruit plants. Made my life-list! 

That wrapped up an amazing day for me! On the ride back home we overheard a Proust quote on the radio "The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." These past few years travel has been impossible but books remain the cheapest way to transcend time and space. It breaks my heart that we are living in times when books are banned but guns are not.