by Danny Adcock

The onshore wind is insistent like toothache. Waves break on the beach in long curls of white foam, and dissipate on the sand and are sucked back into the blue-green water. Sanderling and turnstone pick over weed the tide has strewn behind it, running before me in panic like peasants fleeing a raiding party, but resolutely refusing to fly. It’s a familiar scene, one I see almost daily on the beaches of North Norfolk. This, however, is not North Norfolk. As if to clarify this a pelican chooses this moment to fly into view. Unlike many of those beautifully streamlined diving birds – think tern or gannet – pelicans are big, bulky birds. With a laconic flight and a short, punchy dive, they turn slightly on their side before hitting the water with all the panache of a belly-flopping sumo wrestler.

To be honest I didn’t expect to see species common to my local beach here on a Cuban one. There was a definite double-take on my part when I saw the first sanderling running along in front of me. But, as I discovered later, there are also dunlin, sandpiper, turnstone and whimbrel here. There are different subspecies, such as the ruddy turnstone, to some of those we have at home, but it is still remarkable to me that here, in thirty-degree heat, with a mangrove swamp a few hundred metres away, there are the same birds doing the same things as there are four and a half thousand miles away on a Norfolk beach.

The beach that is before me now plays out a gentle curve which is whittled down to a point like a sharpened, smoothed piece of wood and at its tip is the mangrove swamp. I leave the beach here and wade out through a belt of thickly stinking mud and sargassum weed. It seems collected here purposely by a malevolent tide to keep me from reaching my goal. The water is mostly waist deep, but rises to my chest once or twice. I fight with the mud, sinking to my ankles. A bird as big as any I have ever seen launches itself from the mangrove edge and takes to the wing with deep, floundering effort. Whether it is its closeness, its unnatural-seeming whiteness, or the fact that I am used to seeing its smaller cousin the little egret that make it seem so, the great egret seems like a pterosaur.

After twenty yards or so the mud gives way to a mixture of bone-white sand and darker patches of turtle grass whose fronds beckon the tide on. The sea shallows to between thigh and ankle depth. Crabs gesticulate wildly with their claws like Latin housewives berating their husbands, and scoot away leaving a puff of sand like an exaggerated cartoon effect. I’m here on these sand flats for the first time ever to fish for bonefish and permit, but for now I’m bewitched. Luminescent wavelets harvest the sun’s rays like sheaves of golden corn, then sow them on the sand below in shimmering fields. Their never-ending kinetics scribe themselves onto my retinas, so that when I look away I still see the motion of them superimposed over my vision. Glossy ibis and little blue heron stalk the shallowest water. Royal terns with dark frowns pass me on the wind, and above them frigate birds cruise. A stingray melts across a bare patch of sand with a heat I am wary of, but passes me by gently, benignly even. I wander the flats in a carefree dream, wading amid the green sea, with the blue sky hinged above.

These sand flats and mangroves are extensive. If I followed them along the coast of Cayo Coco, the island on which I am staying, and then Cayo Romano and Cayo Paredon, there would be thousands of acres of them. Before the roads, before the hotels, before the seventeen-mile causeway from the mainland, before the international airport, this archipelago that stretches along the bent back of Cuba’s main island was uninhabited. Huge flocks of flamingos blushed the lagoons and mangrove edges, but the airport and the increased activity of tourism displaced them to more remote areas. Worryingly I am told there are already foundations in place for hotels on the currently still uninhabited Cayos Romano and Paredon, as well as those already half built here on Cayo Coco, and further North at Pilar beach. How much further can the pelicans be displaced?

Beyond a small mangrove-encrusted island that is like a dark green jewel set in a shimmering surround, the colour and mood of the sea changes from the benevolent blue-green of the flats to something deeper, darker, denser. I sometimes dream of being lost in a blank ocean, treading water over the black unending depths with the unknown and the unnameable somewhere below, and I think of this now as I look out across the ocean; out to where the Gulf Stream wells North as if pulsed by the ventricles of the earth itself.

The locals wade the kilometre or so out to this island to fish and gather conch shells. Some of them wave cheerily to me, and shout in Spanish, pointing to the island and indicating with outstretched arms what I presume to be the size of the fish that are to be found there. Life is a day to day struggle for the Cuban people. It is not a nice feeling to know the rod and reel I am fishing with are worth many months wages to the average Cuban. On a tour of the mainland later in the week our guide Laurie tells us he is a professor, and spent five years at university. He earns more in tips now than he did in wages as a teacher, but he still asks if we have any extra toiletries we can leave him when we go home because the shelves are often empty of everyday items. Because of this jobs in the tourist industry are highly sought after. My conscience struggles with the fact that though my being here is helping to provide well-paid employment, is that sufficient reparation for the crippling, spiteful economic embargo the US, and us as her ally, have enforced for decades? As an Englishman who is not altogether proud of his country’s history, or its exploitative colonial past, I believe it is important for us to engage with cultures and populations that have suffered at our hands historically. There is undeniably an element of exploitation where tourism in poorer communities is concerned, but without it there would be almost no interaction between the people of Cuba, and the people of countries such as our own. And according to the World Travel and Tourism Council, tourism accounted for almost ten per cent of GDP in Cuba in 2013. Where people’s livelihoods are concerned, my Western sentiments seem slightly hypocritical: if your children are hungry it must be difficult to care about whether some birds have to move. As a tourist myself who am I to pass judgement on whether or not tourism is ethical? Cubans are still of the land in a way we can only remember through pastoral-tinted glasses, and costume dramas. The industrial revolution was kicked into touch with the successive boots of the revolution, the economic embargo, and the collapse of the old Soviet Union, from whom Cuba used to receive much aid. Facts like this, and the enthusiasm of guides such as Laurie will, I hope, keep at least some of the island pristine.

On the walk back in to the beach I stay even closer to the mangrove trees because the mud is not as deep. Their exposed roots are countless thousands of intertwined fingers reaching down to the underworld and passing three environments – air, water and mud – on their way. Juvenile fish scatter like handfuls of leaves flung by a child onto an Autumn wind; the mangrove is the perfect nursery. Unseen birds with exotic, unfamiliar song call from deep within the maelstrom of roots, branches and leaves like sirens tempting me in. There is the overwhelming feeling of a blizzard of life contained within.

Because I am partially hidden amongst some of the outermost mangrove foliage the osprey doesn’t see me. It arcs overhead like lightning, and plunges in an unsuccessful strike mere feet from me. I am so close that as it lifts itself from the sea and pauses mid-air to shake like a wet dog, I see each individual drop of sea water flung from its feathers. There is somehow a split-second reciprocal meeting of eyes: the one a flaming fierceness of orange, the other an acquiescent yielding to a beauty complete in its wildness. It is something I replay over and over in the slow-mo, high definition of my memory; something that will always connect me to this place and this landscape and its cauldron of life.

Also ingrained in my memory is the graphic vividness of the landscape. Its energy is contained in its colours as much as its wildlife: the lucid sea, blue-green and restless, the white sand under foot, the sapphire sky above and the yellow-gold sun held within it. The individual colours are as separate from each other as utterly and naively as they are in a child’s painting.

By the time I have walked the mile or so back along the beach to the hotel, with a brief pause at the beach shack selling cold beer and grilled lobster, day is ending. There are no long evenings evocative of an English Summer here. By five ‘o’ clock the shadows of the palm trees are draped across the sand like the limbs of languid sunbathers lingering in the last of the sunlight, and by six the dark queen that is night in the tropics reigns. Frogs bat their croaks repetitively back and forth between palm trees and across the darkened pool. Later, in the hotel bar, a black-haired Cuban girl sings in French and Spanish with the heavy-lidded sensuality of a faded black-and-white era; an era before the revolution, when Ernest Hemingway drank daiquiris in La Floridita, and cruised these very islands in the stream on his boat the Pilar.

Significantly, the same treaty which protects the Wash – the shallow, square mouthed estuarine embayment I live less than a mile from – protects some of the Jardines Del Ray national park which encompasses these islands. The Ramsar Convention is specifically designed to protect the ecological importance and diversity of wetlands, whether they be the mangrove swamps and shallow sand flats of Cuba, or the saltmarsh and shallow seas of the Wash in East Anglia. It was negotiated through the sixties and ratified in 1971. Its mission is ‘The conservation and wise use of all wetlands through local and national actions and international co-operation.’ Currently in Cuba there are six Ramsar sites including the Gran Humedal del Norte de Ciego De Avila, which my rudimentary Spanish translates as the Great North Wetlands of Ciego de Avila, though I stand ready to be corrected. Here in the UK there are one-hundred and fifty-four including the Wash, out of a global total of more than 2000 covering an area of more than 200 million hectares. According to the Ramsar Convention wetlands are ‘Vital for human survival… among the world’s most productive environments; cradles of biological diversity… upon which countless species of plants and animals depend for survival.’

The Wash and the Jardines Del Rey may be more than 4000 miles from each other, but their fates are entwined on many levels. We do not live in isolation here on our own archipelago – much as some believe we should – and our wildlife and countryside does not either. Its biodiversity is linked to that of Europe, the Caribbean, Africa and the rest of the world, whether that be by migration routes, or the ability some species have to live in divergent landscapes. Just off Cuba’s shores lies the Sargasso Sea. The only sea without any coastlines, it is bordered by four currents: the Gulf Stream to its West, the North Atlantic Current to its North, the Canary Current to its East, and the North Atlantic Equatorial Current to its South. The Sargasso is the breeding ground of Anguilla anguilla, the eel we are used to seeing here in the UK. As leaf-shaped larvae called leptocephali they drift across the Atlantic on the Gulf Stream, metamorphosing into the more recognisable elver or glass eel, before migrating up our streams and rivers. Once they reach maturity they retrace their journey back to the Sargasso. The eel and its remarkable journey are just one example of nature’s ability to cross the borders that we have imposed upon ourselves. Our climate is driven by these same currents. The ocean conveyor belt is a global system of currents linking ocean to sea, and sea to ocean. Dependent on water temperature and salinity, it is the never-ending flow of countless gallons of sea-water that interconnects our seas with those of the tropics and the poles. But there is also an interconnectedness amongst those of us who believe, as per the Ramsar Convention statement on wetlands, that we are dependant upon our natural environments, and the millions of species found within them, just as they are dependant upon us. When an extinction occurs in Africa or the Arctic, we feel it here in England; it is a wave formed by the calving of an iceberg that reaches every shore on the planet.

Seeing a small, unobtrusive and quite ordinary bird going about its business on a beach in Cuba, at the same time as an exact copy is doing the exact same thing on a Norfolk beach, symbolizes the importance of nature to me as one living, breathing entity. Whether the Ramsar Convention will prove strong enough in the face of corporate growth to protect either the Jardines Del Rey, or the Wash, is something that concerns us all, even though most of us still have our heads either in the sand, or on our own personal crusade. The current détente between the US and her near-neighbour Cuba means, according to one estimate, that 10 million American tourists are on their way to Cuba’s shores quite soon, more than tripling current numbers. This, and the dismantling of the embargo, will be like a shock from a defibrillator to the ailing heart of the Cuban economy. In the face of that overwhelming economic energy I fear treaties such as Ramsar are going to need an awful lot of shoring up. Whether home or abroad these environments and habitats are essential for our survival as a species. While that may be the ultimate incentive for ensuring their continued protection and betterment, our responsibility lies equally to other species as to our own. Unfortunately, much of the world is neither watching, nor listening.

 

Danny Adcock is a contributor to Caught By The River, and The Island Review, and also writes for angling magazine Fallon’s Angler. As well as writing about nature and landscape, he is a keen fly fisherman, cyclist, and amateur photographer. He lives in North Norfolk. His blog can be found at: https://naturelines.wordpress.com

 

by Isaac Yuen

 

I turn to the page on you, eventually. I am sorry that it’s been so long, that I am so late. This edition of All the World’s Animals in my hands is not the one I had growing up, but a used copy I scoured from the Internet. I had to scour because I had forgotten names, left only with scraps of moods and textures. A coarse canvas cover, navy-blue. A dazzle of zebras under letters of embossed gold. Thoughts of you pushed me to make the effort though, and the thin tome on hoofed mammals arrives, upper corner bent, creasing the sections on pygmy hogs and hippopotami, but sparing the brindled gnu, the Himalayan tahrs.

The scent of paper, bleached yet vegetal, pulls me through the years. As I leaf through the pages, the boy within stirs to life, shyly at first, then with unabashed glee. We pause at the section on camels and llama-kin, page 74, to linger on photographs of dainty vicunas and long-lashed guanacos. Next stop, page 92, where optimal foraging theory is explained through a moose’s salt tooth for pondweed and bladderworts. Pulses quicken in concert on page 102, still a favorite, as we dream of pronghorns with matchstick legs blazing across golden fields beneath azure skies.

Enough about me. Back to you. Back to tapirs. Out of all the world’s odd and even-toed ungulates, it is your family, the Tapiridae that I wish most to revisit. Your clan occupies a scant two-page spread, compared to eight reserved for mixed goats and twelve on assorted antelope. Even hyraxes, those obscure fur clumps that live up trees, on rocks, in bushes, command four. A pity. Your section contains no live photographs, only muted watercolors for each species: Mountain, Brazilian, Malayan, and you – at the bottom of the page – Baird’s, with young. Unlike your bristle-maned South American sibling or your panda-esque Asian relation, the illustration does you no favours. You are portrayed in an awkward pose, neither sitting nor standing. The nose is too big, even for you. You resemble more a misshapen pig than one of a lineage that stretches back twenty million years unchanged. Apologies for comparing you to another instead of allowing you to be what you are. I’m forgetting myself.

***

It’s been a decade since I saw you last, when I traveled to Belize to attend a field school to cap off my biology undergrad. It was in Belize where I first learned the importance of hydration, unofficial derivations of campfire songs, the shoe-piercing capabilities of fer-de-lance fangs, and most importantly, the words and deeds that forge lifelong bonds and shapes one’s course. Those times spent hiking through premontane forests, camping in lowland jungles, and snorkeling near mangrove roots remain dear to me. As do my encounters with you.

I met you first at the Belize zoo. Up close, I understood why people dubbed you part pig, part hippo and cow, you being stout and slick and barrel-esque. Watching you pace behind gridded squares, I recalled other meetings, with other creatures. A bull elephant when I was four, caked in yellow dust behind a moat at a Hong Kong zoo long defunct. A rescued rhinoceros calf in Nepal three years ago, orphaned by hunters and blinded by villagers. The same mix of love and pity.

From behind the fence you flirted with my colleague Max, the same Max who broke up with his girlfriend back home to pursue new conquests. You posed for him, letting him snap shots of you, the same ones I’m scrolling through on my computer. Who could resist those dark doe eyes, that moist flared trunk? You lured him in, then turned and doused his shoes and pants with a jet of urine.

Oh, how we laughed and laughed.

***

Our next encounter came eleven days later during a canoe trip down one of Belize’s major waterways. After days of camping in Honduran pine forests and a tense morning threading the rapids of the Cave Branches tributary, I breathed a sigh of relief as we eased into the lazy meanders of the Sibun.

It was late morning. My canoe partner Sammy and I were alone, ahead of some and behind others of the group. The wind was down. A patch of clouds shrouded the sun, but the afterglow suffused the air and laid bare the river’s supple curls and secret riffles. Two weeks of full-on sun had turned me mahogany-brown, and I was glad for the brief reprieve. Still I fared better than my pink and peeling friend. Poor Sammy from Saskatchewan.

I cannot recall the exact order of events that follow. When I concentrate memories begin to surface as flickers, like glints of minnows scattered by diving kingfishers, like flash sightings of otters slipping into dark waters. The dull knife edge of a nearby karst shore against palm. The airy wake trailing a pair of fishing bats on hair and scalp. Their wheeling forms crossing filigree shadows cast by overhanging trees. A ripe fig falls in the water and ripples out. Interplay between sound and silence. Layers and moments circling a creation unfinished.

You shattered that tranquility for me. I do not begrudge you, but you were undoubtedly the cause. We jammed our paddles down into gravel to slow to where the others stopped, forming a half-ring around a raised section of the riverbed. Tracing the gazes of the others, I spotted you, this time inert, in parts: Hoofed feet, butchered neat, exposing the white of joints, light enough to be stirred by the current but too heavy to be carried away. One set of hind legs, thick and three-toed. A pair of forelimbs, an extra digit on each arm, smaller and askew, higher up on the foot.

Functional only on soft ground, my blue book states.

Butchered. I choose this term now not as an attempt to evoke high dramatics, but rather the opposite, as resistance against the impulse, even after all these years. For butchery is a cold and clinical act, the ultimate reduction. It still fits.

Around the bend and before a waterfall laid the rest of you, an open chest of organs and viscera that glistened like a cache of pale and dark jewels. In the nearby shallows we recovered your hide and head. It took two to lift up your sodden coat out of the water, one corner of it thick with maggots. How strange, the transition between life and object, from you to it. I examined your head up close, in profile. The head looked ready to be mounted, with the only blemish being a hole just below the white-tipped ears. One bullet sent carefully into the skull. Dark doe eyes.

No smell. No blood spooled thin from the remains, having already been cleansed by the water. The ruined body bulked like one of the many grey boulders that had always been part of the channel. The noon heat buzzed. Birds sang. The river flowed on. So we went on.

Sammy took pictures, but later lost them when he dropped his camera into saltwater.

***

To this day, I do not know why you were killed that May morning. My professor speculated that poachers may have been supplying meat for cruise ships seeking to entice tourists with “a taste of Belize.” My book states that your hide provides good-quality leather, much prized for whips and bridles. But nothing was taken. No sense was to be had. Parts of you laid strewn about the river like toy blocks awaiting assembly.

***

Should I apologize? If it helps, then I offer it. You were not yet fully grown, having shed your baby coat of spots and stripes only months prior, and my book remarks that your lifespan is measured in decades. Would you be alive today if not for that fateful encounter? Perhaps you would have perished in a clash with the resident jaguar that exists in my mind as your eternal foe. Or maybe both of you would have succumbed to the strains threatening so many species around the world, like the fading saiga and screwhorn antelopes of my book, like the Spanish ibex and scimitar oryx that have vanished since its publication. But most likely, I suspect you would still be roaming those lowland jungles, siring and bearing, growing wise to the mysteries of tapir life. For this theft of years, as part of the tribe that is the coming of the cruise ship, I am sorry.

Yet I do not believe an apology is what you seek. We both know that I played no role in your death, was not the one who robbed you of life. Perhaps you would even regard such a gesture as an insult, a platitude to excuse those responsible.

What I can offer instead, should you choose to accept it, is to serve as witness. To be the one who tells your tale and ensures that it echoes beyond death. Perhaps that is why I sought out this old book on the tenth anniversary of our last meeting, so that I could converse with you once more. Tapir, you who now exist only within these pages, in these lines of words I write, can I tell you of your legacy?

After our meeting, I found myself sensitized to those who fight to protect the natural world.  A parasitologist instilling in students a reverence for the lowliest of creatures. A Hawaiian working to save his native koa and ‘Ōhi’a Lehua forests from invasive ginger and guava. A Nepali boy soaking up the Latin names of ibises and flycatchers spotted by his park ranger brother. A friend single-handedly building my province’s largest volunteer conservation network from her basement. An author extending her consideration to the realities of ants, lichen, and rock. A man, moved by grief and joy, embarking on a journey towards connecting the human and non-human.

But you do not ask questions. Nor do you accept answers. For all our encounters and all my musings, I realize now that I have never heard your voice. Perhaps it is time I cast off my words in exchange for silence. Maybe then I will hear what no art or weave of phrase can teach me. Perhaps then I will at last understand your slow and secret tongue. I close the book and trace my finger along the spine, lingering on the gilded letters that form the title: All the World’s Animals. Not forgotten.

 

Isaac Yuen pens critical and creative work exploring the intersection of nature, culture, and identity. An attendee of the 2015 Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference, he is the creator of Ekostories, an essay blog that explores the power of narratives to affect personal and societal change.

 

by Carrie Naughton

 

In April 1962, at Moore’s Landing in what is now the Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge in South Carolina, a group of observers made one of the last undisputed sightings of a Bachman’s Warbler.  Like most of the more recent but unconfirmed sightings, this was an unmated male, trilling his buzzy notes into the heavy air.

The Reverend John Bachman, a close friend and colleague of John James Audubon, documented the first of his namesake warblers on the Edisto River in 1832.  A naturalist and educator, Reverend Bachman served as the pastor of St. John’s Church in Charleston for 56 years. He also belonged to Charleston’s Circle of Naturalists, a group of academics and physicians devoted to the scientific collection and classification of biological specimens.

Bachman worked closely with John Audubon on the text for The Birds of America and Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America.  The two naturalists became lifelong friends, indeed family – Audubon’s sons married Bachman’s daughters.  John Bachman’s wife Maria Martin – herself a talented, and unfairly overlooked, illustrator – painted many of the contextual foliage backgrounds for Audubon’s bird illustrations, including the Franklinia branch that serves as the perch for Audubon’s painting of Bachman’s Warbler.

Bachman gave the specimens that he’d collected in 1832 to Audubon, who named the little songbird Vermivora bachmanii after his friend.  First called Bachman’s Swamp-Warbler, the birds measured only four inches or so from tip to tail.  They would not be seen again in the States for fifty years, when Americans began actively taking feathered specimens for museums and milliners.  Between 1886 and 1892, collectors shot 192 of the diminutive warblers.  Ornithologists must now rely more on paintings and blurred photographs than actual field encounters when describing plumage, and the closest they may ever come to the actual warblers are the preserved specimens, some of which could have been taken from the last remaining populations.

The collective nouns for a group of warblers are unsettling in their poetry: A confusion of warblers.  A fall.  A wrench.

Olive green with a yellow breast, the Bachman’s male distinguishes himself from similar warblers, like the Nashville and the Orange-Crowned, with a black, bib-like throat patch.  A Bachman’s female is olive-backed as well but shows a paler lemon underbelly, lacking the black bib until it appears – faintly – as she ages.  After reviewing 300 museum samples in the mid-1980’s, ornithologists Paul Hamel and Sidney Gauthreaux (neither of whom have seen or heard the bird in real life), emphasized slight variations in field marks – yellow in the male’s wing bend; a pale, not necessarily golden, eye ring on the female – with the aim of aiding birders in identification of this elusive warbler.  To a non-scientist, perhaps this cataloguing of miniscule particularities seems desperate, a pointless last-ditch effort to assert the uniqueness of a species that is surely vanished from the earth.  And yet, this work could be more than science: a requiem for the dead, or a leap of faith.

It’s not simply visual identification of plumage that makes sightings extremely rare and difficult to certify, though.   Bachman’s Warbler lives – or lived – in the dense, lush swamps deep in the southeastern United States, a denizen of the southern Atlantic Coastal Plain.  Bottomland forests of sweetgum, red oaks, dogwoods, hickories, and cypress once stretched for miles, a landscape that was home to tribes like the Seminole, Choctaw and Cherokee for centuries before European settlers arrived.   The birds tucked their nests into the low, snarly tangles of blackberry, palmetto, and other brambly, vining foliage amidst mirroring pools of tannin-dark water and vast stands of Arundinaria gigantea – native bamboo groves called canebrakes.   Bachman’s bill may be slightly curved to allow it better gleaning of cane leaves for seeds, caterpillars and ants, and our erratic encounters with the bird may be linked to the episodic cycles of productivity within the bamboo stands.  If Bachman’s was indeed a bamboo specialist, that would place it – at least as far as museum collections of neotropical songbirds go – in rare company.

In the past century, the forests of the southeast have been industrially logged and the wetlands systematically drained, dammed and plugged up for agriculture and cattle grazing.  The canebrakes of the coastal plain, like the grasslands of the North American prairie, were cleared out, paved over, and all but lost to ecological history.  Arundinaria gigantea does not grow back quickly once it has been cut down.  However, fire is crucial for cane productivity, and natural fires in the canebrakes were beneficial.  The Cherokee knew this, and practiced their own methods of controlled burns.  Within the last ten years, in the Qualla Boundary of western North Carolina, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and the Land Trust for the Little Tennessee have undertaken a comprehensive land survey to map potential river cane habitats and plant seedlings of river cane’s endangered sister plant, the butternut tree.  Sustainably harvested, these plants are the raw materials for prized basketry, flutes, medicine, tools and woven mats.  Could this restoration provide reliable economic benefits to the Cherokee as well as management implications for Bachman’s historical range?

Migrating Bachman’s Warblers kept to the very tops of cypress and sweetgum trees, singing as they passed over South Georgia and the Florida Keys from Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Alabama, the Carolinas, and Louisiana on their way to wintering grounds in Cuba.  In the late 1800’s, Bachman’s was the seventh most common migratory bird on the lower Suwannee, Florida.  By the early 1900’s, field biologists like Arthur Wayne (who had found the majority of known Bachman’s nests) began to notice a marked decline in all swamp-dwelling birds.  This coincided with a reduction in nesting grounds for Bachman’s Warbler.  Despite forest recovery in the latter half of the 20^th century, Bachman’s is still the rarest of our American passerines, officially listed as Critically Endangered in 2012, and possibly extinct.  Birders often report hearing male Bachman’s Warblers, but so far most claims have turned out to be mistakes; one variation of the Northern Parula’s song sounds incredibly like that of Bachman’s – the same buzzy, cicada-like trill.  When sound recordings of Bachman’s Warbler are played during research outings, the other birds in the forest occasionally fall silent, perhaps as if wondering what strange, unknown visitor has suddenly arrived.  Other times during playback of a Bachman’s call, a Northern Parula might appear.

No formal management plan exists for conservation action regarding Bachman’s Warbler.  Two potential breeding sites were thought to exist prior to 2001: the bird’s former stronghold around I’On Swamp in the Francis Marion National Forest, and the Congaree Swamp National Monument in South Carolina.   A habitat enhancement program in the Francis Marion found no Bachman’s Warblers utilizing those sites.  Based on previous, plausible visual sightings as well as audial, in 2002 a team of ornithologists led by Craig Watson of the Atlantic Coast Joint Venture extensively surveyed likely habitats in the Congaree.  Although field researchers logged ninety species of birds, Bachman’s Warbler was not among them.   These scattered, miniscule remains of the canebrakes provide only a small glimpse of a once remarkably huge and complex ecosystem, and reflect our knowledge of its inhabitants.

Of Bachman’s winter habitat in Cuba, we know even less.  The extensive clearing of lowlands for commercial sugarcane agriculture must have had its effects, as well as the severe hurricanes and storms which often sweep along the warbler’s narrow migration corridor.  In 2002, a man in Guardalavaca, Cuba filmed a bird he identified as a Bachman’s Warbler and sent video clips to the Cornell Ornithology Lab.  Cornell posted the clips on a website and invited feedback from the scientific community and the public.  The video, grainy and inconclusive, is most likely that of a Cuban Golden Warbler.  Even a 1988 sighting in Louisiana has never been confirmed, but is oft repeated on blog posts as the last known glimpse of a Bachman’s Warbler.  Bachman’s, like the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, is a ghost bird of a prior era.

At the turn of the last century, Missouri businessman and amateur ornithologist Otto Widmann spent countless hours studying birds in the wild.  He was the first to collect a Bachman’s nest and eggs, in 1897.  In 1902, his house burned down, along with all his field notes and a draft manuscript of his Catalog of the Birds of Missouri, a culmination of 25 years of observation and writing.   One story survives:  In 1897, a female Bachman’s built a nest within reaching distance of Widmann’s observing point for a week without him noticing.   Alas, no Bachman’s nest, a carefully shaped cup of cane leaves and pine needles holding 3 or 4 white eggs, delicately lined with lichen and Spanish moss, has been found since 1937, in Alabama.

So many questions remain unanswered.  Why are the Bachman’s eggs white, a rare color with wood warblers?  Was Bachman’s specific niche a microhabitat where the canebrakes merged into the forest?  In analysis of the bird’s nest site selection, have we undervalued the importance of nearby water like the biodiversity-rich Carolina bays and pocosins?  Were the hibiscus groves of lowland Cuba its ideal winter territory?  Do we need to keep searching, more of us, the scattered gaps and edges that remain?  To all but a few dedicated birders and scientists, Vermivora bachmanii may seem like just another drab warbler, indistinguishable from all the other yellow warblers, unremarkable in any aspect – one of many songbirds, heard no longer.  Most people don’t even know how to pronounce the name – Backman’s – and its disappearance conjures no fantastic stories.  Bachman’s Warblers did not once darken the skies like massive flocks of passenger pigeons.  No one shot the last breeding pair of Bachman’s Warblers in a dramatic, tragic hunt.

There is no closure to Bachman’s greater story.  It is the story of a population dying largely unnoticed.  We neither knew, nor cared, what we would be losing when we destroyed the canebrakes, clearcut the trees, and converted the swamps to rice-growing estates.  Nowadays, it’s not only outright habitat destruction that threatens species, but cumulative and insidious encroachment in the form of agricultural and highway runoff, power plant and pulp mill drainage, and invasive species.  The Franklin tree that Maria Martin Bachman painted is now extinct in the wild.

There were two confirmed sightings of Bachman’s in Cuba in 1981 and 1984.  Even more poignant, old film footage belonging to famed South Carolina ornithologist E. Burnham Chamberlain shows a male Bachman’s Warbler perched on a pine branch, open-beaked and warbling enthusiastically.  The film has no sound.  Perhaps these images truly are the last certain glimpses of Bachman’s Warblers, and forevermore we can only imagine them: flying singly above lowcountry plantations, flickering through understory thickets, seeking places to nest.  Perhaps one or two of the eldest passed away silently amidst clusters of red hibiscus on Isla de la Juventud.  Or maybe a lone family of Bachman’s remains in the undergrowth safety of a small unreachable Louisiana marsh, deliberately gleaning spiders from leaves or acrobatically clinging to cane stalks.   Maybe the Qualla Boundary canebrakes are a harbinger of future restoration projects in Bachman’s original territories.

Mystery begets both hope and despair.  We are left to wonder.  We are given a chance to ensure that threatened songbirds like Kirtland’s Warbler avoid a similar fate.  We are left thinking of the colors of Bachman’s Warbler.   Ornithologist William Brewster, on a birding expedition to the Suwannee River in 1890, saw at least a thousand migrating warblers in a fifteen-acre area, and estimated that five percent of them were Bachman’s.  Brewster admired one male’s characteristic song for a time – before shooting it for his collection.  He described Bachman’s Warbler with the words dusky olive…deep lemon…light gamboge…ashy white…smoke-grey…purity of black.

Another term of venery: Behold, a bouquet of warblers.  Will we ever see feathers so alive like this again?

 

Carrie Naughton is a freelance bookkeeper who writes speculative fiction, environmental essays, book reviews, and poetry. Her work can be read at WordsDance, Star*Line, Up The Staircase Quarterly, and NonBinary Review. Find her at carrienaughton.com – where she blogs frequently about whatever captures her interest.

 

by Gavin Van Horn

Ever since I moved to Chicago, I’ve been pondering the question of whether there is a single animal that best captures the essence of this city. Can an animal incarnate a place? On the one hand, I realize my quest is quixotic. I’m tilting at windmills of my own imagination. Which animal best symbolizes a place is one of the more subjective questions a person could ask, and if one were to take it seriously, the answer is open to a thousand viable candidates.

Setting aside the obvious athletic associations of animals with Chicago—da Bears, da Bulls—which are prioritized, as most team logos are, on the fierceness not the residency of the animal, what might be some qualifications for an urban icon? What suite of qualities lends an animal this status? A certain presence in the way that she carries herself, an unquantifiable mystery that induces awe in the beholder that such a creature should share the same space with us? A rarity that makes sighting him a special event, a reason to run home and write down the date and place of discovery or breathlessly recount the story to others? A charismatic physiology or coloration or set of behaviors that we find particularly beautiful, that pours fresh fuel on the fires of our imaginations?

These questions push beyond “favorites” toward something more ethereal, to the animals we feel especially drawn to without knowing precisely why. Wildlife ecologist Aldo Leopold circled such questions and landed on a term for what he was after, numenon.

It is unimportant, unless you derive enjoyment from digging into historical cabinets of curiosities, to know that Leopold borrowed the concept, and the ideas it represented from the Russian philosopher-mystic Pyotor Ouspensky, who, for his part, took it from the turn-of-the-nineteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant.* The important thing is that Leopold needed a word to describe a feeling that went beyond physical appearances. Sometimes we feel things so deeply we grope to see if there is a color for the crayon. Germans seem to have a special talent for word combinations that distill what would otherwise demand whole sentences of explanation—Schadenfreude, pleasure derived from the misfortune of others, or Kummerspeck, which literally means “grief bacon” and refers to the excess weight gained from emotional over-eating.

Had Leopold lived to see the creation of the field of conservation biology, he might have opted for flagship, or umbrella, or focal species as his metaphor of choice for what he was after. But maybe not. Those terms somehow seem too ordinary to be useful. He was chasing something closer to the marrow, something that joined marrow, passed clean through it and bound it together.

He was after something, dare I say, spiritual—the numinous spirit of place. Yet he grounded this mysterious spirit of place in a nonhuman animal. Each landscape has a numenon, he writes in the essay “Chihuahua and Sonora,” from his environmental classic A Sand County Almanac. He proposes that the blue jay is the numenon of the hickory groves; the whisky-jack serves this role in the muskegs; the piñonero (piñon jay) for the juniper foothills. “Ornithological texts do not record these facts,” he adds with a wink.

For the north woods, it is the ruffed grouse. About this numinous being, Leopold comments:

In terms of conventional physics, the grouse represents only a millionth of either the mass or the energy of an acre. Yet subtract the grouse and the whole thing is dead. An enormous amount of some kind of motive power has been lost. A philosopher has called this imponderable essence the numenon of material things. It stands in contradiction to phenomenon, which is ponderable and predictable, even to the tossings and turnings of the remotest star.

It is as though a landscape gathers all its energy and concentrates its “imponderable essence” into a species that represents its will and desire to be.

The bulk of Leopold’s short essay is about the numenon of the Sierra Madre in northern Mexico, the thick-billed parrot—a flashy, chatty, communal bird that boldly makes its presence known on the landscape by raising the dawn and scolding unfamiliar visitors. The thick-billed parrot, for Leopold, best incarnated the other-than-human forces that constituted the landscape’s unique presence. The parrot—or the grouse, or the jay—is the visible manifestation of what defines a place qua place, something that, if we are receptive to it, draws us into a greater mystery and fastens us together.

Can a city, a landscape defined by human presence, have numenon? Can one even ask that question of a largely artifactual habitat? I don’t know how Leopold would answer. But I can imagine that if he were here, expansive thinker that he was, he would indulge me. He was, after all, a person who consistently advocated—in the classroom, in the field, and in his writings—for the development of ecological perception. He cautioned that a PhD wasn’t necessary for this mental faculty; in fact, an advanced degree might prove a liability, because “the Ph.D. may become as callous as an undertaker to the mysteries at which he officiates.” For the person skilled with ecological perception, however, “The weeds in a city lot convey the same lesson as the redwoods; the farmer may see in his cow-pasture what may not be vouchsafed to the scientist adventuring in the South Seas.” The intricate connections between plants and animals, through time and across landscapes, are available to us all, no matter where we are. Even weeds in a city lot can open a portal to interconnected fantasias.

The city is characterized by the deep imprint of human activity, but it is not dead matter. It is not an iron lung, breathing by mechanical pumps and pistons. Woven into its living fabric are the lives of legions. I think Leopold would argue a little ecological perception can go a long way, even in the city.

So what animal might best embody the numenon of Chicago?

Coyotes? Make no mistake, I identify with coyotes on a personal level. They are the quintessential urban adapters. Any-habitat-adapters might be putting it more accurately. They continue to surprise and trickify as the comeback kids. But there’s a catch. They’ve been able to do so successfully because we’re missing wolves in Illinois, have been for 150 years, the species that would have hampered the coyote’s dramatic success or suppressed their outmigration from the West altogether. The numenon of Chicago must be, how to say it, more autochthonous, a long-term resident.

Peregrine falcons? Another comeback kid, a triumphant story of reestablishing their presence after a precipitous decline due to human poisons. Also a feel-good symbol of humans awakening to destructive actions and lending a hand in the recovery process. Other attributes—built for speed, terrifying in their power, graceful in their precision, stoic in their demeanor. Peregrines have made the city theirs, as though they orchestrated the construction of skyscrapers, using us as pawns to raise the flattened Midwest to suit their elevated purpose. Chicago is one city among many that peregrines have reclaimed, though their geographical promiscuity doesn’t make them approachable. They live out of reach and often out of sight. Unless you have climbing gear and a hard hat, they are a difficult bird to observe. They embody the ethereal qualities of the numenon, but though they are in they city they are not quite of the city.

If not coyotes, “the ghosts of Chicago,” or peregrines, the winged dynamo, then whom? I’d like to make an argument on behalf of what might seem, at first blush, an unlikely candidate. A creature with a name that sounds like the sobriquet of a comic book anti-hero: the Black-crowned Night Heron.

This is a bird of contrasts and juxtapositions. The species takes its name from the cap, or crown, of black that divides the heron’s head into a sideways yin-yang, but the first feature you may notice is the pair of ivory colored feathers projecting like white contrails from the base of that head. Or the midnight blue contrast of his back, offset by the downy white of his underbelly. Maybe the pair of corncob yellow legs that prop up his football-shaped body and hold it still, as though it’s on a tee.

But eventually the heron’s red eye, a ruby supernova that deepens to a blackhole center, will pull you in. This red eye fixes you in its gaze, letting you know that you are part of his passing world, not he of yours. Black-crowned will do, its evocative as species names go, but better would be the Red-eyed Night Heron.

By land, they don’t usually allow me close. But if I’m in their watery domains, I can, with appropriate gentleness, paddle near enough that the cool red marble locks onto me.
We don’t have much by way of rivers in the section of the city in which I live. We have to make due with a manmade canal, the North Shore Channel, which was cut in the early twentieth century to facilitate the removal of human waste. Down the canal; out of sight, out of mind. With modern treatment systems, conditions have improved for the channel waters, enough that travelling on top of the water is deemed safe. Squint your eyes and it feels like an honest to goodness creek. At least the herons think so.

In recent years, I’ve seen them on the Channel with increasing frequency. They aren’t nesting there, but the waterway makes a decent hunting ground. They seem to like the portion closest to the lake best. One day, I saw no less than eleven of them perched above the waters, some in trees, some on a cement wall, eyeballing the waters below, meditating on fish.

I felt privileged to bear witness. Night herons are a state endangered bird. They once lived on the far Southeast Side of Chicago in some scrappy pocket wetlands, surviving between steel factories and car assembly plants. Then, around 2009, they moved. They moved toward downtown Chicago. They moved to the zoo.

Location, location, location. Walking distance from Lake Michigan and two-and-a-half miles north of the Loop, Lincoln Park Zoo has nine hundred resident species and serves as “Chicago’s Living Classroom.” It’s also a free-to-the-public zoo, which may account for the more than 3.5 million visitors who come each year. In 2008, the zoo constructed a “Nature Boardwalk,” deepening an already existing pond that lies just outside the entrance, planting native vegetation, and introducing aquatic organisms. There’s a walking path that loops around and away from the fourteen-acre area, a popular spot for strolling and snapping pictures, and now, getting splattered with night heron poo.

You see, the night herons—there were 300 nesting pairs in 2015—have selected two locations for their nesting colonies that overhang pedestrian walkways. One is located by the Lincoln Memorial statue just south of the Nature Boardwalk; the other is located over the red wolf exhibit in the zoo itself. No one said that nests or nest location were night heron specialities. Unlike the beautiful tight weave of a warbler’s home or the mud-dappled engineering of a cliff swallow’s abode, night heron nests look like afterthought. Their nests prioritize function over form, little more than a jumble of medium-size sticks jammed into the crook of a tree.

Whatever works. And, apparently, they will build these brushpiles wherever they damn well please. Even over heavily trafficked footpaths in the heart of Chicago. Which returns me to subject of heron poo. In my estimation, any bird that intentionally or unintentionally puts us in our place, causes us to take note of its presence, reminds us that we are subject to more-than-human forces by tarnishing our self-importance as well as our button-down shirts, has my respect. Let us call this the virtue of night heron shit.

But the Black-crown Night Heron’s construction abilities belie the bird’s physical elegance and energetic concision. They are meditators, as I said. The body does not often stir, and when it does, it is for the purpose of mindful stalking. One yellow leg, slowly raised, purposefully placed, the heron makes his food expend energy finding him. Then, like a lightning flash, he strikes.

Their nests, their bodies, and their behaviors evoke a certain prehistoric deep time that contrasts with their modern choices of city habitat. They represent the wild forces, bent but unbroken, that pulse through the city. All these are good reasons for numenal consideration. But, for me, it is the eye that distinguishes the Black-crowned Night Heron’s claim as numenon of Chicago. We need to be eyed with a bit of suspicion. Our approach should be cause for other animals’ concern. We have not gently claimed the city; we steamrolled our way into the landscape, cut channels to flush our unwanted pollutions away from us (and toward someone else), tore through prairie to build shopping malls, and threw concrete wherever we pleased.

And yet.

The herons are part of our story, and we theirs, entangled in a city of juxtapositions that rub against one another, like the black and white of a heron’s head. A man-made canal that can’t be safely swum, but has been repurposed by avian and aquatic beings for food, shelter, and safe passage. A zoo in one of the more densely populated portions of the city that hosts their nesting colonies. An endangered bird who finds the city homey. The Black-crowned Night Heron carries the juxtapositions of the landscape in his body, reclaiming the fruits of modern engineering with a pre-modern disposition. He is the numenon, the will and self-expression of the land, the mysterious essence of this place. The bird bears these entangled histories, and we with him, into an unknown future.

All the while, the cool red marble warily watches. There are cool red eyes watching us all, wondering if these humans will find a way to adapt to this place, to inhabit a city in a way that is enduring. Red eyes waiting. Red eyes watching.

* If you are an appreciator of Western philosophy and its modern-day interpretations, or a glutton for academic excavation, Ashley Pryor offers an astute and engaging tour of the relationship between Leopold’s and Ouspensky’s writing, especially their shared interest in a impersonal nature mysticism in her article “Thinking like a Mystic: The Legacy of P.D. Ouspenksy’s Tertium Organum on the Development of Aldo Leopold’s ‘Thinking Like a Mountain,’” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 5, no. 4 (2011): 465-490.

 

Gavin Van Horn is the Director of Cultures of Conservation for the Center for Humans and Nature. He is the co-editor of City Creatures: Animal Encounters in the Chicago Wilderness (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Relative Wild: Common Grounds for Conservation (University of Chicago Press, in progress). He writes for, edits, and curates the City Creatures blog.

All images by Gavin Van Horn

by Paula Peeters

Cold wind buffets my breath as the small boat bounces along the waves. We are heading towards a tiny, sun-bleached rocky nub of an island, one of the many that cluster about the sprawling, inverted triangle of Eyre Peninsula, like small fish shadowing a large, cruising shark. And sharks aren’t far from my mind. As I clamber from the boat to the sloping brown rocks, slick with algae, I’m concentrating hard on not falling in. Great white sharks are regulars in these waters – they take fish, seals, sea lions and the occasional unfortunate surfer or abalone diver. Right now the Australian sea lions are pupping, which is why I am here on this island. I’m helping researchers Peter Shaughnessy and Terry Dennis count this season’s pups to help track the status of this threatened species.

The Australian sea lion is golden-coated, dewy-eyed and the only pinniped that’s endemic to Australia. The lithe, sleek females are reclining here and there, dozing in the bright sunlight. Their chocolate-brown pups are less obvious and more difficult to find. We scramble transects across the low rocky brow of the island, keeping each other in sight to make sure no pups are missed.

Eyre Peninsula is about halfway along the southern shoreline of Australia, and a special cast of creatures inhabit its coasts and islands. Dapper black-and-white pacific gulls stand sentinel on rocks and beaches, often in pairs. Green rock parrots tinkle as they alight daintily on the coastal bushes, gleaning puckered yellow berries from the ruby saltbush. They chatter to each other, inspecting cracks and crevices in the cliff lines for possible nest sites. Oystercatchers pipe sadly as they fly parallel to the beach, in pairs, and white-bellied sea eagles and ospreys can often be seen drifting high overhead. Some islands have bilbies, others have bettongs, rock wallabies, or stick-nest rats. There are also ark populations of pythons, and odd varieties of tiger snake.

Today, the matronly bulk of gentle grey Cape Barren geese are surveying us warily, red eyes alert behind zinc-yellow beaks. As I carefully examine the bony carapace of the island in my search for sea lion pups, my eyes occasionally sink into the unfocused depths of a downy goose nest. Its softness contrasts strangely with the harshness of the low spiky, salt-pruned bushes and the sparse threads of dry grass. And suddenly, glaring at me with its enormous yellow eyes, is a bush stone-curlew. Upright and obvious on its long, thin legs; slight and seemingly vulnerable against the wide sky.

Sea-lion, goose and stone-curlew, assembled on this low treeless island surrounded by sea – a striking image, and one that challenges my idea of the ‘normal’ habitat of a bush stone-curlew. I had associated this enigmatic, ground-dwelling bird with grassy woodlands, not rocky, sea-swept islands. But I am so happy to see it here, slowly sidling away, neck extended, its buff-and-brown markings already dissolving back into the landscape. The bush stone-curlew Burhinus grallarius – also known as the bush thick-knee – has declined over large parts of it range, including throughout Eyre Peninsula. It’s one of the threatened species we are trying to restore to Coffin Bay National Park, a mainland park that is not far away. Stone-curlews are described as ‘terrestrial waders’, and there are 10 species worldwide. But the bush stone-curlew is more closely associated with dry land than wetlands. Before European settlement it was found over much of the Australian mainland, but it is now listed as threatened in the south-eastern states of Victoria and New South Wales.

* * *

The barren calcrete landscape is illuminated in the headlights as K.D. Lang’s rich, languid voice fills the cab of the 4WD. Perhaps incongrously, but then perhaps there is a likeness between this landscape and the mid-winter bleakness of the lands of the 49th parallel. Nothing stirs as our 4WD lurches after ranger Tom’s ute, which is showing us the way over this seemingly blasted landscape of bare white rocks, twists of grazed-down grasses, and the bleached gnarled bodies of sheoaks, laying sideways where they once stood tall. Stubborn clumps of half green, half twiggy-dead coast beard-heath and other unpalatable shrubs loom in and out of view. And every now and then there is a movement – the rhythmic bounce of a western grey kangaroo – and then it stops and stands, turns to look towards us, into the headlights. Quizzical, and not very smart. An easy target if we had a gun, but we don’t. Tom Gerschwitz isn’t hunting roos tonight – the cull will be later in the year. Tonight we’re hunting bush stone-curlews, but not to kill. They’re a cherished native species, and part of the ecological restoration of this park. Tonight we’re trying call-playback to find out if they have returned.
The call of a bush stone-curlew is an unearthly, haunting thing. It begins as a weird wail that swells in volume and rises in tone, and then multiplies into a shuddering cacophony of hysterical cries. It sounds like many birds are calling, but I’m told it only emanates from one. But bush stone-curlews often call together – in gatherings that have been described as whistling concerts, corroborees or glee parties. In many Aboriginal cultures the stone-curlew’s call is associated with death. The Warlpiri people of the Tanami Desert believe that when a stone curlew calls in a certain way then there are many dingoes around; if it calls differently a small child might throw a trembling fit. Aboriginal names for these birds include Weeloo and Willaroo – which echo the sound of its call – and also Wayayi, Wirntiki and Ngamirlirli. No doubt there are many more Aboriginal names, since the bush stone-curlew’s natural range is most of mainland Australia.

We cut the gurgling diesel engines and are swallowed by the dark stillness of the night. Except for the distant sigh of the sea, in place of the sighing that the wind would have made in the sheoaks, were they still alive. Tom knows from old folk’s tales and surveyors’ maps that this place was a sheoak grassy woodland when white people settled here. The drooping sheoak Allocasuarina verticillata is a graceful greyish tree with fine long hanging branchlets that look soft and hairlike from a distance, like the tails of the feral horses only recently removed from the Park. The Ngarrindjeri aboriginal people believe that the sound of wind in the sheoaks are the voices of their spirit ancestors. These trees are drought-tolerant and nitrogen-fixing; nutritious and highly palatable to horse, sheep, cow and rabbit. The early settlers introduced all four, which competed with the kangaroos that also like eating sheoaks. Any sheoaks that were within browsing height were devoured, and old trees were felled to provide extra feed. Fire and rain loosened the thin precious topsoil – already bared of grass from overgrazing, and the long, dry Mediterranean-climate summers. The soil washed away, exposing the calcrete bones of the Coffin Bay Peninsula. They made it a National Park when it wasn’t good for much else: Coffin Bay National Park, on the south-western tip of Eyre Peninsula.

In the darkness Tom plays the recorded wailing call of the bush stone-curlew. And we wait quietly, our breath steaming in the cold starlight. There is no answer from bird or beast, so we move on to the next monitoring site. And the next. No calls respond to the recorded cries. There are no stone-curlews here.

* * *

Several years have passed, and I now live in Brisbane, subtropical Queensland, many miles northeast of the Eyre Peninsula. I often cycle to the Queensland Herbarium, nestled in the foothills of Mt Coot-tha Forest, on the grounds of the Brisbane Botanic Gardens. The last steep slope up to the back entrance of the Herbarium takes some effort, especially at the end of a long ride. One day, when I was slowly pedalling up this bitumen driveway, I felt those yellow eyes upon me once more. This time there were two pairs of eyes: two bush stone-curlews were sitting blithely on the verge of the road. One standing, one sitting; both eyeing me calmly from their chosen resting place that was in the open, amongst the bark-chip-mulch.

This is a resident pair that is often seen around the back of the Herbarium, seemingly oblivious to the comings and goings of botanists and ecologists, and the loading and unloading of vehicles. Bush stone-curlews may be threatened in most of south-eastern Australia, but they are still secure in northern Australia, including Queensland. Even in the suburbs of Brisbane – which is a major city – there are many places where the wailing cry of the bush stone-curlew is often heard. This made me curious, as foxes were often cited in southern Australia as a major cause of the bush stone-curlew’s decline. But foxes are present in Brisbane, along with dogs and cats.

As an ecologist, I’m always wary of the simple answer. Most ecosystems are composed of numerous species, interacting in a multitude of complex ways, in space and time. I am also suspicious of certain people that seem to gain satisfaction from killing feral animals, and are eager to vilify these creatures, and blame them for the decline of native species. I suspect it’s some sort of displaced guilt. Over the last 200 years or so, humans (and the domestic animals we nurture) have been by far the most destructive feral animals that have impacted on the Australian environment. But instead of facing this reality, there is much hatred directed towards feral cats, foxes and rabbits.

Feral animals are a significant threat to many native Australian species. But sometimes feral species are not the main threat to a native species, or even a threat at all. The main factors that seem to have caused the decline of the bush stone-curlew in south-eastern Australia are the destruction of its habitat by overgrazing, burning and intensive clearing of vegetation. Tom understood this for Coffin Bay National Park – that the stone-curlews were unlikely to return without the restoration of the sheoak grassy woodlands, despite an ongoing fox control program. I suspect that the long dry summers and generally lower productivity of southern Australia also make it much harder to restore some habitats and maintain healthy populations of certain native species. In the parts of northern Australia where the bush stone-curlew is secure, even common, the summers are hot and wet, and the winters are mild. Plant growth is rampant, which results in a large and continuous supply of leaf-litter and woody debris, which are used by stone-curlews as breeding, resting and feeding sites. Heat, moisture and abundant plantlife also results in high numbers of insects, other invertebrates, frogs and lizards which make up the bulk of the stone-curlew diet. As long as some native vegetation is retained, fires are infrequent and grazing pressure is low (as is the case in the more leafy suburbs of Brisbane) it seems that bush stone-curlew habitat is in reasonably good supply, and these birds continue to survive, and even thrive. Even in the presence of the foxes, dogs, cats – and people – who also live in the greater Brisbane area.

* * *

In Coffin Bay National Park, and elsewhere on Eyre Peninsula, people are trying to coax sheoaks and native grasses back into the landscape, and in this way conserve the native species that rely on sheoak grassy woodlands. (In Australia, the term ‘woodland’ is used for a treed ecosystem where the trees are relatively widely spaced, and the foliage cover of the tallest tree layer is less than 30%. The term ‘forest’ is reserved for denser stands of trees where foliage cover of the tallest tree
layer is greater than 30%.) Woodlands with an open, grassy understorey have been heavily exploited for grazing and cropping. It’s no coincidence that many native plant and animal species that once lived in these grassy woodlands – especially those in southern Australia – are now in decline or are gone forever. As I learnt from my island adventure, the bush stone-curlew doesn’t always live in woodlands – it has a preference for open area generally, and has been observed nesting where there is good visibility at ground level for at least 250 m all round. But in many mainland habitats the bush stone-curlew is strongly associated with leaf litter and woody debris. These provide good camouflage for the stone-curlew and also homes for the small creatures that it hunts. Fires, grazing, tree loss, firewood collection and just general ‘tidying up’ all result in less leaf litter and woody debris. Fortunately, people are learning that an ‘untidy’ woodland – where wood and litter are left where they fall – provides a much healthier habitat for wildlife than one that is regularly groomed, and devoid of organic clutter.

In southern New South Wales the Nature Conservation Working Group has been releasing captive-bred bush stone-curlews to supplement the dwindling local populations of this species. There have been six releases since 2008. Most of the birds have survived and some have also bred, with the most recent chicks sighted in January 2015. Predator control is an important part of the rewilding of the bush stone-curlew, but it isn’t the only factor involved. A release of bush stone-curlews into a predator-free enclosure in New South Wales was less successful (in terms of bird survival) compared to a concurrent release of birds into a predator-controlled, unfenced area nearby. The Australian Wildlife Conservancy, which manages these sites, suggested that starvation was the cause of bird mortality in the predator-free area. Research by Elisa Tack in southern New South Wales and north east Victoria has also revealed the important, but often overlooked role of food availability for the conservation and rewilding of the bush stone-curlew.

Bush stone-curlew romance, or at least sex, has also made it to the internet, thanks to an innovative rewilding project in the Australian Capital Territory. The Mulligans Flat Woodland Sanctuary has reintroduced a number of locally extinct woodland animals – including the bush stone-curlew – into a predator-free enclosure which adjoins a new suburb. By law, neighbouring residents are required to keep their cats on their premises at all times. A bird called Rowena was part of the first group of bush stone-curlews released in October 2014. Like many young adolescents she was keen to explore the world on her own terms, and promptly flew out of the predator-free enclosure to try a bit of urban living. Fortunately she survived some brief forays across roads, and some cat-naps on road verges and roundabouts, and was returned by concerned residents when they noticed her leg tag. Since then she has stayed within the predator-free Sanctuary, and has developed an attachment to fellow-release bird Herbie. Both were captured on film while trying to procreate and you can watch their tentative dance on YouTube (https://youtu.be/YxXbqYZ5v-c ). Kate Grarock, the ecologist at Mulligans Flat, thinks it’s unlikely that they will breed successfully for several months, but there is great excitement for the future. A second release of bush stone-curlews is planned for September/October 2015, and the local community appears to be enthusiastically behind the project.

The bush stone-curlew is a curious, charismatic, and some might say spooky part of Australia’s heritage. Many people across the country are concerned for its welfare, and are working hard to ensure the continued existence of this species. Our understanding of wildlife ecology is also maturing, as more and more people comprehend the complexity of ecological interactions, and the importance of good quality habitat as well as predator control when it comes to saving threatened species. Whether these efforts can keep up with the rapacious rate of ongoing environmental degradation, especially the impacts of a continuously growing human population, and the ongoing effects of climate change, is not known. But at least the bush stone-curlew has many friends, and the rewilding movement just keeps on growing.

* Update on the Mulligan’s Flat stone-curlews, December 2015: Rowena and Herbie are still living within the Sanctuary, and have raised their first chick. The chick is doing well, and is seen on camera each week. Ten more captive-bred bush stone-curlews were released into the Sanctuary in October 2015, and all have survived so far. Just before Christmas two of the newly-released birds (Lewis and Kay) were found to be protecting a nest with eggs, much to the delight of everyone involved in Mulligan’s Flat.

References and thanks

Anderson, G.J. (1991) The breeding biology and the bush thick-knee Burhinus magnirostris and notes on its distribution in the Brisbane area. The Sunbird 21:32-61

Gosford, B. 2010 Bird of the Week: the Bush Stone Curlew as a harbinger of death…and more. http://blogs.crikey.com.au/northern/2010/09/27/bird-of-the-week-the-bush-stone-curlew-as-a-harbinger-of-death-and-more/ Accessed 13/08/2015

Hume, R. & Bonan, A. (2013). Thick-knees (Burhinidae). In: del Hoyo, J., Elliott, A., Sargatal, J., Christie, D.A. & de Juana, E. (eds.) (2013). Handbook of the Birds of the World Alive. Lynx Edicions, Barcelona. (retrieved from http://www.hbw.com/node/52241 on 13 August 2015).

Kate Grarock, ecologist at Mulligans Flat Woodland Sanctuary, and www.bettongs.org Accessed 13/08/2015

Kemp, L., D Roshier, L Steindler, N Riessen (2014) Trialling Release Protocols and Thresholds of Predator Presence for the Reintroduction of the Bush Stone-curlew to southern Australia. Abstract for the 3rd Curlew Summit, August 2014, Albury.

Marchant,S. and P.J. Higgins (1993) Handbook of Australian, New Zealand and Antarctic birds. Volume 2. Raptors to Lapwings. Oxford University Press, Melbourne.

Nature Conservation Action Group http://www.bushstonecurlew.com.au/about Accessed 14/08/2015

Peeters, P. J., Gerschwitz, T., & Carpenter, R. J. (2006). Restoring sheoak grassy woodlands on lower Eyre Peninsula. Unpublished report, Department of Environment and Heritage, South Australia.

Tack, E. (2014) Lessons from 10 years of Studying Bush Stone-curlews. Abstract for the 3rd Curlew Summit, August 2014, Albury.

 

Paula Peeters is a writer, artist and ecologist. Her written work ranges from playful observations of nature, to science communication, and many things in between. Her art practice focusses on wildlife and ecosystems, and strives to capture the beauty, habit and characteristic light of these subjects. Paula blogs at www.paperbarkwriter.com

 

Header image courtesy of Raymond Carpenter.