When you stole the house you had a dream

~ Amanda Gelender

(Amanda Gelender is an anti-zionist, Jewish American woman. She has been part of the Palestinian solidarity movement since 2006.)

When you stole the house you had a dream
Was it beautiful, then? In your mind’s eye?

You dreamed of tilling someone else’s soil,
Walking through someone else’s cherished Eden
Sinking your teeth into plucked and looted oranges

I can see how your eyes sparkled
Dreaming of a Jewish national oasis
Fields bursting with bounty
Birthed in rivers of Palestinian blood

You wanted to carve out safety
No matter who you had to kill
To pretend it was your well (poisoned)
your land (seized)
and your sea (blocked)

But you are a stranger to this place
The trees don’t know you, and they’ve swayed in the wind for generations

Cruising on segregated roads, you whiz past military checkpoints
A European refugee turned fascist overseer
Jewish colonial dreams backed by western imperial guns
Raising flower beds and families on mass indigenous graves

When you stole the house you had a dream
But to her, it was just a bullet to the back of the head
To him, a kidnapped child
To them, a trail of tears
To his parents, it was exile
Life snuffed out and rendered to a tent

But for you — Arrival.
Fresh starts in freshly ethnically cleansed land
Kibbutzim stockpiled with guns, poised for manifest destiny
Fresh water gushing onto stolen crops as Palestine perishes from thirst

Did you light the Shabbos candles the night you lit the villages on fire?
Did you pray to G-d before you unleashed the terror squads?
Did you watch the embers fly from your window,
your burnt soul dancing in the wind during Shabbos prayer?

G-d laughs at your hypocrisy, your fascist cowardice
Pray to your ego, worship death, squat on soil
Carry water for empire, be a sadist for the state
You press a knife to the neck of the Torah and try to kill her, too
No one is safe from an abuser like you

Settle down, Palestine
Why are you so upset?

Lock her in the basement
Build a higher wall
She reminds me of rotting flesh
And her ruins ruin my sea view

But Palestine sees you anyway — enduring and steadfast
Palestine flies over, climbs under, and moves through you
Eternal, ineffable, key in hand, ready to return

Was dinner still warm on the table
the night you stole the house full of dreams?
There are ghosts in the kitchen now you know,
I can hear them creak beneath floorboards

They watch you eat pilfered food
And they reclaim the house you stole crumb by crumb,
Building tunnels beneath your sweet, crumbling settler life

Your Jewish national dream is a Palestinian nightmare
Hang the mezuzah, hang your shawl
Carve our sacred star into the captives’ face
Make him remember it was us, the chosen ones,
who wrung life from his neck

It’s your home now, take a breath, settler
Take a breath, a life, a million more
Settle your soul for awhile
Let bombing be a balm for your crushed spirit
Smear your ancestral pain on Palestine’s face, pretend she doesn’t mind

But the olive trees remember
And so do the birds
Every drop of water in the well recalls who poisoned them
Even the earthworms know it was you

Palestine is coming back, can you hear her footsteps approaching the door?The poppies perk up to greet her
The sea waves lap her up
She’s returning home from exile to reclaim what is hers

Get up from your stolen chair
Pack your pilfered things
Take your rifle, your flag, and your audacity, too

Even the wind remembers when you blasted it with bombs
Praying to the wall that wails for Palestine
The entire earth wants you off the land, settler
We want Palestine back, to welcome her home and greet her hello

There was a dream here, once
Before you came
Children laughing and running through sun-drenched living rooms
Pomegranates gifted to outstretched hands from bending tree branches

Palestine was here first and you know it.
Written in indelible ink
She and only she can make the desert bloom
You have to kill to stay here so you know it isn’t yours
Palestine will always haunt your unsettled settler dreams

You can try to sweep her under the rug
Say that the ends justify the means
But you are a monster, Zionism.
You are a genocide, Israel.
It’s over, settler — leave.

The wake up call comes at the crack of dawn
The nightmare is over, sunlight bursts through the wall
And Palestine finally returns home.

Amanda Gelender is an anti-zionist, Jewish American woman. She has been part of the Palestinian solidarity movement since 2006.

 

Imagine the Angels of Bread

This is the year that squatters evict landlords,

gazing like admirals from the rail

of the roofdeck

or levitating hands in praise

of steam in the shower;

this is the year

that shawled refugees deport judges,

who stare at the floor

and their swollen feet

as files are stamped

with their destination;

this is the year that police revolvers,

stove-hot, blister the fingers

of raging cops,

and nightsticks splinter

in their palms;

this is the year

that dark-skinned men

lynched a century ago

return to sip coffee quietly

with the apologizing descendants

of their executioners.

This is the year that those

who swim the border's undertow

and shiver in boxcars

are greeted with trumpets and drums

at the first railroad crossing

on the other side;

this is the year that the hands

pulling tomatoes from the vine

uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine,

the hands canning tomatoes

are named in the will

that owns the bedlam of the cannery;

this is the year that the eyes

stinging from the poison that purifies toilets

awaken at last to the sight

of a rooster-loud hillside,

pilgrimage of immigrant birth;

this is the year that cockroaches

become extinct, that no doctor

finds a roach embedded

in the ear of an infant;

this is the year that the food stamps

of adolescent mothers

are auctioned like gold doubloons,

and no coin is given to buy machetes

for the next bouquet of severed heads

in coffee plantation country.

If the abolition of slave-manacles

began as a vision of hands without manacles,

then this is the year;

if the shutdown of extermination camps

began as imagination of a land

without barbed wire or the crematorium,

then this is the year;

if every rebellion begins with the idea

that conquerors on horseback

are not many-legged gods, that they too drown

if plunged in the river,

then this is the year.

So may every humiliated mouth,

teeth like desecrated headstones,

fill with the angels of bread.

~ Martín Espada

April 17, 1992 - April 17, 2022. Thirty long years. I love you.

 I do want more street protest... more bodies, more noise, more planning, more power.

And also, this...

 

To the fig tree on 9th and Christian

Tumbling through

the city in my

mind without once

looking up

the racket in

the lugwork probably

rehearsing some

stupid thing I

said or did

some crime or

other the city they

say is a lonely 

place until yes

the sound of sweeping 

and a woman

yes with a 

broom beneath

which you are now

too the canopy

of a fig

its arms pulling the

September sun to it

and she

has a hose too

and so works hard

rinsing and scrubbing

the walk

lest some poor sod

slip on the

silk of a fig

and break his hip

and not probably

reach over to gobble up

the perpetrator

the light catches

the veins in her hands

when I ask about

the tree they

flutter in the air

and she says take

as much as

you can

help me

so I load my

pockets and mouth

and she points

to the step-ladder against 

the wall to

mean more

but I was without a

sack so my meager

plunder would have to

suffice and an old woman

whom gravity

was pulling into

the earth loosed one

from a low slung

branch and its eye

wept like hers

which she dabbed

with a kerchief as she

cleaved the fig with

what remained of her

teeth and soon there were

eight or nine

people gathered beneath

the tree looking into

it like a

constellation pointing

do you see it

and I am tall and so

good for these things

and a bald man even

told me so

when I grabbed three 

or four for

him reaching into the

giddy throngs of

yellow-jackets sugar

stoned which he only

pointed to smiling and

rubbing his stomach

I mean he was really rubbing his stomach

like there was a baby

in there

it was hot his

head shone while he

offered recipes to the

group using words which

I couldn't understand and besides

I was a little 

tipsy on the dance

of the velvety heart rolling

in my mouth

pulling me down

and down into the

oldest countries of my

body where I ate my first fig

from the hand of a man who escaped his country

by swimming through the night

and maybe

never said more than

five words to me

at once but gave me

figs and a man on his way

to work hops twice

to reach at last his

fig which he smiles at and calls

baby, c'mere baby,

he says and blows a kiss

to the tree which everyone knows

cannot grow this far north

being Mediterranean

and favoring the rocky, sun-baked soils

of Jordan and Sicily

but no one told the fig tree

or the immigrants

there is a way

the fig tree grows

in groves it wants,

it seems, to hold us,

yes I am anthropomorphizing

goddammit I have twice

in the last thirty seconds

rubbed my sweaty

forearms into someone else's

sweaty shoulder

gleeful eating out of each other's hands

on Christian St.

in Philadelphia a city like most

which has murdered its own

people

this is true

we are feeding each other

from a tree

at the corner of Christian and 9th

strangers maybe

never again.

~ Ross Gay

 

Skunk Cabbage

And now as the iron rinds over,

the ponds start dissolving,

you come, dreaming of ferns and flowers 

and new leaves unfolding

upon the brash

turnip-hearted skunk cabbage

slinging its bunches leaves up

through the chilling mud.

You kneel beside it. The smell

is lurid and flows out in the most

unabashed way, attracting 

into itself a continual spattering

of protein. Appalling its rough

green caves, and the thought

of the thick root nested below, stubborn

and powerful as instinct!

But these are the woods you love,

where the secret name

of every death is life again - a miracle

wrought surely not of mere turning

but of dense and scalding reenactment. Not

tenderness, not longing, but daring and brawn

pull down the frozen waterfall, the past.

Ferns, leaves, flowers, the last subtle

refinements, elegant and easeful, wait

to rise and flourish.

What blazes the trail is not necessarily pretty.

~ Mary Oliver

 

I Go Down to the Shore

I go down to the shore in the morning

and depending on the hour the waves

are rolling in or moving out

And I say, oh, I am miserable

what shall--

what should I do? And the sea says,

in its lovely voice:

Excuse me, I have work to do.

~ Mary Oliver, from A Thousand Mornings

 

Wild Geese

Geese appear high over us,

pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,

as in love or sleep, holds

them to their way, clear 

in the ancient faith: what we need

is here. And we pray, not

for new earth or heaven, but to be

quiet in heart, and in eye

clear. What we need is here.

~ Wendell Berry

 

Trauma. Multiplied by war and conflict worldwide.

 

Noor's cubs, Ranthambhore 

(Photo: Aditya Singh)

 

Tenzin Norbu

 

 

 

In a lifetime of fine photos of this god, this is one of your finer ones, Aditya.

(Photo: Aditya Singh, Ranthambhore)

 

 

(Photo: Aditya Singh)

Mother and daughter, Ranthambhore 2014

Since I was a child, I have felt some sort of ineffable contact with nature. Not connection, that's too passive a word. Contact. It feels like a living spark passes between myself and a tree, myself and a rock, myself and a goose or a snail. I'm a secular person, but oh yes, there is a sacredness, and a one-ness, and a spirit, and it is this living earth. I have been on a hillside of waving golden grass in northwest India, at my daughter's side, watching as a tiger moved silently through the landscape. It is my deep love for the beauty of the natural world, and my deep love for my daughter and our bewildered species, that drive me to climate activism. Despite all the damage and the crises and the work to be done, it is easy for me to imagine a smaller, quieter, greener world in which my daughter and her loved ones breathe easy.

In my fantasy of that world, life and work, family and community, are intertwined because the commons are restored. My daughter, her family, and I, come together with neighbors to work in our forest garden during the day, and tell stories and make music when night falls. Our forest garden needs no fossil fuels. The work is done and the food harvested by ourselves, and by nature. In the world that's coming, there is no plowing that kills the soil and its microscopic life, there are no pesticides, no synthetic fertilizers. My grandchild plays among bees that pollinate, birds that fertilize, and trees that enrich the earth.

That's the world I work for when I work for climate sanity. I work for restoration and for right relationship with the earth. I do it out of a deep sense of biophilia, and belief that our species will finally find its place. I do it for love.

The Summer Day

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean--the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

~ Mary Oliver

In Memory of a Tiger Man

The tiger-tailed comet named Fateh Singh Rathore blazed across our collective skies, dousing itself in the forests of Ranthambhore on March 1, 2011 after 73 years.

I am not a superstitious person. But like everyone fortunate enough to have spent time in his company, I know, without hesitation, that Fateh will spend eternity among Ranthambhore’s tigers. He will occasionally take a little time from his beloved forest to haunt bureaucrats and government officials in Sawai Madhopur, Jaipur, and Delhi foolish or short-sighted enough to fail to do everything in their power to protect the tiger, thus incurring the Tiger Man's wrath. By the same token, whenever they take steps to ensure the tiger's future in India, they will unaccountably feel the most genial presence.

I first met Fateh, in the mid-1990s, in my living room in New York, in the pages of Geoffrey and Diane Ward’s beautiful book Tiger Wallahs: Encounters with the Men Who Tried to Save the Greatest of the Great Cats. The Wards devoted a long chapter to Fateh that will become a treasure and a refuge to those who will miss him so deeply. Anyone longing to spend a few more minutes in Fateh’s company, if only on the printed page, can find solace here. Before I had finished the first paragraph, I was mesmerised by this whiskey-swigging, ghazal-singing tiger guru who in person turned out to be as welcoming of wide-eyed American admirers as he was of the most significant Indian or international VIP.

Fateh’s campfire was a place of wonder. Night after night, stars overhead, happy humans drawn together by the warmth and passion of Fateh’s personality, the occasional tiger or leopard roaming just outside the fire’s glow... was there any more meaningful place to be on this lovely planet? I can picture that campfire as if from outer space. It is burning bright.

It was awe-inspiring to watch Fateh, with consummate grace and his unique panache, balance the demands of protecting Ranthambhore with the more prosaic comforts of his guests. I remember one night at the campfire banquet, laughing as he piled chapatis on my young daughter’s plate, dubbing her “Princess Chapati,” a name she’ll carry with her always. On her first trip into Ranthambhore, Julia sat beside Fateh in the front of his jeep, her face spellbound as she listened to his whispered interpretations of the vocalisations coming from a tigress and cubs invisible in a hillside glade.

The forest found Fateh after he had wandered through his youth, uncertain of his place in the world. Interviewing him for this magazine in March 2008, I heard from his own lips what Ranthambhore’s tiger-filled forest was like when he arrived decades ago:

The beds of the three lakes where people see all the wildlife today were farms where water chestnuts and wheat were cultivated. There was very little water for wildlife. There were shops near the Fort! Everywhere you looked, there were agricultural plots. The forest was completely denuded by cattle, by people, by lopping and browsing. You couldn’t see a blade of grass on the ground. There were 96 villages on the periphery, 20,000 people and an equal number of cattle. People used to camp everywhere. At night, if you climbed the Fort and looked out over the entire park, you saw nothing but campfires. Every hilltop was occupied. No one today can even imagine what it used to be.

If we wish to never see what Fateh witnessed in those first months and years of his work in Ranthambhore, we must follow in his footsteps, giving our own heart and soul to ensuring a secure future for tigers in the beautiful landscape that Fateh returned to Nature. Chinese folklore claimed that the wind was the breath of the tiger. When tigers are secure in Fateh’s vision of India, people of all stripes will breathe easy as well.

~ Written by myself for the April 2011 issue of Sanctuary Asia (www.sanctuaryasia.com)

~ To read an obituary of Fateh in The New York Times, click here.

The future is bright.

Sometimes, a picture really is worth a thousand words.

Happy 205th birthday plus a day, Mr. Lincoln.

    February 12, 1809 - February 13, 1214.

      We miss you still.

Do not stand at my grave and weep,

I am not there; I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow,

I am the diamond glints on snow,

I am the sunlight on ripened grain,

I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you awaken in the morning’s hush

I am the swift uplifting rush

Of quiet birds in circled flight.

I am the soft stars that shine at night.

Do not stand at my grave and cry,

I am not there; I did not die.

~ Mary Elizabeth Frye (1932)

In joy and thanks for your life, which has touched mine, my parents', my siblings', since I was a child... and my daughter's.

Pete Seeger, 94 years.

No, twice in one year is not too many. Today marks the 150th anniversary of the President's delivery of one of the ultimate democratic statements in history, a statement that demands as much attention, as much defending, on this day as it did on that.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863

May, 2013

Dear Cub kids,

By the time you read this letter, my daughter will have graduated from high school! Julia is 18, and will begin attending university in late August. For a mom, this is very hard to believe… that day by day, month by month, year by year, the cherished newborn, baby, toddler, older child, and teenager, has grown to the very cusp of adulthood! What a wonderful, amazing journey, which has been delectably slow and astonishingly rapid at the same time.

Now, it is as if she is a fledgling bird, perched just at the edge of her nest, flapping her wings to strengthen them for flight. I am writing to you about her, and about the two of us, here in Cub because one of the strongest and deepest bonds between this fledgling and me is our passion for nature.

I began writing these letters to Cub kids way back in early 2000. Only a few short months after writing my first letter, my daughter, then 5-years-old, found a maple seedling in her playground sandbox at school. Since she and her pre-kindergarten classmates had studied seeds that year, her teacher encouraged her to bring the seed home, plant it, and watch what happened.

I remember the seed. It was the tiniest thing, just the beginning of a little germinating root, but it had a determined look about it. At home, I gave Julia some soil and a tiny pot. She named the tree-to-be, “Little Tree Grow Grow.”

Wow, did that tree grow. And grow. I wish I had kept track of how many different pots it had to be moved into, like a hermit crab outgrowing its shell! Luckily, we lived in an apartment with a terrace, and the tree was able to live a hardy, outdoor life, braving the elements and the seasons, until at 8-years-old, we knew for sure that this amazing being needed to live in the earth – no pot was going to be able to contain a tree clearly destined for greatness!

“Little Tree Grow Grow,” it turned out, was a silver maple, and the little seed Julia found all those years ago had been dropped by an enormous, old silver maple mom growing near the playground at Julia’s school, that children and teachers have tapped for maple syrup during each year’s spring thaw. She is a beloved old giant.

Well, it was time for the young giantess to go home to her mother! With the help of teachers and maintenance workers, we moved her, in her enormous pot, onto a small, flatbed truck for the short drive back to school. There, in a wonderful spring ceremony, a merry band of pre-K and kindergarten children helped to plant “Little Tree Grow Grow” in the ground just a hop, skip and a jump from the sandbox where the tiny seed had been found 8 years earlier, and almost within the shadow of her mother.

And now, five more years have passed. “Little Tree Grow Grow” is a towering 13-year-old beauty, and Julia is ready to fly! This year’s pre-K children have heard Julia’s story, and each day, they excitedly gather the seeds showering down from mother silver maple, and run around the playground planting them in every available corner.

Meanwhile, a few days before her graduation ceremony, my fledgling walked across campus from her high school to her primary school, to take photographs of “Little Tree Grow Grow” for a school field guide she has been working on. I have had a lot of fun being Julia’s assistant for this project, staying up into the night when Julia has been overloaded with other homework, helping her to finish all the final details of research on the many species of flora and fauna at her school.

At the back of the book, in photographs and words, is the story of “Little Tree Grow Grow.” It’s a natural history story, of two beings joined in care and love, a young girl and a tree, growing through the years together, becoming graceful and resilient, and ready for the wider world.

While Julia takes flight, her silver maple will stay rooted, for countless years to come, dropping its yellow autumn leaves on 5-year-olds, and always there to welcome home the one who raised her.

To children, to parents, to teachers, to the nature and nurture that sustain all of us, happy graduation!

Your friend,

Jen

For the Independence Day, 2013 just passed -- 

The Gettysburg Address

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. [Applause]

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We are met to dedicate a portion of it as the final resting place of those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract. [Applause] The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. [Applause] It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work that they have thus far so nobly carried on. [Applause] It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to the cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion,--that we here highly resolve that the dead shall not have died in vain [Applause], that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom, and that the government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth. [Long continued applause.]

~ Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1863

(The text above is the one Gary Wills (Lincoln at Gettysburg, The Words that Remade America, 1992), considers to be the closest to what Lincoln actually said (read) on November 19, 1863. The applause notations are from the trustworthy AP report of Joseph L. Gilbert, who was present and taking down Lincoln's words as he said them. Lincoln's three-minute speech reimagined the work of the founding fathers, and placed the Declaration of Independence, and its valuing of equality and freedom, above the Constitution as America's founding document.)

In memoriam.

The magnificent black rhinoceros, numbering some 70,000 in 1970, down to 2,500 in 1993.

A 50-million-year-old species decimated in two decades in a wholesale slaughter driven by demand for rhino horns in Asia. How can it be argued that Homo sapiens is not a blight upon the earth? It's too late to make amends to one of four subspecies of black rhino, the Western Black Rhinoceros (pictured above), which was driven to extinction in the first decade of the 21st century.

Please sign the new Avaaz petition to save the remaining exquisite rhinoceros.


(dedicated to Julia - JS)

Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

~ Abraham Lincoln

Let the beauty we love, be what we do. 

~ Rumi, Sufi poet

Dear Cub kids,

I used to think that the behavior of songbirds seemed completely random. In fact, (I hate to say it), in the self-absorbed ignorance and conceit of my life as a human, I used to feel rather sure of it, to feel only fleeting curiosity about the behavior of the small birds in my neighborhood. Too small, too seemingly random… “beneath” my interest??

As so often happens, my mind was changed, my attention seized, by a book. (I hope books never disappear!) This one is called What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal The Secrets of the Natural World. It was written by Jon Young, who was lucky enough to grow up under the mentorship of a man of Native American ancestry, with keen abilities to be in and of wild places.

This book is full of intriguing stories, advice and insight about how to learn of and from birds. Okay, I admit, my realization that birds’ lives and behavior just might be full of meaning preceded my reading of this book. It has grown as I have grown, with the years – if there is one thing I do know now that I didn’t 40 years ago when I was 14, it’s that we – Homo sapiens – know so very little about the natural world around us, and that we constantly, constantly underestimate the behavior, capacities, and yes, wisdom, of other creatures!

Everything that songbirds do is to a purpose. As well-educated kids with great science teachers, you’re probably thinking to yourselves, “well, right, no kidding Jen!” Everything every animal does, with the possible exception of our own species, is to the purpose of survival, to put it a little too simply.

Have you ever spent time watching the small birds in your neighborhood? Have you noticed the quicksilver ways that they move and communicate with each other? Our scientific understanding of songbird behavior is in its infancy, but people like Jon Young have learned a lot from years of simply… paying attention. When you think of songbirds, in addition to their minute beauty, your mind probably dwells on their songs, right? Have you asked yourself why songbirds “sing”? Jon Young and other “observers” of bird language, (including many in India!), listen to, identify, and try to interpret many different kinds of vocalizations: songs, companion calls, territorial aggression, adolescent begging, and alarms. Young says that he is sure that there are many more that we humans are unaware of, including at least three others: migratory flight calls, whisper songs, and copulation calls.

Young shares fascinating stories about blue jays imitating the screech of a sharp-shinned hawk so as to frighten other birds away from a feeder, and his own realization that a weasel (not some other animal) was prowling in the woods near his home by watching the behavior of an alarmed flock of tiny wrens. He asks readers if they’ve noticed the varying behaviors of different kinds of birds at a feeder – the way one type of bird is always the first to flee at some, as yet to we humans, invisible sign of danger, while other birds take longer… and why?

Young urges readers to develop an as-frequent-as-possible habit of sitting in one spot outdoors, and watching and pondering the behavior of the birds in the small area within the reach of our senses. He talks about three reasons for doing this on a sustained basis: first, the human observer will develop a deeper sense of what’s really going on in the world of birds; second, through our deepening awareness of bird language and behavior, we will inevitably see and learn more about local wildlife (since everything birds “say” and do relates to the world around them); and third, we, the human observers, will “settle down.” Literally, into our bird “sit spot,” but also figuratively, into a dawning realization that understanding birds can help us, as Young poignantly puts it, “understand ourselves and, if we wish, make some changes.” “Too often,” Young’s childhood mentor used to tell him, “we humans walk in arrogance.” The awareness needed to understand birds, the prolonged practice of quieting ourselves and turning our attention outward to what is really happening around us, will inevitably change us… into, I would venture to guess, deeper, more thoughtful human beings…

When we first start paying attention to birds and their songs, says Young, we hear only unordered cacophony. Listen more deeply, and you’ll begin to “hear” the reason underlying the chaos. Harmony emerges… an essential lesson for the noisy, cacophonous, fractious primate in danger of desolating a beautiful planet.

But don’t worry about that. For now,  join me in finding your own bird sit spot, and we’ll learn together.

Your friend,

Jen

Ah, not to be cut off, not through the slightest partition shut out from the law of the stars. The inner -- what is it? if not intensified sky, hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/C. Martin (Caltech)/M. Seibert(OCIW)

According to today's New York Times, the "treasures" uncovered by the melting Arctic await plundering. When will it ever end?

(Photo credit: John Harrington)

Talkin' Tigers... 12/11

Dear Cub kids,

In 1933, a little boy named George was born in Germany. As George grew from baby to boy, from youth to adult, he found his salvation in animals, and they found theirs in him. Life took him from the forests of Germany, all over the world, from Alaska to Africa, from India to China, and many, many places in between. On December 2, 2011, George stood with other wildlife protectors on a stage in Mumbai, and accepted a Sanctuary Lifetime Service Award for services rendered to the wild world.

But though George Schaller is being honored for his life’s work, his life and his work are still unfolding.

Here is just a snapshot of George’s adventurous life…

At 14, George and his family left Germany and moved to the United States. During his senior year in high school, George took an aptitude test to help him choose his direction in life. The results of the test pointed George in the direction of interior decoration. But instead of pursuing a life in carpets and curtains, George went to the University of Alaska to study zoology. During summers of fieldwork, George canoed the rivers of northern Alaska, surveying birds. Later, George would compare his summers in Alaska to his childhood years in German forests, conceding about himself, “Essentially, I never grew up.”

Upon completion of graduate studies of Alaska’s caribou, an older scientist asked George a fateful question: “Would you like to study gorillas?” No one had ever studied living gorillas in the wild; they were considered too ferocious, too dangerous. The only things known about wild gorillas had been gleaned after they had been shot. George changed that, moving into a cabin in a flower-sprinkled mountain meadow in the Belgian Congo in 1959. During a year-long study, George discovered and studied eleven gorilla groups and several lone males, and the ecosystem in which they roamed. He achieved what others had thought to be impossible: he studied gorillas on their own terms, alive and fearless in the deep jungles of central Africa. His gorilla studies revolutionized field biology, showing that supposedly dangerous animals could be studied in the wild with little risk.

By 1963, George had a Ph.D. in zoology, a wife, Kay, and two little boys. The family had just begun life in a new cabin, this one in Kanha National Park in India. For three years, as his baby sons grew, George studied tigers, the deer they preyed on, and the beautiful forests and grasslands that sustained them. Embarking on the first systematic, scientific study ever attempted of tigers and their prey, George wanted to unravel the secretive lives of tigers, to learn what effect predator had on prey. While Kay and the boys went looking for tigers on elephant-back, George walked the rolling grasslands and forested ravines of Kanha, sometimes coming face-to-face with his striped quarry as it stalked the herds of sambar, barasingha, chital and blackbuck. After studying the life of Kanha for three years, George realized that tigers were “good” for their prey species, keeping their numbers at levels the ecosystem could sustain. George was among the very first scientists to document the symbiotic relationship between hunter, hunted, and ecosystem.

From India, George and his family moved to Tanzania, studying the lions of the Serengeti, to Pakistan, Nepal and the Himalayas to study the snow leopard, to Central China to study the panda, to the Tibetan Plateau of Western China to study asses and antelopes. He broke new scientific ground everywhere he went, learning about species previously thought impossible to study on their own turf. Everywhere he went, George inspired and enriched the work of fellow field biologists, and looked for young scientists to encourage and mentor.

George’s passion for wild animals and places led him to recognize that they must be protected, and that science could do that best. As fascinating as science is, George said everywhere he went, it must not be undertaken for itself alone, but to ensure the protection of all living things. His insistence that field biology be wedded to conservation might just be his single most important contribution – it led to the protection of over 190,000 square miles of wilderness around the world, an area the size of Spain!

Where in the world is George Schaller today? I don’t know for sure, but I do know that wherever he is, planet Earth is a better place.

Your friend,

Jen

P.S. If you would like to read more about George, I highly recommend: A Life in the Wild: George Schaller’s Struggle to Save the Last Great Beasts, by Pamela Turner.

Talkin' Tigers... 10/11

Dear Cub kids,

I had NO idea how amazing trees are until I read a bunch of books about them. Of course, trees made the books about trees that I read! It’s great to read about single species; I have a wonderful book about oak trees… and it’s also a lot of fun to read books about all trees.

People often use trees to represent nature itself. They play such a large part in our thinking, our mythology, and in our economic and aesthetic lives. Children around the world grow up learning about and experiencing the everyday comfort to be found in a tree.

The very first book with which I struggled as a beginning reader was A Tree is Nice by Janice May Udry. Here are a few lines from the book, a copy of which I still have on my shelf:

Trees are beautiful. They fill up the sky. If you have a tree, you can climb up its trunk, roll in its leaves, or hang a swing from one of its limbs. Cows and babies can nap in the shade of a tree. Birds can make nests in the branches. A tree is good to have around. A tree is nice.

Trees are foundational to humans. In the pre-kindergarten class taught in my neighborhood, the 4-year-olds study the seeds of trees. My 16-year-old is spending a few months in Vermont studying environmental science. The first book the students read, in an apple orchard surrounded by tree-clad mountains, was The Man Who Planted Trees. On the bookshelf at my right shoulder is Valmik Thapar’s little gem, Tigers & A Banyan Tree. A tree is planted in the memory of my mother in a park near my childhood home.

Have you heard of Wangari Maathai? She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for environmentalism and social activism. Worried about the industrialization of her native Kenya, Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, spending decades mobilizing women to plant 30 million trees.

Trees were victims and victors of epic struggles in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. In Tolkien’s vivid imagination, “ents” were trees that spoke and strode from one place to another. In the “real” world, trees cannot run or hide or swat at attackers. But they do have defenses, from their armor-like bark to chemical compounds they make to repel invaders. Trees can warn their neighbors of insect attack, stimulating them to synthesize their own repellents!

The roots of trees in a community may mingle and even fuse, enhancing the trees’ communication and exchange of materials! David Suzuki explains it poignantly in Tree: A Life Story. “No tree is an island; it is a communal citizen and derives the same benefits from cooperation, sharing, and mutual effort that any living creature receives from participating in a fully functioning ecosystem.”

Did you know that trees allow fungi to take up residence in their cells, in return for which fungal cells produce substances that defend against bacterial infection? Fungi and tree roots grow into each other until they become almost a single organism, a compound life-form called mycorrhizae, meaning fungus-root. Very few plant species grow without a fungal partner (there are 90,000 known species of fungi!).

Here’s the relationship: Fungi are incapable of manufacturing their own food because they don’t have chloroplasts as other plants do. But to reproduce, they must have sugars, so they penetrate the roots of trees taking sugar from their hosts. The relationship isn’t one-sided, however. If it were, the fungus would be a parasite and the tree would eventually die. No, the fungus returns the favor. In return for the sugar it takes, its vast network of mini-roots called hyphae provides trees’ root systems with access to nutrients and water that they would not otherwise be able to reach.

The enormous mat of fungal hyphae in the soil beneath trees vastly increases the volume of soil a tree is able to explore, making Tolkienesque ents of them all, capable of amassing far more nutrition from the soil than their stationery stance would suggest!

When I walk in a forest, or within just a small community of trees, I know that in the soil beneath my feet is a universe of fungal hyphae nurturing and sustaining the trees, as they are nurtured and sustained by the trees.

Will wonders never cease? Not if you fall in love with nature!

Your friend,

Jen

Talkin' Tigers... 2/12

My latest letter to readers of Cub...

Dear Cub kids,

There are creatures in my home.

I know I am supposed to be bothered by this. The “extermination” business in America is a gigantic industry. People call “the exterminator” when they see a single ant on their kitchen counter. Cockroach – don’t approach, mouse – out of my house, fly – good-bye.

I do prefer not to live with swarms of anything, including people. But if a mouse finds its way into my apartment, I find a way, hopefully before my cats get busy, to capture it calmly and gently, and release it outside. But my gosh, the effort, the expense Americans go to to try to ensure that they live in hermetically sealed spaces in which all other species are banished, is nothing short of extraordinary.

Take the humble stink bug. A member of the insect “superfamily” Pentatomoidea, in the Heteroptera suborder of the Herniptera order, there are apparently some 7,000 species in this family. I have stink bugs in my apartment. These little creatures are related to insects known variously as “shield bugs” and “jewel bugs.” The kind I have are apparently non-native, having arrived from China (so many things “made in China”!), in some shipment of something or other in the mid-‘90s. Since that time, they have become something of a pest to fruit farmers, as well as to homeowners of the type that flip out whenever they encounter an insect in their tightly-sealed, pesticide-sprayed domiciles.

Stink bugs are so-called because they have glands in their thorax that produce a foul-smelling liquid, used defensively to deter potential predators. The smell can also be detected when the bugs are crushed. Now, people do NOT like animals that employ “bad” smells in their defense, but, hey, if you lived in a world of giants that took pleasure in eradicating you, wouldn’t this seem like a sensible way to protect yourself?

The stink bugs in my apartment (on a good or bad day, depending on how you think about it, I probably see three or four), are known as brown marmorated stink bugs, or Halyomorpha halys. The dignity conferred by the beautiful Latin name is overkill because these are intrinsically dignified “bugs.” They are very small, about 17 milimeters long. They are a nice brown-ish gray color. They have short, elbowed legs, two, nice short antenna. They have a small head, and their body is shaped like a tiny shield.

Really, they are quite charming. But homeowners deplore them, and according to the Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences, they are “becoming an important agricultural pest in Pennsylvania,” since they, like people, enjoy the taste of apples and peaches. They also have a fondness for blackberries, sweet corn, field corn, soybeans, tomatoes, lima beans, and green peppers. Nice vegetarian diet!

The Penn State entomology website says: “These insects are not known to cause harm to humans, although homeowners become alarmed when the bugs enter their homes and noisily fly about. The stink bug will not reproduce inside structures or cause damage.” The website warns that pesticides used against stink bugs are ineffective and may lead to the arrival of other, more “problematic” insects, so waging chemical warfare against stink bugs is not advised. This has not stopped countless extermination companies from advertising their anti-stink bug services on the Internet, however, or homeowners from railing against the tiny insect, and begging each other for tips on how to rid their homes of their deplorable presence.

Well. What is it like, living with stink bugs? The few I see each day seem to do the following: Sit. Walk extremely slowly. Fly, slowly, and with an impressive heavy, buzzing sound for a second or two. My cats were initially mildly curious, but now completely ignore them. I put one outside once, on a chilly winter day, but when I noticed two hours later that it had not moved from the spot I had put it, and seemed stunned by the temperature, I brought it back in to my pleasantly warm living room, leaving it on the broad leaf of a plant. It revived.

That is about all I have to say about stink bugs. They look quite prehistoric, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there are fossil stink bugs indicating exceedingly ancient origins. They are really quite decorative, in their humble, brownish-gray way, and their cousin, the emerald-green jewel bug, is a ravishing beauty. I do not mind sharing my space with them. Why should I? We don’t bother each other. They remind me, when I am indoors, that nature will not be denied. Thank goodness for stink bugs. Having avoided harming one, I have yet to smell one.

Vin et sine vivere. Live and let live.

Your friend,

Jen