midnight snack

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I was asking where the owls were. Even as the hippos snuffled outside my cabin, leopards roamed around the parking lot, and the moon waned then waxed, I never heard the hooting call of wild darkness. I listened and watched as the light drained from the sky in the Mara, as the polluted water lapped on the shores of Lake Naivasha, as the fire was lit at the GRL ranch an hour from Nairobi. Nothing. But back here in the heart of Nairobi, home comes Munir from a tennis game with his son – seven year old, just today! – with four baby barn owls. Their feet were tethered with twine, but at least they were alive, swept from a building site, parents long gone, delivered in a flimsy cardboard box on the back of a motorcycle to Nairobi’s raptor guy, Dr. Munir Virani of The Peregrine Fund.

I know barn owls from my escapades in another city that seems far away, New York. Around this time for the past few years, I have climbed upon a boat captained by Don Riepe,official guardian of Jamaica Bay, with NYC DEP biologist Chris Nadareski and a handful of dedicated volunteers, to find the barn owls in their boxes in that precious window of time in which they are big enough to ring with a leg band but small enough to not have fledged from their box. Sometimes, as we sneak up to the sites, through poison ivy and fields littered with gull nests, we catch an unsuspecting adult. Chris holds her delicately, even as she dips a fierce talon into his palm, gauzy delicate wings the color of dappled honey and snow extending out into the sunlight.

The four African cousins in the cardboard box are smaller. We can see the gradations like days of a calendar marked in down. The oldest is nearly fully feathered with its adult plumage, perhaps three weeks old, I’m estimating. Its dark eyes are alert and it sways its head back and forth in a hypnotic movement, on guard as we humans surround it. In New York, I have witnessed the siblings doing this motion in synch, hissing a strange reptilian sound in defense. But Number One.moves alone. Its three siblings aren’t nearly as strong or active. They fall one upon the other, each one more downy than the last.

We pick them up and unwind the string from their talons, opening their beaks to drop in water. I clutch the smallest and can feel the sharpness of its breastbone against my forefingers, a tiny thing nearly weightless. Closer inspection reveals a wound; something has punctured it in its throat in this already catastrophic day, left motherless and homeless, a refuge at the whim of a human world both brutal and caring. Munir applies antibiotic powder to the wound in hopes of keeping infection away. They refuse the raw meat we offer, and we don’t press them for now. Let them settle into the towel-lined wash basin and rest under a warm light.

Six hours later, we return from our dinner, our nyama choma cooked and seasoned and swept down with Tusker, and it is time for the owls’ midnight feeding. These are raptors, and they need their protein if they are to survive. They are still alive, and we lift them one by one to push the flesh down their gullets. Number One stands, extending its wings, but the other three take the food and then collapse again. They are young, only hints of the powerful night hunters they could become. Anything is possible. Tomorrow we will drop them at woman’s house who cares for orphans like these. There are no rehab centers in Kenya. Everything is unofficial.

I have washed my hands but their smell lingers with me. It is a smell of feathers and blood and raw meat and duffy down. Of desire and connection to something addictive and unnameable. Of fear, maybe, or perhaps hope. Could they smell the same? It is late again, the only time I seem to find to write, and I hope that come morning there will still be four feathered creatures blinking at us when it comes time for the next feeding. If winged visitors visited in my dreams in the time between then and now, I wouldn’t mind at all.

extinct birds come back to haunt us

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My piece is just up in Discover Magazine, eco-art with a formerly finger-lickin’ twist.

Artist Christy Rupp is not afraid of death. She revels in it, and her latest work—”Extinct Birds Previously Consumed by Humans”—uses the remains of the recently dead to recreate long-gone creatures. Her morbid, provocative sculptures are part of the show “Dead and Alive,” currently on exhibit at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City.

Check out the full photo gallery story here.

in the mara

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There are still places on earth where wild things happen. As we approached the Masai Mara in southern Kenya yesterday, the famed landscape reminded me too much of the worst of the overgrazed lands in America’s West. Masai moved across the open grasslands tending their cattle, goats and sheep. But when we entered the reserve this morning as first light brightened the sky, beating even the ticket taker to his post, I saw a sea of red-oat grass, shin-high, knee-high, thigh-high, rich with the rains, green and ready. Within moments we see two jackals, each with its own half of a small antelope. Around the bend, a cheetah sits poised, elegant, the form instantly recognizable, but REAL, there in front of me. A hunk of flesh and spotted fur within range of my camera lens and my binos, and — most importantly — my eyes that can capture the image and store it in some very special part of my cerebral matter. She stands, her belly hanging, and Teeku tells us she’s pregnant. She moves off into the grass, disappearing in perfect camouflage. She emerges and laps from a puddle. She retreats, an awesome arrogance, queen of land-bound speed.

It is just the beginning. We pass an elephant with a criss-crossed tusk. A male ostrich bright pink with lust. Herds of wildebeest moving in single file. By breakfast, as we crack hard-boiled eggs on our knees under an acacia tree, the vultures are soaring. They descend to a wildebeest carcass down the hill from us as we pack up and head down the road. And then in a flurry the scavengers are chased away. Lion! One, then another. But they’re too full to eat it seems. We watch them fifty feet from our jeep, close but seeming to not disturb them. Oh the muscles defined when she tries to pull the heavy body into the grass. Oh, her panting as she stands over the body, catching her breath. Oh, the vultures waiting in nearby trees, others kettling above, ten, twenty, forty, sixty. Oh, the way she passes off her guard to a second female, who emerges from the treeline, and how the second sits to eat off the rump of the fallen prey, her muzzle emerged saturated with blood. But together they have barely broken the hide. They are full, bellies hanging, disinterested. They leave, and we watch as the vultures return. In ten minutes they have gutted the creature. White-backs and lappet-faced vultures, and marabou storks fighting over the organs.

When the lions don’t return, Munir cautiously sets the trap as the students go on lion watch. Twenty minutes later, we’ve caught a white-backed vulture. Evan is out of the jeep in an instant with a blanket to cover her and loosen her talons from the noose, holds her calmly as she vomits bright red innards back out.

Forty minutes later, we’ve attached a GPS unit and set her free. Into the wild.

There is more. The wildebeests have begun the migration, though it is early in the season. There are thousands, grunting – humph! humph! There are warthogs, and a single mud-caked buffalo swarming with flies. There are giraffes, legs sprawled to bend down in reach of shrubs. More elephants. More wildebeest. More ostrich. More warthogs. Grey kestrels. Yellow-throated sand grouse. Crowned hornbill. Striped mongoose on their hind legs like meerkats. Lappet-faced vultures. Two tagged vulture resightings. Tawny eagles. Secretary birds. Superb starlings. Rufous-naped larks. Lesser grey shrikes. Antelope. Thomson’s gazelles. A studly impala trailed by his harem. Water buck. Topis nodding to us in agreement. More wildebeest. We pass seven carcasses in just a few kilometers. Food. Food. Food drives everything and it is either abundance or death at this moment in the Mara. Grass grows. Grass gets eaten. Calves are born. Mothers are hunted. Wildebeests cross the Mara River and crocs lie in wait. Jackals kill. Jackals are robbed. Everything is immediate. Everything is now and it is late but I can barely sleep. There are still places….

where it all began

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I am in Kenya! The heavy droughts that decimated livestock last year have been followed by heavy rains that have carried on through the dry season. The landscape is green and rainy and cool. Each day – and there has only been one full one so far – is christmas, a bounty of the unexpected. It is a new country. A new part of the world. It has been 21 years since I have even stepped foot on the continent – even then, only a moment in Egypt, barely a week in Morocco – and 30 years since I experienced the go-slow market of Lagos, Nigeria. And, really, how long since I’ve been somewhere completely new? Return trips to India are a strange form of going home. Panama had the familiarity of Costa Rica. Was it Thailand? Eight years ago? Definitely too long. I revel in the firm futon mattress in a strange place, the fresh papaya, the fact that is is called popo. Each word is new. I have to pay attention, trying to figure the unspoken communication when the words are beyond me. Each moment there is a chance, once again, to discover the unknown that has always been. Just not for me. It is why I travel.

Munir and I drive to meet Teeku. I look out the window of the vehicle as we travel through the city, observing my mild apprehension that is trying to match what I see to the scary stories about “Nairobbery.” We are in a nice section of town, granted, but even the ride from the airport, down the Uhuru Highway, just shows me people going about their lives. Most are moving from here to there and back, laden with packages, on foot, in their cars. They plaster walls, dig road-side ditches, sell newspapers or posters of chickens or a large yellow antennae that looks like a ray gun from a ’60s sci-fi movie. Drivers stay on their side of the road. Some wear seatbelts. Some do not. Some drive with their windows open. Some do not. I notice single white women with sunglasses and shorts talking on their mobiles as they walk alone down a busy street, or a white couple with a small child buying rosewood furniture from a roadside stand. I learn of the KCs – Kenyan cowboys, the naturalized white people left over from a colonial past, like cricket and tea time.

In the afternoon, I go to the National Museum and smell the rich, almost tasty, smell of human sweat in the un-air conditioned halls. The dim lighting of the Hall of Mammals – an homage and tiny echo of the American Museum of Natural History – illuminates the giant elephant, the towering giraffe. I see Ahmed of Marsabit, the elephant with tusks that swooped to the ground, such a spectacle of tuskiness that Kenyans rallied the government to grant him singular protection in 1970. He spent his days with armed guards around him till he died one day of old age during his 55th year. And another display tells me that the hippo is related to the dolphin! Who knew such things? How can such creatures exist! Will I really see them, live, running, a spotted long-necked impossibility reaching up to graze on trees or a round monster lying in wait amid the lake reeds, nostrils like a submarine’s spyglass?

But humble as the few rooms of the museum are,, New York cannot come close to claiming the skeletons that lie in one room, found so close by in the Great Rift Valley. Fragments of bone dug out of the earth and pieced together with pinchers and glue and an insane patience to unlock some secret story about the way that we – upright, omnivorous, speaking, playing, murdering, ruminating, singing, loving, planet-seeking, planet-destroying – bipedals came to be.

Hordes of school children fill the hall with their echoing calls, the universal cacophony of youth. But each group is a cha-cha-line of organization, a single file with each child in contact with the one before them. They only swarm as they crowd in around each exhibit, or as they pass me, looking up from dark faces with beaming open smiles, “Hello? How are you?!” But their gaze is as fixated when it falls upon the warthog, four times as big as them, or the the harrior hawk within the glass case in the bird room, where the scent of formaldehyde fills the head and takes away the breath.

Outside in the courtyard, workers cover chairs with white fabric and arrange bouquets of blue and orange birds of paradise. Tonight, someone is getting married! Back inside, more men set up speaker systems in a great room filled with displays of gourds and maps of Kenya made out of butterfly wings. When they test the system, the music is alive, leaping across the room and infecting school boys who begin to dance with the beat. Upstairs, after the music is off again, another boy in a school group picks up the mallets and starts to play a traditional xylophone instrument as his teacher leads the others in an impromptu song about happiness that weaves between English and Swahili. I look at circumcision knives behind the glass, imagine their task, but also robes made of animal skins, slings to carry babies and charms to string around their waistlines to protect them from evil spirits, and staffs and hats and skirts and all the humdrum of daily life, from a long ago then to now, from birth till death.

Here, in Africa, if we are to trust the dusty skeletons, is where it all began. There was no boy named Adam. Maybe a boy whose name began with a Ng sound or M, the lips sealed tight. Or just a woman and man, with no need for names, coming together in union. A coupling born of an unanalyzed need, neither sin nor salvation, but an act of bodies, skin-on-skin, amid the savannah or the forest of East Africa. Part of a long story that hasn’t ended, that has no beginning. Why do we need the big story of the start, or the last big cataclysm, when everything that is happening in between is so damn interesting?

into africa

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The next adventure begins. New York City – intoxicating, exhilarating – somehow doesn’t inspire me to peregrinate. It has become home, and so the days fill up and slip by. But I am about to head to Kenya for a two-month trip. The primary reason is to teach an environmental journalism class to a St. Lawrence University (Canton, NY) summer program. I’ll be co-teaching with Munir Virani, a raptor biologist with the Peregrine Fund and Teeku Patel, a wildlife photographer, both of whom are based in Nairobi. Together, we are leading a Conservation Media course. The goal is to teach students how to tell conservation stories through science, words and images. We’ll be spending our time out in the field around Lake Naivasha and the Masai Mara, counting African fish eagles and hippos, talking with local flower farmers, and learning about the conflict between predators and pastoralists.

Not one for short trips, I’ll stay on after the program is over, and loved ones from the States (my immediate family and a sweetheart) will join me for a safari into the Samburu and over to Lake Nakuru and back down into the Masai Mara. Unsure of the internet availability, I’ll try to return to these pages as I can. Hope you’ll join me.

opening our eyes to the cost of energy

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The oil continues to spill. Here, I was thinking that by the time my op-ed got printed in USA Today, it would have been capped and we could move on to the next disaster. But, no. I write:

In the Gulf of Mexico, however, we may have found our infinite fount. This deep-water accident has no horizon. It isn’t an oil spill in the conventional sense, where a fixed amount of fuel escapes from the hull of a ship. When this rig sank, it left behind a severed umbilical cord that had tethered it to an oil borehole reaching deep into the earth’s crust a mile below the waves. We have tapped into something we quite literally can’t control.

And so I argue, that as Cape Cod succumbs to the an interrupted horizon in the form of the nation’s first off-shore wind farm, and oil fills the waters of the Gulf, that one byproduct of this could be that Americans start seeing their energy production for what it is — environmentally destructive and sometimes lethal, to humans and other forms of life. Everything, I repeat everything, comes at a cost, even the so-called green clean energies. Hybrid cars need batteries that need lithium mined in South America. Wind turbines kill birds. Conservation and consumption are the main issues, and if we can watch the meters rise and fall with our electrical use, see the turbine blades spinning on the horizon, kneel to separate sand from oil, if we can viscerally experience that power comes from somewhere other than the Land of Make Believe and West Virginia, a place most have never been and will never go, the better.

Read the whole piece here.

do you believe oil is lighter than love?

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The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has engineers scrambling, environmentalists screaming through their tears, biologists getting their rubber gloves and cleaning supplies ready, the military finally being put to some good use, BP stockholders selling, fisherman learning how to be oil skimmers instead of shrimpers, and—over at Religion Dispatches, Peter Laarman asking, in “Our Lethal Lust for Money,” “Do we really even like the way we’re living?” It’s a Buddha-killing question. His inquiry inspired a few of my own.

What do you believe in? Do you believe that everything comes at a cost? How much are you willing to pay for a pound of shrimp? What about a gallon of gas? Two dollars? Five dollars? Ten dollars? Would you pay a bit more if you knew the goddamn safety valve would work to cap an underwater well in the unlikely event of an accident? Do you believe in rescue efforts, oil daubed from the wings of birds? Do you believe in science, the ability to sit upon the undulating waves and use remote controls to send robots a mile down with the goal of capping a well releasing thousands of barrels of crude oil per day? Do you think the rays of the sun can save us? Do you believe that Don Quixote really believed his windmills were anything but windmills? Do you believe that a broken soul can heal? A broken bayou? A broken planet? Do you think the planet is broken? Do you think it matters if humans as a species survive forever? If daughters no longer become mothers? Do you believe in wishes made with a coin toss? Do you believe in God? Who do you think is in control? Do you think anyone’s in control? Do you agree that we all have blood on our hands? Do you believe gravity is just another law that The Man invented to keep us down? Do you believe that blood is thicker than water? Oil lighter than love?

Tell me what you think over on Killing the Buddha.

a crisis for the faithful

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I’ve been following the South Asian vulture decline for awhile now. In December, following an evaporating trail of vultures, I found myself wandering the sacred Parsi grounds in Mumbai that have been used for centuries to lay out the Parsi dead.

In a ritual so old it was described by Herodotus, Zoroastrians have laid out their dead atop Towers of Silence to be exposed to sun, sky and—most importantly—vultures. These massive harbingers of death with eight-foot wingspans once numbered in the millions across South Asia and could strip a corpse to the bone in hours. Yet their service has come to an abrupt end in the past decade as the vulture population plummeted due to a fatal reaction to a common painkiller given to the livestock and humans that the birds eventually feed upon. Ongoing habitat shrinkage has exacerbated the decline. With vultures virtually extinct, the Parsis are left struggling with the question of how to preserve traditions when modern forces conspire against them.

In an exploration of what it means to be faithful if the biological world stops cooperating, I wonder whether the only way for a faith to survive is to adapt. Read the entire piece here, at least for the next week, unless you’re a WSJ subscriber.

the virgin birth

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In the beginning, there was a virgin birth. Or perhaps there were many. A hundred, or a thousand years before the man from Nazareth was born, another by the name of Zarathushtra came to be in Middle Persia, some say by “an immaculate conception with a ray of divine reason.” Around the same time, somewhere in South Asia, all five Pandava brothers whose story is held within the pages of the Mahabharata were born of mothers who had only been touched by the loving hands of gods. These sexless unions are the starting point for stories of myth and holy magic.

But I’m not thinking of virgins or births as I sit down to dinner in an upscale hotel in Mumbai, India. I’m thinking of a Kingfisher beer accompanied by papadams. A baby sleeps in a stroller at the adjacent table flanked by a married couple of indeterminate ethnic origins, speaking English with an accent that seems vaguely familiar but which I can’t place. I look at them over my menu, trying to suss them out, playing the default game of the solo diner. They debate fish vs. prawns, and dishes that come with rice versus those that—inexplicably—don’t. They order. They change their order. There is a coming and going of multiple staff people. Knowing I should just keep to myself, but not knowing better, I interject and suggest the Goan fish curry that I had last night. Delicious, rich with coconut milk, and rice comes with it. By this time they already have ordered and say they’ll take note for tomorrow night, but the walls between strangers have fallen, and we begin to converse, tossing out the test questions of identity to each other.

The couple, somewhere around my age, are Americans, from New Jersey, no less. The first of my countrymen I have met on this trip, most apparently scared into staycations due to pesky things like swine flu, terrorism, and/or unemployment. But here is this friendly couple, of Indian descent three generations back, now on their second trip to India in under a year. The accent lingers from their birthplace on a Caribbean island, though they’ve been in the States for many years. They rave about the Taj Mahal and India’s ice cream—the best.

I ask about the child, nodding to the stroller, and they tell me there are two. Two! In there? They’re only ten days old, they tell me. I am instantly confused, or maybe just daft, as I often am. Did they come to India planning on having the births here? Why are they going to the American embassy tomorrow? And my, doesn’t mom look great for a little over a week since giving birth to twins. One word clears up all my confusions. Surrogate.

Read the rest at Killing the Buddha.

taking new york

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I’m standing a thousand feet above the streets of New York City, on the 86th floor observatory deck of the Empire State Building, looking for birds. It’s a few hours after sunset, and New York City naturalist Robert “Birding Bob” DeCandido is leading our small group. We can see the cityscape in every direction as the cool wind tousles our hair, but our gaze is focused up. Migrating songbirds, many of which travel by night to keep cool and avoid predators, are passing high overhead on their autumn journey. DeCandido has taught us how to differentiate the movement of small birds—“See how they flap-flap-glide?” he tells us—from the erratic motions of moths, But there is another denizen of the city’s skies that we’re all hoping to see.

A blur of a bird zips past the western flank of the building, level with the observatory. It’s too fast for a gull, too big for a songbird. Maybe a pigeon. Maybe something else. There is an excited buzz as we fumble with binoculars, unable to track the receding figure.