found on Haul Rd

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2015.07.27Pluck-68

Still, always, I am enraptured. The sense memory of a peregrine falcon remains in my hands though it has been years now since I held one. But this gyrfalcon is new to my skin, new to my eyes. I think she’s a she, larger than a female peregrine, and she is dead and frozen on the table in the trailer of Lab 1 at Toolik Field Station on the North Slope of Alaska. Dalton Highway, better known as Haul Road for the semis that carry supplies back and forth between inland Fairbanks and Deadhorse on the Arctic Ocean, parallels the spine of the pipeline through this part of Alaska. On that road, the gyrfalcon most likely made contact with some vehicle passing through. Toolik people found her on the side of the road, intact, limp, just a dollop of blood at the edge of her beak. I found her in the -80 freezer, clouds of coolness pooling at my feet when Seth, the Toolik naturalist, opened the double door and found the plastic bag with her remains. He sets her out on the table. Switches on the light. He lets me hold her, the weight hefty for the hollow-boned fighter. Ice crystals glaze her beak, sweep over her eyes, cinched shut. Her tail is long, barred with bands of smoky grey and and smudged tan, the striations of feathers running on the diagonal. Her head tucks in toward one rounded shoulder, a demure pose, cozy and shy and frozen in place like the permafrost that lies below this northern land. On a piece of paper in the bag are the details: “Found on Haul Road btwn Slope Mtn & OKs culverts 7.17.2015″

Life forms larger than a mosquito are few and far between here on the halo of the earth. Ground squirrels scrambling along the tundra underfoot and the arora borealis, a different type of life force, invisible but existent overhead, masked by the eternal daylight this time of year. There is a buzz with each wolf or grizzly sighting, a coveted moment of witnessing great bigness. The ground is alive with microorganisms, and bees hover around the purple glow of fireweed blooms that are hopeful that a seed might form before the killing freeze arrives. But today there is one less gyrfalcon flying through these wide open skies. Seth slips her back into the bag and returns her to the raptor morgue.

@toolik @Mblscience #eulogy #gyrfalcon #raptor #Alaska #truestoryshort

“a heritage takes wing” wins best feature story

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Saed Ateq Al Mansori, Falconry Festival, UAE

About a year ago this time, I was in the UAE covering a story about falconry receiving a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage designation. The story, “A Heritage Takes Wing,” was published by Saudi Aramco World magazine, and I recently found out it received an award. My editor sent along this dispatch:

The March/April 2012 Saudi Aramco World cover story on falconry, “A Heritage Takes Wing,” was named Best Feature Article in the Association/Custom/B-to-B magazine division at this year’s annual national magazine contest sponsored by Folio in New York.

Here’s their announcement. While Saudi Aramco World is officially a trade magazine, it reads more like the Smithsonian of the Middle East, with smart, well-reported stories about culture, food, travel, history and the like. And it’s free. Yup. You should most certainly check it out.

an ill wind: the trouble with turbines

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I’ve been following with interest the rapid expansion of wind energy and its impact on wildlife. Excited that I had a chance to delve into the issue for Nature magazine. Here’s how it starts:

Marc Bechard turned a worried eye skywards as he walked among the limestone hills at the southern tip of Spain. It was October 2008, and thousands of griffon vultures — along with other vulnerable raptors — were winging towards the Strait of Gibraltar and beyond to Africa. But first they had to navigate some treacherous airspace. The landscape on either side of the strait bristles with wind turbines up to 170 metres high, armed with blades that slice the air at 270 kilometres per hour. [Read more…]

inglorious bustards

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Only Bidoun could come up with this awesome title. Only Bidoun would relish the story of a state-of-the-art hospital in Abu Dhabi—that only caters to falcons and other birds of prey. Here’s an excerpt from my piece, just out in their spring issue on the theme, Sports:

In 1999 Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, founder and first president of the United Arab Emirates and a devoted falconer, banned all forms of hunting in his country. Exterminators need special permits to kill even rats. In spite of Emirati falconers’ massive campaign to add falconry to UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, it is almost completely illegal to use falcons to hunt in the UAE.

The ban was imperative. The object of falconry was extra intangible. The only hope that hunting might ever again be practiced in the Gulf would be to ease up for a time, perhaps decades, and let the hammered hare and houbara bustard populations recover. Abu Dhabi, meanwhile, is trying to jumpstart the project with an international Houbara breeding program. Much to-do attends even small events marking forward progress, as when Sheikh Hamdan bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Ruler’s Representative in the Western Region and Chairman of the Environment Agency-Abu Dhabi, released seventy bustards into the desert last year.

One might ask, then, how an Arab might partake in his cultural heritage? For decades now, the answer has been: he migrates. Some head for North Africa, where a handful of countries still allow falcon hunting. But mostly, those who can afford it — primarily sheikhs and their entourages — go to Yak Much, in western Pakistan.

An alternative title name for the article? “Slouching to Yak Much”

Read the whole piece here.

the dark side of the festival of lights

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Today, on Killing the Buddha…

I knew something was changing in India when I arrived for Diwali about ten years back and some of my nephews were boycotting the five-day Hindu Festival of Lights. While subtler forms of light are used too—a cascade of clay oil lamps illuminating sets of stairs—firecrackers are the big attraction in this annual commemoration of good over evil. Sparklers and M80s and things that go Pop! Bang! Boom! Ravana has been vanquished. All hail Lakshmi, goddess of wealth… with a thousand firecrackers strung together producing a magnificent five-minute-long series of explosions that surely the gods can hear in the heavens, making their ears ring and their eyes water.

My teenage relatives were having none of it. Not only does all that bang lead to missing fingers (a close call for one cousin) and house fires (an uncle’s rooftop thatch hut was engulfed), but the city is subsumed in a cloud of noxious smoke. The firecrackers themselves, my nephews explained to me, are produced in unsafe work conditions by child laborers. They didn’t want to support such a business.

Add to that the revelations that Diwali spurs an increase in the ritual sacrifice of owls to woo the the gods into helping the lives of humans. Something similar was happening during the World Cup in Africa, when smoking vulture brains was thought to help predict winners. (Little did they know they could simply ask Paul, who sadly passed away just last week.)

For Hindus, with their 300 million incarnations of god, it must be hard to please them all. And so many are intimately connected with the animal world. Last year, I met Jitu Solanki, a young naturalist making a living by running a guest house and offering desert tours in Bikaner of western Rajasthan. We were talking about the lack of dog control in India, the world’s leading country in rabies bites. He said:

Hindu people, you know, there is a lot of god and all, so we have a god we call Bhairava, reincarnation of Shiva and his vehicle is a dog, so people believe that if you kill the dog, Bhairava will be angry. This is a very nice concept that I like. If you see any god in Hinduism, you will find some bird or animal related and it is a very nice way to conserve wildlife.

But, everywhere, everyday, we lay lesser forms at the altars—little kids making firecrackers for our celebratory fun, exhaust from the transportation that carries me to a conference on conservation, the wind turbines that create “green energy,” daubed with the blood of birds. If only good and evil were just a bit easier to distinguish from one another. Give me more comics and less complexity. Give me light and the sweet, loud, smokey, conscience-free childhood memory of climbing rooftops in Chennai with my pack of cousins. Me in my brand new clothes, my clean hair freshly oiled, looking for the match to light my next sparkler.

belated blogging from kenya

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I confess. I’ve been seeing another blog. Since I’ve only gotten a smattering of words and pictures from Kenya up here, you’ll just have to visit it — ConservationMedia in Kenya — to see what I was up to in June, running around the horn of East Africa with a biologist, a photographer, and a group of undergraduate students from St. Lawrence University in upstate New York.