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On ‘Writing the Book You Can’t Not Write’

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Between the Lines: Subramanian on ‘Writing the Book You Can’t Not Write’

For the latest installment of SEJournal’s author Q & A, “Between the Lines,” Meera Subramanian talks to book editor Tom Henry about the research and writing process behind her debut, “A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis,” a 2016 Orion Book Award finalist that travels from the barren cliffs of Rajasthan to the farmlands of Karnataka.

SEJournal: What inspired you to write “A River Runs Again?”

Meera Subramanian: I have visited India all my life to see my father’s family and couldn’t help but observe how things were done there compared to my home in the United States. I’d be older with each trip, viewing with a new perspective, but India was changing, too, and when the country opened up its economy in the 1990s, that change ramped up to a frantic pace.

But who was getting left behind as the IT boom swept South Asia? Where was this country that is now poised to become the most populous nation on Earth heading in terms of development? What were they doing right and what were they doing wrong in a place where a growing population was colliding with limited natural resources, where everyone wants to satisfy their basic needs — and then some?

But this wasn’t just describing India; it was the state of the entire world. I decided to start with India, a place I could view with the fresh eyes of an outsider but also with a touch of insider knowledge.

Read the entire interview here.

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.

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.

Peregrines at Padre

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fly! be free! Photo by Gregg Doney

“It’ll change your life.” This was said to me more than once by multiple people I’ve interviewed on this trip – Bud Anderson, Tom Cade, and other men who have worked with peregrine falcons all their lives. They were referring to the study of peregrines that has been taking place on South Padre Island in Texas for more than three decades.

And so I came. I happened to be back in Austin the first week of October, peak migration season for the peregrines, specifically Falco peregrinus tundrius, the northern birds that range across northern Canada and Greenland. The anatum falcons of New York only make smaller migrations, if they choose to move at all, but at this moment in the fall, the tundrius are peregrinating their way across the breadth of the Americas on their way to Argentina and Chile for the winter. Many of them, and I do mean many, pass over the sandy flats of South Padre. It provides an opportunity for study virtually unparalleled in North America.

South Padre is not known so much for its birds, but for a gathering of a more carnal type. This is where heaps of college students come for Spring Break, filling the hotels along the beach and proceeding to get drunk and naked. Usually in that order.

I only saw one naked woman, and she was well over twice as old as she might have been in college. She was walking along the beach smoking a cigarette, her small white poodle cowering in the shade under her large pick up truck, which was rigged up with a large striped umbrella. She’d parked along the shore further north on the 26-mile-long beach, miles beyond where the hotels, kite shops and paved road ended. The shore-side sand, in true Texas form, is a state highway, open to all traffic.

I caught her image quickly. I was flying by on a four-wheeler Honda ATV, trying to keep up pace with Gregg Doney, Alastair Franke and Mark Prostor, while we slalomed through the debris left behind from Hurricanes Dolly and Ike that had passed through the month before. All the salvageable lumber had been gleaned and what was left behind was the waste. The organic matter tossed up from the sea, but also the plastic jugs and plastic garbage cans, the plastic bottles and plastic parts that where once important for something but now have ended up here, severed from their utility, their shape unidentifiable. It was a mess.

We pulled hard to the left and left the waves and trucks and people behind. Into the wash, the dunes sheltering an endless expanse of flat sand that stretched inland toward Laguna Madre, a mile or four away depending on the tides and the wind that moves the land. We killed the loud engines and lifted binoculars to eyes as the quiet settled in. Immediately, we saw a distinct upright form standing on the sand.

It was the same form I have seen now on the stone formations of the Riverside Church on the Upper West Side and the wires of the Brooklyn Bridge. On a severe cliff face at the edge of Lake George in the Adirondacks. I have seen the 18” upright shape on the window ledge of a sugar beet factory in Boise, Idaho, Tom Cade and I standing in the light rain with our binoculars.

I spent the rest of the day following along with the men as they trapped the falcons, mostly yearling females, and collected the data they would need to test for avian flu and West Nile virus, to monitor their size and understand variance. They carefully drew blood for genetic studies, moving quietly and quickly to keep the birds calm. An ID band was cinched around a leg for future identification. None were already banded on the day I spent with them, but about 10% of the birds they catch are. One female from this season had been banded fifteen years earlier. “Think of the mileage that bird has on her,” Alistair said, amazed, and you could see him doing the multiplication in his head…more than 6,000 miles each spring and fall, for at least fifteen years.

Greg, used to working with peregrines in places like Colorado and Greenland, where they’re all on cliffs, looked out across the sand flats and up, as yet another falcon came into view. “You’ve got a vector there with cliff-nesting birds,” he said, looking up at the brilliant blue sky dappled with clouds, “but here they’re right on the ground. You’re in their world here.”

When the work on the bird was complete, she was daubed with temporary red dye so that she wouldn’t be caught again and then, they handed her to me to release. I held her in my hand, the steady warmth and weight of the wild heavier than the two or three pounds she would register on a scale. Her round dark eyes gauged me calmly and on the count of three, I let her go.

whose side are you on?

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Are you still pretending that I’m still in Portland? Good. I learned around the campfire at the wedding ( I love that…campfires and weddings should always go together) that the Vaux’s swifts were passing through Portland on their southerly migration and that they roosted en masse in a now defunct boiler chimney at the Chapman School in northwest Portland. Of course I went to watch. Of course I hoped that not only would I see thousands of roiling swifts circling in a vortex, which I did, but that one of P’town’s resident peregrines might come to nab some dinner. As 17,000 swifts — according to the Audubon volunteers situated at the top of the hill overlooking the school —  gathered into a tighter and tighter cloud as the dusk light grew fainter, a peregrine shot out of nowhere and dove into the fray. It made a few failed attempts. The flock of swifts, at one point, broke off from their swirling momentum to seemingly pursue the falcon, mobbing it away from them. But the peregrine was determined.

The 800 or so people who had gathered to watch — spreading their blankets and beach chairs, sipping on wine and eating their packed dinners — instantly formed two teams. One rooted for the swifts, booing the peregrine as she (I say she because the falcon seemed rather large, and most raptors have reverse sexual dimorphism, the females larger than the males) tore through the flock. The rest cheered her on, claiming victory as she thrust herself into the greatest concentration, right above the mouth of the chimney, where the swifts were draining into in an endless stream, and came away with a small form clutched in her talons. And then off she went, likely to the Fremont Bridge that straddles the Willamette River.

Interestingly, that was the first peregrine I’d seen on this road trip, one month in, one month to go.

Here’s an image, not mine, from YouTube:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECBraaz1-sE]

Fireball is on the move

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Bud Anderson looking over Skagit Valley

Bud Anderson scanning Samish Flats for peregrines

Bud Anderson broke his 16-day fast with a good-sized serving of fried clams. I ate most of his fries, dipping them in the spicy broth from my overflowing bowl of steamed oysters harvested from the nearby waters of Puget Sound. Bud – known as one of the world’s foremost peregrine trappers – is the kind of guy who made me comfortable immediately, as demonstrated by the fact that I had no reservation about reaching over and eating fries off his plate, just hours after first meeting him.  Or maybe that’s just me.

We were sitting in a restaurant-by-day, bar-by-night situated at a small crossroads in Edison in Skagit Valley, Washington, a couple hours north of Seattle. I wondered whether his calm demeanor could be attributed to the ethereal nature that those who go without food seem to take on, something otherworldly, but I suspected it was more of a permanent state for Bud. He reminded me of a cross between a (nearly) clean-cut Jerry Garcia and a slender Santa Claus, and over the course of the day, his generous gift to me was an extended tour of Skagit Valley, from the top of Colony Mountain to the flat agricultural lands below, the music the song of his voice and the stories he’s collected from a lifetime of working with birds of prey.

In 1985, Bud founded the Falcon Research Group, and more recently, the Southern Cross project  that has tagged 11 peregrine falcons with satellite telemetry units in Chile over the last two years. With the advancement of technology and units that weigh as little as ten ounces, the potential for learning more about the movement of falcons – as well as other birds, mammals and fish – has expanded hugely. The Southern Cross website tracks their every move so viewers can follow, in near-real time, their travels. The project lost track of some, the telemetry failed on others, but they knew when Linda was hit by a vehicle in Panama, and when Sparrow King settled back down in Chile after traveling 6,830 miles over the course of nearly 56 days on his fall migration from Baffin Island in Canada. And just now, we can see that the falcon named Fireball is on the move, heading south from Baffin Island to the Hudson Bay, averaging a couple hundred miles per day.

Rooted solidly in his home base of Washington state, where he was born and still lives today, Bud has traveled all over the world, trapping, observing, studying, and collecting blood samples of peregrines as part of a study of sub-species variation within Falco peregrinus, a species that inhabits every continent less Antarctica.

He showed me, from atop Mt. Erie and other hidden lookouts he led me to in his Prius, the span of Skagit Valley and the San Juan Islands from a new vantage point. As we looked over the Samish Flats, where just months earlier fields of tulips painted the landscape with broad bands of exploding color, he pointed out the more than 20 nest sites scattered across the lush green hills that rose out of the waters, focusing in on the exposed gray vertical cliffs that stood in stark contrast to the rest of the forested land. I’m beginning to recognize these natural sites, and look instinctively now for the spray of whitewash (the biologist’s polite term for bird shit), that indicates something has claimed the rock as home. The islands themselves reminded me, as they did when I first set my eyes on them 18 years ago, as a continuous range of mountains that have been inundated by the sea. It is easy for the mind’s eye to fill in the valleys hidden below the surface of the water where Orca whales and harbor seals swim among the kelp.

The concentration of peregrine falcons here is a wilder echo of the density of nest sites found in New York City, which seemed very far away from while Bud and I winded our way through the day. The cliffs were not skyscrapers filled with panicked workers watching their stocks plummet, and I could feel the difference through the calmness of Bud, the stillness of the oxygen-infused air, and the spontaneous smile that erupted upon my face as I boarded the ferry for Orcas Island after I left Bud, heading for the next destination. Fireball is on the move. And so am I.