Conversations with Birds - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Priyanka Kumar is the author of Conversations with Birds. Her essays and criticism appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Huffington Post, and High Country News. She is a recipient of the Aldo & Estella Leopold Writing Residency, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Award, a New Mexico/New Visions Governor’s Award, a Canada Council for the Arts Grant, an Ontario Arts Council Literary Award, and an Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Fellowship. A graduate of the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts and an alumna of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Kumar wrote, directed and produced the feature documentary The Song of the Little Road, starring Martin Scorsese and Ravi Shankar. Kumar has taught at the University of California Santa Cruz and the University of Southern California, and serves on the Board of Directors at the Leopold Writing Program.

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Preface

Birds are my almanac: they tune me in to the seasons, and to myself. The western tanager, Piranga ludoviciana, with its flaming yellow-orange plumage, and the yellow-breasted chat, Icteria virens, glistening with a mango sheen, mean midsummer. When a juniper tree sparks to life with a Wilson’s warbler, Cardellina pusilla, its beady, black eyes prominent in a bright-yellow-and-olive body, I know that the aspens in the nearby Santa Fe National Forest will soon turn to gold. In midwinter, I will see dark-eyed juncos, Junco hyemalis, whose folk name is snowbird, pecking on the clayey, snow-plastered dirt. When specks of green mysteriously rise from the earth and a little ruby-crowned kinglet, Corthylio calendula, with baby-big eyes hops in a piñon pine, it will be time to celebrate spring.

When I was a small child, I lived for nearly a decade in remote mountainous areas of northern India, and almost all the worthwhile moments of my childhood were spent immersed in nature. Back then I didn’t pay any special attention to birds—I mainly looked out for snakes. I was in awe of what were called leaf snakes, such as the green vine snake, Ahaetulla nasuta, and the shimmering skins that many kinds of venomous snakes shed in my garden formed my greatest treasure.

It wasn’t until I moved to the West as a teenager that I found my life increasingly shorn from nature. So many of us are experiencing this disconnect today and our inability to see or fully experience the natural world has played a part in making our Earth a sad and vulnerable planet, where warming temperatures are reducing the breeding success of birds and habitat loss has caused sublime species such as the ivory-billed woodpecker, Campephilus principalis, to become extinct.

In my twenties, I started to mull over the deep connection I’d had with nature as a child. After a debilitating experience in a Northern California forest nudged me to take a closer look at birds, I realized that I had been hiking extensively through California, but not seeing anything. In the years to come, I befriended a string of birds and began to understand why my life in the West was lacking rasa, which in Sanskrit means “juice,” literally and metaphorically. Gradually, the town or city became a place to move through to get to the forest, which was a radiant sanctuary—a place to discover birds, their calls, and their dances, and to comprehend why their numbers were declining. Some of these birds became such fixtures in my life that the time I spent observing them, over two decades, charts my metamorphosis into a naturalist. As I share in these pages, loving these winged marvels has been my portal into the natural world.

I recently led a group of schoolchildren into a New Mexico forest for a daylong excursion. In the morning, the children were introduced to a Swainson’s hawk, Buteo swainsoni, one of the largest migrating raptors we get in these parts, and a burrowing owl, Athene cunicularia, a leggy, ground-dwelling bird who emits a “rattlesnake rasp” to scare off predators. Then we hiked on uphill until we reached a magnificent waterfall. The hawk and the owl had made a deep impression on the children and, still recalling these fierce birds, they raced to the water gushing past black basalt and began scaling the cliff face like mountain goats. It looked as though they were embracing the landscape. I stood there, mesmerized; I recognized the embrace, for nature also offered it to me as a child. A woman who was assisting me pointed out that a child might lose their footing and suffer a fall. I then called out, asking them not to climb any higher and to come back, but the children clung to the basalt rock face for a long while, the sun-inflected water haloing them, before they reluctantly scrambled down. The experience of watching these children at home in nature crystallized my belief that seeds of transformation lie dormant in all of our hearts. Sometimes it just takes the right bird to awaken us.

1. MANGO-COLORED BIRD

Seeing a western tanager perched on a juniper tree is like peering into the molten heart of the Southwest landscape. This sublimely colored bird must be the forest’s expression of joy. Nature concentrates yellow-gold, crimson, raven black, and mango in one midsize bird who flashes like a jewel in an otherwise subdued palette of olive greens and dove blues. Seeing the western tanager is a gladdening, if aleatoric experience—walking along a dirt road, a flash is all you might see, lemon-yellow wing-bar against black, as the bird flicks past the road to perch on a dry birdbath before vanishing into a deciduous tree. Hungry for another look, you stand before the tree shimmering in the last blaze before twilight, but you sense only a flutter in the shadows or you hear a chuckle or two. The western tanager is by no means a rare bird. Well over a century back, countless strands of these birds flew freely over the Americas. Now I see tanagers only singly or in pairs. Breakneck industrialization, wanton use of pesticides, agribusinesses, and habitat loss have largely evicted these shining jewels from our parched land. The tanager, of course, is not alone; some 40 percent of the world's bird populations are in decline.

I owe a debt to this mango-colored bird; once, it quite possibly saved my life. After graduating from film school at the University of Southern California, I moved to Northern California, where, while backpacking on the High Sierra Trail in Sequoia National Park, I had a near-death experience.

It was not my first time at this park. I relished being among the ancient sequoias, their copious, maternal trunks, the color of burnt sienna, soaring toward the shining sky. Sequoia bark is rich in tannin, which shields the trees from the maladies of rot, insects, and fire. I walked among these immortals, as John Muir once called them, with the awe I might experience among columns in a cathedral that was all the more stirring for not being bound by stone. A porous cathedral, the Earth’s cathedral, and I was but a leaf undulating through it.

After a four-hour drive from Santa Cruz, where we were living, Michael and I camped overnight at the Sequoia National Park and, the next morning, we got to the permit office at nine. The air was like the kiss of a pine; in the distance, a quail cackled. We filled out the requisite forms and were handed a backpacking permit and two bear canisters and we were on our way. It was nearly ten by the time we began hiking on the High Sierra Trail. Our first steps were charged with sun-drenched hope: we planned to backpack for five or six days. I dodged an enormous pine cone in my path and inhaled the muddy, dusty, piney fragrance of the trail. From deep inside the mixed-forest canopy, a jay let out a raucous cry. The air grew balmy and my navy tee glistened in the morning light. Our knapsacks bulged with a tent, cooking equipment, water for two days, a filter for the rest, and dried and cooked food in the bear canisters.

By midafternoon, we were hiking due east where the trail rose up a V-shaped...