STANISLAUS CONNECTIONS

Working For Peace, Justice, and A Sustainable Environment

March 2004


©Joe Medieros

Living Lightly

Rivers of Birds, Forests of Tules: Central Valley Nature & Culture in Season

By LILLIAN VALLEE

6.  Animal Byways & Hitchhiking Cysts

In January and February, the earth and sky trade places. The land, normally the site of so much activity against a rather uniform blue, now seems abandoned and possesses an unearthly stillness. Trees, stripped of their leaves, do not rustle; fields, stripped of their crops, lie exposed; and winter gardens have few of the showy fruits and flowers of later months. Cold temperatures add to the torpor by discouraging walkers, freezing water, and wilting winter vegetables. In our part of the Central Valley, most of the action moves into the underground (that pesky gopher) or into the skies (those glorious, dwarfing skyscapes). Then the bustling, sometimes malevolent, housecleaning winds show up, moving enormous quantities of soil and seed, knocking dead branches from the trees, and uprooting living things with shallow roots.

This past Friday a great billowing canopy of every cloud on the cloud chart stretched from the dark face of the Diablo Range to the glistening Sierra Nevada: cloud formations mimicked, in turn, furrows of plowed earth, battalions of sheep, misshapen witches’ hats, towering breakers, boulders and cliffs. The sun disappeared under gunmetal streaks broken only by the mildest wildflower pink or blue. That evening the full moon sported one grizzled eyebrow making the night sky look like the giant eye of a raven. In looking long at earth and sky, the rapt observer rediscovers the raw origins of chthonic (earth-based) and ouranian (sky-oriented) religions: the slumbering and quickening earth, the animated heavens, the powerful forces that push and prune, scatter and bless, threaten and descend.

The stark architecture of valley oaks reveals that they are not simply trees but communities: evident at this time of year are their remnant galls; hawk, egret and heron nests; owl perches; and acorn woodpecker larders. The eloquence of leafless oak limbs is punctuated by the movement and color of small songbirds, musical messengers from distant kingdoms and miniature brethren of dinosaurs. Many of these, sometimes labeled “various micro-birds,” weigh a bare fraction of an ounce and possess an intricate and marvelous beauty, the probable prototype for fairies and angels and other winged intermediaries between heaven and earth.

Is there anything more disarming, for example, than a small flock of bushtits (Psaltriparus minimus), each weighing less than two-tenths of an ounce, busily gleaning microscopic insects from an oak and then descending to a communal bath in which they twitter with abandon while all fifteen perform their speedy ablutions? David Allen Sibley describes these hippies of the bird world as “disheveled-looking, long-tailed ball[s] of fluff” almost always engaged in “sparkling chatter”; bushtits are the most convivial birds I have ever seen with the exception of a band of elegant but tipsy cedar waxwings with a pronounced weakness for privet berries. The year we cut the privet down, the flock of waxwings arrived and stared morosely at the oak sapling that had replaced it.

The bushtits have other endearing habits: they fly singly from one tree to the next, plucking insects and spiders, never crowding one another, each bird following the one ahead, so that at the end of the day (or when they bathe), they are together. According to Sibley, when it is cold, “foraging flocks roost communally in dense cover, often huddling shoulder to shoulder during cold spells.”

Another bird with energy and sociability in inverse proportion to its size is the oak titmouse (Baeolophus inornatus), once known as “the plain titmouse.” Yet there is nothing plain about the language experts use to describe it: “confiding” (because it can be induced to take seeds from your hand), “acrobatic” (its strong legs allow it to exploit the buds at the ends of twigs), prone to “mobbing” (that is, chasing, dive-bombing or generally attacking large birds of prey to make them leave) and “cultural learning” (their British relations or “tits” learned how to puncture the foil/cardboard caps on milk bottles delivered to doorsteps and to drink the cream at the top!). They also cache seeds (for now and later) and have been studied for their impressive spatial memories. Two days ago I happened to see one (they weigh a hefty six-tenths of an ounce) scolding a young cat spellbound by the bird’s audacity.

But it is the ruby-crowned kinglet (Regulus calendula), another foraging and fidgeting insectivore, whose name tells the best story. A muted (Sibley calls it “drab”) olive-yellow with a pale eye ring and bright red crest on adult males, a kinglet weighs just over two-tenths of an ounce. This “hyperactive midget” (as Kenn Kaufman calls it) also seems “confiding.” I have walked along the hiking trail at Sousa Marsh at San Luis National Wildlife Refuge in the company of two kinglets who flitted from weed stalk to weed stalk, looking up, flicking their wings, busily gleaning, alert but not uneasy.

Once upon a time there was a contest to determine the king of the birds. All the birds competed to see which could fly the highest, but the eagle knew he was the mightiest, and he approached the contest with characteristic arrogance. During the last moments of the competition, as the eagle soared to victory with the last of his strength, he was surprised to find the kinglet above him. The eagle had not realized the kinglet had hitched a ride on the eagle’s back, and when the raptor was exhausted, the kinglet flew even higher and was declared king of the birds. The eagle was so furious he chased the kinglet into a mouse hole and asked his crony, the horned owl, to watch the mouse hole while he attended his coronation. Of course, being a nocturnal bird of prey, the owl fell asleep, and the kinglet escaped, winning the crown. To this day, the kinglet wears his ruby (or gold) crown as a reminder that not arrogance and brute strength, but mental acuity and wise use of resources determine the quality of leadership. But that’s not all: the kinglet is also a vigorous singer and has a reputation for “rich, warbling song” during breeding season.

The next time you see a ruby-crowned kinglet plucking insects or spider eggs from the vegetation in your garden, give that drab but savvy citizen a little nod of approval.

Sources: Kenn Kaufman, Birds of North America; David Allen Sibley, The Sibley Guide to Birds and The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior; and Bohdan Dyakowski, Our Forest and Its Inhabitants.

       

Environmental protection and poverty at loggerheads in Tanzania

By LEE RYAN MILLER

Eighth in a series

January to May 2003 I lived on a ship that circumnavigated the globe. I was teaching political science on Semester at Sea, a program run by the University of Pittsburgh. Some 650 students participated, visiting nine countries and ten ports.

In this series, I present excerpts from my journal and commentary on the societies that we visited.

After Cape Town, our itinerary originally had called for us to sail around the southern tip of Africa and up the east coast of the continent to Mombasa, Kenya. But after terrorists blew up a hotel in Mombasa, we changed our destination to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Dar is not a common tourist destination. There was no cruise ship terminal, and we docked amidst freighters. The city was dirty and dangerous. A group of crewmembers from our ship were robbed at gunpoint. On another day, one of my students was forced at gunpoint into a car; by some miracle he was able to escape when the car got stopped in traffic.

Most of Tanzania, however, is rural. It is one of the poorest countries in the world, with a per capita GDP of only $523 and a life expectancy of 51 years. (Comparable figures for the U.S. are $34,142 and 77 years.) It suffered under centuries of colonial rule — first by Arabs from Oman, then by Germany, and then by the British, before finally gaining independence in 1961.

Many contemporary observers blame Tanzania’s economic conditions on decades of socialism and/or on the economic liberalization that followed. Forced collectivization of agriculture in the 1960s led to famine, and central planning led to economic stagnation just as it did in Eastern Europe. Income inequality remained low because virtually everyone was very poor. Mounting foreign debt and a soaring population (the average family in the 1970s had 6.8 children) created pressure for economic liberalization. Whereas under socialism, a burgeoning population meant ever-smaller shares of a shrinking economic pie, now the economy is growing, but most of the benefits flow to a small elite.

Most Tanzanians, like people in other developing countries, engage in subsistence agriculture. There is not much industry, and most exports are agricultural products—primarily coffee, tea, cotton, cashews, sisal, cloves, pyrethrum, and tobacco.

An 8 1/2 hour bus trip across the country enabled me to observe rural life since I chose to go on a safari in Tarangire National Park, hundreds of miles northwest of Dar.

The bus had no air conditioning. At the front of the bus, a digital display gave the temperature: 108 degrees. We drove through the streets of Dar es Salaam, past run-down buildings and sidewalks crowded with vendors selling everything from food to electronics. At one point we passed a billboard depicting a traditional African warrior talking on a cell phone—an interesting example of globalization.

We left the city on a two-lane highway, recently well-paved using development aid from Japan. We passed through a flat grassy plain dotted with bushes and an occasional tree.

Now and then we passed some huts, sometimes all alone, sometimes clustered together. Some had mud walls, while others had no walls at all and were just poles supporting the roof made of palm fronds or grass, or occasionally, corrugated metal.

People tended farm animals and crops, some dressed in shorts and t-shirts, others wearing colorful robes. Few people wore shoes. Women often carried baskets on their heads. There were many bicycles, but hardly any cars. We saw no tractors or other farm machinery.

My sinuses stung from the smoke-filled air. In the fields on both sides of the road were hundreds of small fires, set to clear away the brush for faming.

As we neared the city of Arusha, I could see the lone peak of Mt. Kilimanjaro, and the villages began to look somewhat more prosperous. Farms grew larger, and we began to see a few tractors. Houses were larger, no longer made of mud and grass. I noticed a few cars on the road, and that people were wearing shoes. Their clothing was Western for the most part, but nicer and more expensive than the dirty shorts and t-shirts I’d seen earlier.

We spent the night at a hotel in Arusha where I met half a dozen defense counsel from the UN Tribunal on the Rwandan genocide, located there. The next morning we drove the final three hours to the park entrance.

Once inside the park, the landscape changed dramatically. The villages and farms disappeared, replaced by a grassland dotted with trees and teeming with wildlife, such as elephants, zebras, giraffes, gazelle, impala, baboons, and lions.

The park boundary provided a stark example of how environmental protection and poverty are often at loggerheads. The park preserved the natural flora and fauna. But the only native people inside were rangers or safari lodge workers. Outside the park, the animals had all been killed, and all the trees cut down to make room for farms.

Impoverished Tanzanian farmers, given the opportunity, would have cut down the remaining trees and killed and eaten the remaining game. How ironic it is that the last vestiges of Tanzania’s breathtaking natural environment have been preserved solely so that foreigners can go on safari. But such is the state of human misery: only when your belly is full, it appears, do you have the luxury of worrying about environmental protection.