Wild With Nature

It was June in North Carolina, USA, the humid morning of a day that promised to be hot. The orchard orioles (Icterus spurius) sang sweetly at the Flat River Waterfowl Impoundment, where Kent Fiala recorded their voices. It was a morning full of birdsong in this natural area where the eastern deciduous forest mixes with fields and wetlands.

Now in February, 1700 miles to the southwest in a direct line that crosses 900 miles of the Gulf of Mexico, the orchard orioles are much quieter. They dance among the branches and flowers of a thicket at the edge of the river, flashes of burgundy and lemon yellow in constant motion. There are lots of orchard orioles here, a flock of at least 15, at the edge of the Huatulco River in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico.

The orioles no longer give their sweet summer song; all I can hear are a few harsh trills, almost hidden by the burbling of the river. Seeing them here, you wouldn’t imagine their beautiful song nor where they spend the summer, a range which includes not only North Carolina but also other distant lands: the Dakotas, Michigan, New York. Nor would you guess their routes of migration—routes which, at least for some individuals, involve a flight of over 500 miles across the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico.   

The orioles and the thicket

The thicket along the Huatulco River where the orchard orioles are foraging is covered in arrays of orange flowers in the form of brushes. They belong to a vine known as el bejuco de carape or el peinito (Combretum sp.) that clambers over the shrubs, forming a refuge and cafeteria for the birds at the edge of the river. It’s a beautiful spot and an unhurried morning. I decide to sit at the edge of the river to appreciate it. And the longer I stay seated here, the more birds emerge from the thicket.

The orchard orioles continue feeding among the branches, a swarm of activity like a giant, colorful vacuum cleaner, sucking nectar from the flowers and snatching up insects. Two Baltimore orioles (Icterus galbula), brilliant birds in ebony and orange, appear to investigate the flowers as well. Like the orchard orioles, they’re birds that migrated impossible distances from their natal summer homes to arrive at this thicket. These ones might have come into the world in Alberta, Tennessee, or Pennsylvania. Two streak-backed orioles (Icterus pustulatus), orange birds streaked with charcoal, are leaping from branch to branch. Unlike the other orioles, these ones are year-round residents in Oaxaca. 

Buntings, grosbeaks, and a white-tipped dove

The buntings are more timid. I’ve been sitting here for half an hour when they finally emerge from the shadows. A solitary indigo bunting (Passerina cyanea), a male with feathers like the sky in its most intense moods, perches in the undergrowth, ready to disappear again. But three painted buntings (Passerina ciris) dare to drink from the edge of the river. The two females are a soft, textured green like the hills of my state of Montana when spring surrenders to summer. The male, on the other hand, looks like a color wheel that escaped from an artist’s studio: his head is blue, his breast red, his back yellow-green.

Seven blue grosbeaks (Passerina caerulea), relatives of the buntings, have emerged from the vines. The females are reddish-brown, the males chalk blue. They perch like the indigo bunting, silent at the edge of the shadows.

Suddenly a yellow warbler (Setophaga petechia) appears, a glimpse of dandelion yellow among the leaves. He pauses to perch briefly on a branch alongside a warbling vireo (Vireo gilvus) who wears the color of river rocks. A white-tipped dove (Leptotila verreauxi), a resident that normally only gives her hoots from the undergrowth, emerges to forage at the edge of the river. By now I’ve been sitting here for 45 minutes.

When time stops

A Louisiana waterthrush (Parkesia motacilla) and a yellow-rumped warbler (Setophaga coronata) are flitting on the riverbank, feeding on insects. Another white-tipped dove continues singing in the distance, where the orange-fronted parakeets (Eupsittula canicularis) are screeching. A group of parakeets launches into flight from a guanacastle (Enterolobium cyclocarpum), its canopy replete with strange, wrinkled fruits. The parakeets nest along this river corridor, excavating their cavities within arboreal termite nests (of Nasutitermes sp.). 

Even as an adult, there are moments like this: moments when I’m in nature and time seems to stop, when an animal, a plant, or a community lets me get close to its way of life. Suddenly I feel that astonishment I felt as a child, when the world was full of magical beings, when I saw the plants and animals with new eyes and believed without doubt in the goodness of life, in the magic that there was in the living beings with whom I shared this existence.

This episode is made up of various threads. It includes the birds, the diverse landscapes that their migrations connect, and a conversation with a Oaxacan biologist about the passion we both have for the natural world. But in its essence, this is a story of those moments in nature, moments when time doesn’t exist, when the magic is palpable, when we can see ourselves as part of an intricate, diverse community of living beings. 

Tierra de Aves

I met Ana Rebeca Martínez Martínez in December in the city of Oaxaca. We got to know each other through Tierra de Aves, a non-profit based in Oaxaca that is dedicated to understanding and studying our feathered neighbors, where Rebeca has volunteered for almost two years. What I noticed immediately about Rebeca was her passion for birds and nature. I had met up with the Tierra de Aves team to help with their monthly sessions studying the birds of the Monte Albán Bird Observatory.

The team carefully captures the birds in special nets, records information about them, gives them aluminum leg bands to identify individuals, and releases them. It’s a project that seeks to improve our understanding of the lives and movements of the birds of Monte Albán, as well as those that visit during their migrations. Over time, the project will also help us understand how climate change is affecting these birds.

Afterwards, I asked Rebeca if she would tell me more about her connection with nature and her story as a biologist. And so, one day in December, we met up for the conversation. While I listened to her, I thought about all of the threads of her story that have parallels in mine, in spite of growing up in different countries, thousands of miles apart. I thought about birds, insects, and plants—and about the sense of wonder that they have given us both since childhood. Have you experienced it, too?

The café and the sparrow

We’re sitting on the patio of a café near the Andador Turístico in Oaxaca, an open space with tables and a few trees. And thanks to Rebeca, our conversation begins with another moment of connection with the birds. The house sparrows (Passer domesticus), cosmopolitan birds that many people despise, are searching the ground for leftovers and crumbs. Rebeca doesn’t despise them. Pulling her binoculars out of her backpack, she checks the flock carefully.

Almost immediately she finds what she’s looking for. On the right leg of a sparrow, we can see the glimmer of an aluminum band. This sparrow is one that the Tierra de Aves team banded in the Ethnobotanical Garden of Oaxaca, four blocks away. The Ethnobotanical Garden is the site of another of Tierra de Aves’ bird banding stations—a station that has been functioning uninterrupted, month after month, for more than 20 years, making it the longest-running bird-banding station in Mexico. The sparrow is an individual that Rebeca and the rest of the Tierra de Aves team know personally, a familiar face in the midst of the café.

Hints about migration

If we could glimpse an aluminum band on the leg of one of the orioles or buntings at the edge of the Huatulco River, if we managed to take a photo that revealed the unique numbers stamped on the band, we could understand a little bit more of the story of that bird. Perhaps the band would tell us of an indigo bunting that was born in New York and got its band from a team of scientists there. Or maybe we would learn of a Baltimore oriole that grew up among the cottonwoods and oaks along a river in Nebraska. We might learn whether the orchard orioles are the same ones that Kent Fiala recorded in North Carolina, or if these grew up farther west—in the Dakotas, in Kansas, or possibly closer, in Zacatecas, Mexico.

In a forest of oaks a few miles north of Oaxaca city, close to a creek in the foothills of the mountains, a MacGillivray’s warbler (Geothlypis tolmiei) is calling vigorously. The warbler is hiding among the shrubs and weeds. If we could see him well, there’s a minute possibility that we might see a band on his leg, too. It’s even possible—although it would be like winning the lottery—that the band would have the number of a MacGillivray’s warbler that I know personally, such as the young one that I saw banded in Wyoming last summer. Or perhaps the band would tell us that this individual grew up among the quaking aspens of a British Columbia stream, or in a patch of willows in the mountains of California.

Imagining

In the absence of bands, we don’t know the specifics of these stories. We’re left listening to the song of an orchard oriole in North Carolina, to a MacGillivray’s warbler that I recorded near a stream in Montana—and we’re left imagining. Rebeca imagines—and also, she keeps on looking for bands.

Rebeca was born in the state of Oaxaca; later, her family moved to Mexico City for work. Like many stories of connection with the earth, Rebeca’s story begins in her childhood. Growing up without siblings during her first eight years, as a child she felt a special connection with the small creatures of the garden outside her house. She tells me of a time with a friend when they found a moth stranded on the ground in the patio. The two moved the moth so that no one would step on her, and Rebeca remembers with joy that the experience helped her friend get over her fear of moths.  

The insects and the birds

In college, Rebeca studied chemical engineering, returning to Mexico City afterwards to work. But her affinity for the animals followed her. And living in the city, her connection with the insects (something that had always fascinated her) became especially important. In particular, the butterflies and moths called her attention. She began to rescue caterpillars that other people wanted to kill, feeding them with leftover prunings from the gardeners of the politécnico.

Rebeca also enrolled in a university again, this time to study insects. She got involved with the Global Youth Biodiversity Network (GYBN) and other nature-lovers in Mexico City . And when she returned to Oaxaca in 2021, those connections led her to volunteer with Tierra de Aves, where she fell in love with birds as well. Now she feels as if she is part of a human flock, a team that she describes as “marvelous.”

Rebeca’s passion for nature has touched her family as well. It started with the caterpillars, whose sightings began to be a topic of family conversation. Now it’s the birds, too. Rebeca tells me of a recent conversation with her mom about the incredible migration of the Nashville warblers (Leiothlypis ruficapilla). These warblers, so common in Oaxaca during the winter, migrate unbelievable thousands of miles to spend the summer as far away as Washington state, Manitoba, or Quebec.

Nashville warblers and western tanagers

There are Nashville warblers among the leafy trees of the Sierra Sur as well, 70 miles southwest of Oaxaca city, where a broad-winged hawk (Buteo platypterus) is whistling from a branch in the evergreen tropical forest. At a prudent distance from the hawk, where its whistles fade among millions of leaves, a flock of western tanagers (Piranga ludoviciana) is feeding among the expansive foliage of a fig tree (Ficus). From time to time, between bites of the small fruits, you can hear their rapid calls.

While the migration of the Nashville warblers has touched Rebeca’s family, the tanagers have touched mine. Last September, 2300 miles to the north, my mom heard the same calls in her Missoula, Montana garden. For several weeks, day after day, a flock of five western tanagers foraged just outside of her window, feeding on the grapes she had planted three years before. Every time I spoke with her, she mentioned the tanagers and how excited she was to see them. Her dream of a garden of fruit trees and native plants that would provide food for people and wildlife was coming to fruition. It was the first time she had seen western tanagers in her garden.

The hope of songbirds

When I ask Rebeca how getting to know birds has changed her life, her answer surprises me. She tells me that birds have given her hope. Before, she looked at the ground in search of insects; now she also searches the sky, looking for birds. She recognizes them by their voices, too. And noticing their presence in her daily life gives Rebeca hope that, in spite of the massive challenges that the beings of this planet are experiencing—extinctions, habitat loss, climate change, extractive economies—there are things that we can do. And recognizing the birds, seeing her relationship with them as one of cooperation, gives Rebeca the hope that we can still find healing and thrive, together with the living beings of our planet.

I love this perspective. It makes me think of my connection with the faraway northern landscape of Montana, connected by the impossible migrations that the MacGillivray’s warblers and so many other birds make each year. There you can find the restoration site that I mentioned in the last episode, Sevenmile Creek, where I began observing the local birds in 2017. The land was far from pristine. The decades of abuse were very evident—and even so, the birds and the plants continued, a persistent and exuberant diversity in a neglected place. It gave me hope, too, getting to know the warblers and sparrows among the chokecherries and the weeds, seeing the diversity of pollinators visiting the invasive plants, learning by heart the summer songs of the gray catbirds (Dumetella caroliniensis), the red-winged blackbirds (Agelaius phoeniceus), the American goldfinches (Spinus tristis), and the western meadowlarks (Sturnella neglecta).

A thousand moments of wonder

It gave me a profound connection with the living beings of this place, a connection composed of a thousand moments of wonder, of sitting, listening, and learning. And Sevenmile Creek asked me the question: if my neighbors the birds and the plants can survive so well in spite of our abuses, what if we help them? What if, after getting to know them, getting to know their ways of life, we find ways to reciprocate?  

It’s something that Rebeca asks herself, too. She tells me that she wants 2024 to be her year of action. She shares a few of her ideas: projects to reduce collisions between windows and birds, to share the inspiration of the natural world with more people, to plant native plants and create more habitats for birds within the city of Oaxaca.

Moments of connection

And so we return to the moments of connection with our neighboring beings: to get to know them and feel the magic that it is to be alive on this diverse planet. I believe that, with this type of connection, the desire to reciprocate comes naturally, to take actions that help life thrive. And the personal connection that we have with the birds, the insects and the other animals, with the plants and the fungi, with the lichens and the trees, with our living neighbors, is a source of inspiration and meaning. It’s also this connection that will tell us if the actions we take are working.

So let’s return once again to the orchard oriole in the North Carolina summer. Let’s think of the thicket at the edge of the Huatulco River, the house sparrows in a café in Oaxaca, the MacGillivray’s warblers who spend the winter in the hills of the city and spend the summer singing thousands of miles to the north. And to this symphony of connections, let’s add thousands other wild voices from your community, your garden, and your local park. And then let’s get out there, collaborating with the countless living beings of this earth, and let’s continue learning their stories and caring for them.