A Journey of Curiosity

The bow of a kayak leaves a crease in the gravel as it pushes back from the beach. Nine others slide seaward as paddlers tuck in legs, stretch spray skirts over cockpit coamings, and check moving parts. The paddlers glide along a coastal cliff, passing between rocks in a graceful slalom.

A small white gull paddles with folding feet to hide behind a miniature rock island. A white kayak sneaks up and pauses for a closer look.

“It has a dark dot behind its eye.”
“Bonaparte’s Gull?”
“Don’t see them much around here.”
“No.”

The kayaks glide on. Wild fig trees cling to rock walls with long pale toes. Cacti dig their roots into creases. Cliffs rise sheer. High above, the frigates lounge on crooked wings and watch as little darts of color stitch the rocky shoreline into a memory.

Rocks structure our world. They cradle our beds, define our landings, funnel the wind, hem the sea. Plants and animals, too, have relationships with geology. Shelter. Support. Mineral sustenance.

I am paddling the coast from Loreto to La Paz, along the Sierra la Giganta mountains, for 10 days with 9 other people including Anna, who has been so moved by the expressive geology that she’s on a mission to make a guide for paddlers. She has inspired me with her enthusiasm. We’re not specialists in anything except curiosity, but onward we go, asking questions, taking photos.

Along the edge of the sea, rocks expose themselves. In their breaking, eroding, dissolving, re-sorting, they show their weaknesses and demonstrate their strength. The sea opens to a page, and we try to read the stories of the rock—the crooked, massive, tiny, colorful stories.

The No-Garbage Theory of Chicken Spirits

Nothing disappears. I looked into the yellow and black eye of my chicken as she gasped, and the presence departed from that eye. Where did that breath just go?

I read somewhere of “primitive” cultures without the concept of trash. Where resources are a closed system.

In our lives, garbage goes to that magic place called “away” and new things keep appearing on the shelves. But that’s an illusion. Everything goes somewhere, everything comes from somewhere.

So where does a chicken’s spirit go? Or it’s breath, if you don’t want to grant chickens a spirit. There is something in there that is alive, then it isn’t.

I had a hard time killing this chicken. She had chickenality, which is personality with feathers. But she was a meat bird, I rationalized, of a hybrid breed that will usually die of a heart attack if let live much past its prime butchering age. Besides, somebody was eating the laying hens’ eggs, and that behavior is not to be tolerated in the coop. It was just her time to go.

I cradled her in my arm as she looked around and told her I’d love to meet her again someday, when she’s not the chicken and I'm not the farmer; when we’re more equals. And then I stuffed her gently but firmly into a bucket, pulled her head through a hole in the bottom, and cut her jugular.

I held her head down so she wouldn’t flop out of the bucket as she expired. I apologized, and I sobbed. A chicken takes a long time to completely expire. The eye is lucid, then it blinks. It fades, then returns briefly. The body jerks. One has eons to think and to feel while standing there, knife in one hand, chicken in the other, burgundy blood dripping.

If spirits “come into this world” and go out of it, where is the spirit warehouse?

There was an energy that was trotting around, pecking, scratching, flapping. Now it hangs limp in my hand. Physics gives us the “law of conservation of energy” which says that nothing disappears. That chicken’s breath has gone somewhere. The energy in the flesh has not gone anywhere yet, though it will eventually become part of three things: my body, my activity, and my composting toilet fodder. Poop will become dirt, and then nutrients taken up in a tree. My body, too, will eventually become dirt, taken up by plants. My activity makes body heat and moves resources. So our legacy is dirt, and the things we move. Plus spirit.

One can follow nutrients around. But spirits? Can they appear, like new toys on the shelf, and go, like garbage hauled off in the truck? Then where is the factory, and where is the dump? Or is it the recycling plant? There must be a circle of understanding big enough to encompass the resource flow of spirits.

If rattlesnakes can register the heat left in a mouse’s footprint, and physics can split atoms, should we not be able to measure a spirit and follow its trail as it departs into thin air? Maybe spirit is air itself. It animates a body, and then it stops entering it, and takes that heat back into itself. Is God in the air? Is God the air itself? Is God the Warehouse of spirits? Or is God the warehouse Manager? Or is God just a word for things we can’t measure but need to believe in?

The next steps made the chicken less resemble the entertaining creature I knew, and more resemble food. Scalding, plucking, removing head and feet. Eviscerating. During the final step, I noticed that she was developing chicken testicles inside that body. Sorry, little rooster. Life is full of surprises.

More Birds!

Since I posted the bird stories, a kind Tahitian contacted me to let me know the more common name of the bent-nosed reef poker is Bristle-thighed Curlew (Numenius tahitiensis), teu'e in Tahitian. It breeds in Alaska and winters on tropical Pacific islands.

He also identified some other birds I’d photographed but not written about. The Tuamotu Reed-warbler (Acrocephalus atyphus) is pictured to the right. It lives only in French Polynesia and was photographed on Tahanea atoll. Thanks Yvan.

If you would like to comment on any entries, or edumacate me on any factual errors you’ve caught me at, my email is ginnical@yahoo.com.

Birds

I started photographing birds on our crossing from Mexico to the South Pacific because looking for them gave me an excuse to stand in the cockpit and stare at the horizon for hours, which was a good antidote to seasickness. Then I realized that photos were great aids for identification. One could zoom in closer with the camera than with the eye. The photo would hold still long enough to study markings against the Seabirds book. The challenges of taking clear photos of a flying bird from a moving boat, with the dynamic background of the sea, kept me trying.

On anchor in the Marquesas I fell in love with the flocks of little white terns and their aerial maneuvers. Sun caught them dancing against a dark background of verdant hillside or grey full-bellied cloud. But I couldn’t get a satisfactory photo.

With the mission of capturing their carefree spirit in pixels, I went ashore with the camera on the atoll of Makemo. That started a tradition of wandering about on scraps of land in the South Pacific and photographing birds, and other things that caught my eye.

The following posts are vignettes about some of the birds photographed. For more photos, please see the bird post on Henrick’s blog (link on left)

Bent-Nosed Reef Poker

Curlew? Or, On Naming Versus Knowing

“Koewee!” that’s how the bent-nosed reef poker announces himself. He swoops down to land on the crunchy landscape of old reef, then struts to the edge of the water and looks about for something to poke with his downturned beak. He wears racing stripes on his head and horizontal bands on his tail.

The downturned bill and general coloration remind me of a curlew, but I have no references on what shorebirds live here. It could be curlew, or curlew’s cousin, or someone who happens to look like curlew.

The one bird book we have on board is Seabirds: An Identification Guide by Peter Harrison. It doesn’t cover shorebirds, but for seabirds, it’s an excellent reference for determining the name of a bird, where it lives, and how it looks. I feel the lack of a shorebird identification guide, but am not terribly disappointed. Even if I did know the name, I don’t really know anything about the creature I’ve just seen, other than what it’s called. Naming and classifying things is a noble cause. The structure of science. The basis for sharing and furthering knowledge.

But identifying is not knowing. Matching pictures with what one has seen gives a small thrill of common language, but it is no substitute for experience with the creature itself. Observing. Listening. Spending time.

Observing gives time to think, and thinking reveals ones ignorance. Often the thing I learn when observing is how little I really know. I’m not out for science; I don’t know the complete body of our understanding of the bent nosed reef poker, or what questions to ask to further that knowledge. This frees me to just observe. To be in the moment, in the presence of the poker, or of whatever noddy, tern, or crab happens by. It’s more of a meditation than a scientific endeavor.

Every behavior I observe is new to me. Is fresh. Renews that reverence for nature, that feeling of discovery. Connects me with the great body of life and spirit that is beyond human construct.

Photography is both a distraction and a tool. I’m looking for the perfect lighting, angle, and composition, instead of just taking in the moment. But it also gives me an excuse to be there, to wait, to watch. It’s a way to look closer than my eye can see. A way to share something of the experience with others later.

I stand in the shadows of palm trees and take some photos of the bent-nosed reef poker. He, too, is in the shadows, and the bright sea is behind. I bend down for a different angle, and he looks curiously in my direction. The sunlight slowly creeps towards us both. I lie down on my back on the hard, bumpy moonscape of old reef, and lift my head with the camera to watch my feathered subject.

He exhibits great curiosity, stretching his neck and tilting his striped head. He wanders my way obliquely, pausing and looking. His strut is comical, extending a long leg in front before planting it and shifting weight to it. Curiosity meets caution some 5 meters away, and he wanders back towards the waters edge to poke about for food in the sunlight.

Days later I hear the call again, “Keowee!” coming over the water. I look out and there is the familiar figure of the bend-nosed reef poker winging his way towards the palms of another island.

Red-footed Booby Sula sula

At sea, and on Tahanea atoll
The curiosity of boobies makes them fun birds to be around. While I’ve been kayaking in Mexico, boobies will often circle overhead, peering down. Blue-footed and brown boobies inhabit those waters. On my very first kayak journey in the Marquesas, a booby almost landed on my kayak. In a frantic last minute tangle of wings, it seemed to notice that the kayak was already occupied.

Boobies in the South Pacific can be difficult to tell apart because they have so many variations of plumage and “morphs”. Red-footed (sula sula), masked (sula dactylatra) and brown (sula leucogaster) boobies are the options, according to Seabirds by Peter Harrison.

About a week before reaching the Marquesas we saw a black and white mottled booby which was nowhere in the book. It was seen nearby an adult masked booby. By similar size and circumstantial evidence, we decided it must be some molt in between immature and juvenile masked booby.

According to some texts, boobies are indicative of nearby islands, but it turns out those are the nesting adults and the newly fledged. The islanders have a term for the “carefree teenagers” who range far from islands in their exploration of the world before settling down to raise a family. The mystery booby in its awkward wardrobe several hundred miles east of the Marquesas must have been one of those. Henrick and I decided we must also be carefree teenagers, perhaps permanently stuck in that stage.

A completely brown booby with grey legs landed on the bowsprit railing on our passage from Makemo to Fakarava. Perhaps an immature red-footed booby, it was quite content to hitch a bouncy ride.

It wasn’t until Tahanea atoll, our last one, that I saw the first red leg on one of the mystery boobies, and positively identified one. They hide their feet well inside their feathers in flight. The many color morphs of the red booby can put the fledgling booby birder into a tailspin. There are the 3 different forms of white morph, the brown morph, the white-tailed brown morph, the white-headed white-tailed brown morph, and the brownish juveniles who don’t have red legs when they do show them. As if that weren’t enough, there’s also the “intermediate” category, which is without definite pattern, and may or may not have red legs. Of course these descriptions also overlap a bit with various phases of both masked and brown boobies. It’s a puzzle that keeps me engaged in the discovery.

Red-footed boobies nest on Tahanea atoll, and I was lucky enough to find one large fuzzy chick still in the nest. It watched from its shelf of haphazard sticks each bird that passed its view. Noddies, terns, and boobies all captured its attention. All color morphs of the red-footed booby wheel about the sky over Tahanea.

One evening Henrick and I rowed in to the beach for a modest bonfire. On both sides of us at some distance, were large-leafed trees that boobies like to roost in. Occasionally another bird would fly in to claim a perch, and grumpy croaking conversations ensued from the treetops.

White Tern (Fairy tern) Gygis alba

Makemo, Fakarava, and Tahanea atolls
Early morning sun gilds their white wings as they cavort after each other above the palms. Fairy terns, they are sometimes called. It’s easy to believe one is in the company of playful angels, or fairies, watching their synchronized antics in the wind, and the sun shining through their primaries.

Pure white and inquisitive, with big eyes, they follow as you walk or jog along the beach. Lie down to stretch or relax, and a pair of them may hover close over you peeping at each other. They almost always fly in pairs, doing formation aerobatics.

The camera reveals that the white terns in flight often glance at each other with their black marble eyes. Good close-ups also show that the beak, which looks black from even a close distance, actually has a base of bright blue.

It’s not enough to merely document them, or even just appreciate them; I find myself giving in to the temptation to romanticize them. With their playful, spirited flight, white terns embody the perfect romance. Their companionship, the tightness of their maneuvers, their glances, and their quiet vocalizations in flight suggest a mutual awareness and affection. Each acrobatic twist and swoop is matched by a partner just a wingbeat away.

To a land-bound human, flight itself is freedom. Our metaphors reflect this: my heart flies with them. Joy is a freedom of the heart. Inspiration, a freedom of imagination. The terns are two little feathered beings just being. Carving their essence in white against a dream blue sky with their merry formation acrobatics. Free from gravity. Free from worry.

Viewed from the boat, they are just white specks flitting about over the palms or the sea. Their whiteness catches the eye. White is light. Is pure. Is carefree. The terns wear innocence on their feathers. Then they turn edge on and disappear into the firmament.

The dark shine in the planet of their big eyes suggests some spiritual wisdom. It’s a wisdom tempered with humor and lightheartedness, written in their looping cursive letters against the tropical sky. On the base of their black upturned beak, they wear a snip of blue, a piece of that tropical sky. As if the tern’s lance had pierced the heavens. The little white bird with the big heart won the joust with the sky and carried home a piece of its azure robe.