Pico Bonito, Honduras

                                             the Lodge at Pico Bonito

I first fell under the spell of tropical forest when I was in my twenties and set off to spend three months in the Amazon. In those days, among biologists, it was known as a good gig—room and board at one of the first jungle lodges, the Explorers Inn in Southeast Peru, in exchange for a little guiding and a modest research project.
So I got myself a South American bird book (which weighed about three times as much as my North American guide) read a little about tropical ecology, and decided that my research project was going to solve the mystery of the relationship between certain canopy fruit eaters and seed dispersal. I had been working at a botanical garden and had years of experience as a park naturalist in BC. Piece of cake.
It took about two weeks for it to dawn on me that I had been seriously deluded. First, to put it simply: in a 4 square mile piece of a coastal BC forest, 2 or 3 species (of conifers) dominate the landscape; in a tropical forest you could easily find 200 species of trees and that doesn’t even count the tangles of lianas, the ferns and orchids encrusting trunks, the great aerial pools of bromeliads, the under story of heliconias, herbs, and grasses. This is something like opening a mixed chocolate box—it’s better to have a key.
I had neither plant keys, nor botanists to consult. I would walk the dark forest floor, gazing up at the sunlit canopy, picking up strange fruits and flowers, with no idea what I was looking at. Sometimes a mixed foraging flock would wash around me and shake down the forest and I would flip through my bird book trying to get all the field marks before they rushed off again. Then I would simply lie on the trail on my back with my binoculars plastered against my face. I had a biologist’s existential crisis—if I couldn’t name things where did that leave me? Was taxonomy dead? Eventually I became lethargic, undisciplined, entranced. I would set off, telling the other naturalists that I was going to do research and simply wander the trails, watching.
Every time I’ve set foot in a tropical forest since, I start resolved and am seduced again. I lose my edges, start to melt into the whole thing.
This week though, it was different. I was on task—I was with BIRDERS—at the Pico Bonito Lodge, one of my favourite places in the world. The lodge nestles at the edge of a huge protected area, which cloaks the high steep flanks of the Pico Bonito Range. Looking at the wall of this forest from below is like looking at a beautifully stitched tapestry, rich with the many textures of the trees, occasionally embroidered with flowering canopies. Waterfalls feed rivers, which pause from time to time, in clear cool pools.
My companions were a mixture of writers, local guides, biologists, and eco-tour company owners. Neither a fleeting feather, nor a faint call was lost on them. I followed them happily, though often I felt like one of those foreign correspondents, slowed by their feed—mine being the time it took me to actually find the birds in the dense layers of forest. The final list was long and included some uncommon species. All in all a respectable piece of field work. Yet, it still feels more like love than science.

All Birds All the Time-The Mesoamerican Birding Festival

No, I didn’t sail here. In fact at the moment I’m landlocked, watching a fine rain fall on the hibiscus and citrus gardens of the Finca Las Glorias Hotel, on Lake Yojoa. This week, while Kim sailed off into the Sea of Cortez, with friends Angus and Graeme, I flew into Honduras (where I used to guide an eco-tour every February). I haven’t been back for a couple of years and so I jumped at the chance to re-visit some of my favourite places.
I’m here, as a writer, for the first Mesoamerican Birding Festival, so I thought I’d “fly” (sorry) some of my first impressions past you, dear readers.
First, let’s be clear. I am not in the same league with the birders here. I am far too sloppy with my birding details to be a real birder. For example, this morning, in a reserve up in the mountains, I watched Violet Sabrewing hummingbirds. Someone asked me if I had ever seen this species. If a Violet Sabrewing flew into your kitchen right now you’d remember it forever (and not only because that would be a very unusual event) but because it is a wondrous thing. It is the size of a swallow, wrapped from head to tail in iridescent purple lamé. (If birds are the earth’s jewels then tropical birds are its bling). You might even have what one of my co-birders here called a “birdgasm”.

female Violet Sabrewing

But I couldn’t remember if I’d seen a Violet Sabrewing. I can’t account for this lapse in my bird memory. I could put a good spin on it by saying that I get gob-smacked, side-swiped by beauty and slip into an altered state, in the way you forget the details of a conversation when you are falling in love.

Great Kiskadee

But even though I am not the most diligent lister, I am passionate about birds. 

Once I went to a teapot show at a museum. There were rooms and rooms of teapots of every shape and material used in the past, and more rooms of artists’ conceptions of teapots; teapots shaped like human hearts, where tea poured from the aorta, nautilus teapots, where tea spiralled from inner channels; bejeweled, enameled, scaled, tiled, hammered, hand-painted and hand-blown teapots. It seemed that an explosion of possibilities was contained in the vessel of the teapot.
I think this is part of the delight of birds. But making the delight more perverse, more interesting for the mind and heart to reconcile is that this sheer extravagance, this endless ingenuity has been fashioned by the slow, indifferent hand of evolution.
I looked up the meaning of beauty in the Oxford Dictionary: a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight. But also, a combination of qualities that pleases the intellect or moral sense.
It’s difficult, this meaningless beauty. And it always leads me to something I can only describe as the inherent morality of nature. A morality which is not utilitarian, but complete in itself. Beautiful.
By the way, I checked my notes. Turns out I have seen the Violet Sabrewing, not here in Honduras, but ten years ago in Costa Rica.
Cecropia leaf on umbrella

recent images

Post Script-Flaneur Dog

I returned to La Paz yesterday to find that my little black friend has been adopted, by a gentle older man.  He has named her Lady's (he's a she) and her eyes already look brighter, her coat brushed and gleaming. I was almost sorry, as a friend of mine had already written to say she'd love her. But a happy ending nevertheless...

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Bones

Dried Triggerfish on the beach

One of the pleasures of walking on the beaches in the Sea of Cortez is picking through the tide line. Mounds of coral tinkle like china, bleached porcupine and triggerfish with calcareous grins lie among shells as big as dinner plates, the femurs and skulls of pelicans—like leftovers from a great feast.

Frigatebird Skull

Perhaps because the salt and sun desiccate everything as soon as it dies, these leavings aren't gross. Even in the city, people here don’t seem to mind dead things hanging around longer than they should. A road-killed cat between the marina and town grew drier with each passing day, until it became flat and papery, a blueprint of a cat.
On first glance you might think the Mexicans have a laissez-faire attitude towards death. As I mentioned in my last post, they don’t seem to find it as serious a topic as we do. On the two days around the Christian All Souls day, they celebrate the Day of the Dead. They have parties to remember friends and relatives, visit their graves, sometimes sleeping there, and leaving special food and drink for them to enjoy.
I like the playful “Catrinas”, skeleton dolls sold for these days and as reminders all year that underneath our finery, even in our prime, we are bone; the only part that will last—for a while.

There’s something impersonal about bone; its mineral indifference makes you feel that you are built on some bureaucratic biological specs rather than lovingly designed; that you are a form letter rather than a handwritten note.
Still, maybe it’s us with the laissez-faire attitude towards death, ignoring it, or poking at it with science. For instance, here’s “Kim’s skull” (you may remember it from my first blog post). Kim acquired it many years ago, from a hospital shelf where it had been languishing un-loved. In Canada it is almost impossible to examine a human skull (as it is illegal to sell them). Whenever I see this skull I wonder who he was, where he grew up, why he died so young (as his perfect teeth suggest). What would he have thought of the idea that one day he would be passed from hand to hand, opened up with neat hinges?
One thing is for sure, his skull will never become part of the joyful decay we see on the Baja beaches, or depicted in this Day of the Dead Skull I found in a shop in La Paz.

Of Dogs and Men—the Flaneur’s Life

As we drift around the Sea of Cortez, La Paz seems to be our base. It is the place where family and friends come and go, where flights and buses leave; we sail in the long narrrow channel (which closes when winds are high) into the windy, current-swept harbour often, and tie up at Marina La Paz, where there are so many gringo boats there is a club house on the dock where people meet for coffee and to exchange books, DVD’s, and information every morning.  This week we are waiting for friends to arrive from Canada.

This afternoon I set off for a leisurely amble through town, with my camera. I guess you could call it a flaneur’s expedition (flaneur: An aimless idler; a loafer. French, from flâner, to idle about, stroll) settting off with no clear purpose, but to observe the goings on around me. I did mean to stop at a couple of places to photograph “death art” but other things happened on this walk, as they should to a flaneur.

First, I met a flaneuring dog—a black lab/border collie thing, I’d seen around town. He was a little scruffy and lean, but otherwise healthy, with a big white smile. He sneezed a few times to let me know he was there, took one sniff of me, decided I was a gringa and likely to be fruitful, then fell into easy step with me. At first I told him to go away “vaya, vaya”, but I think he knew it was half-hearted. If I was Mexican I would have been sensible and shouted or tossed a small rock at him. Instead, I studiously ignored him. He trotted along happily, nosing every garbage bag, investigating every food source, even the house sparrows taking dust baths around the street trees. When we passed other dogs, he looked up at me for support as if to say “I’m with her”, but ultimately, he carved a wide berth around them and eventually caught up with me again.

I said “look, we are not together. Don’t even imagine you are in my company.” I was tempted to stop at a food stand and buy him a treat but I figured that would turn him into a more aggressive mooch in the long run…But he seemed happy with our arrangement, trotting along in a gentlemanly fashion. In the same spirit as the Mexican men who occasionally take an interest in me—polite, watchful. If there’s an outside chance, que bueno, but otherwise, respectful.

I eventually lost him when I slipped into a store, where I finally did photograph what I’d set out to: the many little figures one can buy in honour of the dead. It seems that the Mexicans have a healthy relationship with death, taking pleasure in imagining all of us (from the young woman in her prime, to the dentist and gynecologist) as joyful skeletons. 
But what really caught my interest today were the walls I passed on my walk. I like old peeling walls, which show their layers—they are so much more interesting than perfect newly painted walls. Not to push the metaphor, but what do you think? A wall with a past, showing its history…just makes it more beautiful?

As the sun was setting, I stopped for a marguerita at Hotel Perla, on the waterfront. I was the only customer and the waiter was elaborate with me, to the great enjoyment of his idle colleagues. Will that be a marguerita on the rocks he asked me in Spanish. No, on the veranda I answered. Time to sign up for those Spanish lessons... 

Blog From the Sea of Cortez

In 1939, the writer John Steinbeck set off from Monterey for the Sea of Cortez on a marine collecting expedition. Seems like an unlikely activity for a fiction writer, but he had fallen under the spell of an unlikely companion, a biologist named Ed Ricketts. For two months the two of them, along with a small crew, scoured the shores and reefs of the Sea of Cortez on a sardine boat.
If you have read Cannery Row, you will know that Ed Ricketts ran a biological supply company in Monterey (the character “Doc” was modeled on him). He was a man who loved beer, women, music, and (especially) the inter-tidal world. (He wrote one of the first field guides to marine life of the North Pacific, Between Pacific Tides). 
He had the sort of fascination with hidden and inconsequential creatures that most of us lose as children, when we realize that they are not important to most adults. Studying biology can give you permission to continue to love these things and I’ve noticed that many biologists, especially the ones who still deal with animals and plants in the wild, have a child-like love of their subject.
It was this passion that seduced Steinbeck. The book he wrote about that trip, The Log From the Sea of Cortez, came out in 1941. Any edition after 1948 (when Ricketts was killed in his car at a rail crossing) includes a forward on him by Steinbeck: a funny, affectionate, and complex character sketch, which resonates with sadness.
The book is a contemplation on many things, including diesel engines, navigation, social engineering, and philosophy. Occasionally Steinbeck pauses to paint portraits of his quirky shipmates. But mostly he writes about the journey, the smells and tastes of the sea and land, and the collecting expeditions to fill jars and buckets with crabs, shrimps, nudibranchs, snails, worms...
I can’t help but compare that journey, almost exactly 70 years ago, with our own. As they set off from Monterey, Steinbeck writes about not only the material provisions (cans of peaches, crates of oranges, bottles of whiskey) for their trip but the spirit with which they set off: "We suppose this was the mental provisioning of our expedition. We said 'Let’s go wide open'.”
I think about that term mental provisioning often. Wondering what our own is. Certainly to “go wide open.” Maybe also, as Steinbeck writes “to re-align ourselves with light and tides.” Perhaps, like he and Ricketts, to “re-acquaint ourselves with laziness” as “only in laziness can one achieve a state of contemplation which is a balancing of values, a weighing of oneself against the world and the world against itself.”
But also, with a different spirit—a little sadly—to try to see things before they disappear. Part of our mental provisioning is a feeling that something is coming to an end. Not the world of course, it will go on with our without us. But rather, diversity, effortless flourishing. An end of abundance.
We haven’t seen the air bright with leaping swordfish, the great pods of dolphins and schools of tuna thrashing the water to life that Steinbeck described. Today, day after day, many of the beautiful creatures which Ed Ricketts lovingly collected on specially chosen sites and tides are dredged up by the shrimp trawlers we have seen moving like slow combines up and down the coast.
Still, taking Rickett’s cue, perhaps the secret to happiness is finding great pleasure in the small cogs of the living world, a burrowing owl fixing you with a yellow gaze, a tarantula ambling across a sandy wash, a tiny ruby-coloured hawkfish darting among the coral.
In the end Steinbeck found more than specimens on his expedition. He collected holiness in the tide pools of the Sea of Cortez:
…If one observes in the relational sense, it seems apparent that species are only commas in a sentence, that each species is at once the point and the base of a pyramid, that all life is relational to the point where an Einsteinian relativity seems to emerge. And that not only the meaning, but the feeling about species grows misty. One merges into another, groups melt into ecological groups until the time when what we know as life meets and enters what we think of as non-life: barnacle and rock, rock and earth, earth and tree, tree and rain and air. And the units nestle into the whole and are inseparable from it. Then one can come back to the microscope and the tide pool and the aquarium. But the little animals are found to be changed, no longer set apart and alone. And it is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical out-crying which is one of the most prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known as unknowable. This is a simple thing to say, but the profound feeling of it made a Jesus, a St. Augustine, a St. Francis, a Roger Bacon, a Charles Darwin, and an Einstein. Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things—plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.