Diversity and the Future of Birding, part 2

From Oak Harbor, Ohio, Kenn writes: A few days ago (August 24) I wrote about the lack of diversity in the birdwatching community. This issue has bugged me for some time, but on the other hand, I’m encouraged to know some individuals who are actively doing something about it.

John C. Robinson has been a friend for several years. We had corresponded before we met, so I knew he was an expert birder before I knew he was African-American. John has been a writer and consultant on a number of topics, but with his status as a black bird expert, it was perhaps only natural that he would become a spokesperson on the issue of diversity in birding and outdoor recreation. At a conservation summit before the Midwest Birding Symposium in 2003, I heard John speak on this subject, and he was very persuasive and compelling. More recently he has published a book that addresses the same issue, Birding for Everyone: Encouraging People of Color to Become Birdwatchers. It’s a thought-provoking work that offers some real solutions.

More than a decade ago I was already an admirer of Dudley Edmondson’s spectacular nature photography, especially of the birds of prey. Indeed, I arranged to use some of his images in my Kaufman Field Guide to Birds of North America, published nine years ago. Later I found out that this very successful professional nature photographer also was African-American, and had begun to turn his camera toward human subjects as well. He felt that the lack of diversity in the outdoors was partly because people of color didn’t see role models taking part in birdwatching and other outdoor activities, so Dudley has made a point of finding, photographing, and interviewing the exceptions. One result of this work is his fine book, Black and Brown Faces in America’s Wild Places, which is accomplishing great things by highlighting a diverse set of "outdoor role models."

These two guys are both dedicated to this cause of increasing diversity in the field. Here’s just one random piece of evidence: when I was struggling to get my North American bird guide translated into Spanish and then published, John Robinson and Dudley Edmondson were both very encouraging. I hadn’t even met Dudley at that point, but as soon as he heard about the project, he called me up to offer moral support.

Speaking of the Spanish-language bird guide, another person who is doing great things for outdoors diversity is Tamberly Conway, at Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas. She has been working with the U.S. Forest Service in Texas to promote a program called "Latino Legacy: Amigos del Bosque" (Friends of the Forest). This innovative program has had great success in reaching out to the Hispanic community and getting families to connect with nature on National Forest lands. We haven’t met her yet, but she and her colleague Maricruz Flores, one of the team leaders for Amigos del Bosque, will be coming to Ohio - - along with John Robinson and Dudley Edmondson - - to speak at our conference, Diversity in Outdoor Recreation: The Many Faces of Conservation, September 26 in Toledo. You can read all about that event on the Black Swamp Bird Observatory website here.

Mount Sinai

The Egyptian tourism machine swallows 12 million visitors a year and has turned Mount Sinai, one of the world’s most spiritual places, into one of the world’s biggest tourist traps. Each year about 230,000 people sign up for the usual tour; this involves waking in the middle of the night, getting into a bus in Dahab or Sharm el Sheikh, and climbing Egypt’s highest peak – where Moses is believed to have received the Ten Commandments – to share the sunrise with a crowd of tourists in inappropriate clothes and footwear clutching plastic water bottles, guidebooks and even howling babies. Back at the foot of the holy mountain, you cram into St Catherine’s Monastery, glance at its collection of icons, and wait for people to get out of the way so you can take an ironic picture of the “No Smoking” sign next to a giant desert bramble purported to be the original burning bush.

When I go on holiday a crowd is the last thing I want to see. And so, when the monastery closes at noon, and the convoy of vehicles speeding to the Red Sea coast and its world of sunbathing, snorkelling and discos clears out, I stay behind in the town of St Catherine, population 800. It turns out that it’s now possible to disappear into the mountains for days with a local Bedouin guide and connect with the Sinai’s spectacular landscape, ancient history, and indigenous culture.

My first stop is the office of Sheikh Sina, a European Union-funded tour company founded in 2006 to help the southern Sinai’s Bedouin tribes organise and professionalise the wilderness-guiding industry which dates back to the era of camel caravans. It later served early European explorers and got another kick-start when Israel occupied Sinai and brought with it settlers and tourists after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Regarded by many Egyptians from the Nile Valley as primitives who collaborated with Israel, the 20,000 strong Bedouin population has been marginalised from the beach resort industry that developed after Egypt regained full possession of the Sinai in 1982 and which now employs 400,000 people.

“Trekking has existed for a long time, but we’re trying to introduce a business model that has a future,” says Dave Lucas, Sheikh Sina’s 31-year old British operations manager. In addition to organising treks lasting for as long as one month, Sheikh Sina provides language education and emergency medical training to guides; is establishing mountain rescue protocols using GPS and aircraft from Sharm el Sheikh; and is teaching locals how to use computers for reservations and marketing. Sheikh Sina’s mandate – part of a US$83 million (Dh305m) EU initiative to improve infrastructure and socio-economic development in the Southern Sinai – is to hand the trekking operation over to Bedouin guides and managers by next year. It is also committed to expanding hiking programmes outside of the 4,350-square-kilometre St Catherine’s Protectorate, which is dominated by the Jabaliya tribe, and into the territories of the Tarabin, Muzeina, Howeitat, Tiyaha, Garasha, Sawalha and Awlad Said peoples. Given tribal politics, Egyptian government paranoia about security, opium growers, and the series of Red Sea Coast hotel bombings between 2004 and 2006, which north Sinai Bedouin were suspected of having carried out, that’s a hard plan to live up to.

Already, however, Sheikh Sina is attracting clients including Cairo residents on weekend trips like me, hard-core rock climbers, nature lovers who also want easy access to sun and fun in Egypt’s beach towns, and culture buffs who want to understand why Unesco designated St Catherine’s a World Heritage site in 2002.

“Oman and even Jordan have become Land Cruiser cultures whose people just want to drive you around in air-conditioned vehicles and entertain you between meals,” says Geoff Hornsby, 50, a Fellow of Britain’s Royal Geographical Society who has surveyed rock-climbing routes in Oman for that country’s tourism board. In 2007, Hornby hired Sheikh Sina to organise a 275km trek between Taba and El Tor that passed through Tarabin, Muzeina, Jabaliya and Awlad Said traditional lands. He saw tarmac just twice and changed guides and camels as he crossed each tribal boundary. “The Sinai is not an unexplored environment but it’s still one where you can experience the culture on an honest and basic level,” he tells me later, by phone from his home in Derbyshire, England, “It’s the rare place in the Middle East where you will find working camels and people still capable of walking many miles per day.”

Lucas introduces me to my guide for the next three days, Ragab Gabalah, 33, a former cameleer who used to spend all his mornings at the monastery trolling for tourists willing to pay $15 (Dh56) for an uphill camel ride. “On Gebel Mousa, it’s always up, down, hurry, hurry, hurry,” he sighs, using the Bedouin name for Mount Sinai. “I prefer trekking. You walk, sleep, eat with people and get to know them. Inshallah, Sheikh Sina will succeed. Many families will have work, and people who come from such a long way away to visit the Sinai can see the best part.”

A member of the Jabaliya tribe – which is made up of descendants of soldiers and farmers sent in the sixth century by the Byzantine emperor Justinian to support the monks of St Catherine – Ragab was born in a cave on the mountain where his pregnant mother tended goats. Having lived as a nomad until he was eight, he now lives in a house in St Catherine’s with his wife and two young children. Yet he remembers the old ways and promises to show me Bedouin “wedding places”, rock pools and a network of walled gardens hidden from the outside world. Carrying daypacks (a camel with more baggage and a guide will rendezvous with us later), we walk out of town up a steep, zigzagging path between pink granite cliffs, wind-sculpted sandstone and huge boulders. At the top of the first hill, Ragab shows me a mound of large stones over a pit – an old leopard trap. The big cats haven’t been seen in the Sinai since the 1980s, but ibex, hyenas, foxes and wolves – biological relics from the geological era when the Sinai Peninsula was joined to Africa and Asia – remain.

Our trail was laid in the 19th century by the soldiers of the tubercular Sultan Abbas Pasha, who ordered a palace built on the fresh-aired summit of Mount Tinya, but who died in 1854 (some say of poison) before it was completed. In the wadi beneath the palace ruins we pass the first in a network of gardens each protected from flash floods and grazing animals by high stone walls, sometimes surrounding a single, precious tree. From an aeroplane or from the motorway to Sharm el Sheikh, these mountains look barren, but suddenly there are almond trees pink with blooms, white-barked wild figs, carob, peach, pear, apple and quince. Lines of black plastic piping link the deep wells and cisterns from which the Jabaliya used to draw water with a shadoof and goatskins.

The Jabaliya or mountain people, Ragab tells me, descend from 200 families sent from Alexandria and Macedonia by the Byzantine emperor Justinian to protect, grow food for and provide manual labour for the monks of St Catherine; the monks in turn had followed the early Christian ascetics who moved into caves to escape persecution when Rome was still pagan. It was this group who, according to Ragab, began identifying the highest peaks with Old Testament stories about Moses’ flight from Egypt. The Jabaliya converted to Islam in the seventh century, a fact that did not lead to animosity with the monks, whose working relationship with the Jabaliya continues to this day. Indeed, the survival of the world’s oldest continuously functioning monastery, which was never looted, owes much to a gesture of tolerance from the Prophet Mohammed, who issued a letter of protection (signed with his handprint) that has been respected by subsequent invaders, including the Ottomans, Napoleon, the British and the Israelis.

The Jabaliya eventually intermarried with other tribes who fled Mameluke political strife in Cairo in the 15th to 17th centuries. The Egyptian government policy of settling Bedouin in towns has broken the old seasonal way of life, in which Jabaliya families lived in goat hair tents and moved with their herds from November to May, and spent the summer in the cooler mountains harvesting grain and fruit, which they traded for dried fish produced by Bedouin tribes on the Red Sea coast. Today, just 25 of the 400 or so known gardens are regularly maintained. Sheikh Sina staff, who are building two eco-lodges, hope an eventual network of eco-lodges will provide shelter for a hikers and an incentive for Jabaliya families to return to the 100 or so gardens whose fruit trees are still viable despite the decades of neglect.

Already, gardens provide a de facto infrastructure for hikers, offering springs and wells with clean drinking water and places to stop for lunch or spend the night. Ragab and I break for lunch in Wadi Zawatiin, where single-room stone houses are built against the boulders, and the olive trees are over 700 years old. Rubbish from last summer’s growing season is strewn in the deepest part of the wadi – abandoned rubber sandals, empty glass bottles and rags.

But when Ragab uses a fire-blackened sardine can to boil tea, and an old glass bottle to roll out a round loaf of bread that he bakes in the ashes of a fire, I see that what I consider rubbish is in fact a recyclable resource. “When you don’t have money to buy things, you use what you have, or invent new uses,” Ragab explains.

At the valley neck, we climb a col connecting Zawatiin to Wadi Itlah, where we’ll spend the night. It’s late January, and the cool daytime air is perfect for long-distance walking, but summer is also a popular time for treks; the col conceals a series of clear pools where hikers can take a refreshing dip. Sinai granite is among the oldest rock on earth; volcanic activity, which led to the separation of the Asian and Africa continents, left seams of porous black basalt, dykes that became catchments for winter rain and snowfall. Though the Sinai has been in a drought for the last six years, and many old wells have run dry, it’s possible to find water if you dig deep enough. We also see places, marked by greenery, where water springs like magic, dripping from bare rock.

Our stop for the night is a garden belonging to Ahmed Mansour, one of the last traditional doctors in the Sinai, who learnt to identify 270 medicinal plants from his grandfather. With EU help, he has installed a composting toilet for hikers and launched a gardening school to pass on his knowledge to local children. Not everything is going smoothly: the funding covered just five students, and Mansour has had to dig deep into his own pockets to support others, desperate for future employment, who arrived thanks to word of mouth. Mohammed, an 18-year old cameleer from St Catherine, arrives with our sleeping bags and firewood; and for dinner, Ragab makes a stew of chicken, tomatoes and rice seasoned with wild thyme plucked along the trail. We drink spring water boiled with crushed almonds and carob. It’s a sweet, milky concoction thought to be good for memory and eyesight. Night falls, and we turn in for bed, laying our sleeping bags on top of woven rugs and under thick blankets around the fire pit embers. I look up at the moonless night sky and see more stars than I have seen anywhere in my life, thanks to the absence of electric city lights and, perhaps, that Bedouin potion.

The next day’s walk takes us down the romantically named (or not) Naqb al Hoda or Pass of the Winds, part of the old caravan route linking Cairo, St Catherine’s and Mecca. In the shade of a giant boulder shaped like a crocodile’s gaping mouth, we meet a woman embroidering a red-beaded pouch for Fansina, a Bedouin-run women’s crafts collective in St Catherine. “It gives me something to do and a way to make money for my family,” Hoda Ibrahim tells us.

In the past women embroidered their own dresses and veils in bright colours and patterns, a product of tradition, nature, observation, and imagination, a visual code that revealed the wearer’s family, marital status and even, number of children. Hoda is wearing the plain black hijab and abaya of Cairo; she lives just down the valley in the village of Abu Sila. Above us, her three small girls wear bright red smocks and tracksuit bottoms as they tend three black goats and one white sheep. All stand out like jewels against the rock.

The pass descends and opens up onto a broad plain that leads us to Wadi Gharaba, named after its carob trees, and the six-room Al Karm eco-lodge, built in 2002 by a French-Egyptian architect inspired by round Neolithic stone structures called nawami that are scattered across the Sinai. There is an elegant solar-heated stone shower, but no electricity. The walls of my room have windows to let in daylight, candles set in niches, and while the only furniture consists of a wooden table, a thin mattress, mosquito netting pillows and heavy blankets, the place manages to achieve a less-is-more style more trendy than many so-called minimalist boutique hotels costing hundreds of dollars per night.

A room here costs less than US$7, (Dh26) per night. Even more unbelievably, I am the only guest and to make me feel more at home, the lodge owner and host, Gamil Attiya Hossein, who has gone into partnership with Sheikh Sina to attract more customers, invites Ragab and I to visit him in his house, only a 20-minute walk away. Gamil’s wife Firzena is sitting on the floor, brewing goats milk tea on a charcoal brazier for their five children, who are fighting over the remote control of the satellite TV that tourism has paid for. Made from breeze block, theirs is the largest house in the small village of Sheikh Awad, and soon cousins, sisters and uncles drop in to chat, sitting around the glowing brazier. “Today we no longer live in tents,” the 50-year old Gamil says. “But we still have a room called the maga’ad for people to sit around and talk.”

The Egyptian government supplies the village with six hours of electricity every day and tankers bring drinking water – adequate for basic family needs but far from enough for meaningful economic development. I ask Gamil about another EU project that will soon pipe Nile water from Ismaliya to St Catherine where, local rumour has it, a luxury hotel company wants to build a hotel in the plain below Mount Sinai. How will a regular water supply affect the old garden culture? “Just because we have new things, or more things, doesn’t make life easier,” he answers. “The carob trees near Al Karm have survived all this time because we Bedouin know how to conserve water. Our world has changed and is still changing. I tell my children and my guests that people who forget the past are lost.”

Back in Cairo, I feel lost myself, breathing in the polluted air, battling car traffic, grabbing money from a cashpoint. I cling to my memory of the mountain people and hope more outsiders will visit them.

Living Colors: Diversity and the Future of Birding

From Oak Harbor, Ohio, Kenn writes: Okay, here’s some talk about a subject that a lot of us seem to have trouble talking about.

My serious interest in birds began at age six, but at first I birded alone. Then as a young man I was traveling and meeting other birders just a few at a time. So after two decades I still didn’t have a real sense of what the birding community was like. Finally by about the time I hit thirty, I was getting invited to speak to bird clubs and birding festivals all over the continent, and it dawned on me: Wow, we’re practically all white people here.

Once I had noticed, it was strikingly obvious. I’d be doing a bird program for an audience of 200 in New York, or South Carolina, or Alabama, or Chicago, and I’d realize that there wasn’t a single black face in the crowd. Or I’d be talking to a large group at a bird meeting in California or Arizona or Texas, and there would be hardly a face in the room that looked Hispanic or Native American.

The situation remains unchanged today. Kimberly and I live in Ohio, where the population is (according to the 2000 census) about 12 percent black. But when I go to popular birding spots, like the boardwalk at Magee Marsh in spring, the ratio of black birders that I see is not 12 percent, which would be one out of eight people - - it’s more like one out of three hundred. Likewise at big birding festivals and popular birding sites elsewhere on the continent, people of color are just vanishingly scarce.

Why does this bother me? Two reasons.

One, I hate the idea that there might be something exclusionary about birding. I would never join an organization that practiced any kind of discrimination. The birders I know are not racists; I’d like to think we’d be overjoyed to welcome more people of color into our fun times in the field.

But secondly, I’m concerned about bird conservation and the future. Birds and their habitats need all the friends they can get. If an interest in birds continues to be mainly something for white people, support for bird conservation is going to decline. The group that the Census Bureau categorizes as "Non-Hispanic Whites" already makes up less than 50 percent of the population in California, Texas, and New Mexico, and if current trends continue, the same will be true for the U.S. as a whole in a couple of decades. If we really care about the long-term survival of our bird populations, therefore, we need to bring a more diverse crowd of people into the birding world.

Fortunately, there are a few people who are not only talking about this issue, but actively doing something about it. And some of those leaders in the field are coming to our area of Ohio in about a month, bringing practical info on what we can do about it. I’m proud to say that our Black Swamp Bird Observatory is partnering with Toledo Metroparks and Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge to put on a conference: Diversity in Outdoor Recreation: The Many Faces of Conservation. You can read all about it right here. Kimberly and I will blog some more about this issue within the next couple of weeks, but in the meantime, if you can make it to Toledo on September 26, come and join us! This is a great chance to show your support for diversity and learn what to do about it.

Here’s our friend John C. Robinson, taking a group of enthusiastic and fun-loving young birders out on a field trip in California. John is a leading authority on the issue of diversity in the outdoors, and the author of Birding for Everyone: Encouraging People of Color to Become Birdwatchers. He will be a featured speaker at the conference on September 26.

Cooking Eggs

Cooking hard boiled eggs can be a hassle because you have to kor hui (jaga api) or kor chui (jaga air). this method of cooking the eggs whereby you don't have to worry whether they are over-cooked or under-cooked.

1) Place two pieces of tissue paper inside the rice cooker and sprinkle them with water.
2) Put in the eggs.

3) Close the lid and press "Cook" button.

4) Wait till the button jumps up. When it does, TURN OFF THE ELECTRICITY POWER. Do not leave them too long inside the rice cooker after cooked ...only do so if you prefer a harder egg yolk.

5) The eggs are ready.

The speed is faster than using ordinary boiling method. This is because the water sprinkled on the tissue will turn into steam and compressed inside the rice cooker to cook the eggs. You can peel the egg shells off very easily. The egg yolks will turn out just nice, not too dry. And the best part is -you don't have to do any washing nor cleaning at all.

Green Season in Trinidad and Tobago

From back home in Ohio, Kenn writes: Most birding tours to Trinidad and Tobago (T & T) are planned for winter or early spring. That’s the season when you can expect the highest total number of species, because the local resident birds are joined by migrants from the north -- padding the list with birds that you could have seen back in Ohio or New Jersey during the summer. People who judge the success of a birding trip by the sheer number of species seen (we’re not among them) might see that as reason enough to go to Trinidad in winter.

Winter and early spring are the seasons when most other tourists go to T & T also. Partly they go in winter to escape the cold weather up north. But another factor is that the other half of the year, June through November, is what used to be referred to as Trinidad’s rainy season.

I say "used to be" because we’ve changed it. That half of the year is now known as the "Green Season."

Yeah, there’s some rain. But we just spent eight very full days in T & T at the peak of the Green Season, and rain was never an inconvenience for us. We carried rain jackets, we carried plastic bags for the cameras and binoculars, and we used common sense about watching the sky. Showers came a couple of times a day but they were brief, and then the skies cleared again. We didn’t lose more than a few minutes to rain, and in between, the birding was fantastic.

I’ve already written about our extraordinary night with the leatherback sea turtles. That’s an experience you won’t have in winter, because the turtles aren’t breeding then. In a more directly bird-related vein, the Green Season also has a lot of breeding bird activity. The total number of species present may be lower than in mid-winter, but the resident tropical birds are highly active and visible. We saw plenty of evidence of that during our visit.

Palm Tanagers were everywhere in T & T, including in the towns. At the Asa Wright Nature Centre, a pair was nesting inside the living room of the main house, and the adults were coming and going without any regard for all the humans on the verandah. We decided that this could be called "Palm Tanager" because it might easily land on the palm of your hand.

This Barred Antshrike nest at the Grafton Estate on Tobago was just one of many nests we found during our trip.

These male Golden-headed Manakins (and 7 or 8 of their buddies) were displaying like mad at a "lek," or communal dancing ground, down one of the trails at Asa Wright. The gaudy males perform little moonwalks and other dances while making buzzing and trilling notes, all to attract females. Which suggests to me that those female manakins must have really weird tastes!

Over on the Main Ridge on Tobago, the male Blue-backed Manakins were similarly preoccupied with doing freaky dances and making strange noises.

Some of the most interesting breeding behavior that we saw involved Common Potoos on the grounds of the Asa Wright Nature Centre. Potoos are genuinely bizarre creatures. Distantly related to nighthawks and Whip-poor-wills, but classified in a different family, potoos spend the day perched bolt upright on high tree branches, looking for all the world like dead stubs. At night, they fly around catching large insects in flight. The naturalists at Asa Wright had located a potoo nest, which really just consisted of a depression on a high branch where the female would have laid her single egg a few weeks earlier. The poor blurry photo above shows an adult potoo brooding the young bird. If it's hard to see what's going on, the next couple of photos should help. Here's a photo taken a couple of days later, when the adult was roosting atop a different perch. Even here, it doesn't really look like a bird. It's facing toward us, and its very short, broad bill is pointing up toward the left.

And here's the young Common Potoo by itself, still perched on the spot where it had hatched. Its bill is pointing up toward the right, and its eyes are closed. Good camouflage, isn't it? It doesn't really look like a dead stub of a branch -- it looks more like a discarded pale teddy bear, plucked from the trash can and tossed up into the tree -- but it doesn't look very edible. Predators aren't likely to go for it.

Here the young potoo has lowered its head a little, its bill is pointing toward the right, and its eye is slightly open. See the eye? (It's under that impressive bushy eyebrow.) Does the shape of the bird make sense now?

Here the little tyke is more thoroughly hunched down. Possibly because it senses that it's just about to start raining. Um, I mean, greening. This isn't the rainy season, it's the Green Season!

Here's Kim (just right of center), surrounded by a group of students and their teachers, showing them the baby Common Potoo through our digiscoping setup. We saw several groups of students during the time we were at Asa Wright, and it was inspiring to see the amount of educational programming that was going on at that fine nature center.

Incidentally, anyone who wants to visit Asa Wright Nature Centre, or explore nature anywhere in Trinidad and Tobago, should contact Caligo Ventures. They are THE experts on birding and natural history in T & T, and they're the exclusive agents for Asa Wright in the USA. Mark Hedden from Caligo traveled with us in T & T, and he proved to be a very impressive guy in terms of his dedication to birding, conservation, and quality travel.