This week in birds - #120

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment:

The beautyberries are ripening and the mockingbirds have discovered them. Mockingbirds love berries of just about all kinds, but beautyberries are particular favorites. This one was gobbling up those berries as fast as he could. You might notice that he looks a little raggedy. That's because he is still going through his summer molt. In a few more weeks he will be sleek and beautiful again, every shiny new feather in place.

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Birds that are found sick or injured on the streets of New York City have a friend in need, a friend indeed in New York Wild Bird Fund which operates a hospital to care for the birds. It was founded in 2001 and has since treated more than 10,000 feathered patients.

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And on the other side of the country, humans have come to the rescue of a flock of flightless geese that had become stranded because of California's extreme drought. The geese had become helpless prey for foxes and other predators because their pond had dried up. Rescuers moved in to capture them and transfer them to other areas that had more water.

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An oil refinery in Delaware is in danger from the rising sea levels. This is something that we will see more of in the future as global warming continues to melt polar ice and raise the sea, but it is something that is happening in Delaware at present. The oil refinery has asked the government for help in holding back the sea.

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Seasonal articles and regional summaries detailing last year's Christmas Bird Count are now available at the Audubon website.

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There is growing concern about the decline in population of the Blue-footed Boobies of the Galapagos Islands. There is speculation that the decline is related to a decline in sardines which are a major food source for the birds.

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How did birds ever learn to migrate and how did they develop their migratory routes? "Not Exactly Rocket Science" has a blog post about the evolution of migration.

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California's Tri-colored Blackbird is in serious trouble and the state is considering emergency measures that it can take to help the bird and keep it from becoming extinct.

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The "Rewild" blog is featuring a series of posts about invasive species in California. This week's blog features the bullfrog.

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The survival of many penguin species is at risk because of habitat degradation. In this, they are not different from many threatened and endangered species.

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The pangolin, a small scaly ant-eating mammal, is being eaten into extinction. The Chinese consider it a delicacy. A campaign of education is under way to try to stop the decimation of the little creature.

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Many once-common marine birds of the American Northwest are disappearing from those shores. Their decline is apparently related to a similar decline in the species of fish on which they prefer to feed.

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The U.S. Energy Information Agency has announced the release of a mapping tool that will show flood risks to our existing energy infrastructure.

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Friends of Animals has sued to prevent further killing of birds around airports. FOA considers that most such killings are excessive and that less lethal means can be used to shift the birds.

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"Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens" has a very interesting post about some very useful wasps - the stingless ones. Many of these species parasitize insects that are pests in the garden and so they are very handy little guys for gardeners to have around.

Catching up with "The Wire"

"The Wire" premiered on HBO on June 2, 2002. It ran for five seasons, 60 episodes, and ended on March 9, 2008. I never watched it during that time and, in that, I was a member of the majority. The show was never particularly popular and never garnered big audiences.

It also never won any of the major television awards, but it was greatly admired by critics, many of whom considered it one of the best television dramas of all time and it had a devoted hard core following.

In all the years since the show ended, I've read time and again about how good it was and I've heard the same opinion expressed by my husband, who did watch it. All that praise from people whose opinions I respect made me curious and I decided that I needed to watch it at some point. HBO-GO makes it easy enough to do that, so this summer, I've been catching up with that twelve-year-old show. Now I see what all those critics were raving about. "The Wire" is excellent television.

The UK's The Telegraph once wrote that "The Wire" is "arguably the greatest television programme ever made."  I've now watched three seasons of the show - two more to go - and I find myself pretty much in sympathy with that assessment.

The show was very much a product of its time, i.e., just after the attacks of 09/11/01 and at the beginning of the so-called "war on terror." Government resources were being diverted to fight that "war" and local law enforcement was getting short shrift. The needs of large American cities like Baltimore, which is the central character in the series, were being overlooked unless they could be directly related to the government's obsession with terrorism.

Though the stories that "The Wire" tells are now several years old, they still seem fresh and current. We see the city of Baltimore (which could be a stand-in for many American cities) through the eyes of many different characters, mostly police or gangsters, but also ordinary citizens, or "taxpayers" in the patois of the ghetto which is the main language of the show. The stories are very Dickensesque in that they explore Baltimore's social structure from the squats of the homeless junkies to the uptown political fund-raisers in their swank surroundings. But mostly - at least through the third season - they focus on the drug dealers on the streets and those "businessmen" behind them.

It is interesting that the police and the purveyors of the drug trade have worked out their relationship and each group has its code that it (mostly) adheres to, and they sometimes cooperate, even though they are (mostly) adversaries.

For the drug dealers, who are often involved in their own violent conflicts over territories, they don't bat an eye at gunning down a competitor, but part of the code of "the game" is that they never attack "taxpayers." Moreover, they don't go gunning for anybody on Sunday. Sundays are sacrosanct. Thus, one of the drug kingpins, Avon Barksdale, is appalled when some of his "soldiers" attack one of their enemies, Omar, on a Sunday while he is escorting his grandmother to church. The old lady is injured and her hat - her "church crown" - is destroyed. This represents a loss of face for Barksdale and he must make restitution to the grandma.

The creator of "The Wire" was David Simon. Simon had a background, before his television career, as a police reporter for The Baltimore Sun. His writing partner was Ed Burns, who was himself a former homicide detective who had worked on investigations of violent drug dealers using surveillance technology and had found himself frequently frustrated by the Baltimore police bureaucracy. Basing the stories on his experiences certainly gave the drama its verisimilitude.

The two writers set out to portray an American city in all phases of its social, political, and economic life and they succeeded beautifully. This is not just a police procedural. It is much richer and more ambitious than that. If it were a novel, it could be categorized as literary fiction for its realistic portrayal of urban life and its unflinching exploration of social and political themes.

Another thing. The characters here are portrayed warts and all. There's hardly a one of them that is entirely likable and yet one finds oneself pulling for some of them. Even though some of them are very bad guys indeed. Like Omar.

Barack Obama has said that he was a fan of the show and that his favorite character was Omar. Of course, being Barack Obama, he hastened to add that he wasn't condoning Omar's actions, merely that he saw him as an interesting character. And he is indeed one of the many interesting characters on the show. But maybe the most interesting character of all is Baltimore.

I'm very glad that I finally caught up with "The Wire" with all of its pathos, heartbreak, and, yes, humor. Sometimes laugh-out-loud humor. Were it not leavened with a few laughs, it would be almost unbearable.

I look forward to finishing seasons four and five before the end of summer. Then I can join the ranks of the few and the proud who have watched one of the best television shows ever produced.

The Terrorists by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo: A review

The Terrorists by Maj Sjöwall
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I am in mourning. I've just finished the last of the Martin Beck mysteries. There will be no more regular visits with Beck and his doughty but quirky band of Swedish policemen as they battle to rid their society of the evil that afflicts it.

It seems fitting somehow that this last book featured terrorism as its theme, since terrorism has become such an expected part of our lives in the twenty-first century. This book was published in 1975 but it seems as fresh as today's news. Indeed, all ten of the books in this series, starting with Roseanna in 1965, seem current and not at all dated in their outlook. They seem very relevant for the times in which we live.

The Terrorists begins and ends with acts of terrorism - the first in an unnamed Latin American country and the second in Stockholm. These acts are committed by a very well organized international terrorist organization for which terrorism is a business. But Sjowall/Wahloo seem to be exploring a much wider definition of terrorism including that which is perpetrated by the bureaucratic apparatus of the state which is always portrayed as a hapless, insensitive, incompetent villain in these books. The writers were always looking at the wider cultural issues that plagued Swedish society during the time about which they were writing and that, in fact, continue to plague Western societies today. That wider cultural focus is, I think, why these stories remain so fresh while some others from the same period seem hopelessly dated.

At the beginning of The Terrorists Gunwald Larsson is sent to that unnamed South American country as an observer of the security measures taken for a state event. As an observer, he is present when a bomb explodes, killing the president of the country as well as several other people. What he has learned from the experience, primarily, is that the terrorists are very skilled at their jobs.

Back in Stockholm, we meet a young teenage mother who is caught in the coils of red tape produced by that aforementioned incompetent bureaucratic apparatus. She responds by attempting to borrow some money from a bank. Her actions are misinterpreted and she is arrested for bank robbery. The gears of the bureaucracy continue to grind her up.

Then a millionaire pornography filmmaker is murdered and the search is on for his killer. That particular crime is cleared up in fairly short order when a confession is secured, but during all of this, while investigating the everyday crimes of Stockholm, the police must also prepare themselves for the upcoming state visit by a very unpopular United States senator. An act of terrorism is expected, perhaps an attempt to assassinate the man, and Martin Beck is put in charge of the security detail which must try to prevent that from happening.

He assembles his team which includes most of the names that we are familiar with from the previous nine books and they put a plan in place. It's never clear right up until the event itself whether that plan will actually work, but, throughout, the narrative is rendered in crisp and elegant prose and the pace is brisk. The reader is never bored.

As we say a sad farewell to Martin Beck, at least we are leaving him in a far better place than we found him. When we first met him, he was dyspeptic and morose, constantly battling an oncoming cold, and trapped in a loveless marriage with a woman who didn't appreciate him. Finally, after several books, he extricated himself from that marriage and since then, he has been happier and has been building a life that better suits him. He has found a woman, Rhea, whom he loves and who loves him and who makes him very happy. The only fly in his ointment seems to be the job, even though he is very good at it.

In the conclusion of the book, his friend, Lennart Kollberg, who has resigned from the police tells Martin Beck that he has "the wrong job. At the wrong time. In the wrong part of the world. In the wrong system." That is the Sjowall/Wahloo indictment of that "system" which they obviously felt soiled everything that it touched. These books have a point of view and the reader is never in doubt as to what that is.

One further note: One of the many pleasures of the editions of the books that I have been reading has been their introductions penned by present-day crime fiction writers. Those essays in themselves could stand alone and they have been a treat to read. This last one was introduced by Dennis Lehane and it is a worthy member of that collection.        





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Wordless Wednesday: Pipevine Swallowtail on blue plumbago

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingslover: A review

(Note: My review of The Poisonwood Bible was originally published on Goodreads on July 24, 2009.)

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am old enough to sort of remember the events that are at the center of the book.  I remember the newscasts at the time having stories about the declaration of the independence of the Congo and about the election of Patrice Lumumba.  Of course, all the newscasts gave the American "slant" to the story.  They were all about how this action impacted us.  Little notice was given to how it impacted the people who were actually living there.

That much I can remember.  I can also remember the announcement sometime later that Lumumba was dead and the turmoil that followed that death, but although I was old enough to hear the news, I was still too young and naive to have much understanding of what was going on.

Years later, when I was older and a little better able to understand, I remember the Church committee's investigation.  By that time, Watergate had happened and my cynicism about government had grown by leaps and bounds.  I was appalled by the findings of how our government had interfered in the affairs of a sovereign country and the chaos that we had helped to bring about in that part of the world.  But I wasn't really surprised.

It had been a long time since I had given much though to this issue - so many other atrocities had intervened in my consciousness - when I picked up this book.  I remember hearing about the book when it first came out and I knew that it had been greatly acclaimed, but somehow I had missed reading it at that time.  But when I saw it on a table at Barnes and Noble, along with The Bean Trees, it seemed like the right time to pick them both up.  So I did.  I'm very glad that I did.

This is a terrific book, a mesmerizing read.  I think of it now as something of a cross between The Mosquito Coast and Heart of Darkness, but, in truth, it is a unique perspective that stands on its own.

The year is 1959 and a Baptist evangelist, Nathan Price, a man terribly damaged by his World War II experiences, has determined to take his family of a wife and four young daughters to the Congo, there to be a missionary and save the souls of those poor benighted (as he thinks)  natives.  The family, especially Nathan, has no real understanding or appreciation of the culture that they are going into.  Indeed, Nathan plans to plant his own culture, which he believes to be far superior, there, without regard to the wishes or feelings of the people he is determined to "save".

The story of everything that happened after Nathan's ill-considered decision is told in the unique voices of the five women - Orleanna, the wife; Rachel, the oldest daughter; Leah and Adah, the twins - one perfect, one crooked; and Ruth May, the baby of the family.  It is a tour de force of storytelling.

Each of the family members' various reactions to the landscape and people of Africa are at the heart of this story.  From Nathan's rejection of and refusal to compromise with - or even to listen to - the people's ideas and their mores worked out in the jungle over thousands of years; to Leah's initial attempts to follow in her father's footsteps only to have the dawning of awareness that perhaps there is another way of being and that the African culture may have merit, to, eventually, her acceptance of Africa and the African understanding of the world.

None of the Price family is left unchanged by their experiences and they will live the rest of their lives, however long they might be, touched and marked by those experiences. They will never get Africa out of their blood.

The prose in this book is lyrical.  I found myself again and again underlining passages that I wanted to return to later.  I don't usually do that with books.  Kingsolver is a very good writer.  I have read some of her essays before but never one of her books.  I will be reading more and I hope to return to this one and read it again.  It is that good.


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The Mugger by Ed McBain: A review

The Mugger by Ed McBain
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book was of interest to me mostly for its historical perspective. It was published in 1956, the second in Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series of police procedurals. It seemed very dated to me, even more so than the first in the series, Cop Hater, but, as I kept reminding myself, it was of its historical period and this is, I think, the way that male writers of thrillers or crime fiction wrote in the mid-20th century - with gender and racial stereotypes intact and unchallenged.

Even acknowledging all that though, I still found myself irritated by the expression of those attitudes. I was especially offended by the descriptions of the women characters in the book - all breasts and bottoms and legs. Especially legs. Apparently McBain was a leg man. Not that such attitudes aren't still apparent among certain writers today, but, on the whole, they do a better job of disguising it.

The story here is as the title says, The Mugger. This particular mugger preys on women who are out walking alone at night. As the tale begins, there have already been several incidents and the city is on edge because of them.

No one has been seriously hurt in the muggings. The mugger comes at his victims from behind in the darkness. He attacks them, hits them and warns them to be quiet. He grabs their purses and then, while they are on the ground, he bows from the waist and says, "Clifford thanks you, madam," and makes his escape. But then he hits one victim too hard and puts her in the hospital. Then a young woman, only seventeen years old, is killed in what appears to be a similar incident and the police search turns deadly earnest as they search for a murderer.  

Before the young woman was murdered, a young police patrolman named Bert Kling was asked by a friend to talk to his sister-in-law. The man's wife is worried about her sister and thinks she may be in trouble. She hopes that the teenager might open up to Bert. The plan doesn't work, however. The girl will not talk to him even though he can see that she is very troubled. He goes on his way and the next thing he hears is that the girl, Jeannie, has been killed - perhaps by the mugger.

Bert feels a responsibility and determines to investigate, even though it's not his case and, since he's only a uniformed patrolman, he doesn't really have any right to be involved. But he is very ambitious to become a detective and he wants to bring the girl's killer to justice. And - spoiler alert - he manages to do just that in what is clearly meant to be a surprising twist. In fact, the solution seemed pretty clear to me fairly early in the book.

With this series, Ed McBain set the pattern for many police procedurals to come and he's still inspiring writers of the genre today. He continued writing the series right up until his death in 2005 and I think it will be very interesting to see how his writing evolved over those many years. As I stated earlier, these first books seem hopelessly dated in attitude and outlook and yet I suspect they are true reflections of their time. I would assume that, throughout the years, the books continued to hold up a mirror to their times, and that will be a worthwhile theme for the reader to pursue.


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Poetry Sunday: Highwayman

I've had this song rattling around in my brain for the last couple of weeks, so it's time to get it out! Maybe if I share it with you as my poem of the week...

It's an old Jimmy Webb song that was very popular back in the day. That day was the late '70s, early '80s. It was recorded by a number of artists, including Webb himself in 1977, but the most popular cover of it was probably that done by Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson in 1984.

It's an unusual lyric about reincarnation - not a subject that is often written about in a pop lyric - but for those of us who believe that nothing is ever really destroyed but only changed, matter into energy or energy into matter, it is very meaningful.

     Highwayman

      by Jimmy Webb

I was a highwayman. Along the coach roads I did ride
With sword and pistol by my side
Many a young maid lost her baubles to my trade
Many a soldier shed his lifeblood on my blade
The bastards hung me in the spring of twenty-five
But I am still alive.

I was a sailor. I was born upon the tide
And with the sea I did abide.
I sailed a schooner round the Horn to Mexico
I went aloft and furled the mainsail in a blow
And when the yards broke off they said that I got killed
But I am living still.

I was a dam builder across the river deep and wide
Where steel and water did collide
A place called Boulder on the wild Colorado
I slipped and fell into the wet concrete below
They buried me in that great tomb that knows no sound
But I am still around..I'll always be around..and around and around and 
around and around

I fly a starship across the Universe divide
And when I reach the other side
I'll find a place to rest my spirit if I can
Perhaps I may become a highwayman again
Or I may simply be a single drop of rain
But I will remain
And I'll be back again, and again and again and again and again..

As a bonus, here is that most famous cover of the song, in a performance recorded in 1990.

Cash and Jennings are gone now, of course. And yet they are still around...and around...and around...