FIELD NOTES: Voldenor Trail 9/11

TRAVEL JOURNAL

9/11/2017

Today is the 16^th anniversary of the terrorist attack we all know as Nine-Eleven. I was in high school when it happened, and I remember many of my friends going white with fear as we gazed at the televised images of the Pentagon burning. Their dads or moms or uncles worked there, and they had no idea if they were still alive. I was 16 years old then, sort of wondering, sort of not, whether the world was really ending. Twice a lifetime later, with a tad deeper understanding of ecology and global environmental issues, I still can't seem to shake that feeling. But I have found a decent coping strategy: birdwatching. The tunnel vision that a pair of decent binoculars affords helps to block out the underlying dread for humanity's future, even if for a moment. Plus it has proved to be a useful skill much appreciated by conservation biologists, and currently, conservation-supporting tourists. This nine-eleven of twenty-seventeen, I am on the other hemisphere, walking up a dirt road in the mountains of Brazil with one of the world's most respected experts in conservation biology. And we're both geeking out about a hummingbird.

No bigger than my thumb, the Frilled Coquette sports a neon red mohawk and zebra-striped cheek feathers that flare out in the sun, looking almost like gills of a fish. He stretches his wings and zooms off with purpose: to sip nectar from “his” flowers, then return to the perch and wait for the flowers to refill. A creature so strange it seems nearly impossible that evolution produced it, and we all gaze at him through binoculars and cameras and gasp when he spreads his tiny red tail. We meaning me; Bobby; a lovely clinical scientist named Annie from England; Clinton Jenkins, a research professor with Instituto de Pesquisas Ecologicas outside of Sao Paulo; and Stuart Pimm.

If you are involved in conservation biology, you probably don't need an introduction for Stuart. For the rest of us, he has wire-rimmed aviator glasses, gray hair beneath his mesh army bucket hat, his pants tucked into his socks, and that sparkly enthusiastic intelligence that gets students to sit up in their chairs and become some of the world's most important professional scientists. He is the Doris Duke Chair of Conservation Ecology in the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, decorated by awards, published 250+ peer-reviewed scientific articles, and a bunch of popular science books that I will promptly look for on Kindle or wait begrudgingly until April to find in the States. His prolific work spans a breadth of fields, from saving species, to training scientists in Africa and China to be better conservationists, to developing technology that seeks out biodiversity hotspots using satellite imagery. And he's the nicest freakin guy I've met in a while, so absolutely lovely and inspiring that it almost makes me want to go to grad school.

He and Clinton, his former academic advisee and good friend, are visiting REGUA to catch up with Nicholas and another colleague, Maria Alice do Santos Alves from the State University of Rio, but they wanted to get out and see some birds. Bobby and I are “guiding” this walk, although the guidance is mutual; as we point out species, Stuart relays interesting news about recent genetic findings or recounts his adventures such as being helicoptered to the top of the mountains in search of the rare Gray-Winged Cotinga, and the helicopter never coming back (his field journal published by National Geographic here). Or boating deep up the Amazon river to visit a student mapping territories of endemic spinetails. Or trekking deep into the rainforest of Peru to meet a group of Guarani being studied by a former student, where she is helping to facilitate the passing of deep ethnobotanical knowledge from the elder population to their grandchildren before it is lost to globalization. Stuart is one of those completely unpretentious, giddy professors who can't help but take advantage of every 'teaching moment' that arises.

Last night, Bobby and I were asked to put on a presentation about the Hooded Grebe Project, a conservation effort in Patagonia for which we have volunteered two seasons and plan to return again this coming year. The Hooded Grebe is a critically endangered bird with numerous threats to its existence, and the Project has been tackling them one by one. After our presentation, which closed with Bobby's premier footage of a grebe pair performing their exotic and elaborate mating dance, Stuart expressed his enthusiasm in a succinct and effective way: "We cannot let that go extinct!"

I feel incredibly lucky and grateful for the opportunity to spend even a short time with such amazing scientists and conservationists like Stuart and Clinton. It makes me, and even 16-year-old me, hopeful for the future of the planet that such hard-working, passionate people exist on it. And inspires me to work harder to find my own ways to contribute.

Here's a few photos from our hike: