Some analyses of 40-year bird count data in Central Massachusetts

1.

Two years ago, in a post with a cheesy title, I’d written about seeing cardinals frequently. I continue to come across them: it is still a thrill to see a sharp movement of red in the branches of trees, and to hear the bird’s distinctive calls. Inspired by these sightings, I find myself now drawn to other birds, mammals and insects that live in the wooded areas of New England.

On May 27th this year, I visited a tract of land preserved by the Massachusetts Audubon Society near Worcester: the Wachusetts Meadow Wildlife Sanctuary. There, I met naturalist Joe Choiniere. We talked for a while. Joe knew well the birds in the area -- details of their range, habitat, prevalence, appearance, calls etc. As the current property manager, he, like others before him, organizes a bird count each year at the meadow. I told him about my interest in looking at the data -- an interest that has grown ever since I began to teach probability and statistics. 

Joe said could share the data with me.  To observe how the data was collected, he also invited me to attend the count this year, on June 9th. It was a somewhat cloudy Sunday morning, but visibility was good. Around 10-15 people, most of them expert birders, broke into groups and went on different trails that wound through the hill forests, ponds and marshes of the sanctuary. I followed one group along the main dirt road. Each person carried a paper listing of all species and marked the numbers as soon as something was spotted. Close to 500 species of birds have been observed in Massachusetts, so one has to be a keen and experienced observer of birds to get the identifications right.

Late morning, everyone returned to a room in the Visitor’s Center. A coordinator called out the name of each species; the birders around the table responded with their counts, and a tally for 2013 obtained. This process remains the same each year. Minutes of the discussion are maintained, and journal published each year presents the tally. Variables such as the number of observers, weather and temperature can of course change somewhat, but the trails on which the counts are made have mostly remained the same. Most importantly, despite year to year variations, the 50-year duration means that some general inferences on population levels of particular species can be made. 

Joe sent me an Excel Spreadsheet with the count for all species at the meadow from 1964 to 2003 (the data for 2003-2013 is also available, but has not yet been entered in Excel). I started working with the data recently and made some preliminary graphs. In this post, I will illustrate, with examples, whether or not the annual bird count at Wachusetts Meadow tallies with other statewide trends. 

So let’s take a look at the cardinal count for 40 years since 1964, when the count first started at the meadow. The x-axis is the year. The y-axis is the number of cardinals observed by birders at Wachusetts Meadow.  We notice the variability from year to year (except in the early years when no cardinals were seen). But it’s pretty clear that there is an increase in the number of cardinals seen, even though there are still years when none are observed.

Note that the image is only of the male cardinal (somewhat sexist, you could say!); the female is more gray than red, but females are of course part of the count.

What do the statewide counts compiled by the Massachusetts Audubon tell us on the prevalence of cardinals? There are three such counts: the Bird Breeding Atlas (conducted from 1974-1979 and again from 2007-2012); the Bird Breeding Survey (an annual effort on specific roadways); and the Christmas Bird Count (a 114 year tradition that is kept going by enthusiastic citizens).  Trends in the cardinal population based on these counts can be seen here. Notice that all counts suggest either a "likely" or "strong" increase in the number of cardinals. This agrees with the graph above, based on the Wachusetts Meadow annual count.

2.

It is of course also possible that Wachusetts cardinal count may have only coincidentally agreed with other counts. So, for further validation, let’s look at the 40-year trend at Wachusetts for two other birds: the cliff swallow, and the house finch. 

I am fascinated by swallows: this July, I saw hundreds of rock swallows, their appearance similar to the above image, at the desolate ruins of the ancient city of Ani, along the river that separates Turkey from Armenia.

Sadly, for the cliff swallow we see a precipitous decline and counts have been zero for most of the 80s and 90s. This agrees with three statewide counts posted at the Massachusetts Audubon Society: they confirm a “strong decline” in numbers. The brief note says: “Today, the Cliff Swallow occupies less than half of the distribution it held in 1979. Loss of nesting structures, such as old barns and bridges, along with nesting competition from introduced House Sparrows are among the factors accounting for this restricted distribution.” 

For the house finch, we see no sightings at all until the 1980s. It turns out that the house finch was introduced into this region in the previous decade: “The introduced House Finch arrived in Massachusetts during the 1970s and never looked back. It can now be found living alongside humans over much of the state, and as a breeder it is nearly ubiquitous.” In the above figure, we don't notice high numbers in the years leading up to 2003, but the early years validate well with the available knowledge on house finches.

In both these cases, the Wachusetts Meadow trends again seem to match reasonably well with other statewide trends. Still, this is just preliminary evidence. Birders may be influenced by what they hear from others in their community or what they read in journals; during counts, they might unconsciously seek for a particular species or ignore others, thus introducing some “unnatural” variation. Yet, there is no way to completely escape such biases in a field study.

What impressed me most was the perseverance of anonymous individuals participating to keep such censuses alive all over the country. The comprehensive bird counts listed in the Massachusetts Audubon Society, all depend on the efforts of such individuals; the Christmas Bird Count has been going on for 114 years! 

Notes from Yellowstone and Wyoming -- Part 3

Read Part 1 and Part 2. This part focuses on the wildlife I saw during the trip. In Part 1, I’ve already mentioned prolific herds of bison, which are easily spotted in Yellowstone and take center stage. Here I list other, more subtle experiences:

1) Grasshoppers were our constant companions throughout the trip. Perhaps August – mid to late summer – is when they are most active. When flying, they made constantly spaced sounds -- one every half second -- loud enough to be clearly audible more than a hundred feet away, each note like a small, flat-sounding firework. On the ground, these drab brown grasshoppers were quiet and hardly noticeable. But when in flight, I noticed that their bodies had a touch of bright yellow. 

2) While driving from Cody to Riverton, we passed by the Wind River Canyon. On the slope of a high mountain adjacent to the road, we saw three male bighorn sheep, grazing along with deer, looking cautiously at us, although both distance and a steep slope separated us. We had seen female bighorn sheep before, in Zion National Park, Utah, and some in Yellowstone, but never any males with their signature curved horns. 


The writer and naturalist, Joe Hutto, who raised wild turkey chicks to adulthood in a forest in Florida – his experience has been reenacted in the PBS Nature documentary My Life as a Turkey – now lives in this area. He disappears for months at a time in the Wind River mountain wilderness, following populations of bighorn sheep as part of a research study. His new book, The Light in High Places, is as much about mystical and solitary engagement with high and wild places, as it is about the causes of decline in bighorn sheep numbers. 
4) Approaching Jackson from the south, you come to the National Elk Refuge. Elk are active here only in the winter. But right before the road enters town is a marsh, where we saw a pair of trumpeter swans (see center of picture below), whose numbers have declined in the last century.
5) Other significant sights: (a) a pair of resting ravens, probably a couple, completely still as if frozen, on a fallen log by the side of a lonely road in Yellowstone, the head and beak of one tilted upward; their jet black color – something I've always admired – contrasting sharply with the bright hue of the grass around them; (b) a red fox, caught in the headlights late in the evening, moving discreetly along the side of the main road in Yellowstone; (c) an osprey (a brown bird of prey, with a white head; see picture below) perched on a branch of a tree; and (d) pelicans soaring in the sky above Hayden Valley.  

3) At the edge of the Grand Teton National Park, not far from the Jackson airport (which, strangely, is also within the park), a mother black bear and two cubs crossed a major road and made their way to the wooded hills on the other side. They moved at a deceptively steady pace, but in the end covered ground very quickly. But for a pair of binoculars – amazing how an intelligent arrangement of lenses/glasses can bring the distant so vividly and breathtakingly close – we would have missed them. They would have been two black specks on the horizon not worth commenting about. Instead, it was an absolute delight to see their languid, unstructured and carefree walk towards the hills, now disappearing behind a thicket or tree, now reemerging again, before finally fading away on the forested slopes.

Notes from Yellowstone and Wyoming -- Part 1

1.

The iconic Yellowstone National Park, the oldest in the US, established in 1872, is not easy to get to. If you don’t live in or close to the northeastern corner of Wyoming, you need either to drive from major cities like Denver, Salt-Lake City or Seattle – by no means a trivial drive -- or fly to two small airports, Bozeman (Montana) or Jackson (Wyoming). Despite its remote location, Yellowstone National Park gets 3.6 million visitors each year. Each day in the summer, as many as 10,000 tourists may visit the Old Faithful Visitor Center, named after the natural geyser -- one of dozens in the park -- which spews thousands of gallons of hot water every 90 minutes or so. Yellowstone is so crowded in the summer months that it can feel like a catered amusement park, rather than the genuine natural wonder it is.

For eight days in August 2012, we visited parts of the Greater Yellowstone region, shown below [map credit: yellowstonewiki.com]. Our flight departed from Hartford (Connecticut) at 7 pm; we reached Bozeman, Montana, with a stopover in Minneapolis, at 11 pm. From Bozeman, we drove to Yellowstone, where we spent two days, before leaving the national park and exploring some of the lesser known towns and regions in Wyoming.  Cody was the first stop on this route, reached through the Chief Joseph Scenic Highway that runs through the desolate Shoshone National Forest. Next, the town of Riverton and the Wind River Indian Reservation. In the last leg, we turned north to Grand Tetons, the other major national park in the area. Yellowstone is only 40 miles north of the Grand Tetons. From Yellowstone, it was a short ride back to Bozeman, Montana, through the town of West Yellowstone and Gallatin National Forest, for the return flight.

The descriptions below mostly follow the chronology of the trip.

2.

The Bozeman airport was just outside town, in Belgrade. We stayed at a Quality Inn nearby, managed by local employees. There was a Bible in the room: a reliable presence in most American hotels. But there was also, uniquely, a long note encased in a glass frame, placed on a desk. I will paraphrase the gist here: “We sincerely wish you a wonderful journey wherever you are headed in this beautiful region. We wish your presence is profitable for us; we also hope that if you are conducting business, like we are, that you have a most profitable time.” The message, brimming with cheer and goodwill, seemed a most natural merger of American evangelism and entrepreneurial zeal. It felt like a condensed version of the hyper-positive sermons the Houston evangelical preacher Joel Osteen delivers every Sunday on television.

In the morning, I had my first glimpse of the landscape around Bozeman. I’d imagined a very lush green setting, perhaps Alpine forests in close proximity. Instead, what I saw was not very different from the small towns in northern Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico that I had traveled to as a graduate student: a mostly flat, dry and indistinct plain that stretched in all directions, allowing a very large sky, and ringed by bare brown mountains in the distance. 

Bozeman was a ten minute drive from the hotel. Naively, I had expected it to be a remote town with little to offer. Instead, Bozeman sprawled over an area that seemed large for its population of 37,000. The downtown had trendy restaurants, well-stocked bookshops, and a cooperative grocery selling local and organic food. The idea of a rugged, inhospitable West is only a decorative exterior in Bozeman. The coffee shops had plush seating and colorful interiors; and the well dressed young clientele, absorbed in their laptops, were probably students from the nearby Montana State University or urban backpackers on a break. Thinking back, I feel amused I did not spot a meditation or yoga center. But an easy google search reveals that there are in fact many in town.

There are two routes from Bozeman to Yellowstone National Park. One leads to the western entrance and the other through the northern – through Gardiner city. We took the latter. After downtown Bozeman, one could be forgiven for momentarily forgetting about the social conservatism of the region. Very soon, however, there were prominent signs on the freeway: “Life is a Beautiful Choice”. The radio shows were sympathetic to the Republican worldview. The grass had a beautiful tinge of yellow; the wildflowers by the roadside, also mostly yellow, were in full bloom. Otherwise the scenery was primary agricultural: grazing cattle and farms with mechanized equipment for irrigation, suggesting some sort of large scale ownership.

At the northern entrance to Yellowstone – commemorated by a historic old arch – a black SUV from Colorado proudly declared: “God bless our troops and especially our snipers.” How this message, aggressive in tone and spirit, could be reconciled the large cross of Christ that hung from the rearview mirror of the same car, remained a mystery.

3.

Most natural parks revolve around some startling visual feature or theme. The Grand Canyon National Park, for example, is about the wondrous shapes, depths, colors and textures that water and other natural forces have created in the brittle, dry and high Colorado Plateau. The same theme echoes, on a smaller but no less dramatic scale, through the national parks of southern and south-central Utah: Zion, Bryce, Arches, Capitol Reef, Canyonlands.

Yellowstone, however, is not just about one thing, though its active volcanic status – expressed through geysers, strange-colored (prismatic) springs, mud volcanoes, steaming vents – would be grand enough to draw crowds. There is a lot more. The Yellowstone River carves its own canyon (picture below), and provides startling and intimate views of waterfalls, sheer cliffs and rapids. And then there is the easily observed wildlife: bison, elk, bears, bighorn sheep, red foxes, pronghorn antelope, bald eagles, pelicans, ospreys, otters, trumpeter swans.  

This diverse visual bounty means that the five visitor’s centers, where the expensive lodging, dining and shopping options are, can feel like miniature cities in the summer. The large parking lots are constantly abuzz with people and cars, the constant opening and slamming of doors.

The suburban mall analogy isn’t far off the mark: for us humans, it is about shopping and consuming experiences that Nature has to offer. Whatever the cost, we are intent of capturing a slice for our own memories: by driving the 142 miles of paved roads in the park; getting too close to herds of bison or mother bears and cubs (as happened during my visit) for the petty reason that the posing tourists can be in the foreground of a photograph that can be proudly paraded on Facebook; using the expensive lodging and dining facilities, creating enormous quantities of trash in the process, a fact quickly forgotten as we bask in the glow of the odd environmentally sustainable practice that the parks and hotels promote.   

4.

During the summer, the National Park Service (NPS) hires 800 employees, who live within the boundaries of Yellowstone. The private firm, Xanterra Parks and Resorts, runs the lodging, fine dining and cafeterias for NPS, while the general stores are owned by Delaware North Companies Parks and Resort. These corporations have 3500 employees who live in inside the park, in shared dormitory-like settings. The employees, young and old, are hired from far flung states like Texas, but also abroad (Taiwan has a formal exchange program).

Xanterra claims to be an environmentally responsible corporation. It also has a presence in Grand Canyon, Death Valley, and Zion. Their 2011 sustainability report, accessible online, provides details about how they reduced absolute as well as adjusted greenhouse gas emissions over the last 10 years.

In true corporate style, the report is glossy and promotional, with scenic pictures distractingly placed next to the graphs and tables. The report essentially admits that the very idea of high end resort in a fragile natural places runs contrary to any notion of environmental protection. In this sense, it is honest. Corporations, the report says, make huge claims about sustainability to promote their public image; this façade is aptly called “greenwash”.

To its credit, the report does list some specifics: waste vegetable oil to partly power Xanterra activities; building a solar power generation facility in Death Valley National Park in California; soaps that are made of organic materials; and creating a store (the first of its kind, they claim) with a sustainability scorecard, to promote awareness. The vending machines smartly adjust themselves to peak and low usage periods, switching refrigeration on and off, thus minimizing unnecessary energy use. At Zion National Park, Xanterra has stopped the use of bottled water.  

In 2008, Xanterra was bought by Philip Anschutz, a Colorado-based billionaire whose empire includes businesses ranging from petroleum to entertainment. Anschutz is a cultural and social conservative, and, according to Wikipedia, was a major supporter of the George W Bush administration and his policies. When he bought Xanterra in 2008, however, he was, as this website claims, fully in favor of its sustainability initiatives. The question however remains: Can a billionaire involved with the petroleum industry and interested in furthering economic development, really be supportive of sustainability, or is he concerned more with the impression of sustainability, so that customers who use Xanterra feel less guilty about their travels – proud, even? The impression of sustainability is good for business, but sustainability itself is a more complex matter, and raises questions that we are afraid to face. 

One of Xanterra’s high end attractions within the park is the pricey Lake Yellowstone Hotel. The building is large and multistoried. Its yellow paint makes it look bland although the blandness could also be interpreted as a kind of minimalistic elegance. The lobby and lounge are spacious, have clean wood floors, small lamps attached to pillars, cushioned seating, a large piano, and a glass doors which provide a view of the Yellowstone Lake. When we got there in the afternoon, families and older couples, with drinks in their hands, were enjoying the view, as they waited for dinner.

An LCD television on a wall near the lobby provided a map and details of the local farms the food was sourced from. It was good to see this, but I wondered whether the benefits of local were incomparably overwhelmed by visitors like me, who had flown or driven from far flung places in the world.

5.

Driving north from Lake Yellowstone, you pass through Hayden Valley. The wide meadows and rolling hills here looked grand, and I felt it was principally because of the striking green and yellow hue of the grass, this last phase of the summer. Bison grazed in the valley along the winding path of the Yellowstone River. Occasionally there were clouds of dust as they indulged in mud baths, vigorously twisting their upside-down bodies, their legs flailing. Roads were routinely blocked by herds leisurely making their way across the road, from one meadow to another (these traffic halts have a name: bisonjams). Unlike elk, deer, bears, foxes, coyotes, and pronghorn antelopes, which are alert to the slightest movement, sensitive to the presence of people around them and therefore harder to see up close, bison seem to display a Zen-like dispassion to the flow of people or cars. This dispassion is an illusion of course: a roused bison can move fast and finish off a pesky, intrusive tourist with little fuss.

Indeed, bison are so easy to spot within the confines of Yellowstone that weary tourists, who have been in the park for a few days, declare with a touch of annoyance: “Oh, it’s only a bison.” 

How quickly one gets used to extraordinary sights! It’s easy to forget that this magnificient animal almost went extinct. In fact, it is not to be found in other wilderness areas in the country. Bison are raised in farms for their meat, but such herds cannot be considered wild. In all, there are about 4000 bison in Yellowstone. Once millions of them roamed the Great Plains. As America expanded westward, Plains tribes lost their lands; and new settlers hunted bison with rapacity and abandon. Their numbers at Yellowstone came down to an astonishing 23 – yes 23! -- at the end of the 19^th century. By pure chance, the thermally active region around Yellowstone did not lend itself easily to agriculture, and so was spared direct colonization by settlers. That did not stop poachers, however. The decline in numbers would have continued had it not been for a concerted, government backed effort at protecting bison and its habitat.   

6.

The somewhat less crowded Lamar Valley is in the northeast of Yellowstone. The landscape, dominated by scrub vegetation, is more rugged, and the silences mysterious. Bison herds are even more extensive, and are spread for miles and miles along the banks of Lamar River. Now and then, I spotted elusive pronghorn antelope grazing with bison. At trailheads, park rangers warned of recent bear activity.

Lamar is also where one is likely to see wolves. If the Bison’s near-extinction story is tragic, the Wolf’s is even more so: wolves were completely eliminated in Yellowstone, primarily due to their adversarial relationship with farmers. Efficient, large-scale agriculture is opposed to species diversity: anything that kills, directly or indirectly, what we eat (cattle or crops) must be eliminated to improve yields. Wolves kill cattle and therefore are on the wrong side of human interests. So, even as bison were protected in Yellowstone, wolves continued to be hunted. Unlike bison, wolves were not threatened on a global scale: there were other habitats where they still thrived. But in Greater Yellowstone, by the mid nineteenth century, they had disappeared.

In 1995, wolf packs were controversially reintroduced to Lamar Valley and Greater Yellowstone. They have a healthy presence in the region now. Their reinstatement provides a fascinating opportunity to quantify the impact a major predator’s absence or presence creates in the food chain.

This is what has been hypothesized: With wolves missing, elk numbers rose through the last century. Coyotes, rivals of wolves, also prospered. But streamside vegetation – willows, aspen – that elk consumed declined. Beavers, which depended on these plants, also declined. When the wolves returned, elk numbers reduced by half, coyote numbers are down as well. But beaver populations are back to healthy levels. Bears, meanwhile, have benefitted, since they can scavenge wolf kills easily. Scavenging birds – ravens, eagles, and magpies – have also more wolf-kill carcasses to feed on.

Whether observed increases and decreases in numbers of other species are chance correlations or whether the reintroduction of the wolf was indeed the principal cause is difficult to say with certainty. Nature is far too complex:  there exist plenty of other changes that happened in the same timeframe for the reintroduction experiment to have neat conclusions. Yet it is fascinating preliminary evidence on the interconnectedness of everything.     

The year in retrospect

Or what interested me in 2011

1.

This was a fascinating year in many ways. It was certainly the busiest year of my life. I’ve been busy before but only for a few weeks or a month. But this year, the busyness of my schedule was taken to a whole new level. It may sound funny, but I realize now what people mean when they say they “work”. For the first 2 years of my faculty position, I still felt like a graduate student, and as if there were no worries in the world. Work would get done when it had to. This feeling of lightness allowed me to travel repeatedly to Latin America (Mexico, Peru and Bolivia) and write pieces at a pace that I had never managed before. But now that I have my own students – doctoral students who are very committed and work very hard but who understandably require a lot of guidance – the responsibilities are greater.

That’s the main reason I haven’t been able to write much here. But despite all the activities at the university that vied for my energy and attention – the endless emphasis on papers and grants to prove that one is “good” at what one does – this break from writing for the blog did open up time for a free-ranging exploration of many new topics. As always, I am amazed at how much there is that one doesn’t know. More importantly, I am amazed how previously uninteresting clichés and topics suddenly acquire new meaning and relevance because of altered life circumstances.

2.

For reasons difficult to explain, I started thinking seriously about spirituality and religion this year. I was driven to find out what was at the bottom of it all. I was especially interested in Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta (non-dualism), because unlike the ritualistic version of Hinduism that I grew up and was dissatisfied with, these traditions prescribed a contemplative and experiential approach that could be applied easily in everyday life.

It became clear to me that understanding how sense perceptions are translated into thought and how thought creates our conscious experience was perhaps the first step in understanding the reality that we face. All philosophical, religious and scientific questions – what is moral and immoral; the nature of suffering and happiness; science’s search for an answer to explain the mysterious workings of the universe – are questions within the realm of human consciousness. Consciousness is the very source that creates these questions and the reality that we experience. But what is this mysterious source and is there a reality that is outside of it? Another, related question that continues to puzzle me is this: What is the "I" in my consciousness that makes me feel as a separate individual -- in other words makes me feel the duality of “I” versus “the rest of the world”?

I became interested in meditation, which seemed like a logical first step in investigating what the mind is all about. I realized through practice that meditation is a fascinating and baffling scientific experiment where you are both the observer and the observed. In other words, it is the “I” in me observing its own behavior – a strange idea, to say the least. Of course, I found no comprehensive answers through meditation – expecting such answers is unrealistic to begin with – but I did begin to understand how thoughts function and how they skew our perception of reality.

I found many benefits from an unstructured form of meditation that I have been practicing for over a year. I arrived at it after experimenting with and rejecting prescribed methods. Unlike what the manuals or the books said, I did not focus my attention on anything but simply let things be and let thoughts wander. I found that to keep one’s attention on a single object is quite unnatural. Our consciousness does not function that way. It is always dynamic, shifting and moving, even when the mind is calm. So my meditation was a simply a session of sitting (15-20 minutes) every night without interfering with the mind’s activities. Somehow, these sittings led to deeply relaxing and still moments. Thoughts slowed down on their own, without any conscious effort on my part. I realized the key role that breathing plays in relaxing the body and why it is emphasized so heavily in the Indian meditation traditions.

I also learned that most thoughts are not created by choice. Thoughts appear and flit across the screen of our consciousness as randomly as clouds in the sky. When there are no thoughts, there is simply an awareness of the body, the breath or sensations within the body, but these too are finer forms of thoughts, or finer perceptions experienced through the veil of thought (the blue of the sky, to stretch the previous analogy). Emotions, whether unpleasant or pleasant, are simply physiological disturbances – a constriction near the chest or stomach, or a pleasant wave of energy – and all emotions, and the thoughts associated with them, are impermanent. That is, they have a temporary life-span within the mind-body system.

3.

The questions about the nature of consciousness lead to other, equally interesting questions in biology and physics. How do other species experience reality? Do they have self-awareness and if so how different is it from what humans have? How do other species deal with suffering and loss? Why do human always feel they are better than all other species, when there is really no objective basis for putting one species above another? And what about the vastness of the universe, the strange fact that time and space are intertwined, and the counterintuitive theories of quantum mechanics?

These lines of enquiry lead me to a number of interesting books – from the essays and speeches of philosopher/mystic Jiddu Krishnamuti; the teachings of Ramana Maharishi; essays by American Buddhists who in my opinion have taken a very practical and very useful approach to Buddhism; and the self-help bestseller, The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle.

On the science side, I read (or sampled) Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and The Magic of Reality; Brian Green’s explanation of Einstein’s theory of relativity in The Elegant Universe; David Linden’s The Compass of Pleasure; F. Baumeister’s Willpower; and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. I also liked Brian Greene’s documentary, The Fabric of the Cosmos, which explored the nature of space and time.

I did not always agree with or understand the abstract ideas discussed in these books -- whether spiritual or scientific – but they were useful, nevertheless, and revealed new perspectives.

4.

I had almost forgotten, meanwhile, about literary fiction and its ability to capture the interplay of thought, memory and time, and detail the inner life of a person as no other form can. I had not read fiction for more than a year. It was by chance that I stumbled upon Ivan Turgenev’s A House of Gentlefolk this November. I had bought the slim book a long time ago and it had stayed, untouched, on my bookshelf for years.

It turned out to as good as the other, more famous Turgenev book, Fathers and Sons. Turgenev’s deft characterizations, the fast moving story, the poignant moments when the characters reflect on the crises of their lives, took me back to the time, about ten years ago, when I believed unequivocally that literary fiction was the highest form of writing. That impression has faded a bit in recent years or as I came to rely more and more on non-fiction.

A House of Gentlefolk reminded me of how good fiction is at touching some of the incomprehensible aspects of life – those emotional aspects that cannot be described or quantified easily but are simply felt subjectively. I finished the book within a week, and, like a man in search of an old treasure he himself has buried but has forgotten where, I started looking closely at my shelves for other works of fiction. After starting and abandoning Salman Rushdie’s Shame, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let me Go, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, I finally settled on Thornton Wilder’s ingeniously simple yet profound play, Our Town, which took only a few hours to finish. Through simple characters and the almost naive, small town setting (in New Hampshire), Wilder was able to demonstrate with great power the meaning of death and changes in perspective that it brings.

But my most dramatic discovery of the year came just a few weeks ago, when in a bookstore in Northampton (not far from Amherst, where I live), I found Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Back in 2007, my friend, the novelist and writer Chandrahas Choudhury, had recommended their translation of The Brothers Karamazov. I took his advice then and had the most sublime few months reading Dostoevsky’s classic work.

I bought the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation of Anna Karenina, but I thought it would be impossible to read an 800-page novel, with the end of the semester approaching. Luckily, I had to make two trips to New York City on back to back weekends, and the long train journeys (Amtrak trains) allowed me to get well into Anna Karenina. But it was not hard at all – in fact, the novel flowed so easily, so seamlessly from one character to another, from one scene to the next, and so clear and concise was the psychological detailing that it never felt like anything was being overdone. In three weeks, I was more than halfway through the book. This amazed me since I am an incredibly slow reader, generally incapable of reading more than 30 pages a day.

Anna Karenina has a very simple storyline. It is most a novel about families and marriage – marriage more than anything else. It is set in the decade following the emancipation of the serfs (the 1860s or the 1870s). Darwin’s ideas of the “animal origin of man” had just reached Russia. Electricity had arrived but was not yet common, travel in trains was common and telegrams had made communication quick and easy. Christianity in Russia was changing too – there were more rapturous, evangelical versions but also many more unbelievers and nihilists who used scientific materialism to reject the structures of religion.

The characters in Anna Karenina are ordinary. By that I mean they aren’t people with special talents, just people with both good and bad in them. At one level, the story is a simple tale of gossip – what is after all so new about an extra marital affair, which is at the heart of the novel? Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov had gruesome murders at their core – and it always felt that there was something serious at stake; the plots were intricate and thrilling.

But the genius of Tolstoy is in providing intimate portraits of the married relationships and affairs of intertwined families, interspersing these personal lives with the social and religious questions of the era.

I couldn’t help feeling that Anna Karenina has tremendous relevance even today. And as often happens while reading a great book, every single observation of mine, about the world and people, is colored by Tolstoy's view. In a year that I began to think seriously about how thoughts create both our expectations and disappointments, Anna Karenina, more than any other non-fiction book I read, was able to accurately portray, through its many characters, the unreliable and constantly changing nature of the individual self – now experiencing moments of transcendence, the next moment in deep grief, disoriented and puzzled, then finding from nowhere the strength to recover and feel happiness.

5.

And finally, a note on the one other thing that inspired me to no end this year. Even as a child I had always been drawn to animals and nature. It is an instinctive feeling that most of us share. But my interest then had been only in specific wildlife settings – such as wildebeest migrations in the plains of the Serengeti – and not much else. Birds or insects or beavers or trees or the complex interactions in nature which make life tick never interested me much.

That changed this year. Perhaps the biologist Edward Wilson’s remarkable experiments and study of the social behavior of ants, seeded my curiosity about nature as a whole. Further, it seemed almost impossible not to think of nature when dealing with spiritual and religious questions. I often find it puzzling that many organized religions, so engrossed in their own dogmas and rituals, pay very little attention to nature. Miraculous things already happen in nature, yet we remain interested only in unverifiable myths and legends.

In March, with the snow still covering most of the woods and the ponds still frozen, I started walking the trails that surround Amherst. I began to observe birds, beavers, raccoons, foxes, chipmunks, skunks, ants on the pavement, struggling spiders in my bathtub, and much else. When you do this on a regular basis, the human-centered or self-centered view that dominates our lives begins to break down momentarily. It never goes away completely – the ego is much too strong – but a different perspective begins to open up. Humans tend to be incredibly self-congratulatory: all our religious and scientific institutions always stress how special humans are, how evolved we are compared to other species and so on. But the fact is that humans, whatever our abilities, are no more or no less important than any other species on earth.

In parallel, I watched many documentaries on PBS Nature (PBS refers to American public television). These documentaries are available free online. I was interested most in the difficulties of surviving in the wild, and how animals cope with physical pain, suffering and loss. A recurring example was the high mortality of offspring in the early days or months, when they are most vulnerable and unable to fend for themselves. The mother puts an enormous effort and is yet, in many cases, unable to save her offspring. In some species – elephants, lemurs, hawks – the pain of the loss lasted visibly for days.

I was moved by these stories. The arbitrariness of life was now an inescapable fact for me. Yet the same arbitrariness also implied that one could approach life in an open ended, less burdensome way, with fewer illusions.

The best of all the documentaries I watched was My Life as a Turkey, which premiered in November this year. It is a reenactment of Florida farmer Joe Hutto’s attempt at imprinting – in plain terms, the attempt be a mother, despite being of a different species, to wild turkey chicks (wild turkey are different from the turkeys that are consumed as food). Hutto begins by incubating eggs and mimicking sounds that a mother Turkey might take. The pivotal moment is when the chicks emerge and see him before they see anything else. Some sort of bond is formed and the wild turkeys follow Joe Hutto for the next year or so. Hutto is totally responsible for their welfare and makes a full time commitment. This means he will live in the forest, cut off from other humans, for as long as it takes to raise the chicks.

The premise of the documentary – based on Hutto's book Illumination in the Flatwoods – may not sound exciting, but I invite you to give it a try. It is superbly edited, well narrated and has stunning visuals of the forests of Florida. My Life as a Turkey is interesting both as a scientific experiment and for its philosophical content. Joe Hutto’s sentences from the book, which are used in the reenactment, are thoughtful. The curiosity of the growing turkeys; the intelligence they are born with about the natural world (“humans do not have a privileged access to reality”); their ability to live in the moment which we can only envy – all of this made it one of the best documentaries that I have ever watched.

A very happy new year to everyone!

A buttferfly's 2000 mile journey

Every summer, the North American Monarch butterfly embarks on a remarkable journey that begins in Canada or the northeastern United States. In two months, millions of these butterflies congregate in a high forest in Mexico. Each day, the butterfly travels fifty miles and the total journey is around two thousand miles.

Birds of course can fly even longer distances. But then birds also travel in groups: there are older members in the group who have covered these distances before and are therefore in a position to guide others. The Monarch butterfly makes the journey alone and it does so only once. When a Monarch butterfly starts from Canada, it has never flown before. No one is there to guide it to Mexico.

And yet, this delicate creature, with wings less than four inches wide, crosses the Great Lakes – imagine crossing these massive bodies of water, where there are few opportunities for nectar and rest – then Midwestern towns, the Great Plains, the deserts of Texas, the Sierra Madre range in Mexico, and makes its final approach to forests in Michoacan, 100 km northwest of Mexico City.

Some unknown compass – either the earth’s magnetic field or the sun – seems to tell it exactly where to go. Even when these butterflies are tagged for study are taken off course by scientists (say far to the east or west), they still recover and know exactly how to adjust their path.

Nature always throws up these inexplicable and mysterious examples. Why should we believe in the unverifiable miracles advertised by organized religion – that the Buddha was enlightened, that Krishna lifted a mountain, or that Jesus walked on water – why even think of them when the miracles of nature are much more tangible, more varied and can be observed every day?

The butterflies start from very different regions in the northern US and Canada, thousands of miles apart, but as they approach Mexico, they start to cluster together and can be seen in their hundreds of thousands in Texas as they narrow in on their destination. In the forests of Michoacan, they congregate in the millions, covering the skies, the forest floor, the trees, the twigs – just about everything. What started as a lone journey now culminates in the collective blanketing of a destination they were drawn to.

As they hang from the branches of trees, they look like leaves themselves -- see picture to the left.

The Monarchs rest in Michoacan until spring, and then begin the journey back. But no butterfly ever makes it back to Canada. About a third of their way back – around Texas – they mate and die. The few hundred eggs that each female lays then transform into butterflies and continue the journey. But this generation too does not make it all the way back. About halfway or three quarters of the way back is another mating cycle and the third generation continues the reverse migration. In the end, what we have is an incredible intergenerational relay spanning four generations. As they move northward, the butterflies begin to disperse geographically, eventually reaching original regions where the epic southward migration began.

For some reason, no single butterfly ever completes the cycle, but the generation that is born in Canada and reaches Mexico is the one that lives the longest.

A cardinal a day keeps color blindness away

The male cardinal is bright red and a treat to watch. In my two and a half years in Massachusetts, I had never spotted one. But this March, I started seeing them frequently: outside my window, during my walks in the woods around Amherst, and while driving (they would often fly across the road). One gets pretty superstitious when such things happen. I started to feel special every time I saw one. I asked others if they had seen any and would feel proud if their reply was negative. There was probably a simpler explanation of course. It snowed and rained a lot this year, and the population could have spiked for some ecological reason. Or the sight of the first made me look for more every day, with the result that I had simply begun to see what had always been there.

Whatever the reason, the sight of cardinals did me make me feel great. They sparked a wider interest in birds, nature and other species. It all seemed a tremendous mystery.

The apartment I used to live had massive windows in the living room. It overlooked a wide green lawn that sloped down to a stream. Close to the window was a fledgling tree or plant that had grown only to a few feet. It was here that every morning the birds of all kinds would come, perch on a weak branch for a few seconds, their heads bobbing this way and that, before moving to a nearby bird feeder. There was a family of chipmunks too. They had their own routine and burrows into which they disappeared and hid food. The squirrels – giants compared to the chipmunks – frequented the bigger trees just beyond, flashing their bushy tails and chasing each other. This was very much a window onto domestic wildlife.

It was here that I saw the same pair of cardinals almost every day for a few weeks. Only the male cardinal is red. As in so many other species – peacocks, lyrebirds –and in contrast to humans, it is the male that struts his beauty or defining characteristic. That defining characteristic can be color, a dance, a unique song. The female cardinal is a drab grey – but still carries a tinge of red. Like so many other birds, cardinals mate for life. So a sudden sighting of bright red would invariably be followed by sober gray or vice versa. A month or two later, I learned to identify their calls. Cardinals have very distinctive metallic sound. Even if I was unable to spot them, I knew they were around in the trees. I just had to roll down car windows while driving through tree-lined narrow roads.

An aside: There is also a rarer but equally colorful competitor --the yellow finch. A finch is smaller than the cardinal – about the size of sparrow. It is a bright yellow, and the brightness is made sharper by the black strips along the finch's wings. Finches were harder to spot, but they did show up once in few weeks.