Today I'm writing about the Golden Swallow, an island endemic. These birds used to be found on Jamaica, but not any more; they can only be seen on Hispaniola now, the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. I've seen Golden Swallows - two of them - once. My husband and I were birding with an expert friend in Haiti. You can learn more about these beautiful birds here, on the Birds Caribbean site. And you can see the prompts I'm following (all three versions) at any of the Birdtober posts above.
Golden Swallow
Hispaniolan birds Nesting in Hispaniolan Pines In cavities drilled by Hispaniolan Woodpeckers. This is the only place you can see these particular flashes of green and gold, these swooping, shining, iridescent golden treasures.
In keeping with today's mouse theme (the US prompt is Tufted Titmouse), the Ugandan prompt is the Speckled Mousebird. You can see why someone thought it resembled a mouse, with its hairy-looking head and long tail. I also read that they like roosting close together, similar to the way mice cuddle. I have to say I find them much more appealing than mice, especially when the mice are in my house.
Fuzzy Mousebird in the tree, You are not annoying me. You don’t get inside my house Like the other kind of mouse. You just cutely fly around, Sometimes hanging upside down. Your hair on end and bright wide eyes Make you look a bit surprised. Fuzzy Mousebird in the tree, You are not annoying me.
Today's official bird prompt is a Ruby-crowned Kinglet, but my colleague's Uganda suggestion was the Gray Crowned-Crane, and I had to pick the Uganda one today because it is Ugandan Independence Day. My husband and I used our day off to take a bike ride and go birding. I was hoping to see a Gray Crowned-Crane or five, but we didn't. Never mind! It's on the Ugandan flag, plus my son sent me the bird from the Bird-A-Day calendar. (See below for both of those GCCs.)
Yesterday in our school Independence Day celebrations, we were asked what the bird on the flag symbolized, and someone near me was saying loudly, "Uganda moves forward!" The answer given from the stage was "longevity." Apparently both are true. The bird's raised leg shows forward movement. And Gray Crested-Cranes can live 20 years in the wild and up to 30 in captivity - which is a long time! I often see them on the compost pile on our Lakeside campus. I think it must feel warm and cozy to them. And they are gorgeous in flight.You can see them in the video below, which was made five years ago as a promo for a film called "Flight to Extinction." The word is that the population of these birds has rebounded somewhat since then.
Independent Proud Uganda Cranes are flying Moving forward
I've written a lot about herons in the past; here's a post from earlier this year with lots of heron poems. On Sunday morning by Lake Victoria I watched a Black-headed Heron hunting something, so I decided to write about him.
Photo Source: eBird.com
Spear-like bill ready Looking for Sunday breakfast He stalks frog or fish
I've been enjoying the multiple calendars for Birdtober this year, because it makes me think of families and of the enormous variety of birds across the world. Taking delight in the diversity of birds is one of the things I love about birding. I have three species on my Life List with the name cardinal: the Northern Cardinal (the one you see in the US), the Yellow-billed Cardinal and the Red-crested Cardinal. The Northern Cardinal isn't related to the other two, which are found in South America, but it is related to buntings and grosbeaks. My colleague put the Cardinal Quelea on today's Uganda calendar. That's one I haven't seen before, and it's not related to any of the others I mentioned. Of course what they all have in common is that they have red on them, just like the Cardinals in the Catholic Church.
From top to bottom: Northern Cardinal, Red-crested Cardinal, Yellow-billed Cardinal, Cardinal Quelea, all photos from eBird.com
Cardinal
The Pope gives a red hat to the Cardinals of the church but the birds get their red topper from a higher authority; the birds live and move and have their being in the skies.
Red-winged Blackbirds are common birds throughout North and Central America. My eBird records tell me I've had them on my checklists 51 times in nine states. The males are flashy and the females are nondescript. They are loud, too. Here are two poems I had saved with Red-winged Blackbirds in them:
“Is it rare to see a Red-winged Blackbird?” Googled someone hopefully, for the flash of red and yellow seemed something miraculous to one who’d never noticed it before.
Google dampened the unknown Googler’s enthusiasm, responding that this was one of the most common birds you were likely to see in North American wetlands.
“Is it rare to read a poem about a Red-winged Blackbird?” I wonder, turning to Google to look for some and finding so many that it hardly seems worthwhile writing another, and yet a sight doesn’t have to be rare to lift your heart with joy. You just have to see it with all your attention, loving it in the moment it’s there.
I, for example, have seen and heard many Red-winged Blackbirds and will always stop and stare, enraptured, at another.
Today's Birdtober calendars call for mockingbirds - either the Northern Mockingbird, seen all over the United States and Southern Canada, or any one of the approximately seventeen other mockingbird species in the world. I have four mockingbirds on my Life List, but today I decided instead to go with my colleague's Uganda Birdtober list. She put the Eastern Plantain-Eater down for today, and I immediately knew why. Mockingbirds get their name from their ability to imitate other birds and even non-bird sounds. Eastern Plantain-Eaters don't do that. But while not a mockingbird, this species sounds like someone laughing hysterically, poking fun at the world. (You can hear the call in the YouTube video below, although the one in the video sounds very staid; usually there are groups of them and they sound a lot more mocking than this one!)
I guess today's poem is cheating just a bit, since I didn't write it specifically for this post. Instead, I wrote it back in March after attending a Good Friday service. The bird in the poem is definitely mocking, even though I didn't use that word.
Before the Cock Crows
In the outdoor Good Friday service in Kampala someone read about Peter denying Jesus before the cock crowed three times, and at that moment an Eastern Plantain-Eater called.
It wasn’t a rooster but with its slightly menacing laughter it worked just as well. Did I deny Jesus too, I wondered and the bird kept chortling as though it knew all the ways I could have.
More than sixteen inches long, Cackling, squeaky, squawky song. They catch fish, then beat it senseless — Never could be called defenseless. No sooner fledged than they start diving, Swooping, hunting, just plain thriving.
Our Spiritual Journey Thursday theme this month is Change and Transformation. Visit our host, Leigh Anne, here to see what everyone else is writing on this topic.
These last few years have been times of huge change for my husband and me. This time three years ago, we were still living in Haiti, and since then we have lived on two different continents (three, if you count the weeks spent in the United States in between). I'm teaching a different subject now, and we're living seven thousand miles away from our kids, and I walk as often as possible in wetlands, getting my boots muddy and making a checklist of the birds I see.
Change is often frightening, especially when it comes unexpectedly. But it can also be life-giving. Wetlands are a symbol of change. Every time I go to Lake Victoria, the beach looks a little different. Sometimes the water is high, sometimes low. Sometimes it's rough, and other times completely smooth. There are different combinations of birds each time. The plant life is different. Sometimes there's a whole new "island" out in the water; it blew in from across the lake and will be around for a while. Wetlands are in between water and dry land. People speak of draining the swamp but that, of course, is the last thing you want to do, as the swamp protects against storms and flooding, filters water, and is downright beautiful. The swamp is always in flux.
Back in 2019, I wrote this post about change. I referred to the hymn "Abide with Me," and particularly the words "Change and decay in all around I see; oh thou who changest not, abide with me." As things change around me, in my work life, my family, and the world, I can trust God's unchanging love that will keep on holding onto me. I hope others can take comfort in this, and I'm thinking particularly of people cleaning up from Hurricane Helene, people struggling with war, and others dealing with huge change, well beyond their ability to control it.
The bird prompts for today are Bluebird, Eastern Bluebird, and Ross's Turaco (which is a very blue bird, and which I wrote about and shared pictures of here). (See the calendars below; one is a US-based calendar, one is more international, and one was made by a colleague and is fully Ugandan.) I decided to choose the international calendar for today, but I've written about the Mountain Bluebird, which is found in the United States.
Photo Source: eBird.com
Mountain Bluebird
I held your hand while you told me something about you I didn’t know before. We laughed and cried and adjusted. And the Mountain Bluebirds flitted around the whole time, being so purely blue, and filling me with hope that we could weather the changes coming, just as these pieces of sky catch bugs and migrate and make the best of it all.
I knew that American Robins got their name from European settlers who thought they looked like the European Robins they were used to back home. Even though the ones back home were far smaller, weighing about a quarter as much. But I didn't know all the details in this great essay by Robert Francis called "How Robins Got Their Name." Specifically, I didn't know that the settlers gave the name Robin to any bird they saw with red on it. "At one time," writes Francis, "Eastern Bluebirds, which have a band of orange on their
chests, were also referred to as Robins. Eastern Towhees were called
Ground Robins, while Baltimore Orioles were Golden Robins." He goes on to report that there are over a hundred birds in the world now with robin in their name, and most of them have no relationship genetically to the European Robin or the American Robin, but were just given the name because they made Europeans think nostalgically of the Robins back home. Francis makes the deeper point that the newcomers didn't bother asking the people already in America what they called the birds. In fact, go read the whole essay - it's really good.
American Robin
Settlers called the American Robin a Robin because it had red on it just like the Robins back home. In the same way, I reacted to the African Thrush and the Rufous-bellied Thrush by saying, “It’s basically a Robin.”
You feel more at ease when you can recognize something. You may be in a new continent, but look around, see what’s familiar. No need to ask questions. You already know what that is.
The American prompt list today has the Blue Jay, but I decided to go for the more generic Jay on the International version. The video above shows a Plush-crested Jay, which I saw four times in Paraguay, all but once in the Asunción JardÃn Botánico. The other time was while visiting my brother's home in the countryside. My brother and I were doing some early-morning birding on my birthday.
Plush-crested Jay
Out looking for ants Soft, fuzzy Plush-crested Jay Snazzy birthday gift
I'm going to attempt Birdtober again this year. Here are the prompts in case anyone wants to join me! This is an art event, and most people do portraits of the birds, but since 2021, I've been using the prompts to write poems instead. I'm planning to do daily poems for as many days as possible, and then I'll post links on Fridays to the week's poems. This year there are two complete calendars, one with US birds, and an international version with more general family groups, so that people can choose a bird that's local to them. I am going to be using both, I think, depending on the day. Plus, a colleague at school did her own version, a fully Ugandan calendar, so I will be using that some days as well!
Book #49 was African Holocaust: The Story of the Uganda Martyrs, by J.F. Faupel. I became curious about this story when I saw a statue here in Kampala of a man impaled on a spear. This book tells the story of the martyrs, both Protestant and Catholic, who were killed by the Kabaka in the 1880s.
Book #50 was James, by Percival Everett. This is the story of Huckleberry Finn, but told from the point of view of Jim. There's no longer any humor in the story; it's pure horror now that we recognize the stakes for James and all enslaved people.
Book #51 was Miracle Creek, by Angie Kim, a courtroom drama that's seeking the truth of what caused an explosion at a hyperbaric chamber.
Book #54 was One Corpse Too Many, by Ellis Peters. This was the second murder mystery in the Brother Cadfael series.
Book #55 was My Lady Jane, by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows. This is a ridiculous but fun retelling of the Lady Jane Grey story, in which people change into animals and there is no effort at realism.
Book #56 was The Women, by Kristin Hannah. This is a heartrending story of military nurses in the Vietnam War, both what they went through during the war itself, and how it shaped the rest of their lives.
Book #57 was The Expats, by Chris Pavone. Kate and her family have moved overseas to start a new life, but it seems as though there's a lot of concealment going on and Kate doesn't know whom she can trust.
Book #58 was Edwidge Danticat's new book of essays, We're Alone. Danticat does an amazing job of communicating what it's like to be connected to Haiti.
Book #59 was Hello Beautiful, by Ann Napolitano. This novel is the story of a family of sisters over several decades. I found the characters completely believable and I couldn't put the book down.
Book #60 was Kololo Hill, by Neema Shah. This is a novel about the expulsion of the Indians from Uganda by Idi Amin in 1974. We follow the Indian family in the story through leaving Uganda and arriving in their new home with all the adjustments that brings.
Tomorrow's Poetry Friday, the first one of the school year! We're finishing our first week with kids. It's gone pretty well, all things considered.
One of the exciting things that happened this week was that I received Irene Latham's National Poetry Month postcard! This means it only took four months to wend its way to Uganda. I looked up my thank you note to her for the NPM postcard from 2023 and found that it took six months last year, arriving on November 9th. It's a National Poetry Month miracle, my friends!
Today I'd like to share a poem that I got recently in the Poets.org Poem-a-Day email. It's called "When it Really is Just the Wind, and Not a Furious Vexation," by Kyle Tran Myhre. It's hard to excerpt it, but I'm going to share the last four stanzas. You can read the whole thing here, and I recommend reading the whole thing, for sure!
So here's the end:
Because in every universe in which
I am alive, it is because of other people. And I don’t always like them, but I love them. In every universe in which I am alive, it is less because I could fight, and more because I could forgive. Because I could cooperate. Because
I could apologize. Because I could dance. Because I could grow pumpkins in my backyard and leave them at my neighbor’s door, asking for nothing in return. In every universe in which I am alive, I am holding: a first aid kit, a solar panel, a sleeping
cat. Never a rusty battle ax or rocket launcher— sure, maybe sometimes a chainsaw, but only for firewood. I am holding: a cooking pot, a teddy bear, a photo album, a basketball, a bouquet of flowers. Survival is not a fortress. It is a garden.
Survival is not a siren. It is a symphony. And yeah, we fight for it sometimes, but survival is not the fight. It is the healing after: the soft hum of someone you trust applying the bandage, the feeling of falling asleep in a safe place.
(from "When it Really is Just the Wind, and Not a Furious Vexation," by Kyle Tran Myhre, here.)
So good, right? I'm glad to be holding, instead of "a rusty battle ax or rocket launcher": a white board marker, a French textbook, a dishcloth, a pair of binoculars, a feather. "Survival is not a siren. It is a symphony."
(P.S. That last stanza made me think of Emily St. John Mandel's novel Station Eleven, of which I wrote here in 2016, "'Twenty years after the end of air travel,' we meet the Traveling
Symphony, a company of actors and musicians who travel around the ruined
United States in horse-drawn caravans performing Shakespeare and
various types of music, because 'survival is insufficient.' It's about
connections, the power of the past, and healing. 'What was lost in the
collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such
beauty.'")
I haven't done a reading update since May, but I've been reading. Some of the recent books:
Book #33 was Maame, by Jessica George, a novel about the child of Ghanaian immigrants navigating her twenties in London.
Book #34 was a rererereread, The Silver Chair, by C.S. Lewis. I'll never stop reading these books again and again. "No one suggested doing anything. There was so obviously nothing to be done. For the moment, they did not feel it quite so badly as one might have expected; that was because they were so tired....'Now don't you let your spirits down, Pole,' said the Marsh-wiggle. 'There's one thing you've got to remember. We're back on the right lines. We were to go under the Ruined City, and we are under it. We're following the instructions again.'"
Book #35 was Cahokia Jazz, by Francis Spufford. This was a rollicking read, in a hard-to-categorize way. It's a murder mystery, an alternative history, an adventure story. It imagines a world where Native Americans have not been marginalized, but are instead full and equal participants in US society.
Book #36 was Written in My Own Heart's Blood, by Diana Gabaldon. This is the eighth Outlander book. I'm kind of thinking the tenth one is going to be coming out pretty soon (though no publication date has yet been announced and Gabaldon is still writing it), so I've been rereading these.
Book #37 was The Summer of Songbirds, by Kristy Woodson Harvey. This is the story of three best friends who grew up going to the same summer camp, Holly Springs. I am a sucker for these tales of long friendships, but this one was a bit forgettable.
Book #39 was Wrath Goddess Sing, by Maya Deane. As I've frequently written here, I love retellings of mythology. This one takes its inspiration from a story about Achilles that's found in ancient sources outside the Iliad. Thetis, Achilles' mother, doesn't want him to fight in the Trojan War, and she hides him in the court of Skyros, where he dresses as a princess and is discovered by Odysseus through a clever ruse of presenting a sword that Achilles can't resist. In this novel, the time in Skyros becomes a gender transition and Achilles is a powerful female warrior. As always when I'm reading retellings, I was fascinated to see how the author would include the characters and scenes from the story. The book is full of erudition and research, and while some of the content was a bit over the top for me (no spoilers so I won't say what), it was well-written and thought-provoking.
Book #40 was Dear Committee Members, by Julie Schumacher, a novel made up of recommendation letters.
Book #41 was The Other Mothers, by Katherine Faulkner. It's a "twisty thriller" set among wealthy new mothers in London. I didn't find it believable or like any of the characters at all, but it kept me reading.
Book #42 was How to Walk into a Room, by Emily P. Freeman. This only came out in March and it was already my second time through. This time I read it aloud to my husband, something we like to do while on road trips. We both found it compelling and it gave us a lot to talk about.
Book #43 was The Hunting Party, by Lucy Foley, another thriller about rich unlikable English people.
Book #44 was The Husband's Secret, by Liane Moriarty. I just looked back over all my reviews of Liane Moriarty books, and a common thread seems to be that they seem light-hearted but then have heavy themes. This one was the ultimate example of this. If you think the husband's secret of the title (and actually a few husbands have secrets, as well as other people who aren't husbands) is going to be fun and amusing, you are WRONG. It is a terrible, awful secret that will make you feel bad the whole way through the book. Or at least, that's what it did to me. I HATE books where everyone has a secret and there are hundreds of pages of deception. So stressful. That said, I had to know what happened, so I read every word.
Book #45 was Running Scared: Fear, Worry, and the God of Rest, by Edward T. Welch, and book #46 was Corrie Ten Boom's Don't Wrestle, Just Nestle. Both were about dealing with anxiety and how we can trust God to take care of us. They both were full of good reminders that I needed. And if anybody has earned the right to talk about this topic, it's Corrie Ten Boom, who spent time in a Nazi concentration camp.
Book #47 was Go Tell the Bees that I Am Gone, by Diana Gabaldon. #36 was the eighth in this series, and this one was the ninth. I think it's my favorite. I really like Claire and Jamie as an older couple, surrounded by children and grandchildren. I read this in 2022 and reread lots of it while lying awake for hours in the throes of jet lag after our recent trip back from the US. Now I'm ready for the tenth book to come out. Soon, I hope?
A Facebook friend posted the following picture yesterday:
I'm sorry to say that nobody succeeded in preventing August from getting here: not the Grinch, not my Facebook friend, and not me. It's here, and that means we're going back to school in just a few days.
Our SJT host this month, Carol, is encouraging us to pause to reflect. That's a good idea, because it's going to be my last chance for a while. Ready or not, school is coming, with all the work and stress. We just got back to Uganda, and we're slammed by jet lag, but we're also enjoying a brief pause before the school year begins.
Psalm 46:10: "Be still and know that I am God." A pause to reflect reminds us that we're not in charge. God is. Even in August.
Last weekend we visited Emily Dickinson's house in Amherst, Massachusetts. It is beautiful and the staff is knowledgeable. My favorite detail was the pine cone placed on each chair where visitors may not sit. The Dickinson poem after the photos seems appropriate since the table where Hope is dining will only seat one.
Welcome to July's Spiritual Journey Thursday. Please leave your links in the comments and I will round them up. We skipped the first Thursday in July because it was a holiday, but also because I had forgotten I had even signed up to host this month. It was on my calendar, but I hadn't looked at it. I'm in the part of the summer when I don't know what day it is. Also, we are traveling (we were in seven states yesterday), and completely out of our routine. I have a reminder on my phone to take my daily medications, but it's on the Uganda time zone (EAT: East African Time), so although it is set for 5:30 AM at home, here it appears at either 9:30 or 10:30 PM, depending on whether we're in Eastern time zone or Central. Oh well. I see it in the morning, swallow my pills, and call it good.
Here's a quote from Emily P. Freeman's latest book. (Yes, I've been quoting from it a lot lately. I really recommend it. It's called How to Walk into a Room and you can read more about it here.) Emily talks about different kinds of fires in chapter 5, and asks: "What kind of fire is this anyway? Is God standing by, ever the expert, bearing witness to the refining, making space for new, good growth in this planned, controlled burn? Or is this a fire that has caught God by surprise? Is this a fire of destruction, taking the waste and the wellness alike? Sometimes our questions don't reflect facts, reason, logic, or good theology. Sometimes our questions reveal our lack of faith, our fear, or our confusion. Ask them anyway. God has what it takes to sort it out."
Below I've posted a video of an a cappella group singing the song "I Know Whom I Have Believed." Each verse is a list of all the things the songwriter doesn't know, but then each ends with a Bible verse, 2 Timothy 1:12: "I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I've committed unto Him against that day." My list of things I don't know would be a bit different, but I can hold on to that thing that I do know: God is still with me and can hold all my questions and help me navigate each day. Even if I never figure out any of the answers.
Back in 2010 I used the metaphor of a GPS when I wrote about dealing with family life after the earthquake in Haiti displaced us. I still think it's a good metaphor. In the borrowed car we're driving on our summer odyssey, the GPS is built in, and the car helpfully tells us where we should go next. But if we turn off the path, on purpose or by mistake, it's immediately recalculating, trying to give us a new suggestion. "Make a legal U-turn," the voice calmly counsels. And I love the little excited lilt when it says, "Turn left at the end of the road." As though the end of the road is going to bring some exciting surprises. And maybe it will. I don't know.
From Henri Nouwen's book Lifesigns: "'Do not be afraid, have no fear,' is the voice we most need to hear. This voice was heard by Zechariah when Gabriel, the angel of the Lord, appeared to him in the temple and told him that his wife, Elizabeth, would bear a son; this voice was heard by Mary when the same angel entered her house in Nazareth and announced that she would conceive, bear a child, and name him Jesus; this voice was also heard by the women who came to the tomb and saw that the stone was rolled away. 'Do not be afraid, do not be afraid, do not be afraid.' The voice uttering these words sounds all through history as the voice of God's messengers, be they angels or saints. It is the voice that announces a whole new way of being, a being in the house of love, the house of the Lord....The house of love is not simply a place in the afterlife, a place in heaven beyond this world. Jesus offers us this house right in the midst of our anxious world."
Here are links to other SJT contributors' posts:
Patricia's beautiful post shares some things she doesn't know, and the way her IDKs inform her prayers.
Denise also shares what she does about the I don't knows in a post filled with goodness.
Margaret didn't know, but then she acted anyway. Way to go, Margaret!
Leigh Annhas written aboutwisdom, as she's been studying the Biblical book of Proverbs."Chapter 8 taught me that everywhere I look, wisdom is calling out," she writes. "But what keeps me from not seeing it or keeps me in the I don't know? Am I taking the time to search for wisdom or to notice it. Sometimes, it's easier to just say, 'I don't know.'"
Ramona wrote about the ultimate I don't know, death. Beautiful, Ramona!
Bobreminds us that it's OK not to know. Because God knows.
Carol tells us about the uncertainties she's been facing lately. So many difficulties, and yet Carol has found wisdom in them!
Karen has a wonderful description of her VBS experience this week!
I've been privileged to live in three of the world's great cities (Nairobi, Port-au-Prince and Asunción, Paraguay) as well as spending time in many others (including nine weeks in Paris as a college student). I just moved to a new city: Kampala, Uganda. I've also lived in smaller towns in three countries. In all of those places there have been difficult days, but I've never found a city or town yet where God is not, and I don't anticipate finding one in the future, either. The name of my blog comes from the song "Love is Always There," by Carolyn Arends.
