Wild Things, Wild Places

by Jane Alexander

  Our time in Shangri-la was coming to an end. Our last days propelled us into the urban mainstream of city life. Thimpu, the capital of Bhutan, is suffering from pollution, unemployment, teenage restlessness, and a drug trade. It is also the seat of a nascent cultural scene that includes filmmakers, writers, and visual artists. Archery is the national sport of Bhutan, and we watched a contest between two top teams. The archers danced like cranes each time an arrow pierced the target.

  Thimpu is also where the “Ashis” live, the grand queen mother and her ninety-year-old sister, both of whom are known as Ashi. Serendipitously I had met Dasho “Benji” Dorji the day before. Benji founded Bhutan’s Royal Society for Protection of Nature and is a cousin of the queen mother. He arranged for Ed and me to present Hope’s gifts.

  The palace looked more like the modest estate of a Greenwich, Connecticut, investment banker than the residence of Himalayan royalty. Made of stone, it is set on a rise and landscaped with flowers and shrubs you might find in New England.

  The queen mother, grandmother of the current King Khesar, is a delightful, thoughtful woman in her eighties. She was dressed in a beautiful kiri of maroon silk and a jacket of turquoise and gold. She presided over a formal English tea, replete with crumpets and delicious lemon tarts. We talked of the wildlife we had seen, including the odd-looking Takin at the zoo that afternoon. The Takin, on its way to extinction in the wild, is a dark ungainly ungulate that looks like a cross between a cow, a black ram, and a moose. It is the national animal of Bhutan and proliferates happily behind zoo bars, but not elsewhere.

  A Takin. Almost at an end in the wild, because of overhunting, it thrives in the zoo in Bhutan.

  We presented Queen Hope’s gifts to the Ashis and they gave us a beautiful book on the flora of Bhutan in return. Then the power went out. The power goes out with regularity in Bhutan, but I did not expect it to in the palace. Servants immediately brought illumination in the form of very modern battery-powered lanterns and we continued our tea as if nothing had happened. It is one of the charms of Bhutan that everyone rolls with the punches.

  Then the conversation turned to a love the queen mother and I shared, that of Hope Cooke’s daughter, Princess Hope Leezum. “Little” Hope, as we called her, and her older brother, Prince Palden, first visited our Putnam County home as youngsters, swimming and playing games with our sons Tony, Geoff, Jace, and Jon, who were close to them in age. Palden was a storybook-handsome prince and Princess Hope was a darling, feisty little girl.

  In the early 1970s India initiated a takeover of Sikkim, as China had of Tibet. A strategic pass to China in the north was important for India to control. The monarchy began to collapse and Queen Hope, fearing for her children’s lives, fled to the United States. A few years later the king died of cancer, India incorporated Sikkim as its newest territory, and 333 years of the Namgyal dynasty came to an end.

  “Little” Hope graduated from Georgetown University and was starting a career in New York City when she and my stepson Geoffrey Sherin, who was attending the Culinary Institute of America, became reacquainted in a Midtown bar. They had last seen each other as adolescents; now in their twenties, they fell head over heels in love. Their wedding, on the sprawling lawn of our home, was attended by many Buddhist monks chanting sonorous prayers for the young couple throughout the steamy August afternoon. The future seemed bright. But while they were on their honeymoon in Sikkim, which Princess Hope had not seen since childhood, she found herself irrevocably drawn to her native land and its people. She felt compelled to live there and to help the Sikkimese hold on to their culture and language, much as her mother had done before her. Geoff felt he could not commit to a life as a chef in Sikkim, or as prince consort, and these two beautiful star-crossed lovers parted ways.

  And so the queen mother of Bhutan and I talked fondly of Princess Hope and all she was accomplishing in Sikkim to keep the ancient culture alive, despite the fact that she no longer had the infrastructure of monarchy that Bhutan had.

  It is a time of great transition for this unique country. Poised to become a leading source of water and hydropower for the masses to the south, Bhutan will have to make hard decisions about its future. The great rivers of the Himalayas are the lifeblood of India: the Indus, the Brahmaputra, and the Ganges. As the world warms and lowland streams and tributaries dry up, as grasslands and paddies turn to desert, the Himalayan melt feeding the rivers will become increasingly important to more than six hundred million people. The mountain countries know this and are planning to build hundreds of dams in the next few years. Sikkim alone has twenty-two hydroelectric stations in the works, and Bhutan has triple that. They are banking on the economic prosperity that will ensue, but the downside may literally wipe all of it out. No one can predict how fast the glaciers will melt. Right now the Himalayas, with more than fifteen thousand of them, seem safe at the highest altitudes. But there are hundreds of glacial lakes, which are increasing in rate and size as the glaciers retreat annually. These lakes could burst their frozen walls in just a few minutes, triggered by water pressure or earthquakes; the entire area of the Himalayas is seismically active, as the massive earthquake of 2015 in Nepal attests. Fully 10 percent of the existing glacial lakes are currently in danger of having such an outburst flood. Any dams built will have to withstand unprecedented pressure in order to hold.

  Bhutan also has “the worm.” Cordyceps sinensis is not actually a worm but a fungus that grows on a caterpillar. The desiccated carcass with the finger-like fungi on it is allowed to be handpicked from below the ground in late spring. One kilogram of “worms” can fetch as much as $20,000 in the thriving Southeast Asian medicinal market. Cordyceps is touted as an aphrodisiac, a boost to the immune system, and an antidote to liver disease and certain cancers. Like the days of the gold rush the valleys where the worm lives are overrun with pickers turning over the soil. So far Bhutan has been able to manage this boom business. When the soil is replaced after disturbance the worms continue to breed. It is a well-balanced natural resource. And there is tourism, limited today so the country will not be overrun and because of insufficient infrastructure, but that will be developed. With exceptional leadership Bhutan will still manage to get many things right. It is the first nation in the world to ban monoculture and go completely organic with its agriculture. It is also carbon neutral; emissions from agriculture, energy, industry, and waste are offset by forests, fully 70 percent of the country.

  The power came back on and we bid goodbye to the gentle Ashis. The queen mother stood at the door as resplendent in her silks spilling to the floor as the rare birds we saw in their luxurious feathers. The new young queen plays basketball in shorts and a T-shirt with a local girls’ team. Things change. As democracy becomes more established, people will demand more development and the opening of all kinds of new global markets straining the peace of this peaceable kingdom.

  Buddhism counsels against attachment, because nothing is permanent.

  Robert Browning wrote, “If you get simple beauty and naught else, you get about the best thing God invents.” Bhutan is beautiful. Its Black-necked Cranes are beautiful. My eyes misted at the thought of the glorious Monal Pheasant. When the old monk dies, who will be there to feed him in the morning light? How long can he escape the collector’s net? And will such beauty come again?

  21

  Bahamas

  Three floating skyscrapers with names like Enchantment of the Seas, Norwegian Getaway, and Disney Dream were attempting to come about in a harbor the size of a few football fields. They were each a thousand feet long and twelve stories high, and the displacement from their combined 400,000 tons threatened a tsunami on the lawn of my hotel. It was dawn; I had found a yoga mat in a closet of the ubiquitous exercise room where TV blasted to the grind of treadmills and clinking weights. My down dogs and warrior poses were thankfully done, and I ducked outside between tropical showers to watch the considerable skill it took the captains to negotiate the turns. It was a slow
process, one ship following the next in a precise ballet they must have executed a hundred times. A small wake washed over twenty feet of lawn, and that was it. The ships, each with thousands of passengers tucked in their berths, powered out of the harbor and headed for Coco Cay.

  Nassau on Providence Island in the Bahamas is one of the most popular cruise destinations in the world. The ships are playgrounds featuring gambling, dancing girls, spas, and pools, then traded on arrival for more gambling, more spas, steel drums, water sports, and high-end shops. If a cruise is not your thing, you can fly to Atlantis, a self-contained resort city with a thousand rooms offering casinos, spas, dancing girls and boys, water sports, and the added attraction of swimming with dolphins. And if resorts of this size don’t interest you, there is some of the best fishing in the world to be had in the clearest waters you’ve ever seen. The Bahamas cater very successfully to the tourist trade, which employs half the population, making it the third-richest country in North America after the United States and Canada.

  There are about two million islands on earth. Most of them come and go with tide and time; about 180,500 are estimated to have any appreciable landmass. Greenland is the biggest, followed by New Guinea, Borneo, and Madagascar. In the United States, Alaska has the most islands, with Florida and Michigan vying near the top—yes, Michigan, with all its lakes. New islands are formed from volcanic activity along oceanic continental plates, from coral reefs above the water making atolls, and from barrier reefs close to shore composed mostly of sand. And there are myriad islands in lakes and rivers that are part of the landmass.

  I have gravitated to islands my entire life. There is something comforting about confines, the belief that you can know the nooks and crannies of an island intimately within its watery borders. Fifty years on the barrier island of Nantucket certainly seduced me into believing I knew the length and breadth of its thirteen by three miles. My parents bought a small cottage on Surfside Beach in the early 1950s. There were a handful of old fishing cottages on Surfside back then, and our days were spent barefoot and careless, swimming, sailing, clamming, crabbing, or casting for Bluefish when the run was on. I would head out to Eel Point to see Short-eared Owls cruising the dunes for rodents, or Glossy Ibis seeking baitfish in the pond. Least Terns and Piping Plovers nested on select beaches. I knew the best places where Blue Crabs hung out in the salt marshes, where the tiny Northern Saw-whet Owl roosted, and where a few huge white oak grew in a hidden copse. I kept my secrets to myself, but small islands really have no secrets. People have been stumbling upon them for eons, and changing the equation with each revelation. We can never know anything with complete assurance because the landscape is always changing, as axiomatic of our relationships with human beings as of the land. Nantucket’s sandy shores were always moving; the ocean took 120 feet of our land in one storm back in 1974, leaving the cottage just 12 feet from the bluff. The ocean built the island five or six thousand years ago and the ocean will take it away with the rising tide of glacial melt in another five thousand years…or less.

  Through the 1980s and ’90s Nantucket became the darling of a new class of wealth, people who built mini-mansions with manicured lawns to the waterline, paved the dirt roads, and packed the harbor with yachts and the town with boutiques. The scallop beds diminished in the runoff of pesticides, clam beds were dug out, the birds were disturbed, and the line of jeeps fishing for Blues off Great Point was miles long. Surfside’s few cottages, which looked east to the sea and west to fields of grass, heather, and scrub pines, were now crammed to the bluff’s edge as hundreds of homes piled in behind us. The deer and the owls disappeared and the rare indigenous tulip-like lily was crushed underfoot or picked by folks who had no idea there were just a few dozen left in all the world.

  This is an island story told many times in many places. Beauty is a magnet. Everyone treasures the experience of it, but there is a cost: the very elements that make a place beautiful, the wild land and sea and the wild creatures that live there, are sacrificed to the demands of human beings. And we are rapacious, as predatory in our needs as any species that has ever roamed the earth.

  The Bahamas is a country of seven hundred islands, some underwater at high tide but more than thirty of them inhabited. It was here in 1492 that Columbus is reputed to have first landed in the Americas, although the Dominican Republic also claims the distinction. Not actually in the Caribbean, the islands occupy an area of 186,000 square miles partly in the Bermuda Triangle, 50 miles southeast of Florida. The climate is balmy year round. The waters surrounding the Bahamas are teeming with aquatic species. The islands sit atop three banks of fossilized corals and shells at the edge of the continental shelf, giving the shallow waters a stunning turquoise hue where people play, fish spawn, and birds feed. Fifty thousand West Indian Flamingos live at the edge of shallow lakes, while in the deep waters off the shelf great ocean fish ply the canyons for their next meal.

  Migratory birds, abandoning the cold North, alight in the Bahamas for the winter just like human “snowbirds.” Congregating by the thousands on remote cays and lagoons, shorebirds poke their beaks into sand and silt for tiny worms and snails.

  The Piping Plover is one of those birds. The handsome pale plover with a partial black collar and a chunky little breast has never been a bird easily seen. Because it fades into the coloration of the sand, it goes unnoticed, and except for piping in distress, it is silent. It breeds from the coasts of North Carolina up to Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland, and also along the shores of the Great Lakes. The plover pair scratch an almost-imperceptible indentation in sand and pebbles above the high-tide line near a wrack of seaweed and plugs of dune grass, and both sit on the eggs until they are hatched twenty-five days later.

  There are about 8,000 of these small plovers left, 3,100 on the Atlantic Coast, where I first encountered them in childhood. I remember picking up a chick and putting it in my sand pail on a Nantucket beach when I was about five. How could I not? It was the most adorable puffball of a toy I had ever seen, and I carried it about in ignorance of its mother piping her alarm call twenty feet away. My own mother was not so ignorant and gently chastised me, placing the tiny one back on the sand, where it scurried back to the nest scrape and under its mom’s soft belly.

  There must have been hundreds of children on hundreds of beaches throughout history who have done the same. The plovers share our coastal territories and suffer many indignities, onslaughts, and death from human and animal disturbance. Beachgoers leave trash, attracting seagulls and crows, which pick off the chicks. Jeeps run over them, and dogs scatter them. Too many people walk too close, eventually weakening the birds’ resolve to lay eggs, or to raise their brood of three or four. There is predation by raccoons, foxes, owls, feral cats, and Coyotes. It is a wonder that any of the chicks fledge at all, but half of them manage to every year. The Piping Plover is a plucky bird.

  I am a “Piping Plover Guardian” in my southwest area of Nova Scotia. Bird Studies Canada recruits volunteers to monitor the beaches for the birds and educate people about them. We observe when the birds arrive to scout nest sites, we check the eggs and chicks regularly to make sure they are safe, and we keep track of disturbance, predation, and abandonment of the nests. It is a joyful and sad task. The joy is in seeing these chicks pop out of the nest just hours after birth, looking like chorus girls in tutus with their long slim legs and puffy down skirt, scurrying about to forage for invertebrates. The sad part is seeing the tracks of a fox or a gull when the nest is empty.

  My favorite beach to monitor is a wild windswept expanse of crashing surf locally called Hemeon’s Head. I love the long walk through the grasses, despite the multitude of ticks, and the high berm of cobblestones all the way down the high-tide line to the flats of Matthew’s Lake, a mile away. Fledge success has been difficult at Hemeon’s because of so many predators. The year 2014 was cause for cheer.

  In the seventeen years I had been a guardian on our southwestern beaches I had not en
countered a pair of plovers I found more endearing.

  The female was particularly beautiful, a very pale sandy-beige color, the black collar around her neck widening to perfect triangles beneath her head. When I first saw her on May 30 she displayed nesting behavior—agitation and diversionary tactics—before she settled down again on the same bare scrape of sand between several stones. Later in the day she did indeed lay five eggs, one more than is usual.

  I saw the male on June 16. He was more traditional looking, a darker beige body and a black collar all the way round his neck. He too was calm, standing on the cobble like a sentry. I watched the changing of the guard as she came off the eggs and went to feed at low tide and he took over incubating.

  On June 28, right on time, I saw the dad on the nest with a fluffball at his breast, the first chick. Within twenty-four hours two other chicks had hatched; the remaining two did not.

  Hurricane Arthur blew in on July 5 with 70 mph winds for fourteen hours straight. The bird fallout when it all subsided at 7 p.m. was huge. Laughing Gulls fell out of the sky by the hundreds all up and down the coast, and Black Skimmers were found on Cape Sable and the Eastern Shore. Following the previous hurricane it had rained blue-colored birds: Indigo Buntings and Blue Grosbeaks!

  I felt sure the plovers were in trouble, and first thing the next morning I raced down to Hemeon’s through washed-up kelp and storm flotsam to their nesting area. I heard and saw nothing in the wrack and pebbles near the nest. I sat on the cobble to deliberate. They weren’t on the beach feeding, nor near the nest site. Then I heard the briefest of piping, and the pale female flew low out of the wrack and landed on a pile of stones one hundred feet away. Then the male, standing guard beneath the “Piping Plover Nest Area” sign, followed and sat next to her. For a moment I thought they were going to copulate, which made me believe the chicks were dead, but no, they acted as if they were signaling the chicks to stay put. I rose and nonchalantly walked down toward the water a bit south of them.