Fourth in a series of short writings based on our recent ecotourism trip to Costa Rica

4.

It was one of the half-dozen most strange, almost surreal, and unlikely scenes that I had ever seen in a natural setting: a whimbrel, alone, standing on a beach log, looking out over the Caribbean south of Manzanillo, Costa Rica. My camera was a Canon SX50, upper-end point-and-shoot, my go-to equipment for situations requiring minimal size and weight coupled with maximum flexibility and zoom power. How close can I get and not scare this one away? That was my question. When you’ve been a professional biologist for nearly sixty years, spending forty of those years in the field, you capture images first, as many as you can, then start asking how close you can get, how long a bird will stay in a particular place, and why this scene is happening. Thus my whimbrel is not in as sharp a focus as I would like for social media, mainly because I had to use digital zoom, and was so far away, to get it on that log. However, thinking back on that morning, this bird seemed so totally occupied with its thoughts, watching the breakers, that I probably could have walked up and touched it.

What were the thoughts that I put into this whimbrel’s head? The answer is: a bunch of questions. Should I fly back through the United States during migration, given that its leaders are so determined to reduce the environments that I need on my trip to northern Canada? Will I be welcomed, or will I be disdained? Will the scientific illiteracy that is so characteristic of those in charge of that piece of North America make it more, if not fatally, dangerous for me when all I’m trying to do is get to a place where I can rear a family? Will I be considered an undocumented immigrant? Will I be arrested? Will there be a pipeline break and a bunch of crude oil in the South Dakota marshes? Will someone shoot me, like they used to do my relatives, just because they have so many guns and want to try them out on something alive? But most of all, will my human friends, the ones who get such pleasure out of my passing in the night, be ridiculed because they like, no, love, nature, try to understand nature, and read about nature, instead of just tearing up the land because they believe it has some minerals of value? What will happen to me if I just decide to quit going to the United States, like some of those folks living in San Jose, retire in Costa Rica? I know what I’ll give up, but is it worth the cost, just to avoid that part of North American that is nothing at all like I remember it three years ago on my first flight from the Arctic tundra to Costa Rica? I don’t know the answers to all those questions. Maybe I’ll just stare at the Caribbean for a while.

The third in a series of short writings based on our recent ecotourism trip to Costa Rica

3.

Many years ago I volunteered, no, actually demanded, the opportunity to teach a course we called BIOS 204: Biodiversity, in the spring semester. I knew from many years in the large introductory courses that students who hated me, or were afraid of me, in the fall semester of BIOS 101 would avoid me like the plague in second semester, and that students who appreciated my efforts would enroll in BIOS 204. That guess was about 52% correct. I wrote the labs for my spring students, usually about 260 of them in a single lecture section, but 24 to a lab. We did all sorts of wonderful things that are either forbidden nowadays for liability reasons, or more likely, too difficult for teaching assistants who are not parasitologists, therefore not microscope-literate, to teach. However, Biodiversity also involved me having to learn a hell of a lot of biology that I’d either avoided for the previous 30 years (e.g., botany) or was never exposed to (e.g., mycology). Among the most pleasant of surprises involved fungi. I made up a lab exercise in which students opened an agar plate, touched their four fingertips to the agar, returned the lid, and set the plate aside for a week so that bacterial and fungal colonies would grow from the micro-organisms that had been on their hands. That was a truly wonderful exercise. People saw themselves in terms of fungal and bacterial colonies. Eventually I started re-living my whole career, deciding at the age of 23 not to become a parasitologist, but instead study fungi, like those living on dead trees in Costa Rica. My material would be beautiful, exotic, easy to smuggle across borders and grow in my lab, and some of it would be edible. And so in Costa Rica I take picture after picture of fungi, just to remind me of that long ago intellectual experience and the revelation that some vicious campus politics had provided, namely, the beauty of fungi, especially deep in the rain forest.

The second in a series of short writings based on our recent ecotourism trip to Costa Rica

2.

I know, ecotourism guides are notoriously good at their jobs, and that has certainly been my experience in a variety of places. All of my previous trips to far-off lands, however, were pre-Trump and prior to the bubbling up of willful ignorance that his short administration has modeled, encouraged, and enabled. And so, during our ten days in Costa Rica, I found myself thinking: suppose you had our guide, Alejandro, and Mr. Trump in the same room, alone, somewhere far from the cameras and media, with nothing to talk about but their respective nations’ history, culture, natural resources, and human potential. What would this conversation sound like? Based on the evidence gathered so far, I strongly suspect that Alejandro would assess his audience immediately, tone it down, hold back so as not to offend, be patient, thinking that this other person needed a great deal of help just getting through the hour, but at the same time wondering why all his former client groups, e.g., those from France and Germany, seemed so aware of reality compared to this one. And what would Mr. Trump be thinking? Based only on what we have heard come out of his mouth so far, and his actions so far (e.g., Puerto Rico), I suspect he’d be nervous as hell in the company of a small brown man with such command of the English language, such breadth of knowledge about the natural world, such skill at bringing his nation’s cultural and economic history into any discussion but in an educational way. I suspect Mr. Trump would feel quite threatened by this young man’s knowledge, his understanding of natural processes, and his perspective on agricultural economics. This kid would obviously be educated. Educated! That nasty word that got me unfriended from Oklahoma relatives prior to November 8, 2016. That condition that makes me and most of the ~17,000 university students to whom I’ve given grades since 1966 anathema to the folks lining up behind our current president, that model of willful ignorance and fragile ego begging for a big military parade he believes will honor the Commander in Chief, but actually will only show just how important he thinks he is.

The first in a series of short writings based on our recent ecotourism trip to Costa RIca

1.

Saturday morning I was in the tropics, twelve hours later I got off the plane in Omaha to a wind-chill blizzard. When we left for Costa Rica on January 26, I decided that I would simply disconnect from the Internet for the ten days we were gone. For the benefit of my GOP friends, those ten days in the company of intelligent, self-confident, dark-skinned, multi-lingual people who placed enormous value on their living natural resources were an enormous relief from the shallow, discriminatory, theocratic, Trump wannabe folks who seem to be dominating the news from my home country nowadays. I know, ecotourism places you in contact with special people, but so does a trip to the Oklahoma legislature. More later. Foreign travel always does things to my mind. Back when I was still teaching those large classes, it took a serious effort to resist dumping on that captive audience after I’d returned. That restriction no longer applies. Over the next few days you’ll get the results. Cheers. In the meantime, here’s looking at you from the swamp.