Pepper Trail | Essays | Birds of Passage / Living in Place

As winter swings toward spring, I find my own personal compass veering between north and south, between the satisfactions of home and the attractions of travel. At this time of year, restlessness seems to rise like a vapor from the awakening earth. Giving physical form to this restlessness are the birds of passage that will soon be all around us. In the coming weeks, the sparrows and finches that crowded our winter birdfeeders will withdraw, following the melting snow up into the mountains, or journeying over the northern horizon. As spring’s tender leaves unfold, the birds of summer will arrive; the orioles, tanagers, and flycatchers that we think of as “our birds”, but which actually spend most of their lives among the lianas and orchids of the rain forest.

Each spring, the reanimation of our forests by these distant travelers causes me to re-examine my own life’s travels, and my own longed-for destinations. My childhood was spent very much “in place”, on my family’s 100 acres of abandoned farm fields and woodlands in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. I wandered the countryside every day, becoming deeply imbued with my father’s love for nature in all its aspects. I haven’t seen that landscape in over 20 years, but can still summon it up in my memory in more detail than anyplace I have lived since. And yet, while loving the land, I chafed at the limits of small town life. I voraciously read books of travel and adventure, including the journals of Lewis and Clark, Audubon, and Darwin. I had a fine adolescent pity for those schoolmates of mine who would spend their whole lives in our tiny town. I was determined to see the world.

Almost as soon as I left home for college, my traveling years began. My very first airplane flight took me out of the country and to the jungles that I had dreamed about for so long, as a volunteer for CARE in Panama. One experience with the inexhaustible variety of tropical nature, and I was hooked. For the next 20 years, I spent more than a quarter of my time outside the U.S., carrying out studies of animal behavior and ecology in Costa Rica, Panama, the Caribbean, Suriname, South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Tanzania, Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, New Zealand, and Australia.

In 1994, after 3 years in the South Pacific studying flying foxes and fruit pigeons, I arrived in Ashland with my wife Debra. Our children were 8 and 4 years old, and we decided, not without great ambivalence, that it was time to settle down. We signed a mortgage, bought some furniture, and didn’t leave the country for 2 long years. I became involved in Northwest forest issues, and gained deep respect for grassroots activists like Julie Norman, Richard Hart, and Dave Willis, who have devoted decades to understanding and preserving this very special corner of the world.

		BIRDS OF PASSAGE / LIVING IN PLACE As winter swings toward spring, I find my own personal compass veering between north and south, between the satisfactions of home and the attractions of travel. At this time of year, restlessness seems to rise like a vapor from the awakening earth. Giving physical form to this restlessness are the birds of passage that will soon be all around us. In the coming weeks, the sparrows and finches that crowded our winter birdfeeders will withdraw, following the melting snow up into the mountains, or journeying over the northern horizon. As spring’s tender leaves unfold, the birds of summer will arrive; the orioles, tanagers, and flycatchers that we think of as “our birds”, but which actually spend most of their lives among the lianas and orchids of the rain forest. Each spring, the reanimation of our forests by these distant travelers causes me to re-examine my own life’s travels, and my own longed-for destinations. My childhood was spent very much “in place”, on my family’s 100 acres of abandoned farm fields and woodlands in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. I wandered the countryside every day, becoming deeply imbued with my father’s love for nature in all its aspects. I haven’t seen that landscape in over 20 years, but can still summon it up in my memory in more detail than anyplace I have lived since. And yet, while loving the land, I chafed at the limits of small town life. I voraciously read books of travel and adventure, including the journals of Lewis and Clark, Audubon, and Darwin. I had a fine adolescent pity for those schoolmates of mine who would spend their whole lives in our tiny town. I was determined to see the world. Almost as soon as I left home for college, my traveling years began. My very first airplane flight took me out of the country and to the jungles that I had dreamed about for so long, as a volunteer for CARE in Panama. One experience with the inexhaustible variety of tropical nature, and I was hooked. For the next 20 years, I spent more than a quarter of my time outside the U.S., carrying out studies of animal behavior and ecology in Costa Rica, Panama, the Caribbean, Suriname, South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Tanzania, Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, New Zealand, and Australia. In 1994, after 3 years in the South Pacific studying flying foxes and fruit pigeons, I arrived in Ashland with my wife Debra. Our children were 8 and 4 years old, and we decided, not without great ambivalence, that it was time to settle down. We signed a mortgage, bought some furniture, and didn’t leave the country for 2 long years. I became involved in Northwest forest issues, and gained deep respect for grassroots activists like Julie Norman, Richard Hart, and Dave Willis, who have devoted decades to understanding and preserving this very special corner of the world.