All posts by meanderer007

Why do we hate so much?

Polarization

 

Will Braun who taught the course that Christiane and I took at Canadian Mennonite University 2 years ago said that “we are all God’s Children.”  He is a Christian and to him that is a fundamental principle. God loves all of us. Not just the Christians who go to church. Not just Christians. He also loves Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and people who don’t love him back or even believe he exists. I suspect a lot of modern Christians don’t agree with Braun. I find it easier to believe that many of them hate Muslims for example. At least that is what their actions suggest. They don’t even treat Muslims with respect let alone love. Some claim to love them but I just don’t believe them because their words and actions suggest otherwise.

 

In fact, it seems to me many Americans hate Muslims. Many hate Jews or blacks or indigenous people. Again, they might claim to love them, but to me it seems more likely that they hate them. Perhaps even more obviously, many Americans hate Democrats. And Many Americans hate Republicans.  They hate them because they are on the “other side”.  And they can’t stand the other side in many cultural disputes. They hate gays or lesbians, or heterosexuals. They hate whites or blacks. They hate, often with surprising viciousness, those on the other side of their important cultural and political debates.

 

About a year ago or so, Charlie Kirk was murdered. He was loved on the right, but not so much on the left.  In fact, it seemed if the right loved him the left would have to hate him. He was immediately attacked on the left and defended on the right. People took sides. And those sides were sacred. No one gives up on what they think is sacred.  At least it is very difficult, if it is not impossible.

 

Some have called this “binary thinking.”  Mark Edmundson said this in an article in the New York Times: “Look around: Binary thinking (often informing binary rage) is everywhere in our country.”

 

One person who resisted binary thinking was Van Jones an occasional commentator on CNN. This is what he said about Kirk: “I was very frustrated with people in my party throwing rocks at the corpse before he could even be buried.” According to Edmundson, “Mr. Kirk was on the other team, and in binary-thinking America, that meant he was a foe.”

 

I think he was right. Not all teams work that way, but increasingly political teams do. You are almost required to hate the other team to stay on your team. You risk shunning if you don’t hate enough. Religious groups used to work that way too, but thankfully, many of them are moving in the other direction.

 

At Charlie Kirk’s funeral service his widow said, demonstrating Christian principles in action, that she did not hate the man who killed her husband. She said she forgave him. That is uncommon. Donald Trump was very different. This is what Trump said,

 

“Mr. Kirk did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them.”

 

Kirk and his wife were followers of Trump, but they did not follow him down this path. When leaders do the wrong thing we should not follow them. That is unusual in modern politics, particularly politics that are as polarized as American politics, and increasingly, Canadian politics which is going down the same path as Trump, not Kirk.

 

I recently attended a conference that was attended by many religious people of various religions and they all got along  respectfully. It was great to see. Pluralism in action. This is a big improvement over the “good old days”, that were really not always so good. I hope we don’t start back-sliding. Extremism is really not often attractive. Often its ugly. Just watch Trump. Or the extremists on the left for that matter.

There is a better way.

Lawful Little Migrants

Hummingbirds

In South America the Andes mountains provide great habitat for numerous hummingbirds. In fact, as David Attenborough remarked, “half of all humming birds live in these mountains along with their plant partners.”

 

The Ruby-throated Hummingbird, which is the only one to live in Manitoba, needs to make sure that it leaves the north before its plants stop producing nectar for the winter. If it fails to do that right it will starve.  When the time comes, they begin their incredible migration to the south. When they arrive in places like Rockport Texas they load up with food where they can get it. Many people place feeders for them on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Each of the humming birds must convert sugar from its source such as nectar, into fat for the long migration over the gulf which has very few islands for resting on the flight.  Most fly non-stop across the Great Bay that some idiots call the Gulf of America.

According to David Attenborough, “in just 3 days the average hummingbird will nearly double its weight. This is the equivalent of a human of average weight putting on over 50 kg of fat in 3 days.” As Attenborough said, “During the peak of migration Rockport is home to tens of thousands of hummers. This spectacle of so many hummers can be found nowhere else on earth.” Needless to say, it attracts bird enthusiasts from around North America. Those are the real bird brains.

 

The crossing of the Gulf of Mexico is the greatest test of the flying skill of the hummingbirds. They make their journey at night and fly at least 800 km non-stop. That is an enormous task for such a little bird. No one really knows how they can do it. But they do it.

I love this photo because it shows the long tongue of these birds which are used to suck out nectar from flowers with long nectar chambers.

 

David Attenborough summed up hummingbirds like this:

 

“There is much we do not know about humming birds and their secret high-speed lives, but what we do know is that they are the most remarkable, colourful, energetic and acrobatic of all creatures. They live at the limits of what is possible. Nature’s miniature masterpieces and all because they are the messengers of plants.”

 

 

We are fortunate to be blessed with hummingbirds. Life would be so much duller without them.

 

At the Edge of what is possible

Hummingbirds

 

 

 

It is abundantly clear that hummingbirds have an abundance of skills, some of them spectacular. As a result of all of exercising these skills they require a lot of energy. Their flights are often like aerial pilots with their dogfights.

As  David Attenborough in his film explained this:

 

“When flying, hummingbirds have the highest oxygen demands of all vertebrates. Their wings beat as fast as 80 times a second. The problems is getting all that oxygen to the proper place. When the bird is perched its heart beats at around 400 times per minute. In flight it rises to an astonishing 1,200 beats per minute [20 times per second] as the heart pumps oxygen rich blood to the wing muscles. Even this is not enough for hovering, so the heart expands in size so it can pump more blood with each beat. When this happens, the blood circulates around the whole body. Heart to lung, heart to muscles, and back to the heart in under 1 second! They are living at the edge of what is possible. Extreme aerial athletes with extreme needs. It’s no surprise that when they are not flying and feeding, they rest and conserve energy.”

That really is astounding. As a result of all of this, hummingbirds spend 80% of their day perched. That is why I sometimes have such a hard time finding them, as they perch often inside tree branches where it is so dark and difficult to photograph them. During this time, they stretch muscles and groom their very important feathers. They also take advantage of rains to clean their feathers. Unlike insects they really seem to flourish in the rain. I noticed this from inside my cottage this summer when I was watching hummingbirds in the rain.

 

The hummingbirds also as a result need to protect their sources of nectar. In the forests of South American for example, they must protect their flowers from nectar thieves. That is why they have evolved to drive out competitors. Like all good capitalists they are habituated to destroy the competition. It is in their nature.

 

As a result of all of these high energy needs, hummingbirds must feed every 15 minutes or more. “Starvation and even death is always only hours away,” Attenborough reported. As a result, they don’t have time to visit flowers that have no nectar. They don’t really have time to chase competitors to away either, but I can report they do. This begs the question, what do they do in the dark?

 

Staying alive until morning is a challenge for every hummingbird. They do that by going into torpor every night of their lives. This is similar to hibernation. It is like going into hibernation every night! Their heart rate drops precipitously and their heart rate goes down from 400 to 40 beats per minute. That is 1% of the energy they use when flying!  This is a radical solution, because while they are in torpor they can’t move and are easy prey for predators that are out and about where they are. They can’t escape from nocturnal predators that find them. If a predator finds them at night, they are dead meat. When day breaks, they shiver and in about half a hour can fly again. It is a remarkable transformation for these truly remarkable birds.

 

To feed themselves sufficiently hummingbirds must be smart, except when it comes for rivals at least.  Then they can be stupid. Competing when it is not necessary to compete. Reminds me of humans.

 

They must learn to avoid flowers that don’t produce nectar or not enough or are temporarily drained. As a result, they learn to avoid flowers they have already drained of nectar until they are replenished. They must have mental timers in their brains and be able to remember flowers already visited recently in trees or flower patches among enormous numbers of virtually identically coloured flowers. So Hummingbirds are indeed smart. That is why Attenborough said it was “a great feat for a bird brain.”

Hummingbirds can’t live on nectar alone. That is why they have learned to catch prey such as flying insects as well, which of course requires incredible aerial dexterity. They particularly need protein to replace feathers and build muscles.

 

Hummingbird Plant Partnership

Hummingbirds, Nature

 

It is interesting that hummingbirds are not found outside the western hemisphere except with the assistance of humans who help them to visit there. Some have been carried to Africa by humans. Most of them live in South America, but we found many in Arizona the years we lived there in winters, before the United States declared economic war on us here in Canada.

Manitoba only has one native humming bird, the Ruby-Throated Hummingbird (Archilochus colubris), but it is gorgeous. The males are particularly gorgeous of course.

 

That is also why so many hummingbirds have such flamboyant displays of colourful feathers that are designed to scare their foes. Some of their feathers are what Attenborough called “extravagantly iridescent.” Those extravagant colours are not produced by pigments, but rather by layers of  air bubbles in the feathers. Attenborough described this as follows: “Those air bubbles refract, reflect, and recombine sunlight to produce dazzling colours. The colours depend on the angle of the sunlight, so hummingbirds can turn on and off their brilliant signal, flashing a warning to an intruder, or hide from an enemy.” That is why one can never be sure that a dull hummingbird is nonetheless a male with its gorget feather not reflecting well because of the angle to the sun

 

Hummingbirds are not unusual in the sense that like so many other birds, they look to flowers for their food in return for agreeing (or not) to carry the flowers pollen from one flower to another. It is an example of a free trade agreement. As a result, as Attenborough said, “nectar fuels their frenetic movement.”

 

Nowadays a lot of flowers use birds as carriers, but this was not the original inters-species agreement. When flowers first evolved, over 60 million years ago there were no hummingbirds. The first flowering plants depended on insects to carry their valuable cargo, but in South America the mornings are often cool and damp, and insects are cold-blooded so are often lethargic at such times. Flowers could use better, more reliable, messengers, so they looked to birds. The original bargain was one between plants and animals such as butterflies. Butterflies carry the pollen from one flower to another and hence fertilized flowers they encountered. Insects are then fed with nectar. A fair deal. Some flowers cheated however. For example, some orchids deliver no food to the insects, but only sweet smells. They promise nectar to the birds but don’t actually give it up.

 

Hummingbirds in South America, and now Manitoba, are able to fly in all weather conditions, at least in summer. Thus, they can carry pollen more reliably than butterflies.

 

As David Attenborough said in his film, The Secret Life of Birds, “the plant and insect have been in a long and successful arrangement, but at some point, some plants dropped their insect messengers.” Birds like hummingbirds provided a safer pair of wings as far as the flowers were concerned. This first new deal probably happened about 50 million years ago according to Attenborough. Hummingbirds were ideal partners.

 

Birds at first probably were attracted to the insects on birds as a source of tasty food. But some hummingbirds could also drink the nectar inside the flowers. The first hummingbirds were larger and clumsier than the modern hummingbirds. They learned better in millions of years they related. Evolution in time—long time—provided smaller birds that were better flyers. As Attenborough said, “the bird evolved to better suit their new way of life.”  That’s how evolution works. “Over millions of years birds’ bills to be evolved thinner and lighter all the  better to scour for nectar,” as Attenborough said. The birds also became more agile than their ancestors. They had to learn to hover in order to insert their bills into the flowers. They also evolved long tongues to probe the flowers and sip the nectar.  These tongues are visible on some of my photos.

 

The hummingbirds also had to reduce their weight and did not have any Ozempic pills to help them. So their legs got lighter, thinner, and smaller. As a result they could no longer hop. As Attenborough said, “Hummingbirds live on an energy life edge”.

 

 

Today over 8,000 different plants depend on birds for pollination. Of course, there was a problem.  Insects are cold-blooded unlike birds. As a result, birds require a lot more energy than the insects. In fact, often they need 10 times as much energy than the insects they replaced. According to Attenborough, “a hummingbird eats more than its weight in nectar each day.”  So flowers have to produce a lot of nectar to keep those birds coming. No nectar; no birds.

A lot of flowers that are attractive to hummingbirds are red or orange.  Bees are red-green color blind. To make their flowers less attractive to insects, some of the flowers evolved to have long thin flowers which the birds could find and insert their long slim bills into. Hummingbirds can hover, which is needed to get inside those flowers, but that costs the birds a lot of energy. They are the only birds that can hover well enough to hold their bills in place to extract nectar. Hummingbirds are formed to give them lift and power on the downstroke as well as the upstroke, unlike other birds.

 

Hummingbirds are unique among birds because they are able to fly backwards. They can also rotate on the spot. They can even fly upside down. As Attenborough said, “Plants with their hard to reach flowers have produced the ultimate aerial acrobats.” It really is the plant that creates the animal, and the animal creates the plant. It’s called coevolution. The entire world is connected that way. And it’s all amazing.

 

 

 

 

Celebrities of the Bird World

Birds, Hummingbirds

 

 

 

 

David Attenborough in his film about the Hummingbirds, The Secret Lives of Hummingbirds said, “They are the celebrities, the stars of the bird world.” I agree with this. Who can outshine hummingbirds?

This summer Christiane and I have been spending a lot of time on our deck at the lake watching hummingbirds. We put out feeders filled with sugar water—1 part sugar for every part water—and wait for the birds to come to us. We pull out binoculars on the little table between us and are entertained for hours. We can sit there reading and watching. The entertainment is astounding. Every few minutes another hummer comes by or is chased by one of his cantankerous colleagues.

 

Humming birds do not play well with others.  They cannot abide a competitor no matter how much abundance in feed.  They will spend enormous energy flying after foes to make it clear to the others that this is their territory and no one else’s.

It is strange that they are so territorial. In the forests of south America that is necessary. They must fend off competitors for food. In the front yard of our cabin at the lake they waste their time and energy chasing rivals away from their food source—my feeders. Perhaps in millions of years they will adapt and change if some people continue to support them with supplies of sugary nectar substitution

This was one of the rare males I saw this year. Are the males dying out? Teh gorget was more orange than red.

I have been trying to catch them in flight with my camera and my big lens, and that is an incredible challenge.  They rarely stay long in one place.  But again, the fun is in the chase. They are so fast they fly by in a blur.  But modern high-speed cameras can slow them down when 1 second becomes 15 seconds.  When you slow them down you can look into their secret world.

The Secret Life of Hummingbirds

Birds, Hummingbirds

Lately I have been spending a crazy amount of time following and luring hummingbirds.  I want to capture them. Not literally, but virtually, with my camera.  It is great sport. It would be much easier to shoot them with a rifle. But this is more fun. Great fun in fact.  People often say the fun is in the chase. And I agree with that.

 

I recently watched a video narrated by David Attenborough, one of the finest nature narrators and interpreters.  The video is called The Secret Lives of Hummingbirds. He said that “hummingbirds are amongst the most spectacular of animals on earth.”  I agree with this as well.

Hummingbirds are very small birds. Among the smallest warm-blooded animals on earth, according to Attenborough.

 

He also “their glittering colours and prowess in the air are unmatched.”   Many birds have gorgeous colours, including hummingbirds, but their flying skills are astonishing.

 

 

 

They Stole a City by Lauren Collins

Death of Truth, History, racism, Sacred Ignorance

 

 

Lauren Collins is a staff writer at the New Yorker. Recently, she wrote a book called They Stole a City, about the startling events that occurred in Wilmington North Carolina which I visited a number of years ago as part of the North American Orchid Conference. It is a lovely city with a dark history that many want to keep dark.  There are many Americans who want to keep the real history of America quiet so they can celebrate all the wonders of America without considering its warts.

 

Lauren was interviewed on CBS Sunday Morning, a television show that Christiane and I watch quite frequently. This episode was worth the watch.

 

Collins started by making an important point about history that MAGA cheerleaders don’t consider.  She said, “Loving a place doesn’t mean lying about it or lying for it.”

 

Her book tells about the events that happened on November 10, 1898. As Jennifer Szalai said in a review of Collins’ book, “What happened in Wilmington on Nov. 10, 1898, has been variously called a riot, a massacre and — by the white people who perpetrated it — a revolution. Collins calls it both a massacre and a coup.” As Szalai said, “It would take more than half a century before a historian would dare to call what happened “a coup d’état.” In hindsight that seems remarkable because it was so obviously true. Colins called it “the only successful coup in American history.”

 

Until then Wilmington had been a model of black and white power sharing, but white supremacists don’t share well with others. It’s always their way or the highway. The supremacists really wanted to purge all black influence in the city.

 

White people got together in Wilmington North Carolina after a clarion call to “white men” to gather in that city to ensure that “business in the furtherance of White Supremacy will be transacted.” They did not hide their intentions. They were completely transparent.  They wanted to take over. No more sharing power. They wanted a coup d’état and that is what they got. They gathered together under the banner of white supremacy because as Szalai said, “white Wilmingtonians were particularly resentful of Black success after the Civil War, complaining of “Negro domination” and “insolence.” The panic was so unhinged that it could border on parody, with unintentionally ridiculous headlines to match: “Negro on Train With Big Feet Behind White,” or “Stole Cheese: Negro Man Boldly Purloins a Cheese.”

 

Whenever people dominating another group of people feel that dominance slipping away it is painful to the dominators. They hate, and inevitably want to do whatever they need to in order to stop the slide. And they don’t care what explodes as a result.  That is how resentment and hatred operate—with fire. They don’t want to be replaced. They want to continue in the driver’s seat. That’s what happened in ‘Wilmington.

 

As a result, the white men took over the local government, signed a new city charter that they called, grandly, “The White Declaration of Independence.” After that they attacked the Black newspaper in killed blacks in a rampage.  No one knows how many blacks were killed. Numbers vary from low tens to more than a hundred. Collins believes higher numbers are more likely because the powerful white men tried to hide the true numbers. At the time 56% of the city was black. Today it is a mere 15%.

 

 

The next day, they attacked the offices of the Black newspaper that ran the offending editorial and proceeded to take over City Hall.

 

The granddaughter of one of the victims was interviewed by CBS and said, We need justice and we need healing and healing does not come with lies. Neither does justice. It comes with the ugly truth of things.”  This is a woman with honour and genuine pride, entirely unlike the white supremacists who support the current Republicans in America who want to hide the truth from their families. They want their children to be proud of their ancestors whether they deserve the honour or not.

 

One of the white citizens of Wilmington put it well: “It is incumbent upon white people like me to consider their history and grapple with it and shoulder the full truth of it even when it is uncomfortable.” Only the truth will set you free.

 

And of course, the same steadfast devotion to the real truth is required of us Canadians as we confront the history of our country and its treatment of Indigenous people in Canada.

Meandering into and out of Danger

Hummingbirds, Natural History, Nature

 

When Christiane finished breakfast and stepped outside our cottage at Buffalo Point this past week, she remarked, “This is what heaven should look like.” Sometimes she is very wise.

This day we woke up to a glorious day. Nothing special about that at the lake, but it sure was great.  First, the Hummingbirds were going crazy. They were chasing each other madly. That is what they do. Around humming bird feeders they spend much more time chasing each other away from the feeders than they do feeding. Even though they had 4 feeding troughs that could easily be shared, they would rather waste time and energy chasing competitors  away from what they want to hoard. Of course, as soon as the two hummingbirds flee, another flies to the feeder to take advantage of what the foolish birds left behind undefended.  And these were female birds, presumably the smarter sex. The males had already flown to warmer climates, it seemed.

When you think about it, hummingbirds are about as stupid as humans, who also spend a lot of time and energy defending their territory from perceived threats.  Isn’t that what gated communities are all about? Well, hummingbirds are probably not quite as stupid  as humans.

I spent much of the date sitting on the deck in the shade reading a fantastic book, The People v. Democracy by Yascha Mounk. I was drinking hot apple cider, chatting occasionally with my lovely wife Christiane, looking at the lake, watching the crazy birds and enjoying life as good as it get. In any event the day was deeply pleasant.

Near the end of the afternoon, I was sitting alone on the deck, when I was very surprised.  I looked up and saw a black bear walking right by mean on our front yard. He took only quizzical look at me and gave me a pass.  He was not interested in me. I was happy about that. Perhaps he did not see me as very tasty. That would not be surprising.

I have never been as close as that to a black bear. I doubt that it was 10 yards away. Even  closer.  I was holding a camera with a big zoom lens, to photograph tiny hummingbirds, so I had to turn it as far down as possible to get the big bear into focus. After dismissing me, the bear continued meandering towards a bird feeder filled with luscious sunflower seeds. He gave them a sniff but passed on them too. Why? I am not sure but I have a theory.

Black bears have thrived in North America since the arrival of white visitors. Grizzly bears and Polar bears not so much. Why is that?  My theory is that black bears are smart. They have figured out that humans are trouble.  They know we are dangerous.  Even though I was an old man who would have been defenceless to any attack, and I had nowhere to escape,  the bear ambled on.  Somehow it knew that if it mauled me the bear would get in trouble. More trouble than it wanted. There is food around that it is much safer to sample. And probably more tasty too.