March 19, 2007, by Sanson Corrasco

On March 10 and 11 I saw my first redwing blackbird (by the Redwing Marsh), my first meadowlark (north of Winterview Thicket), and my first robins (Bluff Lake) of the year. In the course of the next week, biddie flocks of redwings showed up at Bluff Lake, males were disbursed in trees along the watercourses, meadowlark calls were everywhere and a few were posting up in the low trees.

And the hawks were gone. I saw kestrels, but no eagles or red-tails either on the thermals or in the trees. Mid-week or so a pair of killdeer showed up near Redwing Marsh. No sign of the cliff swallows as of March 19.

February, 2007, by Sanson Corrasco

I’ve been watching the raptors all winter. My best and most frequent sighting was a kestrel female, who perched near the 26th Ave bridge over Westerly Creek (we call this spot Winterview) and hunted north along the creek and west along the 26th Ave swale as far west as Central Park Blvd. I saw her often, sometimes with a field mouse-sized prey in her clutch. She is a very pretty and graceful looking small hawk with black face-paint and gray-blue wings. One extremely cold morning I saw her in one of her frequent perches fluffed out to a basketball shape. She looked like a pigeon. I would not have thought she could get herself so big. I concluded hichy was a female, because of the gray-blue wings, males have brown wings. But, I had some confusing sightings. Eventually, I saw the pair together on a tree in the thickets below Winterview bridge.

I didn’t see the bald eagles nearly so much this winter, as I did last, I think the increased traffic is driving them away, but I had several sightings of single birds, perched in the trees over Bluff Lake, perched on the earth mound along the west side of Havana-Moline, and hunting the prairie dog town which runs along 26th Ave at the end of our block (from the earth mound to the 26th Ave bridge). Along with the eagles we have hawks, red-tails, I think, who also hunt in Dogsburg.

One day I saw an eagle make a south to north pass over Dogville. A large red-tail was simultaneously crossing west to east. He seemed to be taking advantage of the distraction created by the eagle. I assume this must work sometimes since the prairie dogs who are not under the path of the eagle are all watching the eagle and the hawk is coming from behind them. I’d suppose the eagle must also be looking out for the sentinel whose attention is focused on the hawk. The tactic didn’t work on the day I saw it.

I got some nice pictures of the hawks hunting in Dogville. Of red-tails, the “Field Guide to Western Birds” says, “chunky tail, tail reddish above, colorless below” (so if it’s colorless, how can we see it?) but it could be a white-tailed hawk, of which the book says, “Tail white, above and below” (but the white-tails seem to go with a darker body, so I think red-tail). I bought a whole book—the “Peterson Field Guide to Hawks of North America”—which only succeeded to complicate my life, since it lists lots and lots of hawks I never heard of (and thus never had to think about) before.

I like my old copy “A Field Guide to the Birds” (which is inscribed to me on “July 14, ’49. Daddy”). I don’t recall the occasion, I was only five and couldn’t read, but I suppose I was taken with the pictures. It has a wonderful flavor of mid-century missionary erudition:

In old England (and today) the only birds called ‘Hawks’ were the bird-killing diurnal birds of prey, the Accipiters [sic], birds like our Sharp-shin, Cooper’s Hawk, and Goshawk. The colonists who settled here were not naturalists, so they applied the name Hawk to almost all the day-flying raptores [sic]. This has been a great handicap to the conservationist, who can prove by food-habit studies that most of these birds are beneficial, or are, at least, an important cog in the balance of nature. In spite of his charts and tables he has a difficult time securing protection for these birds because of the stigma attached to the name

I should like to advocate a return to the old English names in some cases:

Harrier—instead of Marsh Hawk
Peregrine—instead of Duck Hawk
Merlin—instead of Pigeon Hawk
Kestrel—instead of Sparrow Hawk

Through the efforts of Doctor Walter Spofford in Tennessee, the field students in that state now use these names without being self-conscious about it.

The Old-World name for the Buteos is ‘Buzzards.’ Unfortunately, the name Buzzard in North America has been corrupted in popular usage to mean our Vultures. The connotation being what it is, it is perhaps impracticable to try to change the names of the Buteos to Red-tailed Buzzard, Broad-winged Buzzard, etc.

In the last few weeks things have picked up for the non-raptors. Recently I saw a purple martin flying in the meadow, and twice I have seen a belted kingfisher in the streamside trees along Westerly Creek north of Winterview. He’s shy, so I’m not sure he’ll stay. Mallards and ducks are occasionally spending the nights in the ponds, but those still freeze over, so the waterbirds haven’t yet moved in. I heard an interesting bird out in the meadow. It started like a meadowlark but instead of the long signature note at the end it had a bunch of short staccato notes. I didn’t see the bird.

Yours for unself-conscious bird names, that’s it from here.

Homage #2, dos Grullos, August 28, 2001

So there I was, trapped in a hotel
wrapped in barbwire bite,
Alone with a sheet and a bed spring,
and only a coal for a light.

But the coal it was compelled;
The barbs were innocent.
At the ends of time will the minds of men
wonder where the old one went?

At the ends of time, will the minds of men
a new world to come to be?
Or when Kingdom comes, shall we dwell in slums
of imagined poverty?

* * * * * *

In Tchokinar did Lochinvar
and the musclemen in blue
And red, and white, in the fiery night
go do what muzzlemen do.

The lives that were lent were spent;
and lives that were borrowed were too.
And mothers bore in that rocky war
as mothers always do;

Their wombs they were howling, their vaginas they were growling
for lovers and children too;
But though the mothers wept, all that was left
were the holes where love once grew.

Still the madman sits on his hams and sifts
through drifts of limbs left behind,
And in the bloody sand, his groping hand,
seeks a lost and shriveled mind.


Homage to Naghib Mahfouz for the line "a mad giant, seeking his lost mind, beneath the damp grass..."
--JLR dos Grullos, by the Lord’s blessing, August 28, 2006.

Tanzania #4, Lucia Correll

July 16, 2006

It will be easier to write the Tanzania letter from home, where we arrived yesterday-not quite 24 hours ago. It is nice to be home but it is so much hotter than Africa.

Africa at this time of year is quite pleasant and not surprisingly, you cannot really talk about the climate in Africa or even in Tanzania. We had the amazing opportunity to travel around much of the country. In Makete, in the west, it was so cold that Tim bought a sweat suit and I bought a jacket. Luckily I did not give it away in Makete because it was also chilly at Kisilanza Farm and near the Ngorongoro Cater. In both Ngorongo and Kisilanza, the hotels heat with fireplaces; in Makete, there are few hotels and none with any amenities.

Makete and Mwanza are not places that people visit often. Mwanza gets some attention because it has an airport and is near Lake Victoria. Makete is not near anything and reachable only with 2 days of driving from Dar. The pitted windy road inclines steeply and it takes about three hours to drive from Njombe, which is on a paved road, to Makete, although it is perhaps 50 Kilometers. Cars are rare enough that when we stopped our car, people would emerge from their houses to see what was happening. The small children almost never wore shoes. Small children were playing with other small children close to the road; it is safe there I guess. An image remains in my mind of two small children who ran across the road obviously scared of the car. When they got to the other side of the road, the little boy of about 4 years old put his arm out to protect his three year old sister as the car drove by. They were so adorable and so young to be out on the road unsupervised. And the children play with almost nothing. In this age where children in the US are programmed with so many activities, the scenes in the Makete villages, reminded me of my childhood where children engaged in free play.

We wondered how well our visits in Makete had been planned. It seemed that perhaps the officials did not plan the activities until they saw us there. We were supposed to interview district and local officials and the Most Vulnerable Children’s Committee members, NGOs, parents, young people, but we never quite knew what we would find upon enter any building. So when we entered a yard and saw a group of women in traditional dresses sitting on the ground waiting for us and looking like flowers (see attached photo), we thought we were going to meet with the Mama Makubas. (Mama Makubas are community women who look after children who are at risk. They may oversee up to 20 children. ) But these women were not Mama Makubas; they were caretakers of most vulnerable children. They were mostly older (grandmothers) who were caring for from 1-4 children. They told us what food and school resources they received and it was almost nothing. Reports about Tanzania describe the situation that is supposed to be, but not the situation that exists. I think the authors read the reports and plans, but don’t really go see the reality for themselves.

Driving across the country from east to west was not enough. So we also drove from across the Serengeti to Arusha, stopping along the way to see the wildebeest migration and the Ngorongoro Crater. The Serengeti is beautiful and with the predators following the wildebeests, we saw hundreds of animals – in one view. If you are thinking of going, go soon. There is a $100 fee now for entering the Ngorongoro Crater for a half day and we heard talk of raising the fee to $750. There is concern for the environment with the high usage of the tourist areas.

This was a hard trip in some ways. It is still difficult to write about it. The juxtaposition of the good conditions in the tourist areas and the poor conditions in a normal household is shocking. I feel unable to even start the report I should be writing.

It is good to be back in Colorado and seeing friends and family. We are planning to be in NJ in September and in Italy in November for the olive harvest. I hope you are all well and look forward to seeing you or at least communicating with you now that I am home for a while.

Hugs,
Lucia

Quails and Fat Men, Tim Correll

‘A fat man eating quails while children are begging for bread is a disgusting sight, but you are less likely to see it when you are within sound of the guns.’ George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia.

For the last four days I have been sick with diarrhea and general queasiness. It came on while we were in Bluebay Resort in Zanzibar. I really wish it had come on a day later, so I could blame an outbreak of malaria on Precision Airways’ leaving my doxyclycline, but, since my condition predates the airline’s misconduct, I’ll have to savor my grudge without malaria. I’ll settle. Perhaps I’ll lose some of the weight that surrounds my queasy stomach.

This trip to Tanzania is a bitch.

From June 23 to June 29 we did an epic drive across Tanzania from Dar es Salaam to Makete and back, close to forty hours of driving.

Dar to Njombe is on the A-6 national road, a two lane tarmac that is one of the best roads in the country, and indeed, where it is unpotholed and away from the villages, a pretty decent road, but there are frequent patches where the surface is pocked by unmarked 15 cm deep holes, and there are speed bumps, as well, the Tanzanian road crews apparently not understanding the Major’s explanation that Romania—in an unaccustomed economy of effort—didn’t need both potholes and speed bumps. After road hazards in the form of other traffic have been added, the ride amounts to lots of rapid acceleration and urgent braking.

Near the villages, pedestrians and bicycles fill the road’s edges. Bicycles carry 2 or 3 2m by 1m bundles of charcoal, bundles of 4m planks, canisters of water and bundles of thatch. Mr. Kapezi, our driver, is no bicycler. He forces our Landcruiser around lorries and dalidalis (15 passenger vans, usually carrying 30 or more passengers) in the face of oncoming bicycle traffic, sending them and their loads into the ditch.

On the road from Iringa to Njombe, as we followed the Baobab valley, approaching the escarpment of the Somthi Ngorotha Mountains at a speed of 120 kph (84 mph), we rounded a curve as a boy, size 8 or 9, but 10 or 12 in Tanzanian years, I suppose, with a 20-25 kilo bag of maize on his head, stepped into our path. He stood there dumbstruck as our Toyota skewed through a 90 degree skid. We heard no telltale thump, and our attention turned to the approaching rock wall, with which we became suddenly well acquainted, but somehow missed. On the realization that we had neither flipped nor crashed, I looked back to see the boy bounding into the brush on one side of the road as his brother, I suppose, dropped his bag and ran the other way. Mr. Kapezi and I unbuckled and got out. The boy’s bursted bag and shoe lay in the middle of the road. Mr. Kapezi picked them up and carried them to the side of the road, calling to the boy that it was alright and that he could come back. He didn’t show and neither did his brother.

We examined the car. We thought for a moment that the tread had separated from the left rear tire, but it turned out the loose tread we saw was debris from an earlier accident. We drove on, leaving only our dramatic four-stroke curving skid marks and a blotch of corn meal in the road. I wondered if the boy would be punished for wasting food.

****

June 26. After a night in Njombe and three hours of rutted mountain road, we arrive in Makete. Makete is a poor region in a poor country. Men from Makete seek work elsewhere as miners, plantation workers, drivers and soldiers. On infrequent trips home they bring HIV, and Makete is widely described as the ‘epicenter’ of AIDS in Tanzania.

The purpose of our trip is to examine the functioning of the ‘Most Vulnerable Children’s Committees’ structure in Makete as part of our larger examination of the child welfare capacity of Tanzania. We’ve talked about the MVCCs before, and will again, so I’ll only summarize. The MVCCs are a lovely, delicate attempt to formalize the traditional village system to care for orphans and vulnerable children. The Tanzanian government, lacking resources to create a paid and sustainable system of child welfare, has initiated MVCC committees in the villages. These are volunteers, unpaid and largely unskilled members of the community, who identify the most vulnerable children (MVC) in the community and report their numbers and needs to the district government. The MVCCs are supposed to mobilize and coordinate resources and support. In theory the district government directs resources to the village MVCCs to address the children’s needs. In theory, the village reports are incorporated into a district plan. In theory, the district plan is shared with the donor-funded NGOs, who, in theory, use the plan to allocate their resources and to deliver essential aid to the MVC in the villages.

We were to meet the District Executive Director, but he was on ‘safari’ (it just means a 'trip'), as was the Deputy. We made do with the Human Resource Officer, the Social Welfare Officer and a number of district level departmental officers. Essentially, the government departmental officers described a system that is working more or less as it was described in the written plan, so I’ll skip ahead for now.

****

On June 27 we went to two villages, Ndulamo and Ivalolila. In each village we met with the MVCC members. These meetings were simultaneously heart-rending and heart-warming. In each village, committee members met us in mud-walled school rooms to describe their activities. In communities of ~700 and ~500 children, the committees have identified 253 and 260 MVC respectively. These are the ones who are lacking food, shelter, school uniforms or exercise books, or bedding. The MVCC members told us that they know of only one or two NGOs who are providing assistance. One NGO delivered 20 ‘iron sheets’, that is corrugated iron, to mend roofs for five children. Another delivered 20 school uniforms and food for 20 children and 60 exercise books. And that’s pretty much it for outside assistance. As for the rest, the community taxes themselves, 100 Tanzanian shillings—that’s 9 cents—a month per household, but not all households can pay it, and the government, mostly the Ministry of Education puts in a little money, and when we do the math it turns out that there is about $2 a year of support per most vulnerable child, and then there is the community plot. The villages have set aside one or two hectares (e.g., 2.5 to 5.0 acres) to grow food for the most vulnerable children. They grow Irish potatoes. According to calculations we have made elsewhere, it takes about a dollar a day per child to provide food, clothing, shelter and education.

We met with a bunch of caregivers, seventeen little old grannies, probably younger than Lucia and I, but looking like the dawn of time. They are toothless and bent and they walk with sticks. They throw their sticks under a bench outside the school house and help each other struggle over the threshold. In traditional kangas they seat themselves on the benches like flowers. We briefly introduce ourselves, and the translator translates, they clap for every sentence. Some ululate. Merick, our translator, a young lawyer, counselor to the District Executive Director, tells us this is traditional and simply means that they are happy to see us, yet we have a hollow chilly fear that the enthusiasm is because they think we bring money.

One of our colleagues asks a question, ‘What do you do when you don’t have enough food for the children?’ and I hate this question, no doubt because I fear the answer, but the answer comes back: ‘We send the children into the forest to cut wood to take to the market to sell. Then we buy food.’

Once upon a time there was a boy named Jack who lived with an old woman in a very poor house at the edge of the forest and one day his grandmother said to him, ‘My boy, you must go into the forest to cut some wood… .’ And there you have it, the classic tale, but without the magic beans. So far, they do not live happily ever after. We heard the same or similar stories in three other villages in two other districts.

****

7/8/2006

So today we are in Ngorongoro Crater. The previous three days we were in the Serengeti. I am standing in the back of a Toyota Landcruiser under the canopy of the lifted roof. The wind is in my hair. Binoculars at the ready, I am Rommel, scanning the horizon for enemy rhinoceros and light armored cape buffalo. We scour the trees for sniper leopards. We are consumed by guilt, but last night we enjoyed the obscenity of a mixed grill and tonight I’m asking the chef to fix me some quails.

July, Sanson Corrasco

I like the Secretary birds. They are eagles who are nothing like eagles. They are not built for powerful wing-beats to lift themselves and their prey. Instead they have long legs and they run across the veldt with their wings outstretched. They have curlicue topknots, and they glide between long, bounding steps. They look like little boys in fantastic hats playing at being airplanes. I don’t think they can fly. Maoudi says that the name comes from 18th century secretaries’ practice of tucking their quill pens into their wigs.

On the ground, congeries of vultures look like ugly undertakers squabbling at a convention, and tall frock-coated Maribou Storks look like long faced parsons come to eulogize the meal. In the air, the vultures are beautiful. Their wings turn up gracefully at the tips and they circle on the thermals. The Maribou Storks fly with them too and are differentiated by their diamond shape and the way they drag their feet behind, like herons and cranes and egrets.

Saddle-billed storks have a yellow patch across the beak, flanked by red patches, just below the eyes. It gives them a surprised look like someone whose nose has just been bloodied.

Hornbills, when they fly, can be confused with cormorants or frigate birds. They are of similar body shape and they fly with necks and feet extended, but the hornbills, usually in pairs, appear to have crooks in their necks. These are not actually crooks in the necks, but the bills of the hornbills which, in flight silhouette, appear midway along the neck.

Bishop males are black with red cowls. They are mating now and display in profusion. Bee-eaters in the Serengeti are bright green with yellow heads. They are stunning, though not so bright as the Carmine bee-eaters we saw in Selous. I don’t think they eat bees.

Blather, Feral Bourgeois

Fourth of July, we were in Tanzania where the holiday went unnoticed.

We were doing a human capacity assessment on the child welfare system there. Tanzania’s HIV/AIDS situation is that ten years ago they had ~8000 orphans, today they have 2.5 million, and in ten years they will have 5 million. Basically, their child welfare capacity consists of a lot of strategies and policies being promulgated by the high level people and little community committees of village volunteers who are doing nearly all of the work. If it weren’t for the heroism of the village volunteers it would be unrelievedly depressing.

Of course, since we were going to be in the areas where the big wildebeest migrations take place every June and July, we decided we should take some vacation time while we were in the area. This may have been a good way to save money on a rich man’s vacation and to see the last great African scenes, BUT the emotional disconnect was almost enough to kill us.

You know, you can steel yourself to address poverty and think you’re part of the solution, but then to hang out with the remnants of the colonial empires is just too much. You feel as if you are betraying everything you believe in. Vodka tonics and crème caramels taste good at night and a Maasai warrior with a flashlight and spear walks you from the dining hall to your luxury tented camp at night but you spend the whole time counting up, not how much you have spent, but rather how much the village committees could have bought with the same money.

And what about this poor debased creature, the Maasai? Here he is in fabulous traditional costume, wrapped in brightly colored light weight wools, metal enough in ear bangles to start a car factory. This is a guy whose cousins are still in the Serengeti herding cattle where wildebeest and zebras run free and where lions and leopards and hyenas hunt. I have seen this guy’s cousins, boys as young as 12-14, defending their cattle, sheep and goats from 600 pound lions using only hand built iron spears. That is, I didn’t actually witness them fighting lions, but I saw them herding in the veldt where the lions are. They have a proud and impressive culture being steadily degraded by tourism.

When you leave Olduvai Gorge (where the Leakeys did all their research) the younger boys flag down the cars and beg for tourists’ leftover lunch boxes. Where you enter the Ngorongoro crater adult males cluster at your windows and offer to pose and to trade their traditional knives for your watch. And in the chill of the evening, as you listen to the grunting of the wildebeest, the bark of the hyenas, the nightnoises of a thousand unfamiliar birds and insects, these Maasai warriors escort you to your tent, carefully shining the light on each rock so you—stupid tourist—won’t stumble. What must they be thinking about people who spend in a single night enough to support an African child for a year yet are so afraid of the African night that they cannot walk the beaten path alone?

Blather. The Tanzanian tourist authorities say that the money collected in the game reserves is a significant infusion of money into the Tanzanian economy, but I suspect it pays more for MPs’ cars and bureaucrats’ housing than it does to improve the qualities of life of the Tanzanian people, don’t you? Blather, more blather.