Before going any further, it should be pointed out that L. Frank Baum, who wrote the Oz books, was never in Kansas. Whatever Midwest memories he had were based on South Dakota, and why Dot & the dog didn’t get whisked out of that place instead of Kansas by that twister remains shrouded in the mystery that was L. Frank’s creative process. One suspects there’s a bit of “flyover” mentality at work somewhere, a notion that one Midwestern plains state is like another, though this is perhaps unfair to assume. When it comes to wondrous make-believe places (Never Never Land? Middle Earth? Washington D.C.?), could it also be said that one Oz is like another? What would Baum say to that?
Were there birds in Oz? Given that a scarecrow is a major character, of course there had to be some of the ebony corvids in there somewhere. In the book, in fact, the scarecrow evidently goes around breaking the necks of same, which was evidently a bit too much to be shown in the movie. As for Hollywood, the filmmakers reportedly tossed in a toucan, a peacock, and a Sarus Crane (a bird of the Indian subcontinent!) somewhere in Dorothy’s travels, according to some who obsess over that movie. Of course in Oz anything is possible, which might also be said about Hollywood, as well.
Were there birds in Kansas, on this trip? This will be answered more completely a bit later, but hints have already been dropped about how this trip’s focus was clearly about much besides adding to one’s cache of avian memories or adding species to a life list. One tipoff was how the itinerary mentioned a number of stops without listing birds to be found there, unlike the usual birding itinerary whereby every stop on the trip tends to specify “target” birds to be sought out and listed.
Another tipoff was evident when we first met the trip leaders. As a general rule, part of the birder’s uniform is a baseball hat with something bird-related stitched onto it, often an iconic species or conservation group such as Audubon or a well known birding destination, or some combination of all these. Another fairly common protocol is that one wears this hat all the time, even at dinner, though this is true of a lot of cap wearers nowadays. On this trip, our leader Ed’s hat displayed “The Aldo Leopold Foundation.” His wife, Sil, tended to not wear a hat much at all, though as one photo shows, at some point she wore a cap with what looks like a sun rising behind some large blue letters. Ryan, the other leader who also happened to be the “trainee,” had a cap that read “CACTUS ROPES Texas.”
Most leaders on birding trips love the natural world but also happen to be ace birders, period, and tend to do trips all over the world in all manner of habitats. Some specialize in N America while others cover specific geographic areas, such as Europe or Africa or Asia. Guiding birding trips has usually been their career for awhile, or even a long time. In contrast, it seems Ed and Sil had long careers as educators, teaching science and biology at various grade levels. Ed also worked for Mass Audubon in DC for awhile on conservation issues, and Sil had her own stories about being an activist in this regard. Both had lived much of their lives in the Midwest, first Missouri and Minnesota and now Kansas, and the nature trips they’d led were to places like the Platte River in Nebraska and Isle Royale in Lake Superior, as well as this trip through the Flint Hills, which has been their specialty for a long long time. This was the last one they intended to lead; in fact they’d come out of “retirement” to do it one more time, by special request.
Another reason for this final trip was that they’d come up with Ryan, who’d expressed interest in “carrying on the torch” as the next leader. Ryan’s background was in anthropology, though more importantly he’d been raised on a ranch near Manhattan (also home to Ed and Sil at the moment) and his father, besides being a rancher, had been instrumental in prairie preservation work. All three of them expressed a clear passion and love for the area and what it represented, and the fact that it truly was their “home” lent this meander a special meaning.
Of course it was Dorothy who famously proclaimed “There’s no place like home.” Those words and that sentiment were in no way original to the movie but have roots deep in the American consciousness and spirit, if not someplace much deeper than that. Home is all about what’s safe and familiar, the place one finds sanctuary from all that is unknown and uncertain, where one belongs to a community and often has “family,” which can mean a whole lot of things. It seems possible all sentient creatures have a need for such a place, because it can be a tough world out there. Life is all about making one’s way in that world, with its difficulties and challenges – Oz certainly presented Dorothy with a lot of these – but when the day is done, home is where you get a break, whether it’s just a cave or nest or burrow somewhere, or Kansas, if you’re Dorothy, or whatever singular abode fits the bill in your heart or imagination.
It might also be said that “Kansas” has a sentimental or even iconic appeal beyond the usual thoughts about home. The Midwest, with its spacious skies and amber waves of grain, represents all that is true and good and worthy in the American mythos, as the bonafide center of the authentic American “heartland.” It’s entirely possible Baum knew that Kansas, in his readers’ minds, packed a whole lot more punch in this way than South Dakota. Iowa or Nebraska might have served the same purpose, but why quibble?
In contrast, the Kansas that is “home” for Ed and Sil and Ryan also involves a good bit of warm sentiment, but unlike Dorothy’s Kansas, theirs packs a strong dose of earthy reality, as well. Their Kansas is just one part of a planet that is home to everything alive, at the most real and physical level. To love that means to respect it, and to want to preserve and protect it from all threats. The shrinkage or the tall grass prairie to 4% of its original area should tell you something about how that is going.
This was our first trip, ever, that gifted us a couple of books, one to them about local wildflowers and grasses whose author, Iralee Barnard, showed up for a few hours on one of our walks. The other, surprise surprise, was Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, which Ed passed out on the last day of the trip, urging everyone to at least check out Leopold’s definition of a Land Ethic, which I shamelessly share here, not just to help fill out this post but because it captures much of the essence of our week in Kansas:
“All ethics has a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. Instincts prompt them to compete for their place in the community; ethics prompts them to co-operate.
The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively, the land.
A land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It also implies respect for his fellow members, and also respect for the community as such.”
Leopold wrote those words in 1948, which was the year he died. If you have a love for the environment and haven’t read any of his books, you might consider taking a look, and his Sand County Almanac is a good place to start.
Speaking of beginnings, our trip officially started with a visit to the Great Plains Nature Center, one of a number of places dedicated to preserving prairie flora and fauna. It was free and provided easy hiking through what nowadays is called “protected habitat”. Nature Centers the world over seem to specialize in education, providing lots of “hands-on” displays and programs about the natural world in the particular local neighborhood where they’re located. Or as often as not, about the natural world that once prevailed in the local neighborhood before the conquering species had its way with it. They tend to work a lot with schools. There is a Boston Nature Center near our house that has been steadily hemmed in over the years by housing developments, but it appears that what is left of it shall survive intact. It is run by Mass Audubon, and was once the only urban Audubon facility in the country, which may still be the case. It is notable that it runs programs in Spanish and English, and one hopes Aldo Leopold would approve.
The GPNS was representative of a number of stops on our trip. We’d walk around and identify and marvel at the plants, and Ed or Sil would pick off leaves or flowers or grasses and provide info as to what was important or interesting. Iralee came along on one of these jaunts, and probably would’ve signed copies of her book though it is not clear anyone took her up on this. In that book one learns, among other things, that 1) “prairie” is derived from the French word for meadow 2) there are some 1000 species of flowering plants and ferns in the Flint Hills, about half the total for all of Kansas 3) they represent 110 plant families, the largest being the Aster family with 145 species, followed by the Grass Family with about 125 species 4) of the 11 species of Kansas sunflower, nine are found in the Flint Hills. Botany has its fascinations, but it also seems to pack a whole lot more information and much more daunting identification challenges than is the case with birds, at least insofar as birding trips and their leaders approach the topic.
As for birds, the second day of the trip was billed as the Big Birding Day, at least compared to the other days. We visited the Dyck Arboretum of the Plains, (usually) “a great place to see Mississippi Kites” as the itinerary suggested, and Cheyenne Bottoms, a major watering hole on the continent’s central migration flyway. But there was a problem, as Ed and Sil made clear the first day and which was already national news for those paying attention, that it had been a very hot and dry summer in the Midwest. The entire western part of the continent has for several years, in fact, been struggling with an epic drought that may yet only be the beginning of historic changes in the climate.
What this meant for our trip was that the usual wet places crucial for migrating birds, or wildlife in general, were in crisis. The details of this became clearer as the week progressed, but it is a fact that we saw no Mississippi Kites at Dyck, nor any hoped-for American Avocets or Black-necked Stilts or “spinning Wilson’s Phalaropes” at Cheyenne Bottoms. It was still a great day, with large flocks of various egrets and White Pelicans and White-faced Ibises and Wilson’s Snipes, but all of these at distances too great for good photos, which turned out to be the case for the entire trip, at least for one not equipped with a giant lens and great reflexes, which includes this writer/photog. Appropriate field-guide images have thus been provided, a miserable cop-out substitute if there ever was one, but there will be no apologies and none should be expected.
But every birder, including this one, always has their memories, like those Mississippi kites doing group aerobatics over southern Louisiana – there is no more graceful bird in flight than a kite – or that phalanx of Avocets wading along in shallow water down in S Carolina, swishing their long beaks back and forth in unison stirring up food together, which was magnificent, or those phalaropes whirling at that waste water treatment facility in Arizona, which was basically a swimming pool for birds out there in the desert. The birder never forgets such things. If you’re a birder, sometimes memories are all you’ve got and that’s all the joy you’re gonna get, at least today, and most birders don’t mind, especially if that’s all there is. Get over it.
At Cheyenne there was also hope of seeing Burrowing Owls in the single remaining prairie dog community around, which turned out to be on private land at a considerable distance. There were no owls but lots of cute little critters, some standing on their hind legs staring at us. It was great to get a glimpse of the locale’s eponymous “dog,” who, like its counterpart iconic prairie species, the bison, has seen its numbers tragically reduced since the coming of the white man.
The day ended at Coronado Heights, a 300 foot mound of sandstone and a great spot to watch the prairie sunset. Surely you had to learn about Francisco Vazquez de Coronado a long time ago in the Great Explorers chapter of your high school history book, or maybe you even got treated to a great video. He’s the one who went looking for the Seven Cities of Gold, one of many get-rich-quick places dreamed up by the fervent and greedy imagination of 16th century Spain, looking to loot the New World. As the story sort of goes, after “conquering” a number of pastorale native tribes in the American Southwest while finding nothing he considered to be of value, some of the exploited convinced him that the Real Deal lay to the northeast, which found Francisco and his merry violent men going all the way to Kansas. The lack of solid archaeological information means the story of Coronado Heights remains speculative, a place “some believe” he once ascended, or where Spanish coins were “reported found by Swedish settlers.”
No matter. It was great to be up there on a clear prairie evening, watching the daily solar descent and imagining the famed and rapacious Spaniard and his gang of disappointed gold seekers all those years ago, witnessing the spectacle and wondering if it was time to get the hell back to Mexico. Chasing buffalo was evidently not their thing, as they had no understanding of the riches to be found in that activity, unlike the local populace at the time. It was his loss. Our group was untroubled by any such thoughts (or so one hopes) and our minds were open to the simple quiet splendor of it all, and most splendid it was.
