Iolair Mhara

Two eagles lock talons in mid-flight
and tumble together towards the water

    as if they’ll never stop falling,

but they disentangle just in time
and ascend to the top

    of a scraggy Scots pine.

Still as Ross Island
they roost side by side,

    till one of them lifts,

glides over Lough Leane
then makes a thunder-bolt dive

    before levelling to snatch a salmon.

Will they settle,
build an unruly nest,

    fledge chicks that will spread

from here to Loch Iolar, Binn an Iolair,
Iolard Mór and Iolard Beag?

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South Africans got it right when they made “kuning,” the isiZulu word that roughly translates to “it’s a lot,” one of the defining words of 2023.

It was a lot this year.

2023 seemed an epoch of crises: the highest number of global conflicts in three decades, myriad climate disasters that claimed more than 12,000 lives, and the erosion of democracies worldwide.

Amid all of it, Zócalo was here—sifting through the pressing stories and providing context, perspective, and humanity.

Our favorite 15 essays of the year, selected by the Zócalo staff and you, our readers, remind us that even in overwhelming times, people forge ahead. They think deeply. They ask questions. They create. They build community. And they even have some fun.

May you enjoy revisiting these writings as much as we did, as we ready to ring in a new year.

Boxers Know the Power of an Entrance

By Rudy Mondragón

Can anyone make an entrance like a boxer? Before moderating the Zócalo panel “What Does Boxing Owe Its Champions?,” scholar Rudy Mondragón made the case that the boxing ring entrance is the most important ritual in sport. More than a mere act of bravado, he writes, a ring entrance communicates everything from pride to dignity to political protest—in just a few ephemeral, glittering, bombastic moments.

A boxer’s entrance is more than just flash. It’s how they make their mark in the sport and the world, scholar Rudy Mondragón writes. Above, William “El Gallo Negro” King wears a Mexican sarape with a rooster and a sombrero de charro, embracing his Afro-Mexican roots. Photo by Rudy Mondragón.

How Is a Poem Like a Political Campaign?

By Derek Mong

Most of us haven’t given much thought to how poetry and political campaigning might be alike. But Zócalo contributing editor Derek Mong, who won a National Arts and Entertainment Journalism award for this essay, has given it serious thought. Aside from the obvious—that “both benefit from a clipboard”—he unearths deeper threads tying the pursuits together.

My Work as an In-Home Caregiver Shouldn’t Be This Hard

By Alva Rodriguez

Alva Rodriguez is one of more than 550,000 caregivers in California’s In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS) program—workers who help an estimated 650,000 disabled, blind, or elderly Californians continue living in their own homes. Writing from Fresno for our The James Irvine Foundation-funded series “What Is a Good Job Now?,” Rodriguez describes the deep precarity of the job—“one of the toughest and worst-paying you will find”— and reflects on ways to improve this essential line of work.

What Mourning Looks Like in Monterey Park

By Wendy Cheng

On January 21, 2023, a gunman opened fire and killed 11 people at Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park, resulting in the deadliest mass shooting in Los Angeles County history. Wendy Cheng writes about the outpouring of community support and solidarity in the wake of the attack, and the ways a public memorial for the victims reflected the city’s unique multiethnic and multiracial history as a home for “immigrants and lost ones.”

Whose Sedona Is It, Anyway?

By Tom Zoellner

During the pandemic, Sedona, Arizona, temporarily stopped advertising in high-end travel magazines. In the place of well-heeled visitors have come day travelers and overnighters from nearby cities that some residents say are destroying “Slo-dona”—and the town finds itself stuck in a fierce debate about whether it should “yank back the welcome mat to the middle class,” writes Tom Zoellner. Published in the fall, the piece generated enough chatter that just recently the city and the chamber of commerce put out a joint statement in response.

Intellectual Snobbery is for the Birds

By Tim Birkhead

Ornithologist Tim Birkhead shares how an encounter with a hobbyist birdkeeper who breeds bullfinches (who are, if you aren’t aware, “humbly endowed”) led him down a new line of research into the phenomenon known as sperm competition, and a better understanding of reproduction in birds. While the subject of Birkhead’s essay might make a middle schooler giggle, the story itself makes a powerful point: Researchers need to listen to people outside academia’s ivory tower.

Tim Birkhead, one of the world’s leading bird biologists, shares why being open to learning from people outside of academia’s ivory tower—in this case hobbyist birdkeepers—can lead to “unexpected and exciting results.” Photo by T.R. Birkhead.

Dianne Feinstein’s Most Important Job Was an Unofficial One

By Joe Mathews

Zócalo columnist and democracy editor Joe Mathews has made some big proclamations this year. That San Diego is California’s “finest college town.” That we should call it the California, not the Colorado, River. That the Santa Cruz otter absolutely should have bitten back. But one of his most memorable takes came in the wake of Dianne Feinstein’s death. Reflecting on her long tenure in U.S. political life, Mathews makes a case that her greatest role in office was as California’s “last ambassador to the American government.”

Reckoning With Racist ‘Lynch Law’ and Rape Charges, a Century Later

By Margaret Burnham

For two years, Zócalo has worked on a project supported by the Mellon Foundation that asks: “How Should Societies Remember Their Sins?” This essay by Margaret Burnham, director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University, shows how such reckonings can lead to action and change through the story of John Henry James. In 1898, James, a Black man in Virginia, was accused of raping a white woman, murdered by a lynch mob, and posthumously indicted for assault. Burnham details how, 125 years later, a judge dismissed the indictment thanks to a campaign by historians, lawyers, and community members. The decision opens a “path forward for a crucial American reckoning with a thousand-plus state executions of Black males accused of assaulting white females,” Burnham writes.

The Struggle for a Latino Place in Chicago

By Mike Amezcua

Historian Mike Amezcua explores the parallel struggles of mid-20th century Black and Latino Chicagoans overcoming segregation and making space for their communities. “This history of Latino placemaking is far less known than the civil rights struggle led by King,” Amezcua writes. “But it remains an important context for later developments in Chicago’s urban and political history.” Readers were passionate about Amezcua’s piece, writing it in as a favorite in our audience survey.

My Mom is Out of Prison, But I’m Still Not Free

By Angel Gilbert

Most young people look forward to college as a time of independence, but when Columbia University student Angel Gilbert started school, she had already been on her own “for far too long.” In her Zócalo essay, Gilbert, one of millions of young people who have had an incarcerated parent, shares what it was like to grow up with a mother behind bars. “My emotional pain will never truly heal,” she writes. However, she adds that once she reaches her goal of becoming a lawyer, all of her experiences ensure that she will fight harder for her future marginalized clients.

Destined to Be Trans, Muslim, and Indonesian

By Amar Alfikar

Growing up in a traditional Muslim neighborhood in Java, Indonesia in the 1990s, Amar Alfikar, a trans man and activist, shares how he leaned into family and faith to understand—and embrace—his true identity. “If it was not for my family’s acceptance, I would have left my religion,” he writes. “Instead, I am pursuing an academic career in theology and religious studies and have become firm in my faith and thinking about gender diversity in Islam.”

Can Two Friends Agree to Disagree on Abortion in Post-Roe America?

By Joanne Samuel Goldblum and Colleen Shaddox

Joanne Samuel Goldblum and Colleen Shaddox found sisterhood raging about injustice—but they disagree about abortion. Read how they’ve worked to maintain their bond in post-Roe America. “Being truly pro-life or pro-choice requires us to knock down rhetorical barriers and focus on the areas where we wholeheartedly agree,” they write, “that every child has a right to be placed on a path to success and that no mother should have to sacrifice her own success to make that happen.”

Where I Go: The Candy Wrapper Museum

By Darlene Lacey

Darlene Lacey was 15 when she started collecting old candy wrappers. Eventually, she turned her hobby into an online museum. For our series “Where I Go,” she gives truth to the adage that one person’s trash is another person’s treasure, and shows the power of appointing ourselves as the curators of the things that matter to us the most.

Candy Wrapper Museum curator Darlene Lacey was 15 when she started collecting for her “roadside attraction.” Building the online museum has led to all kinds of surprises—including being sent a Necco scrapbook saved from a dumpster (pictured above). Courtesy of author.

Zócalo’s Diaspora Jukebox

As part of Zócalo Public Square’s 20th birthday celebration, we’ve been sharing the sounds of the Southland with “Diaspora Jukebox,” a series of playlists that celebrate the unique communities and musical traditions that represent greater Los Angeles. Our first “drop”—which had us moving to the rhythm of the city, dancing like it was 1982, and partying like a Zacatecano—culminated in an IRL dance party we threw at the Port of L.A. 

The Human Costs of Building a World-Class City

By Ankush Pal and Anubhav Kashyap

And, drumroll please: Our first-ever audience choice award goes to authors Ankush Pal and Anubhav Kashyap! They take a clear-eyed look at New Delhi’s effort to “polish” the city ahead of this year’s G20 summit, at the expense of poor and working-class people. “Rather than improving life in the city for everyone,” they write, “the beautification projects funnel public resources into creating a cosmopolitan bubble for a few.”

The post Our Favorite Essays of 2023 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For her Zócalo Sketchbook, Franson offers a snapshot of fall in Bryce Canyon in pencil and watercolor. She includes a Golden-mantled ground squirrel, sharing with Zócalo a humorous encounter she had with one while walking in the forest behind her cabin—catching the squirrel with its cheeks stuffed, “busy storing seeds for the cold winter ahead.” She also includes all three of Bryce Canyon’s species of Nuthatches (there are only four species in the entire country). “They can all be seen out our front door, busily caching pine seeds into the thick bark of the ponderosas, hammering away like little carpenters,” Franson says of the Nuthatches, adding that they “create the soundtrack of the season.”

And, of course, her Sketchbook features illustrations of the seeds themselves—“an essential part,” Franson says, “of this interdependent web.” She describes the seeds to Zócalo as “lovely, thin-winged like cicadas, that spiral down to the ground, sometimes getting caught in a beam of light.” The forest floor is full of them now, Franson continues, “as if the trees threw confetti everywhere.”

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Birdkeepers are almost universally scorned by anyone else interested in birds. Biologists and birdwatchers alike are generally opposed to the idea of birds being kept in captivity. But during a lifetime of admiring and studying birds, birdkeepers have helped me push the field forward and taught me something along the way: Sometimes seemingly irreconcilable worlds can collide, with wonderful results.

Some estimates suggest that during the 19th century, every second household in Britain raised “cage birds.” In an era before radio, TV, or social media, the creatures provided company, entertainment, and occasionally education. The European goldfinch was the most popular: easily tamed, beautifully colored, and with a tinkling, spirit-raising song.

In the 1950s, when I was growing up in northern England, many people—usually men—still kept birds. They bred and raised their birds, as well as entered them in competitions and exhibited them at shows in hopes of winning awards.

For someone keen to get close to birds, as I was as a kid, it was natural to want to keep birds, too. My father encouraged me by building an aviary in the garden. Looking after my birds made me generate a tremendous sense of empathy for them. When they successfully nested and reared their chicks, I was a proud parent. I felt the same about wild birds—a sense of wanting to care for them—especially during the pesticide era of the late 1960s, when many died from DDT exposure. I became obsessed. I studied zoology as an undergraduate, and then undertook a doctorate on birds at Oxford.

Birdkeepers at work. Photo by B. Oliver.

By the 1970s, when I did my Ph.D., most people who still kept birds in Britain were working class. Among the wealthier set concerned with conservation, including some of the people with whom I studied, keeping birds in confinement was considered unethical.

At the time, my field of study was undergoing a revolution. We were beginning to look at behavior through an evolutionary lens, and to ask new questions. Why, for example, did some animals pair monogamously while others were promiscuous? With this new approach, formerly inexplicable behaviors and anatomical features started to make sense.

My work focused on bird reproduction, a subject of interest for evolutionary biologists, but also for birdkeepers. When a group of the hobbyists invited me to make a visit and tell them about my research, I willingly agreed.

The meeting was in a pub in a deprived, and to me scary, part of town. Everyone ignored me until they had consumed a couple pints of beer. We then walked upstairs, where my talk was to take place. There was no introduction—just a long pause followed an irritated voice from back shouting, “Well, go on then!”

I started talking, but the atmosphere was like ice, with everyone leaning back on their chairs as though to keep as far away from me as possible. I’d never felt such hostility. After 30 minutes there was a break for more beer and sausage rolls. I decided to abandon my planned talk. In the second half of the meeting, I instead focused on one aspect of my research, a topic known as “sperm competition” in birds.

Zoology’s new evolutionary approach had also transformed our thinking about sexual selection. Before, for example, biologists had assumed that female animals were sexually monogamous. When they observed a bird copulating promiscuously, they considered it an aberration of no biological significance. But with our new evolutionary spectacles, we saw that such behavior might increase an individual’s success — it would enable it to leave more descendants and more copies of its genes.

And it wasn’t just promiscuity that enhanced an individual’s breeding success. Other traits also increased a male’s chances of fertilizing a female’s eggs—including the size of his testes. Bigger testes mean more sperm, and more sperm mean more lottery tickets in the competition to fertilize a female’s eggs after she has mated with more than one male.

My audience knew all about promiscuity, of course—but not in birds. Now they listened in amazement, leaning forward, eager to discover the seedier side of avian life. The questions came thick and fast at the end of the talk. With a huge sense of relief, I realized I’d made a connection.

Then, as I prepared to leave the meeting, a man came up to me. He told me that he bred bullfinches. He thought their biology might differ from the birds I had discussed in my talk.

Note the differences of sperm morphology—the size and shape of sperm—with the greenfinch sperm (left) and the bullfinch sperm (right).

The males of many small birds, such as robins and finches, have a structure called a cloacal protuberance during the breeding season, which houses the male’s sperm store. Species whose males have large testes also have large cloacal protuberances.

The bullfinch, he said, had no cloacal protuberance. I was taken aback. I had examined dozens of species and never found one with no cloacal protuberance at all. No one else had reported such a finding, either. How could this birdkeeper had noticed something no scientific ornithologist had seen?

I visited the birdkeeper and left with the body of a male bullfinch that had recently died, which the man had kept in his freezer. I took the bird to the university, thawed it out, and dissected it. To my amazement, the bird’s testes were tiny, despite the bird being in prime breeding condition. And sure enough, it had no cloacal protuberance.

With a bit more dissection, I found the bullfinch’s sperm. To my astonishment, they were smaller and simpler than those of any other finch I had ever examined. I began to feel like I had struck gold.

A close-up view of a house sparrow sperm with a helical head (left) and a bullfinch sperm head with a round shape (right).

My bullfinch dissection suggested that male birds’ reproductive organs adapt depending on the likelihood that their partner will be unfaithful. There was already plenty of evidence for male adaptation associated with high risks of female promiscuity—large testes in randier species—but here was evidence it could work the other way too. If a female wasn’t going to play the field, a male didn’t need to waste energy growing bigger testes or producing more sperm.

There was one more discovery from the dissected bullfinch: its sperm was an unusual mix of good and bad: some were perfectly formed, but many had broken tails, deformed heads, or two tails, and were incapable of fertilizing an egg. Why so many hopeless sperm? I conjectured that “quality control” was another thing the monogamous male bullfinch could do without.

With the help of birdkeepers, I began to test my hypotheses. I examined large numbers of male finches during the breeding season, checking the size of their cloacal protuberance and examining their sperm (conveniently shed when the bird pooped, and therefore easily and harmlessly collected).

As I looked at a range of other bird species, a clear pattern emerged: The quality of the sperm a male bird produced correlated with the amount of competition he faced. The bullfinch was humbly endowed—with tiny testes, tiny sperm, and a high proportion of badly made sperm—because he was strictly monogamous. But more promiscuous species like the dunnock—a common bird in English gardens whose females sometimes keep two husbands—were the opposite. The males have huge testes, a very large protuberance, and produce super sleek, high-quality spermatozoa.

All of this discovery came out of one casual conversation outside academia’s ivory tower. The bird breeders helped me obtain samples that would have otherwise been very difficult to get, and by involving them in our evolutionary research, their horizons were broadened too.

People engage with birds in many different ways. We underestimate the knowledge bird breeders have, simply because they are not part of mainstream birding culture.  Intellectual snobbery is the enemy of discovery. Being open to the ideas of others, especially amateurs, can, as I discovered, lead to unexpected and exciting results.

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Because we peafowl are tired of being California’s leading scapegoat—I mean, scape-bird.

You Californians like to pretend you’re more humane and inclusive than the Floridians and Texans you denounce, for their cruelty to immigrant neighbors and others who might not look or sound the same as they do. But when it comes to how you treat your blue and feathery neighbors, you Californians are no better than Ron DeSantis.

From the San Joaquin to the San Gabriel valleys, property owners and municipalities are ordering mass round-ups of my kind, without warrant or probable cause. Having unlawfully detained my fellow peahens and peacocks, the authorities then seek to relocate us—without providing counsel or a court hearing—to farms on the outskirts of your major regions.

Imagine being grabbed one day and told you’re moving from Pasadena—the leafy hometown I share with this column’s usual author—to a dusty farm in Kern County, without any choice in the matter. The horror! It’s hot up there, and I’m a cultured, urban hen.

You humans justify such atrocities by claiming that we’re foreign invaders—an “invasive species”—because peafowl originated in India. But it’s pure disinformation and discrimination to call me non-native. I was born and raised right here in Los Angeles County, and experts say I make little or no impact on so-called “native” species.

Indeed, my family has probably been in California longer than yours. I’m likely descended from the peafowl that late-19^th-century businessman Lucky Baldwin brought to his land in what is now Arcadia, east of Pasadena. Yet the state committee that oversees bird records still refuses to add us to its list of “naturalized” birds.

So why are you sending us away from the only homes we’ve ever known?

I like to think you’re threatened by our beauty. If you read Nextdoor or the newspapers, you’ll find scare headlines (“Wild Peacocks Terrorize California City”) and claims that we eat too much of the wrong stuff (like your flowers) and make too much noise (we can get loud). But, heck, so do your teenagers!

Still, you complain that we live on the street and poop on the sidewalks. True—but Californians look the other way when their fellow humans do the same things in many city neighborhoods, from L.A.’s Skid Row to San Francisco’s Tenderloin.

Put the public defecation issue aside, and I’d argue that we’re far better community role models than most Californians. We walk everywhere, sustainably, in our hunt for food, while you create greenhouse gases with short drives to the grocery store. We’re social creatures—outside all the time, engaging with our neighbors—while you’re home alone, bingeing Netflix or watching cable news.

And while you’re dividing yourselves with your political obsessions, we don’t even follow American politics. We’re not pro-Trump or super woke. Indeed, you’re most likely to find us in the middle of the road, feathers out—so slow down and don’t run us over! As the poet William Blake wrote, “The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.”

You could find homes for us, but I’m not holding my breath. You’re not exactly rushing to find homes for the humans living on the streets. But at least you try to feed unhoused people. Your largest county, Los Angeles, has made it illegal to give us food.

Of course, your strategy of starving us out won’t work. We were omnivores and foragers before it was cool, and so we’ll keep feasting on plants, flowers, seeds, insects, various small reptiles and amphibians, pet food, cheese, and all the vegetables in your garden.

Still want to get rid of us? It won’t be easy. We’re wild animals, and hard to wrangle. And we’re much more loyal to California than most humans.

After all, we don’t have to pay extortionate rents, giant mortgages, or your high taxes.

The post Hey California, the Peafowl Isn’t Your Scape-Bird appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For her Zócalo sketchbook, Tianjiao brings us a series of digitally rendered watercolor birds. By shape and color, the creatures feel firmly part of the sky that holds them. It’s as if each of the clouds saw something interesting on the ground and decided to form part of themselves into birds to dive for it. Of course, when presented in the context of Zócalo’s homepage, each bird may simply be interested in checking out the nearest article.

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For our November Sketchbook, Strauss takes us on a retro-fabulous bird migration. As in all modern travel, there are rules and regulations. In this case, each flock of birds is allowed one item of luggage to be stored in the backseat (or strapped to the roof) of a vintage car classified as “bitchin” or better. To honor Zócalo’s Los Angeles home base, all birds she features are either native to California or spend a significant amount of time here on their migration. See if you can identify the blue-gray gnatcatcher, the western tanager, the black-bellied plover, the streak-backed oriole, and the Bohemian waxwing.

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I was of the islands; yet I was not. My dad was from Chicago and my mom from Salt Lake City. Certainly, if anyone had asked me, I would have replied that I was a native—after all, I had kama’aina status—someone born there, literally “child” (kama) “of the land” (‘aina).

But then I wrote a book about the extinction and evolution of birds in Hawai‘i, including feathered immigrants from other lands as well as ones that had been resident in the islands for thousands of years. I also wrote about their status as natives, or not native. And in writing and thinking about birds, I felt a responsibility to investigate just what claiming native status actually has meant for humans on these islands as well.

In doing so, I stirred a great big muddy pot of understandings and misunderstandings about just what it means to say something or someone is a native of a place. It also got me to thinking differently—and more broadly—about what it signifies to claim native status.

Nativeness isn’t a fact, but a spectrum. Nativeness is a quality, I would argue, that is somewhat alchemical: influenced by scarcity or abundance, length of residency, charisma, evolutionary change, and usefulness to others. I say this despite protests from biologists who work from a traditional definition: A native is something that got to where it is under its own power—it flew, crawled, walked, wiggled, or otherwise arrived without any human help or agency. If something was brought by humans, then it’s a non-native. To many scientists, that bright line—around humanity—is the only line that matters. And so every living thing that did not involve human agency can be classified as a native, and everything else is introduced or downright invasive.

But the state of my birth reveals some problems with this notion. Everything in Hawai‘i comes from somewhere else, regardless of its route to the archipelago. Smoking volcanic rock rose out of the oceans between 400,000 years and nearly five million years ago, depending on the island, and everything living had to come to it. Even the word “lava”—the rooting force of the islands—is not of the islands; it is an Italian word.

The opposite of “under its own power” is “brought by humans.” Yet the pigs that came by canoe with the original Polynesian settlers of Hawai‘i—the pua’a—are a powerful symbol of nativeness in some corners of Hawai‘i; the pig’s name even appears in that most Hawaiian of land tenancy units, the ahupua’a—the wedge-shaped pieces of land that marked the political, economic, and cultural boundaries of every island. Each of the boundaries of the ahupua’a had an altar of stones topped by a carved pig’s head, and the altar was saturated with native rituals. The Hawaiians also had a mischievous pig-god—kamapua’a—that could take either human or pig form. Pigs—tasty, short-tempered, and with razor-sharp tusks—have been cultural icons in Hawai‘i for a millennium.

Another way these traditional notions of nativeness are overturned is via a biological route: evolution. Every living thing is in the act of turning into something else.

It’s been well established that some bird species in Hawai‘i, introduced by humans but having been there for between 100 and 1,000 years, already have evolved into something unique to the islands. The common myna, for example, has experienced sufficient evolutionary change that it is now genetically different from its Asian cousins. The red-vented bulbul, in Hawai‘i for decades, now appears quite different from off-island congeners. Even the lowly house sparrow in Hawai‘i has demonstrated rapid differentiation over a hundred generations since its appearance in the 19th century.

When the myna arrived, changes in environment meant changes in behavior and resources, which led to natural selection, which led to evolutionary change—something that’s been taking place over shorter periods of time than evolution has been traditionally thought to occur. And change means that something becomes identifiably, morphologically, of a place. It’s our myna now.

As human beings, we form bonds with the plants and animals around us as they become part of our backyards, our weekend jaunts, our dinner tables and birdfeeders. They move in, as it were. And although some introduced species have been undeniably damaging because they compete with other organisms that have had a longer tenancy, others seem to have taken up residence in our yards as well as in our hearts. As writer Michael Pollan asked in a 1994 article in The New York Times about some species of introduced plants in New England, “Shouldn’t there be a statute of limitations on their alien status?”

This is not only a symptom of human emotion, but also of biology. Isolated populations, like humans, begin to change when they’re somewhere new. Monarch butterflies on the Big Island have a much higher incidence of albinism. Brush-tailed rock-wallabies on O’ahu are an important and distinctive population, different from their Australian mates. Does this make the house sparrow native? Well, kind of, it does, although most people in Hawai‘i would find that idea repellent. Perhaps it’s native in the way that I am also a native: birthed in the land, knowing no other home (in my case, until adulthood), and influenced by all of Hawai‘i bearing down on me, via the wind, sky, seas, geology, and my fellow residents.

Native status in Hawai‘i for humans is also confounding. In 1921, Congress passed the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, in response to the declining populations of Hawaiians, many of whom had been forced to relocate from ancient homesteads because of commercial real estate pressures. The Act created a land trust comprising 200,000 acres, exclusively for use by those who could prove that they had at least 50 percent Hawaiian ancestry. But the system doesn’t work very well, for a variety of reasons.

For purposes of claiming publicly trusted land and to reap other benefits in the islands, the Office of Hawaiian Affairs will designate you as native Hawaiian (with a lowercase “n”). If you have some Hawaiian blood, but less than half, you’re a Native Hawaiian (with an uppercase “N”). As bloodlines have thinned in the last century, though, fewer and fewer people have been able to claim native status—excluding descendants of people who did qualify for homestead lands. And despite the precision required to claim that preferred, lowercase “native” status, the documentation required is not precise at all: People cart in photo albums, documents, scraps of family tales passed down, and other potentially questionable archival evidence of long tenancy in the islands that predates the arrival of Captain Cook.

I find this highly problematic. Not all bloodlines were considered equal even in ancient Hawai‘i. Various tribes and groups in the islands were often at war over issues of rulership, rebellion, island succession, and the right to control land, and genealogists on both sides of a conflict were “always busy exalting the purity of their champion’s bloodlines, and deriding the mean ancestry of the enemy,” writer Gavan Daws has noted. There were strong distinctions between commoners and those of royal blood, with many strata of status, and ancient Hawaiians had a caste system that provided various pedigrees and ranks, including leaders who could trace their ancestry back to the gods.

For these reasons, I don’t think the purity test holds up today, either for birds or for humans. People have various synonyms for being of a place. For instance, you hear the word “local” in countless contexts in Hawai‘i: a “local” boy; “local” food”; a “local” custom; all are “from” the islands, or “of” the islands, and in some seemingly immutable way. Once you’ve secured local or native status, it doesn’t seem revocable.

But again, things start to fall apart upon trying to pin specific examples to nativeness of some kind. Manapua, the Chinese-influenced, sweet pork-filled buns? Kimchi, the pickled Korean food? The loco moco, which consists of an egg over a hamburger patty and rice? All are typically described as “local” in the islands. But they’re from somewhere else, or a modern mashup, conditioned by the intense and longstanding cultural vectors that have passed through Hawai‘i. They’ve earned their reputation as local through affection, habit, and cultural inclusion. Purity as a notion is overrated, and over.

The other aspect of nativism in Hawai‘i, and everywhere, is that time changes everything. Even the most invasive, landscape-changing species will eventually, with a long enough arc into the future, modify, assimilate, and settle into a particular role in an ecosystem for which it will then be uniquely suited.

Today becomes tomorrow becomes another millennium. We will resist the so-called non-natives, and understandably, because of the risk of unintended consequences and the norms they upset. We will contemplate, guiltily or not, their eradication from our established ways of life, or we will rage against them. We will breathe a sigh of relief when they seem to assimilate without causing a commotion. And far in the future, as the spring of time’s clock unwinds, they will be a part of us that we can’t live without.

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By joining the 116th Audubon Christmas Bird Count, I became one of more than 70,000 volunteers from Canada to South America who counted perhaps 70 million birds in the days between December 14 and January 5. (This year’s count isn’t tallied yet.) While most of the world’s important data is gathered by computers, governments, and corporations, the annual bird count—which started in 1900—is artisanal, a labor of love and feathery obsession. As old and personalized as it is, the bird count is a powerful way to collect data and a future model for understanding and responding to environmental issues on Earth—not to mention other planets.

I’m not a bird person. I like bugs, trees, and sheep. But finding the scoters in the waves excited me in a way that looking at GPS blips on a screen never could, and I stayed focused through the cold winds over the next five hours as our party of five moved around Maine’s Mere Point, surveying more ducks. We counted 150 common eider, big gorgeous sea ducks whose males have a graphic Z of white feathers. There were also 150 long-tailed ducks, 300 scoters, 40 goldeneye, 15 buffleheads, nine mallards, one red-breasted merganser, two kinds of gulls, 20 Canada geese, and a raft of maybe 900 scaups. We moved around the point trying to get better views of the galaxies of ducks as some dabbled and others dove. This wasn’t just a count of birds, we were mapping the geography of ducks on the water—a duckography of Mere Point.

We were guided by Don Hudson, a botanist who has been compiling this area’s count for 35 years, and Ralph, a high school science teacher, who’s been doing it almost as long, or maybe longer, he couldn’t remember. They had worked with people who’d done the count for 40 years before them and so they were part of a chain of relationships stretching back to a famous ornithologist who did the count here in 1905. Though the count is typically done by volunteer amateurs, not professional scientists, it has developed levels of expertise and checks and balances that keep it stable over generations. As we spotted more ducks, I realized that despite its age—or maybe because of it—the bird count database ties birds and people and places together across great distances and more than a century.

The bird count has, at its core, concern about birds going extinct, but over the years that’s morphed into surprising political power to stop those extinctions. Passenger pigeons once traveled in flocks so large they clouded out the sun, but by the mid 1890s the flocks were merely hundreds or dozens of birds. The very last passenger pigeon died in 1914. The Audubon society introduced the count in 1900 as a way to induce people to appreciate birds rather than shoot them on Christmas day, as was the custom. The count has created a database that has allowed scientists to continue to watch for signs of coming extinctions. A recent report used bird count data to anticipate how climate change might affect 588 species of birds in North America and found that 314 species are at risk.

The count also has a secret weapon: It simultaneously gathers needed data and mobilizes concerned citizens to advocate on behalf of endangered birds. Among the birds that have been counted and saved from extinction are bald eagles, California condors, peregrine falcons and brown pelicans. Preserving millions of acres of wetlands has doubled populations of wetland birds since the 1960s.

Even though we were shivering in Maine, we were watching birds that fly from the tropics to the Arctic. A few miles away, snowy owls have taken up residence on the unused runway of an old naval air station. The bird count database has long shown that owl numbers rise and fall in cycles of four years—depending on how many lemmings they eat during breeding season in the Arctic. But over the last few years their numbers in the Northeast have risen dramatically, and researchers are trying to figure out whether that’s the result of a lemming glut or some other change in the Arctic that only the owls know. (Researchers recently gave one of these owls a 3G tracker and you can view her movements.)

We stood in a wooded area on the point counting songbirds like blue jays, red-breasted nuthatches, goldfinches, red-winged blackbirds—all expected. Then a retiree in a voluminous red coat waved us over to see a real find: a hermit thrush. I had heard its haunting trill over the years, but it takes patience to see its brown plumage among the leaves. Such persistence is surprisingly valuable. University of Washington researchers analyzed more than 300 citizen science projects on biodiversity (like our bird-counting expedition) and found that the work of as many as 2.3 million volunteers amounts to a contribution of about $2.5 billion to biodiversity research every year. This fall the White House Office of Science and Technology began a push to formalize and expand more such citizen science projects. If you wanted to build a system that can evaluate changes in the climate, and respond to them, you couldn’t design a better system than the Christmas bird count with its mixture of birds, data, and gentle fanatics.

Oddly enough, it’s not that big of a jump from counting ducks to counting galaxies, and this is where humans outstrip computers. Tens of thousands of citizens have combed through space photos at sites like Galaxy Zoo, making significant discoveries that computers and experts have missed. In 2007 a Dutch schoolteacher discovered Hanny’s Voorwerp, a galaxy-sized gas cloud that looks like Kermit the frog. When Caltech scientists recently announced that there is likely an additional ninth planet out there in our solar system, but they haven’t yet found it, they even invited backyard telescope enthusiasts to try to speed up the discovery process. Obsession is what makes humans better than computers at finding things. Humans get distracted by anomalies and their fervor is driven by their emotions. In a panel on citizen astronomy at the Kavli Foundation, Oxford astrophysicist Aprajita Verma observed: “It’s very difficult to program diversity and adaptability into any computer algorithm, whereas we kind of get it for free from the citizen scientists!”

Computers, you know, don’t have eureka moments.

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Take hummingbirds, for example: If you know anything about them, you might think it would be a pretty cool existence.

Hummingbirds are the only birds in the world that can fly backward. They’re the fighter jets of the bird world. But have you ever watched hummingbirds fight with each other? They’re vicious.

At my home in Oregon, my backyard is visited by Rufous hummingbirds during the summer, and I have to put out three different feeders so that three different male hummers can stake out territory around the yard. They won’t tolerate each other at all, and, if one trespasses on the other’s territory, they’ll immediately get buzzed. It’s ridiculous, because the feeders have an unlimited supply of sugar water.

Why are hummingbirds so mean? Only the greediest survive.

Hummingbirds are so small that they lose a lot of heat. Their surface area-to-volume ratio is very high (which is why small ice cubes melt faster than big ones). If they were any smaller, they couldn’t physically eat enough to stay warm. Sharing your food might mean the difference between life and death. And if they slow down even for one minute, they risk running out of calories.

Because they have to be so greedy all the time, hummingbirds never stop bickering and fighting with each other. Males and females can’t even get along enough to raise their children together. Mating takes about a second, then the female retreats to build a nest and raise the chicks all on her own. Does this sound like a life you’d want to have?

The trouble is, we humans are speeding up, too. In recent years, the speed with which people walk on the sidewalks of the world’s major cities has increased dramatically—according to one 2007 study, from 2.97 mph to 3.27 mph in a decade. Instant gratification is becoming ever-more-instant for us today—and we seem to be in a rush to get wherever we’re going.

If I were given the choice to become any bird in the world, I’d be an albatross.

Just imagine having all the time in the world to put out your wings and glide indefinitely. Albatrosses are the opposite of hummingbirds: Where hummingbirds have the highest cost of flight of any bird, albatrosses have the lowest.

Scientists have tried to measure how much energy it takes for an albatross to stay in the air and they’ve come up with … zero energy. There are various reasons for this but when an albatross is gliding on the wind, it actually has a lower resting heart rate than when it is sitting on the water. So they stay in the air, and fly, and keep flying. Some people think albatrosses may live this way to a hundred years old—we just haven’t studied them that long yet.

By the most conservative estimate, the average wandering albatross will fly several million miles in its lifetime—from the Earth to the moon and back eight or 10 times. And, for most of that time, they will be alone.

With all this time alone, you might think that albatrosses, like hummingbirds, have sacrificed something in their love lives, but nothing could be further from the truth.

I’ve seen nesting albatrosses in a couple of places. When I visited black-browed albatrosses in the Falkland Islands, off the tip of South America, it was a moving experience. Up close, these birds are huge, and they just feel, well, incredibly calm and collected, completely the opposite of a hummingbird.

Albatrosses are never in a hurry. They truly do mate for life: So-called divorce rates in albatrosses have been measured at near zero percent. Pairs stay together until one of them dies—they’re the most committed lovers of any bird. Human divorce rates around the world hover near 40 percent, which puts us on about the same level as a seabird called the Nazca booby.

Like us, albatrosses take a long time to pick a partner. When they’re a few years old, they return to their nesting colony and begin to perform elaborate dances with prospective mates, at first in small groups, then, gradually, over the years, with fewer and fewer partners, until each bird dances with only one other, which will become its mate. At that point, they pretty much quit dancing and move on with their lives.

It’s humbling to watch a pair of albatrosses in their nest. They snuggle together, preen each other tenderly, and gaze into each other’s eyes, just as you would imagine from a pair of lovebirds. The oldest known albatrosses are still raising chicks with their partners into their 60s.

Do these birds actually experience love like we do? Well, I think so. Since love is really just a flood of chemicals released in the brain–technically, you never love someone with all your heart but your ventral tegmental area–there is no reason this feeling should be limited to humans.

Love serves a practical purpose: It helps parents and families stick together. The same evolutionary forces that acted on us, and made us fall in love, have also acted on albatrosses, which live a long time, don’t have many children, and put a lot of effort into their offspring.

And if this kind of devotion comes with a life of calm and a bird’s eye view of the entire world, what’s not to love?

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