We Belong with Birds

Note: This is an excerpt from the preface of my upcoming new book, "Birding for Life." Watch for its publication later in 2025.

Flying wild geese (Photo by Claude Laprise on Unsplash)

In 2010, after a years-long absence, I returned to Latin America to continue my efforts in conservation. Within my first year back, my work directed me to an Indigenous Miskito village in Honduras. To start our conservation season, most of the village circled tall pine trees where once hundreds of parrots had flown and now only a few could be found. I asked each person to offer a blessing or prayer for the work before us. When it was my turn, I began to recite Mary Oliver’s poem, “Wild Geese.” The villagers had never heard of wild geese, so I substituted macaws and places they would know. Please forgive me, Mary Oliver.

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the jungle, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine …

Meanwhile the macaws, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

During the poem, we heard the calls of five macaws, a rare family at a time when most chicks were poached before they could fly free. The macaws soared directly overhead with their beautiful wings spread against the sky as they sang their deep cries and I continued.

Macaws flying

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild macaws, harsh and exciting –

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Many of us, including me, wept. The birds had told us we belong. In fact, they always tell us that, but in that moment we were able to hear them. In that knowing, we committed ourselves once again to the life around and in us.

The power of our connection to other species is a form of love that allows humans to work under extraordinary conditions with extraordinary results. Since I began working there, Honduras has suffered a coup, had the highest murder rate in the world, had the highest death rate of environmentalists, and witnessed a massive emigration of children escaping violence and despair.

Sadly, in 2014 not one scarlet macaw chick escaped poaching to fly free in our Honduran conservation area. Yet we persisted, and in 2016 and 2017 not one chick was poached for the wildlife trade. Such successes tend to be temporary. Poaching continues, although at a significantly reduced rate, as does loss of habitat. But those of us who do conservation work are sustained by our connection to all of life. That connection fans our hopes and softens days of struggle like feathers brushing our cheeks.

Some success decreasing the poaching of scarlet macaws in Honduras can be seen when released birds and their wild friends return to feed at our Rescue Center.

That connection and belonging are available to you too. This calls for faith that even if you don’t see a particular species or the abundance you hoped for, the beauty around us never dies. And that’s true of tragedy also. Our task is to attend to the intricate weaving of beauty and tragedy that we may live for the benefit of all species, that we may, with Terry Tempest Williams, pray to the birds, believe in their invocations and benedictions, remember our love more than our fears, and allow the birds to teach us how to listen. Welcome to the community of birds and birders!