The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 (17 page)

 

Like most Cypriot restaurants that serve
ambelopoulia,
the one I went to with a friend and a friend of his (I'll call them Takis and Demetrios) had a small private dining room in which the little birds could be consumed discreetly. We walked through the main room, in which a TV was blaring one of the Brazilian soap operas that are popular in Cyprus, and sat down to an onslaught of Cypriot specialties: smoked pork, fried cheese, pickled caper twigs, wild asparagus and mushrooms with eggs, wine-soaked sausage, couscous. The proprietor also brought us three fried song thrushes, which we hadn't asked for, and hovered by our table as if to make sure I ate mine. I thought of Saint Francis, who had set aside his sympathy for animals once a year on Christmas and eaten meat. I thought of a kid named Woody, who, on a backpacking trip I'd taken as a teenager, had given me a bite of fried robin. I thought of a prominent Italian conservationist who'd admitted to me that song thrushes are "bloody tasty." The conservationist was right. The meat was dark and richly flavorful, and the bird was enough bigger than an
ambelopoulia
that I could think of it as ordinary restaurant food, more or less, and of myself as an ordinary consumer.

After the proprietor went away, I asked Takis and Demetrios what kind of Cypriots like to eat
ambelopoulia.

"The people who do it a lot," Demetrios said, "are the same ones who go to cabarets, the lounges where there's pole dancing and Eastern European girls who make themselves available. In other words, people with not a high level of morality. Which is to say, most Cypriots. There's a saying here, 'Whatever you can stuff your mouth with, whatever your ass can grab—'"

"I.e., because life is short," Takis said.

"People come to Cyprus and think they're in a European country because we belong to the EU," Demetrios said. "In fact, we're a Middle Eastern country that's part of Europe by accident."

The night before, at the Paralimni police station, I'd given a statement to a young detective who seemed to want me to say that the attackers of the CABS team had only been trying to get the team to stop taking pictures and video of them. "For people here," the detective explained when we were done, "it's a tradition to trap birds, and you can't change that overnight. Trying to talk to them and explain why it's wrong is more helpful than the aggressive approach of CABS." He may have been right, but I'd been hearing the same plea for patience all over the Mediterranean, and it was sounding to me like a version of modern consumerism's more general plea regarding nature: Just wait until we've used up everything, and then you nature-lovers can have what's left.

While Takis and Demetrios and I waited for the dozen
ambelopoulia
that were coming, we argued about who was going to eat them. "Maybe I'll take one small bite," I said.

"I don't even like
ambelopoulia,
" Takis said.

"Neither do I," Demetrios said.

"Okay," I said. "How about if I take two and you each take five?"

They shook their heads.

Dismayingly soon, the proprietor returned with a plate. In the room's harsh light, the
ambelopoulia
looked like a dozen little gleaming yellowish gray turds. "You're the first American I've ever served," the proprietor said. "I've had lots of Russians, but never an American." I put one on my plate, and the proprietor told me that eating it was the same as taking two Viagras.

When we were alone again, my field of vision shrank to a few inches, the way it had when I'd dissected a frog in ninth-grade biology. I made myself eat the two almond-size breast muscles, which were the only obvious meat; the rest was greasy cartilage and entrails and tiny bones. I couldn't tell if the meat's bitterness was real or the product of emotion, the killing of a blackcap's enchantment. Takis and Demetrios were making short work of their eight birds, taking clean bones from their mouths and exclaiming that
ambelopoulia
were much better than they remembered; were rather good, in fact. I trashed a second bird and then, feeling somewhat sick, wrapped my remaining two in a paper napkin and put them in my pocket. The proprietor returned and asked if I'd enjoyed the birds.

"Mm!" I said.

"If you hadn't asked for them"—this in a regretful tone—"I think you really would have liked the lamb tonight."

I made no reply, but now, as if satisfied by my complicity, the proprietor became talkative: "Young kids today don't like to eat them. It used to start young, and you'd get used to the taste. My toddler can eat ten at a time."

Takis and Demetrios exchanged skeptical glances.

"It's a shame they've been outlawed," the proprietor went on, "because they used to be a great tourist attraction. Now it's become almost like the drug trade. A dozen of them cost me sixty euros. These damned foreigners come and take down the nets and destroy them, and we've surrendered to them. Trapping
ambelopoulia
used to be one of the few ways people around here could make a good living."

Outside, by the edge of the restaurant parking lot, near some bushes in which I'd earlier heard
ambelopoulia
singing, I knelt down and scraped a hole in the dirt with my fingers. The world was feeling especially empty of meaning, and the best I could do to fight this feeling was to unwrap the two dead birds from the napkin, put them in the hole, and tamp some dirt down on them. Then Takis led me to a nearby tavern with medium-sized birds grilling on charcoal outside. It was a sort of poor man's cabaret, and as soon as we'd ordered beers at the bar one of the hostesses, a heavy-legged blonde from Moldova, pulled up a stool behind us.

 

The blue of the Mediterranean isn't pretty to me anymore. The clarity of its water, prized by vacationers, is the clarity of a sterile swimming pool. There are few smells on its beaches, and few birds, and its depths are on their way to being empty; much of the fish now consumed in Europe comes illegally, no questions asked, from the ocean west of Africa. I look at the blue and see not a sea but a postcard, paper thin.

And yet it is the Mediterranean, specifically Italy, that gave us the poet Ovid, who in the
Metamorphoses
deplored the eating of animals, and the vegetarian Leonardo da Vinci, who envisioned a day when the life of an animal would be valued as highly as that of a person, and Saint Francis, who once petitioned the Holy Roman Emperor to scatter grain on fields on Christmas Day and give the crested larks a feast. For Saint Francis, the crested larks, whose drab brown plumage and peaked head feathers resemble the hooded brown robes of his Friars Minor, his Little Brothers, were a model for his order: wandering, as light as air, and saving up nothing, just gleaning their daily minimum of food, and always singing, singing. He addressed them as his Sister Larks. Once, by the side of an Umbrian road, he preached to the local birds, which are said to have gathered around him quietly and listened with a look of understanding, and then chastised himself for not having thought to preach to them sooner. Another time, when he wanted to preach to human beings, a flock of swallows was chattering noisily, and he said to them, either angrily or politely—the sources are unclear—"Sister Swallows, you've had your say. Now be quiet and let me have my say." According to the legend, the swallows immediately fell silent.

I visited the site of the Sermon to the Birds with a Franciscan friar, Guglielmo Spirito, who is also a passionate amateur Tolkien scholar. "Even as a child," Guglielmo said, "I knew that if I ever joined the church it would be as a Franciscan. The main thing that attracted me, when I was young, was his relationship with animals. To me the lesson of Saint Francis is the same as that of fairy tales: that oneness with nature is not only desirable but possible. He's an example of wholeness regained, wholeness actually within our reach." There was no intimation of wholeness at the little shrine, across a busy road from a Vulcangas station, that now commemorates the Sermon to the Birds; I could hear a few crows cawing and tits twittering, but mostly just the roar of passing cars and trucks and farm equipment. Back in Assisi, however, Guglielmo took me to two other Franciscan sites that felt more enchanted. One was the Sacred Hut, the crude stone building in which Saint Francis and his first followers had lived in voluntary poverty and invented a brotherhood. The other was the tiny chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli, outside which, in the night, as Saint Francis lay dying, his sister larks are said to have circled and sung. Both structures are now entirely enclosed by later, larger, more ornate churches; one of the architects, some pragmatic Italian, had seen fit to plant a fat marble column in the middle of the Sacred Hut.

Nobody since Jesus has lived a life more radically in keeping with his gospel than Saint Francis did; and Saint Francis, unburdened by the weight of being the Messiah, went Jesus one better and extended his gospel to all creation. It seemed to me that if wild birds survive in modern Europe, it will be in the manner of those ancient small Franciscan buildings sheltered by the structures of a vain and powerful church: as beloved exceptions to its rule.

FROM
The New Yorker

I
N THE SHEDD AQUARIUM,
on the lakefront in downtown Chicago, there's a video display that makes visitors laugh until they're falling down. The video is in an area of the aquarium devoted to invasive species, and it shows silver carp (
Hypophthalmichthys molitrix
), a fish originally from China and eastern Siberia, jumping in the Illinois River near Peoria. A peculiarity of silver carp is that when they are alarmed by potential predators they leap from the water, sometimes rocketing fifteen feet into the air. In the video, several people are cruising in a small motorboat below the spillway of a lock or a dam while fish fly all around. The people get hit in the arms, the back, the sides. They're ducking, they're yelling, the silver carp are flying, the boat is swerving. Aquarium visitors whoop and wipe the tears away and watch the video again.

The invasion of Asian carp into the waters of the South and the Midwest differs from other ongoing environmental problems in that it slaps you in the head. Videos like the one in the Shedd are the reason a lot of people know about Asian carp. Not only are the newcomers upsetting the balance in midcountry ecosystems; they are knocking boaters' glasses off and breaking their noses and chipping their teeth and leaving body bruises in the shape of fish. So far, apparently, there have been no fatalities. And while threats to the environment tend to be ignorable (if only in the short run), this one is not, because millions of people go boating, and the novelty of being hit by a fish wears off fast.

Right now there are actually two kinds of Asian carp to worry about: silver carp and their nonjumping companions, bighead carp (
Hypophthalmichthys nobilis
). Bigheads, which can grow to a hundred pounds, are bigger than silvers. Neither really has the appearance of a carp, because their mouths are not the downward-pointing mouths of bottom-feeding fish. Unlike the common carp, which we think of as an American fish although it was introduced here in the 1880s, silver carp and bighead carp feed not on the bottom but in the top few feet of the water column. These carp eat only plankton, which they filter from the water with rakers in their gills. They are highly efficient feeders, outconsuming other fish and leaving less for the fry of such game fish as bass, crappies, and walleyes. The fear is that when they get into a lake or river you will soon have nothing else.

In the United States, the Asian carp started their journey from a place of formerly ominous reputation: Down the River. As long ago as the 1970s, bigheads and silvers escaped into the lower Mississippi River from waste-treatment plants and commercial catfish ponds in Arkansas and Mississippi. Down South they were worker fish, imported to clean up enclosed areas by eating algae. Presumably, Mississippi River floods gave them the chance to get away. Once at large, the carp headed north, eventually turning up in the Missouri, the Tennessee, the Ohio, the Des Moines, the Wabash, the Illinois. For the long term, they seem to have their sights set on Canada. Today, just a few decades after their escape, they are almost there.

Not to get too sentimental about it, but the Mississippi River is us, and vice versa. It's our bloodstream. Last summer I was driving along the river in western Illinois thinking how horrible the Mississippi had been lately, with its outsized floods and its destruction of New Orleans, and I noted the recent flooding still in progress along the Illinois shore—the miles of roads and fields submerged, and the ferry landing at Golden Eagle, Illinois, now separated from dry land by seventy feet of mud and water, and low-lying parking lots full of river mud cracked like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle curling in the sun. In the sprawl of standing water over parts of the landscape, no actual river could be found. Then the road I was on descended from a ridge to the mostly unflooded river town of Hamburg, Illinois, and the Mississippi itself was running fast beside the main street, and just across the shining expanse were the houses and church steeples on the Missouri side. An old and powerful emotion hit me; my blood leaned with the current and I let the recriminations go by.

The fact that Asian carp are now in this river and many others, sucking in plankton and growing big and reproducing and waiting to smack a Jet Skier's face, is really not good. Possibly these carp will change large parts of our national watersheds forever. We may be infected with a virus for which there is no cure.

 

Among Asian-carp-infested rivers, the Illinois has it worst of all. This river is formed by the junction of the Kankakee and the Des Plaines about fifty miles southwest of downtown Chicago. It runs at a diagonal partway across the state and then turns due south, meeting the Mississippi north of St. Louis. Via the Des Plaines, most of the treated wastewater of Chicago flows south into the Illinois. It's the main industrial river of the state. The fields of corn and soybeans through which it passes are the factory floor, the river is the conveyor. If there's any stretch of this river that doesn't hum and throb—with barges, tugs, grain elevators, power plants, coal depots, refineries—I didn't see it.