Naturalists in Sonora

Ten years ago, while still a professor at Evergreen, I spent ~2 weeks at Navopatia, a small field station on the Sea of Cortez, in Sonora near the border of Sinaloa. I wrote this essay then, and have not added to it since, although I find that there is much more to say now. I also, somehow, have no photographs from this time, but Navopatia’s site does, and I have used a few of theirs here.

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The Sea of Cortez in February. I am wrapped in fog and wool, and there is thorn scrub at my back, but it is as invisible as is the estuary at my feet. By 6:30 am, the sun is well over the horizon, but there is only a soft light everywhere, diffuse.

In front of me, a grey slow flickering, as dawn rises, but still no horizon. I hear a laughing gull, cackling, fly by. Far away, another sound, another bird, I know not what. I arrived at Navopatia, this little field station in Mexico, with little prior knowledge of what to expect. Now, waking up on my first morning to this fog, a nearly complete visual barrier between my eyes and the world, I am torn between what I am experiencing now; what I saw directly, yesterday; and what I have merely been told. We are so quick to lay down impressions, and to assume they are true, not just for the moment we had them, but for all time, under all circumstances.

Yesterday I was introduced, for the first time, to the Pitayal, coastal thorn scrub, dominated eponymously by Pitaya, organ pipe cactus, tallest plant in the landscape, tallest anything in the landscape, but for the mountains far to the South, in Sinaloa. Turn around—at midday, the sun bright in a clear sky—and the estuary itself dominates: shorebirds overwintering on flat blonde sand expanses. Across the water not a quarter mile away lies a long thin island, Masocarit. It is made in part of mangrove, and no human lives there. Beyond the island there is the Sea of Cortez—of that I have only been told, though. I have no direct experience of it.

As the thick, palpable grey begins to give way, the sky above becomes tinged with blue. To the East, a pale pink shimmers through the fog. And the animals appear. Mostly they do not arrive; they appear. A large heron, standing utterly still, knee deep in the water. A long-billed curlew, one of the shorebirds here for the Winter, flies past, outrageously long bill stuck in front of it. When wading, the curlews look…appropriate, one leg often tucked, the long, long beak probing for sand-dwelling invertebrates deeper than most of the shorebirds can access. Flying, the bill just looks like a liability. Below it, a small fish jumps vertically, out of the water. The heron cocks its head, and once again becomes utterly still. 

A tree behind me in the Pitayal is filled with chattering grackles. A flock—20, maybe—of blackbirds emerge from across the water, a still impermeable expanse of grey, shifting with hints of blue. All together, they do a loop-de-loop, somehow understanding the intentions of each neighbor well enough that there is never a crash. They join the grackles in the tree, now full of close relatives—all icterids—a family full of smart, canny birds that seem to have a lot to talk about, and like to gather together to do so.

The sun is now visible as the fog rises and falls again. The island is now visible, now not. Am I at the edge of the world, or is there in fact land right there, a horizon closer than most? How can something so close be so intangible? Now, a thin yellow light, becoming a brilliance as I watch, white and even gold, glimmering over and on the water. It pulses. A different person would see god in this. It fairly sings. Over land, by the icterid-tree, another similar vision, and oh, they barely connect above—it is a bright, nearly pure white, so pale, almost a rainbow. It shimmers. Two pelicans fly through it, steady and regal. Then a laughing gull, the clown.

This moment is between categories as, to some extent, is this place. I know the desert around L.A., and also lowland tropical rainforests, and this is neither, with some aspects of both. We have names for this too, of course, at nearly all spatial scales, but our categories, our words, suggest a permanence, and stability of borders, that is not warranted. Real things often have fuzzy borders. Does the descent from mountain to valley, and our inability to identify a moment of transition, render either concept less real? And yet, our brains seek pattern, and then, seek to immortalize that pattern.

And so we give things names. But once we have a name for something, ah, we have reified it. That thing must be. It is far harder to unname than it is to name. And it is the fate of field guides to be out-of-date a moment after being published, for the scientists behind the scenes—the taxonomists who name species and the systematists who discern relationships between them—are constantly at work. And as our understanding of relationships changes, so, ultimately, will the names of at least some of the organisms involved.

Five shorebirds—willets, I learn later—fly low and fast over the water, their wing beats audible. The sound of those wings produces a phantom wind on my face. It is impossible that I felt the air their wings moved, but my brain melded the two senses for me. The water is like glass all the way to a sand bar, where scattered birds stand. Closer in, two dolphins surface, silently. Perhaps a mother and child, one fin smaller and always behind the first. They surface again, this time snorting air.

What are names for? They serve at least two purposes, two purposes often at odds with one another. First and foremost in nearly everyone’s head, once they pause to consider the question, is that names allow us to speak to one another, and to use the shorthand that is a name to point repeatedly to the same thing—be it a cormorant or a cactus or a café—and to develop complexity in our thinking around that thing.

The second purpose that a name serves, though, a purpose philosophically formalized by Willi Hennig, father of a primary branch of modern systematics in the 1960s, is to accurately reflect historical relationships. So, for instance, when new morphological evidence revealed that the Pacific tree frog (Hyla regilla) was in fact more closely related to frogs in the genus Pseudacris, the chorus frogs, the species got a new name, to go with our new understanding. The Pacific chorus frog, Pseudacris regilla, was born, or rather, it fully replaced the Pacific tree frog, the frogs themselves neither noticing nor caring that we had changed what we call them. Similarly, when molecular evidence suggested six distinct clades—robust evolutionary groups—within winter wrens (Troglodytes troglodytes), and later acoustic analysis supported the finding that western and eastern groups were distinct, “cryptic speciation” was invoked (cryptic, we can assume, to us, but not to the birds), and new names were again handed out. Now we have Pacific wrens (Troglodytes pacificus) and also still winter wrens, but with reduced membership, including only those members of the previous species from the eastern parts of North America.

The first purpose of names, to allow for easy communication, suggests that we should prioritize stability of names above all else. The second purpose of names, that they accurately reflect history, mandates that as our understanding improves, names change. Stability, or change? To which goal, both real, both laudable, do we defer?

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There are so many ways to understand a place. Here, in Sonora, I am among researchers and naturalists, students and not, who prize utter precision. They keep Grinnell Journals, a method immortalized by the great naturalist Joseph Grinnell who, among many other contributions, served as the first director of the University of Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. In a Grinnell journal, a person makes note of nearly everything that can be counted or named. Latitude and longitude, cardinal direction, landmarks, weather, human company, and all of the organisms you see or hear or otherwise sense. It is a complete record, at one level. And it does allow for the journaler’s personality to be revealed, especially when there are drawings alongside the text. But sometimes, with that level of precision, that much detail in the moment, you lose the possibility of poetry.

Can we learn through poetry—nuance, allusion—things that we cannot through raw data? In poetry, the synthesis and the interpretation are integrated with the description. Just as a beautiful, testable, falsifiable scientific hypothesis has within it both crisp perception, and the intuition that sparks creative synthesis. Perhaps the best hypotheses emerge from the same place in us that poems do.

There is tension between raw data, and poetry, at least at some moments in each process. I am a scientist who believes in the power of poetry. Generate some numbers, and you can find trends…and then, if you like, you can formulate hypotheses and test those, see if the trends you think you saw are truly there, or are just artifacts of the way you collected numbers, unthinkingly. Data and science are not the same thing. Science needs analysis; interpretation; careful, creative thought. Sometimes we get there through repeated actions, through developing temporal and physical habits that become habits of mind: every day we write in our journals. Sometimes we get there by sitting back, still carefully observing, freeing our mind of extranea, and letting it all come in, unabated, until: synthesis occurs. The informal gathering of information that is careful observation can drop a person on a new doorstep, from where you might ask questions down some path not visible to those who would merely count.

I am a visitor here, more so than any of the few others who are here. Navopatia is a small, rustic field station at many borders, both literal and metaphorical, created from a happy chance meeting ten years ago. Then, Steve Herman, another great naturalist, if not as famous as some others, an intellectual descendant of Grinnell’s, and the co-founder of The Evergreen State College’s small Natural History Museum, brought down a class of undergraduates to explore the birds and ecosystems of Northern Mexico. He also had a former student with him, Adam, who invited Steve’s daughter, Sallie, then a graduate student, to surprise Steve on his birthday. Adam and Sallie later fell in love, both with the place and with each other. They took stewardship of it from an older couple, who were ready to pass it on to the right others, and have made the station what it is, and run it now, without recompense. Adam and Sallie are themselves heirs—intellectual and, in Sallie’s case, also genealogical—of Steve Herman.

In academia, we keep track of connections this way, speaking in terms of kin when we mean to indicate that we are of that way of thinking, that we learned some of the best of what we are and do from him or her, at this or that institution. I am able to be a visitor here because I was hired on to the faculty at Evergreen just as Steve was retiring, and while my ways of understanding the world and recording it are not exactly of the same tradition as his, they are complementary, and sympathetic to one another. He and his have built something remarkable, a way of preserving a place and time, such that nuances can be precisely observed, and understood.

Sallie and Steve Herman, kayaking near Navopatia, 2008. Steve died in 2020.

There are so many ways to understand a place. By forming a habit, the physical habit of recording what you have seen and done, where and when; and the temporal habit of doing it every day; you begin to create a habit of mind. A cataloguing of events, a slowing down, a constant voice that says: you are experiencing this. Before you experienced this, you did not know it would happen. This is new. We are too quick to assume that that which we are now experiencing, which we know now, we have always known. It is as if we don’t believe in the past.

The questions I tend to ask will sometimes be excluded by a process that only records that which can easily be counted and named. Sometimes, by contrast, the act of recording will allow for those questions to bubble to the surface.

Why are the icterids hanging out together—are grackles and blackbirds more likely to have come together due to their shared ancestors? Do they share a way of approaching the world, or perhaps a dietary aversion?

Why are there so many species of herons and egrets here? There are nine, all of a type, and of an ancestor. Did they diversify under these circumstances, or do they all share physiological needs, which brought an already diverse group back together, here in this place, now at this time?

Why do some shorebirds stop here on their migration South, overwinter, then head back North, and others continue South, and only pass through this spot, at 27° N, twice a year, for a day or two? What determines who stays, and who goes? What determines the timing of the precise Northern migration yet to come? At Gray’s Harbor on the Washington coast in early May, one of the great North American migration funnels will occur, many of the same birds now in Sonora will be two thousand miles North. And there will be orders of magnitude more of them there, too. But go in early April, or late May, and there will be almost none.

I have not had students keep Grinnell journals in the field, but I do a comparable thing, given what I am interested in having them learn to do. I have them watch single animals at a time—to conduct focal watches, the gold standard of ethological field work, first formalized by Jeanne Altmann in 1974, from her work studying baboons. A student watches individual animals for set amounts of time, and takes careful and complete notes of what the animals do—not what she thinks it means. That distinction—watch and record what you see, not what you want to see, or think you will see, or think you have seen, or would find easier to write down—is akin to the strictures of Grinnell journaling. It reveals that we fool ourselves too easily: fail to journal every day, and you will wake in the morning without the record you thought you would always have. And you will never know, for sure, what actually took place, because memory slides immediately. Similarly: write down that an animal was “acting territorially” and you will never again know what you actually saw, only what you thought it meant at the time.

I see dolphins every day I am here. One day, after an area search for birds on the island, in a tandem kayak with Jesse, a recent graduate and excellent outdoorsman and birder who also has much more experience here than I have, we see dolphins and he says, “paddle fast, maybe they’ll play with us.” We do, and they do. They push us from behind, and from below, and swim close enough, so that we make easy eye contact with them. Such close physical proximity to them produces in me overwhelming joy, and both of us can’t help but laugh, the experience is so visceral. Why do they want to play with us? How is it that you can look into a dolphin’s eyes and be sure that they are engaging the world through play and logic, as we are? Yes, I have only anecdote by which I am making this claim, but making it I am. It is hypothesis at this level, of course—data and statistics are necessary to remove our desire for things to be true from our assessment of whether or not they actually are—but hypothesis based on real experience.

Another great naturalist, Louis Agassiz—first to accurately interpret the evidence for ice ages, and to draw predictive parallels between adult and embryonic forms across taxa, and founder and first director of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology—famously said, “Go to nature, take the facts into your own hands, look, and see for yourself.” All good naturalists do this, but it bears repeating in this age of diminishing appreciation of natural history, and support for its Museums, and with the rise of virtually- and socially- created realities. If you are trying to experience a place, understand an animal or a landscape, should you first go to a text and see what someone else has thought about it? Or should you, in fact, trust yourself and your own sensory apparatus and just dive in?

Navopatia dawn

The names that others have already given the organisms you’re seeing cannot be intuited. But once you’ve seen six of something that all look the same, and you’ve built a model of what that sameness is—mid-sized birds that are often alone at the edges of flocks of other shorebirds, with bills that are uncurved and fairly long but not as long as some, and when they fly, oh, look at the black and white wing stripes—then you can go to an authority to find out what we call it: open a field guide, or ask a knowledgeable person, or both. We call it a willet. And some of what you noticed about the bird really does diagnose it, and some of what you noticed was just noise when you thought it was pattern. But now you own that name, as a stand-in for the bird that you identified out of the crowd, and you have observed something true.

On my last day at Navopatia, Sallie Herman leads me through the mangrove labyrinth on the island. We paddle over, then mostly pull ourselves through, holding prop roots and branches, gliding, looking, emerging into an inner lagoon, then to a hidden exit through more mangrove. There are three species of mangrove here: they look different and accomplish what they do in different ways, but by virtue of their shared habit of having their roots immersed in the tidal zone, and having therefore to pull saltwater in and convert it to fresh, we give them all the name “mangrove.” But oh, again, the problem of names.

That word—mangrove—reflects shared solutions to shared problems, without reflecting shared history. There are at least 36 unique plant families in which “mangroves” have been identified, and those families are, generally, not entirely made up of mangrove forms. To be a mangrove is to be convergent with many others, others who have encountered a problem like you have—there is salt in this water, all the time—and also the trade-off on the other side of that problem—there are few other plants here, few who could compete with me if only I could figure out how to clear the salt from my system. And so mangrove, the strategy, evolved, many times over, in many places, around the coasts of the world.

Over in animal-land, we have names that are even more confusing, for sometimes they suggest convergent habit, and sometimes they suggest history, and it is often difficult to know which meaning is being used. Take carnivores. It would seem that they are so named because they eat meat. The ecological, small-c carnivores do exactly that. But the phylogenetic, unique-part-of-history Carnivora are a group of closely related mammals—including cats and dogs and bears and seals among many others—many of whom eat meat, but some of whom don’t. The delightful kinkajou, from lowland neotropical rainforests, is a frugivorous member of the Carnivora—a Carnivore, that is, that eats only fruit. Our names, it seems, are not serving one of their purposes—clarity of communication—when such a thing is true.

On my last morning at Navopatia, in the thorn scrub dense with dolphins and mangroves, I rise before first light one last time, to say good-bye to the people paddling to the island to conduct area searches for birds, and to see dawn break. A few darkly silhouetted shorebirds sitting in the estuary grow in number, emerging from the dark foliage of the mangroves on the island. They huddle and forage in the sand and then, a third of them float away to a sandbar nearby, and so two groups are born. As the sky grows less inky, faintly paler, a faint peach-yellow glow appears on the Eastern horizon. Above it a crescent moon floats, like a cup-nest askew. It is one day from new, the dark side barely visible, rendering it whole.

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