"Does the fate of a tiny, quizzical, picky, jaunty, crimson-eyed, migrating, night-flying, snail-eating, lagoon-living and horribly threatened water bird that lives only in the outback of Patagonia matter?"
That's the question Alanna Mitchell asks as she begins the first part of a gracefully written, two-part series on the hooded grebe of Patagonia. Mitchell, a Canadian journalist, lives almost as far from Patagonia, at the tip of South America, as one can be. What, she wonders, could the bird mean to Canadians?
If we, like the ancient Sisters of Fate, snip the hooded grebe’s thread of life, killing off a creature that painstakingly, chaotically, maybe randomly evolved over billions of years from a single-celled entity to a heart-tuggingly beautiful bird with a scarlet crest, are we diminished? Or here’s another thought: are we at risk too? Is the snipping of one thread a prophecy for the indiscriminate snipping of many?
Mitchell flies from Toronto to Rio Gallegos, in Patagonia, to meet Santiago Imberti, the grebe's most passionate defender. They drive five days to a remote research station where Imberti is told that the researchers have spotted North American mink, introduced here years ago by fur farmers who eventually gave up on making a fortune and released the animals to the wild. When Imberti is told, he "looks like he’s been kicked in the stomach," Mitchell writes.
The story appears in The United Church Observer, which identifies itself as a "religious publication," but religion doesn't seem to enter Mitchell's story, which could have fit comfortably into the pages of Audubon magazine or any other literate environmental publication or website.
Mitchell doesn't tell us, at the end of part 1 of this story, the answer to the question she posed at the outset. For that, we will have to wait for part 2. I'm guessing it will be worth waiting for.
-Paul Raeburn
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