The Empathy of Birds: Lessons from Pacha Mama in the Face of Despair

We are floating down the Tiputini River. My son sits in the front of the canoe, listening. He is fourteen. He turns his head slightly, lifting his ear to the concert pulsing around us. We are in Yasuni National Park, the most biodiverse corner of the Amazon. He listens a little more, then whistles a haunting, three-point song. He pauses, listens, waits, and then, out of the canopy, the whistle returns. My son is singing with a Panguana, an Undulated Tinamou. Their call and response last for over an hour.

We visit the Casa del Alabado, the “House of Praise.” Elegant stone carvings behind protective glass stare out at us. They are?w’akas.?Ancient sacred beings. Carved thousands of years ago, we don’t know who these stones represent, but their eyes look like birds. Owls.

Our guide pours water into a ceramic, u-shaped bottle with two necks, a replica of one of the many pre-Columbian sonorous objects in the Alabado collection. A red bird perches on the rim of one of the necks. Small holes circle the other like a flute. She tips the bottle back and forth, her fingers flowing over the holes in the lip. The songs of birds swell into the room—a canopy full of calls rising up from the waters that swirl through the dark hollows of this ancient instrument.

Perhaps this, too, is?w’aka.

The ceramic flute astonishes with its liquid concert of songs, and yet it does not surprise me that a talented and observant musician thousands of years ago conjured out of clay this musical wonder, for we live in the land of birds.

In this tiny country the size of Colorado, there are 1,670 identified species of birds, almost twice as many species as in all of North America. Hummingbirds alone, those fierce jewels of the air, represent 132 of those species. There are migratory birds who make their home in this land, and many who spend a portion of their year here. There are birds that arrived generations ago, found this land pleasing, and decided to stay. There are newly arrived birds. And there are forty-one species of birds who transformed into their current selves here, bodies and behaviors shaped by their relations to this particular place. Thirty-four bird species alone are endemic to Galapagos, along with seven endemic to the mainland. You have likely heard of our Andean Condors, our Waved Albatross, our Flightless Cormorant, and of course, our Darwin finches.

There is an old?w’aka?story, recorded for the first time in 1653 by the Catholic priest Padre Bernabe Cobo. Still told today, the story recounts the origin of the Ca?ari people in southern Ecuador.

The story goes something like this:

It is said that after the Great Flood, two brothers survived on a mountain. As waters receded, they gathered wood and built a rustic shelter. During the day, they hunted for food, returning at night to their makeshift home. One morning, two Guacamayo sisters cloaked in shimmering blue feathers flew high across the forest and spotted the men below. They watched as the brothers returned to their home, prepared their spare meal, and fell exhausted into their cold beds.

The Guacamayo sisters felt pity for the brothers. One morning they waited for the men to leave and flew down to the shelter, transforming into beautiful women with blue shawls. The sisters built a fire, prepared chicha and a delicious meal, and then flew away.

When the brothers returned, they were astonished to find their house warmed and soup laid out for them. Overwhelmed by curiosity, the brothers hid in the darkest corner of the house in order to see who was coming to their aid and watched as shimmering Guacamayo sisters descended, transformed into Ca?ari women, and began to work, bringing joy to their home. The brothers decided to capture these women, grabbing them before the sisters could slip back into bird form. They spoke to the women, convincing them to stay and marry them.[1]

These are the first fathers and mothers of the Ca?ari people: brothers who survived the Great Flood and captured Guacamayo sisters; birds who, in their keen empathy, transformed into women to help the brothers in the face of devastation and despair.

Early morning. A fluffy layer of clouds blanket Guagua Pichincha, the volcano rising before me. I was born on the flanks of this mountain, as was my daughter.

I have crawled out of bed after a sleepless night to write. This is the amber hour—that predawn smoky ring of time when the Earth’s dreams interweave with our own. I light candles, open the window, and lean out as far as I can to hear the soulful aria of a Great Thrush and the?tsi-kiri-ki?of hummingbirds rising from the clutch of pines circling our eight-story building.

I reread the text above. Written only a few weeks ago, my words speak to me as if over a great chasm.

Today is Sunday, March 29, 2020. We are in Day 13 of Quito’s COVID-19 total lockdown. Confined to our fourth-floor apartment in a nationwide quarantine, my husband and son are with me. My beloved daughter is a heartbreak away.

The House of Praise is now shuttered. Yasuni closed.

Here in Quito, birdwatching is now defined by our wraparound windows. I follow the swoop and dive of Blue-and-White Swallows. Listen for the soft, rhythmic murmur of Eared Doves perched momentarily on our window ledge before our cats startle them away. I scan the pines with a fierce intensity. Look! There! A Sparkling Violetear! And there! A Black-tailed Trainbearer! I watch with hungry delight as the hummingbirds spar and dance in the air.

I learn new names.?Spinus magellanicus. Jilguero Encapuchado. The Hooded Siskin with a black head and bright yellow body forages for a moment on a branch and then, in a flash of gold, flits away.?Phrygilus plebejus ocularis.?Frigilio Pechicenizo. Grey-blue, the Ash-breasted Sierra-Finch stares up at me. His branch sways in the mid-morning breeze.

I crane my neck to track a Peregrine Falcon soaring above our building.

Over the past few weeks, we have tracked the novel coronavirus sweeping across countries, ravaging China, Iran, Italy, Spain. We have watched in disbelief as the United States, United Kingdom, and Brazil have downplayed this existential threat circulating amongst us.

In Ecuador, we believe that our government has acted swiftly, but the virus has already slipped past our gates like a ruthless band of thieves. In a state of alarm, Ecuador closes its borders with two days warning.

As soon as I hear the news, I call my daughter, a college freshman in New York, and tell her to leave immediately. With the help of friends, we get her masked and gloved and onto planes headed south. But then, a faulty bathroom in her connecting flight leaves her stranded for four hours. The wait is excruciating. She arrives in Florida, having missed her flight to Quito by minutes. As I write, my dearest first born is marooned in the United States. In my bones I feel she has been caught on the wrong side of a border, ambushed by an unseen enemy in what promises to be a devastating war.

I obsess on the miserable absurdity of her delay—a broken bathroom! Later, she tells me that her plane was full of raucous “bros” headed for spring break. We see them in news footage crowding beaches, bragging about their invincibility. “Nothing is going to keep me from partying,” one sunburned blond boasts to the camera.

Five days into quarantine, my beautiful son turns fifteen. We tele-celebrate. Perched on my phone screen, my daughter sings “Happy Birthday” to her brother from 4,379 kilometers away. As my son blows out his candles and his sister calls out to him in love, I shut my eyes, and with the silken powers of Chagall, I will my beautiful children up over the Andes, eastward to the Amazon, back into the forest and into that canoe with the lulling ripple of the Tiputini and the mournful song of the Panguana to comfort us all.

“I pray to the birds,” Terry Tempest Williams writes. “I pray to the birds because I believe they will carry the messages of my heart upward. I pray to them because I believe in their existence, the way their songs begin and end each day—the invocations and benedictions of Earth. I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to listen.”[2]

I am trying to listen.

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Excerpt from my essay "The Empathy of Birds: Lessons from Pacha Mama in the Face of Despair" in Minding Nature at the Center for Humans and Nature. You can read my full essay here: https://humansandnature.org/the-empathy-of-birds-lessons-from-pacha-mama-in-the-face-of-despair/

A version of this essay was later published as “The Wondrous W’aka World: Lessons from Pacha Mama in the Face of Despair,” in the award-winning book series Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations edited by Gavin VanHorn, John Hausdoerffer and Robin Wall Kimmerer, Center for Humans and Nature Press, 2021. This book series is extraordinary. You can read more about this series here, including purchase options: https://humansandnature.org/kinship/