Hey Tweeters,
Please excuse me if this is not an acceptable topic for
Tweeters but the post on the rediscovery of Berlepsch's Six-wired Bird of
Paradise put me in a rather somber and thoughtful mood. While I was wowed by
this rediscovery and excited by the thought of an untouched land it also made me
think about my future. I have doubts that in my lifetime I will be able to
explore a new land and that makes me very sad.
At age 20 I am half way through my sophomore year of my undergraduate
career and if I continue on my educational track towards ornithology it will be
many years before I am able to go on an expedition of these proportions (with
the assumption that by the time I am done there will be places left to explore).
I am not trying to sound pessimistic, but it's a saddening thought that one of my
biggest desires (and one I am working toward academically) could not be an option open to me. My understanding of areas unexplored is limited but from what I know there are very few areas with the exception of small areas of the Andes, Southeast Asia, and Africa that have not been visited by man in his quest for knowledge. Unless by some unusually auspicious fate I am allowed to accompany an expedition somewhere into one of these mystical regions during work on a doctorate, these lands of mist will have been gobbled up by older explorers of a similar creed as myself.
Then again maybe these areas are not meant to be visited by man. For the sake of the probably fragile populations of species there, maybe people shouldn't cause a disturbance for knowledge. Still, I doubt I could convince myself to not venture into the heart of New Guinea or another remote region if the opportunity arose. Sometimes I dislike the words discovery and exploration because of the Western dominance inherently apart of such terms but I lack appropriate substitutes. Most people can believe that exploration brings positives and negatives.
Of course there are always places to be observed more closely but the
romanticism in me wants to visit areas unknown. This probably has something to do with the fact that I know I will be a part of many studies of more familiar species. Still, we as people know only so much about the natural world; discoveries can happen in your backyard as well as a foreign land. The lust for new information is something that most people can commiserate with and it's something that is hard for me to shake. These are my humble thoughts, an escape from a lab report on fruit fly genetics I should be writing on this beautiful February day. Maybe I don't fully understand the land of academia and my worries about lack of opportunities are unfounded. I hope people will not find this pretentious and will ignore or correct any ignorance incorporated in my musings.

Good Birding and Explorations

-Brendan McGarry
uglyduckling at comcast.net
Olympia (Evergreen State College)/Seattle, WA