Names of Birds I Did Not Know

Pie-billed grebes, coots and gallinules, great egrets, snowy egrets, painted snipes, black ibis, king-fishers, green and striped. Banded plovers, two-banded plovers, black-chinned siskins, reedhaunters with bills curved and reedhaunters with bills straight. Names of birds I did not know.

Calls of birds I did not know. Waterbirds and the birds that live among them, a jeering bedlam of hoots and chirps, howls and screeches, every sound on earth rendered every conceivable way. Gabbling puddle ducks, clattering mobs of parakeets waking in the tops of casserina bushes, geese drifting somewhere out in the Can't See crying like axles squalling for grease. The morning clearing of heron throats, the soft interrogatory whistling of tree ducks and four flavors of teal. The Southern cross hanging low over distant trees and the east just beginning to streak up, in boots too small and boots too short, I slosh out in to the brown velvet of the Argentine dawn.

Poncho brought me here in a wheezy Fiat on an overgrown track, rutted and always downhill. Bushes snatched at the mirrors and the wheel bucked and rattled in his hands while he drove like he knew every bump and wallow, even if the Fiat did not. Poncho is my driver, a dapper man of middle height, with a manicured goatee, a wool beret and a silk kerchief. Poncho used to be a cop and still has his badge, which he slaps onto the dashboard whenever we pass a police checkpoint. But there were no checkpoints this morning when he brought me down to the reservoir of the Rio Hondo.

I have a shotgun, a well used Italian over-under. It says Boniotti but it looks Fausti, a trim little 20, extractors and double triggers. If you borrow a shotgun in Argentina, it likely will be well used. There are birds down here, birds beyond imagining. Peg it to the Law of Unintended Consequences. Thirty or forty years ago, after nearly a century of fierce economic independence, Argentina went global. Free-rushing rivers were dammed for irrigation and power, swamps became rice fields, the pampas went under the plow and vast herds of sullen hump-backed cattle were loosed upon the land. In the States, such doings resulted in extinction, near extinction. But down here it had the opposite effect.

Maybe it's how they farm, big, but sometimes still with horses. The tractors are vintage Kansas 1950, Molines, John Deeres, Farmalls, Massey Fergusons, and the machinery creaking along behind them is the best they can get, sometimes not so good. Little chemical fertilizer, few pesticides, lots of grain on the ground after harvest. The result is a plague upon the grainfields, hundreds of millions of doves, great clouds of pigeons, and sky-darkening flights of ducks and geese. Songbirds, perching birds, raptors are everywhere. Argentines advertise heavily and the hunters come, birders, too, an estimated hundred million dollar bump in the GNP in a place where such a bump is sorely needed.

I am here to hunt, here to bird, an ill-fitting key to the puzzlement of the hunter naturalist, the hunter environmentalist, the hunter philosopher. We shoot birds and we love them, a conundrum to those who do not shoot birds. We love the water and the air and the land and how they work together to give us birds to shoot at. We love the dogs and dogmen, the smell of gunpowder and gun oil, and we love the guns themselves, the artistry of metal and wood, extensions of your hand, extensions of your will. The little rituals, early morning coffee, sumptuous field lunches, laughter and good whiskey around the campfire at the end of each day. And the big ritual too, this making meat, this fetching birds down from the air, this thing that has been quickening our hearts since our ancestors first learned to sling stones

` But you likely know this already. My philosophy gimps along sometimes, but as a hunter I make no apologies. I raised my babies on duck and venison, pheasant and quail, for sport sometimes but from necessity most times, through years fat and lean. As an environmentalist, I have hugged ancient trees and begged them for stories and they have told me more than you might believe. I have owned land and it has owned me and I have cared for the creatures who shared it with me, from moose to hummingbirds. I have sicced lawyers and archaeologists on developers, lobbied and litigated, penned books and placards. I have spent my time in jail and have been shot at but--Praise Jesus--never hit. So I make no excuses here, either.

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We picked Dani up at the truckstop in Termas, the hot springs tourist town a few miles downriver, where anti-government graffiti sprawls down sidewalks, along walls. "Peronism rises again with Kirchner." President Nestor Carlos Kirchner has buffaloed international creditors one more time but he had to let the peso float and it is riding low in the water. This does not sit well with some folks, as you might expect.

Dani speaks no English and my Spanish is OK so long as I can figure out what I need to say before I need to say it. He's my guide, protector, and as much advisor as language allows. He's twenty-something, eagle-eyed, lean and lithe, dressed in tattered surplus cammies. If my boots leak, his surely do too.

Dani works birds for a living this time of year, wages, tips, and all the birds he can eat. Globalization again. An Englishman may gorge on Argentine beef, but here on these rangelands, campesinos often cannot afford to eat the cattle they tend, and they can shuck the meat out of a duck quicker than it takes to tell you how. The ranch hands hang on the fence gates late afternoons waiting for pigeons and the school kids at the adobe village of San Gregorio ate well off the doves we took from the dusty cornfield just down the road.

I'm feeding the poor--yes--and bumping their GNP more than I might like to think about just now. I would like to say I'm also doing my part to save their crops, but as fellow hunter-philosopher Chris Dorsey once noted, hunting in Argentina "has less effect on bird populations than a passing thunderstorm." Indeed. With signs and half sentences, Dani tells me when he was a child, his daddy sent him walking powerlines with a gunny sack, picking up birds which had collided with the wires the night before.

Now Dani crouches, peers skyward and gestures. "Senor, Senor! Patos, patos!"

Patos. At once the sky is full of ducks, moving silhouettes against a brightening sky. Too dark for colors, I try to read them the way duckhunters do--shape, size and wingbeat. Teal yes. Then mallards? No, not mallards. No decoys, no blind, we stand in knee deep water and chest deep grass while Dani whistles between his teeth, Poweet, poweet.

We know how reservoirs silt up and go toxic, but the Rio Hondo--dammed in the mid 60's and too wide to see across come daylight--has not turned nasty yet. Annual summer drawdowns expose a broad alluvial plain around its considerable perimeter. Come fall, the water comes up again and all the vegetation and weed seeds make duck heaven. Not just ducks, but the herons and plovers, coots and siskins, all those other birds whose names I do not know.

I had brought along two calls, and had both long enough for them to be collector pieces. One whistled and one quacked. "Un en Ingles, y un en Espanol," Poncho had joked. They are handy on a lanyard dangling from my neck but I do not have time to grab them.

There's more to shooting well than geometry and physics, there is a Zen to it too, much like the Zen of ancient archers. Mind, hand, eye, but if your feet ain't right, the rest won't matter. It's hard for your feet to be right in boots tight as condoms, and utterly impossible if you're off-balance straddling a sunken log and all caught up in the wonder of such a great rush of wings. Four big ducks angle high overhead. Rosy-billed pochards, I figure, the finest table-fare in the Argentine sky. I get my sights on them, try to calculate height, speed. In the half-light, my muzzle flashes are big and orange as pumpkins. And I shoot three holes in the air.

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Argentina is the world's eighth largest nation, stretching from the glaciated fjords of Terra del Fuego up through the tall grass pampas north to the Amazon jungle, from the copper curve of the thundering South Atlantic beaches and east across the pampas again to the Andean Great Divide. There are about thirty million Argentines, a short people with broad shoulders who have borne the weight of too many things.

Never call an Argentine Hispanic. One at a time, they look decidedly European. Gather a crowd and you might notice few blondes, no redheads at all. You won't find obesity, either, a wonder considering their habits. They get up early and stay up late and if you sit down to eat with them, you'd better like wine and have a couple of hours to spare. Crawling off to bed at midnight with buzzing head and brimming belly is good for you, they'll swear, and rolling out of bed with a head full of spiders at 6:00 AM is just part of what it means to be Argentine

But to their sad and bloody history. Early residents labored in the backwater of the Spanish empire, struggling and smuggling, provisioning Andean miners, hunting feral cattle for skins and fat. The British Navy bombarded Buenos Aires during the Napoleonic Wars, occupied the city until dislodged by Nationalist troops. The Nationalists, realizing Spain, no longer able to help them, could not hurt them either, proclaimed independence on May 25, 1810. But native royalists fought fiercely. They were eventually defeated not far from where I bog along the shores of the Rio Hondo, by Argentina's first military hero, General Manuel Belgrano, who gave his name to the cruiser sunk by a British submarine in the Faulkland's Island War, one of the finer ironies of modern history.

Independence was won and maintained, but that was hardly the end of bloodshed. It's often been said the leaders of our country were once selected in smoke-filled rooms. Here in Argentina, the smoke smelled of gunpowder, not cigars. General Rosas overthrew the government of President Rivadavia, such that it was. Rosas was overthrown by Urquiza, who was overthrown by Sarmiento, and so on until you lose count of coups and the juntas and jefes become a great bloody blur.

Along the way, they exterminated the last of their Indians, fought a war against Paraguay. A lone bright spot was an averted border war with Chile in 1903. Successful negotiations were commemorated with the thirty foot bronze Christ of the Andes, cast of cannons, astride the mediated border atop the cusp of the Great Divide. One hand clings to the cross and the other is outstretched to rebuke the belligerents. A tablet reads, "Sooner shall these mountains crumble to dust than Argentines and Chileans break the peace sworn at the feet of Christ the Redeemer."

That promise still stands, but others were broken. Argentines again sought relief in dictatorship in 1944--this time with Juan Peron, a colonel who greatly admired Mussolini and only slightly less so, Hitler. Peron had the support of the military, police, and wealthy landowners. His marriage to actress and populist Eva Duarte--Evita--cinched the deal. Peron declared a one-party state, closed opposing newspapers, jailed his opponents, but campesinos still speak lovingly of him, get all misty should you mention Evita, who sold her closets of Italian shoes and lay the money at the feet of barefoot peasants.

Evita died, Peron was deposed and went into exile and would have made another run, had he not been arrested upon his return. In his stead were another long string of generals, the last of which, beset by economic woes and rumors of human rights abuses, trumped up a war with Great Britain in 1982 by invading the Faulkland Islands. British were pre-occupied with Northern Ireland, the generals reasoned, and would not fight for a few thousand fishermen, seal hunters and sheep ranchers. They neglected to reckon with Margaret Thatcher--the iron maiden of English politics--who sent the Royal Navy some eight thousand miles to dust up the Argentines in less than eighty days.

Argentines--fed a steady diet of just war and certain victory--took to the streets. The generals resigned, as did their hastily-appointed replacement, but when political prisoners were released, a headcount came up nearly 30,000 short.

The call them Los Desparecidos, " the disappeared ones," opponents, real or imagined, of the junta. Teachers, students, priests, nuns, trade-unionists, socialists, communists, anarchists, journalists, men, women, children, families, babes at the breast. Kidnapped, tortured, shot, burned and buried alive. Two thousand were drugged, stripped naked and shoveled from military transports into the sea from 13,000 feet, Christian deaths, the Argentine church proclaimed, since they were enemies of the state and when they died, they felt no pain.

It might be hard to believe good could come from all this, but it has. And I, in boots too tight and boots too short, am here to testify to it. The glory of Argentina--these birds, this land, this rock in the shoe of democracy, this spirit of a people forged in the fire of repression and revolution. Yes, old habits die hard and down in Buenos Aires, you may likely still attract more Argentines to a riot than a caucus but that does not matter right now. Now it is broad daylight and I am knee deep in the Rio Hondo marsh among birds whose names I do not know. Great waves of ducks have come and gone and Dani has gathered the ones I have shot and hung them from branches and crotches of driftwood snags. Teal, speckled, cinnamon and silver, will grace my table and his. Long strings of black ibis have ghosted the beach, hanging out of gunrange even though we would never have shot at them, hooting that guttural ibis hoot older than time itself.

Time. Time passes slowly here, but it does pass. There will come a time when I will leave this place and that time would not pass easily. A day, two, three, and I will be gone, most likely forever. But that day has not yet come.

My feet are wet and my hands are cold and the sun is up two hands-breadths up the morning sky. There's a bird on a clump of thornbush an arm-reach away and I do not know its name. It looks like a black-capped chickadee but it's cardinal crimson where chickadees are black. It hops from branch to branch and eyes me with eyes quick and liquid.

And then Dani grabs my shoulder. "Patos, senor, patos," he whispers with a quiet intensity.

I wheel and look up and the morning's last flight is right on top of me. I shoulder my gun, shoot, and miss again.