Gods of the Gaps

My park is scheduled to be developed. My sparrows will need to find another winter home. The park is being replaced by a new Holocaust museum, another truth that left unsaid becomes rumor, myth, and heresay. Just as we must confront Holocaust deniers with raw, blunt, unadorned truth, so should we confront the nature deniers. The truth is evidenced each day on Ben Franklin Parkway, near the Franklin Institute. There a scattering of white-throated sparrows, skulking beneath a dozen trees, stand in for all birds, for all of nature. If I could only convince the commuters to stop and gaze over here rather than blindly out there. If only I could convince them to peer through the branches and see the gods of the gaps.

Birdlife International reports that

A technological breakthrough has enabled researchers from the Australasian Wader Studies Group – a special interest group of Birds Australia [BirdLife Partner] – to study the amazing migratory routes of Ruddy Turnstone Arenaria interpres. Four birds fitted with ultra-light
geolocators took just six days to fly from Australia to Taiwan before continuing on to northern Siberia. One bird then completed its return trip back to Australia via the Central Pacific – a total round-trip of 27,000 km!

"All four birds flew 7,600 km non-stop to Taiwan in just over six days, with three apparently travelling together", said Dr Clive Minton. They then flew on to northern Siberia, following separate paths and stopping over at different sites. "By early August, two had moved to Korea and south-eastern Siberia, respectively, but another bird returned to Australia via the Central Pacific!"

Whimbrels are found to fly 5000 km nonstop from Virginia to breed in Alaska, and sooty shearwaters annually travel 40,000 miles figure-eighting around the Pacific. The ruby-throated hummingbird, equipped with a brain the size of a pea, zips across the Gulf of Mexico twice a year as though going to the local 7-11. 

Bird migration, perhaps of all natural phenomena, flabbergasts me. Now we pin tiny transmitters and geolocators to their lapels, and what has always been an entertaining story becomes a gut-grabbing thriller. Some nights I need a Tom-Tom to find my way home, while these tiny blobs of gristle and feather are island hopping to Tahiti. 

Yes, birds are engaging, exposed, colorful, and vividly alive. This is why we watch them. Much of what birds do, however, is out of sight. Countless millions of birds wend their ways around, over, and above the world each moment of our lives, and, until very recently, we lived blissfully unaware of their presence.

If we, the watchers, are only now beginning to grasp the nature and magnitude of migration, what must the general public think? Once people believed that swallows buried themselves in the mud in the winter months when they were absent, and that hummingbirds must migrate on the backs of other birds. We now know that these explanations were band-aids covering intellectual blemishes, warts pretending to be beauty marks.

The warts are with us still. Bill O'Reilly claims that tides prove the existence of God. O'Reilly says that "tide goes in, tide goes out, never a miscommunication." He could as easily offer the same for bird migration. The birds come in, the birds come out, never a miscommunication.

Bill O'Reilly is purposefully wrong. His senseless blathering is meant to incite, not to inform. But unless we better reveal the complexities, incongruities, and blessed mysteries of the natural world, simple answers such as his will fill the voids. O'Reilly's is a God of the Gaps argument, using God as Duct Tape to patch over what he does not know or comprehend. Yet as Dietrich Bonhoffer (executed by the Nazis, an important point that I will return to later) wrote,

"…how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don't know.  

What I know is that for over a year I have been working in Philadelphia with their parks and recreation department. I usually stay near city hall, and each morning I walk from Logan Square up Ben Franklin Parkway to Love Park and one of the city office buildings. Along the way I pass a postage-stamp park with perhaps a dozen tailored trees. Other than these glorified shrubs, the angular park has little to offer a bird other than mowed grass and a green space. 

Yet my tiny park offers refuge to a remarkable number of bird species. American woodcock, ovenbird, slate-colored junco, and northern flicker are a few of the wanderers that I have seen on my daily walks. I know, these are likely migrants disoriented by the downtown buildings, desperate to find any tiny patch of green. 

But not all are wanderlings, for a few of my birds return every year. I haven't banded them, so I cannot say for certain that the same individuals are returning. But back when I did band, I often netted individuals returning to my yard year after year. Among the birds that regularly returned were white-throated sparrows. Like my yard in Houston, or Boy Scout Woods in High Island, they also return to my Philadelphia park. The sparrows come in, the sparrows come out, never a miscommunication.

White-throats do breed in Pennsylvania, but only sparingly in the northern tier. My park birds could as easily have originated in the boreal forests of Canada. All I know is that they return to my park each year, somehow finding their way through the urban landscape to this minuscule sanctuary, soon to be seen scuffing around in the leaf litter and snow.

Thousands of people walk past my birds each day, and no one notices. Commuters keep their eyes glued to the distant horizon, avoiding eye contact and brown birds. Yet within arm's reach is a revelation. Within a few feet, peering through the lowest branches, is a miracle.

The antidote for lies is truth. My mother treated every cough with Paregoric. The drug didn't cure the cough, but I (and my parents) slept soundly. The truth of the white-throated sparrow is also a drug,  a salve that can sooth and heal the wounds of ignorance and hate. Each of my sparrows, like my fellow commuters, is an individual. Each faces life's daily challenges, whether scraping seeds from the pavement or scraping a car payment from a weekly check. 

We are all voyagers. We sail through our lives and around this planet, oblivious of the shipmates standing along side. As watchers we see them, and, in part, we absorb their stories. But just as lies unchallenged become truths, stories untold become rumor, myth, and heresay.

My park is scheduled to be supplanted. Soon my sparrows will need to find another winter home. The park is being replaced by a new Holocaust museum, another truth that left unsaid becomes rumor, myth, and heresay. Just as we must confront Holocaust deniers with raw, blunt, unadorned truth, so should we confront the nature haters.

The truth is evidenced each day on Ben Franklin Parkway, in a triangular park near the Franklin Institute. Here a scattering of white-throated sparrows, skulking beneath a dozen trees, stand in for all birds, for all of nature, for all of us. If I could only convince the commuters to stop and gaze over here rather than blindly out there. If only I could convince them to peer through the branches and see the gods of the gaps.