What It Takes to See 10,000 Bird Species

In this piece, Jessie Williamson joins Peter Kaestner on an epic adventure to South America — all to try and spot some elusive birds. She is quick to realize the lengths that Kaestner will go to reach his target of 10,000 birds, writing that “for one of his top targets, the Ayacucho antpitta, he needed permission to navigate through an unstable area ravaged by Shining Path guerrillas.” Kaestner seems to take that sort of thing in his stride, in a tale that is bird watcher meets Indiana Jones.

In 1986, Kaestner became the first person in the world to see a representative of every bird family in existence, 159 back then. But the birding event that most changed his life was his 1989 discovery of the Cundinamarca antpitta, a species new to science. Kaestner had traveled outside Bogotá, Colombia, for work and was exploring a forested area up a newly constructed road. Suddenly, he heard a call he didn’t recognize.

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Reclaiming a North Carolina Plantation

What should happen to former slave plantations? It goes without saying that they shouldn’t be event spaces for lavish weddings and fraternity fêtes. They can be grounds for teaching the South’s brutal history, certainly. But a non-profit group in central North Carolina believes the land can do even more, and it’s showing how on a plantation once known as Snow Hill:

The property sat in disarray. Massive trees were strewn about like a giant’s abandoned pickup sticks. The only road in and out became a car-stalling mud bath after rain. A two-story stable and other outbuildings stood dangerously dilapidated or encircled by brambles.

Sellars didn’t mind — she was envisioning what the onetime plantation, founded in the late 1700s and operated well into the twentieth century, could be. A former social worker who had headed Durham County’s extension office, Sellars had spent nearly a decade managing programs that helped home gardeners and farmers grow sustainable produce. Now she imagined a farm, where people could raise their own food and she could establish an incubator for new and future farmers through the nonprofit UCAN, short for Urban Community AgriNomics, which the sisters had recently launched to encourage gardening and fight food insecurity. “I was giddy,” Sellars, who is sixty-nine, recalls. “It was gorgeous.”

Patterson — Sellars’s younger sibling by two years — saw something quite different: a nearly insurmountable cleanup job. “I looked at Delphine and said, ‘Have you bumped your head?’” UCAN had less than $300 in the bank. But they agreed on one point: They wanted land. And they’d have to persuade TLC to help them secure it.

Now the sisters are on the cusp of finally fully getting their wish — not just to lease the spread, as they have the past five years, but for their nonprofit to own and manage it, in a deal that could model for the national conservation movement how to easily redistribute land to Black institutions and individuals. In time, the sisters hope this seemingly radical move, which would be one of the nation’s largest transfers of land-conservancy property to an African American–led nonprofit, will spark other such organizations to let go of acreage they’ve stewarded, to boost land access among Black people in a country that’s benefited from their dispossession.

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Encountering the High Arctic

After James Conaway takes a summer trip to the high Arctic on assignment for National Geographic and becomes unable to return to camp, he faces his insignificance as a single, helpless human in the vast wild terrain as he waits for a helicopter to arrive to take him to safety. “I think often of the person dropped off at the headwaters of the Lewis,” he writes. “He is down there yet, still waiting.”

I tell the pilot that if I am not back in camp in two days I will be over on the Lewis River, headed back to camp, and I gesture. The casualness of this request will come back to haunt me, but for now I am walking across what feels like a newly minted, untrod land.

I sleep with my very own glacier that night. Try it sometime if you want to know just how insignificant you can be. Melting throughout day, the ice releases what sounds like barks, then pistol shots. It groans, a sound like no other, and shoots out thick streams of snowmelt that arc high above, luminous in the half-light of a dim reeling sun, before plunging down, down into the dark lake.

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How Tokyo Became an Anti-Car Paradise

Thirty million people commute by train each day in Tokyo, and among wealthy cities, the Japanese capital has the lowest car use in the world. In this excerpt from his book, Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It, Daniel Knowles explains how and why Tokyo was built to be human-centric and relatively car-free, making it an unexpectedly calm major city that’s functional but also pleasant to walk and live in.

And even if you are willing to pay all of the taxes, you cannot simply go and buy a car in the way that you might in most countries. To be allowed to purchase a car, you have to be able to prove that you have somewhere to park it. This approval is issued by the local police, and is known as a shakoshomeisho, or “garage certificate.” Without one, you cannot buy a car. This helps to explain why the Japanese buy so many tiny cars, like the so-called Kei cars. It means they can have smaller garages. Even if the law didn’t exist though, owning a car in Japan without having a dedicated parking space for it would be a nightmare. Under a nationwide law passed in 1957, overnight street parking of any sort is completely illegal. So if you were to somehow buy a car with no place to store it, you could not simply park it on the street, because it would get towed the next morning, and you would get fined 200,000 yen (around $1,700). In fact, most street parking of any sort is illegal. There are a few exceptions, but more than 95 percent of Japanese streets have no street parking at all, even during the day.

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Generation Connie

For some immigrant families in the U.S., Connie Chung — the first Asian and second woman to be an anchor of a major news program — was a symbol of success and the American dream. Connie Wang and her family came to the U.S. in the early ’90s when she was a little girl, and at 3, she told them what name she wanted to choose for herself in this new country: Connie, named after the woman — the “pretty auntie” — on TV. In this piece for The New York Times, Wang recounts how she discovered many other Connies like her — an entire generation of American-born Asian women named after the journalist — and shares bits of their families’ stories, as well as insights from the “original” Connie herself on her path to journalism in a white- and male-dominated field.

But the names these parents gave their children represented so many different approaches to handling this shock: holding on, letting go, diving in, reaching out for a lifeline. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all the Connies I spoke to describe their mothers in similar terms: as leaders, brave, athletic, creative, successful, idealistic, capable. These moms were architects, editors and medical professionals, who’d often had to abandon their careers and reinvent themselves upon moving to a new country, who looked at the television and saw how things might be different for their daughters.

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Sincerely, Your Sister

After a bout of post-surgical meningitis in the early 1970s, Dr. Jillian Horton’s sister Wendy was left with severe mental and physical disabilities. In this gutting essay, she recounts her mother’s struggles to get assistance with Wendy’s care. Jean Horton wrote letter after letter to provincial politicians in Manitoba, pleas for help for her daughter that went mostly ignored. “Wendy needed a residence that was capable of managing the complex medical needs of adults with brain injuries,” writes Dr. Jillian Horton. “The problem was that in Manitoba there was no such thing.”

Wendy’s surgery years earlier had been a “success”; her brain tumour had been completely excised. But in the days after that surgery, she developed bacterial meningitis. That infection changed the course of her life. Over a few cruel days, Wendy lost the ability to talk, write, walk, regulate her emotions and control her body. Eventually, when she was conscious, she often raged and fought, unable to speak or communicate her terror, pain and frustration.

As soon as it became clear that Wendy would be left severely physically and mentally disabled, many medical professionals began suggesting to my parents that everyone would be “better off” if she were in an institution.

But who exactly would be better off? My parents’ dream for Wendy’s life did not include separation from her family. They railed against ableism long before it had a name. They knew Wendy’s worth as a person with a disability was unchanged from her worth as a child born without one. But as is so often the case when parents fight and advocate tirelessly for disabled children, they were often branded “the problem.”

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Dark Waters: How the Adventure of a Lifetime Turned to Tragedy

Adventure tourism is big business, whether it’s climbing Everest, or sailing around the world. But it can come at a cost. In this piece, Sally Williams investigates the death of Simon Speirs, a customer who was swept overboard while on the Clipper Round the World yacht race. Exploring the investigation into his death, along with first-person testimonies from other crew members, Williams meticulously uncovers the flaws in the Clipper operation.

Simon Speirs is exactly the sort of person Robin Knox-Johnston, the veteran sailor, had in mind when he founded the Clipper Round the World yacht race more than 25 years ago. At that time, the only people who got to race boats around the world were professional sailors. Clipper was designed for ordinary people: offering training and the opportunity to join a mixed-ability crew, it would enable customers to achieve the ambition of a lifetime.

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