Black Birders Week, hiking the West Bank, and plant of the week
The second annual Black Birders Week, Raja Shehadeh's "Palestinian Walks," and a globetrotting pea
Black Birders Week: 5/30-6/5
It’s the second annual Black Birders Week! The event seeks to amplify the voices of Black birders and promote the inclusion of more Black people in the birding and conservation world. Created last year in response to prominent birder Christian Cooper being racially targeted in Central Park, the week is a celebration of the ways Black people connect with nature and a way to build towards an equitable future. Monday’s event is #BirdsOnMyBlock, which asks people to share what birds they encounter where they live and highlights the fact that birding is “ a hobby anyone can engage with at any level.” It includes a workshop from Cornell Lab of Ornithology on bird ID from 3-4 p.m. ET. Learn how to participate and support the events here.
Hiking the West Bank
What does nature writing have to say about Palestine? Plenty, it turns out. In Palestinian Walks, Raja Shehadeh reflects on seven journeys in the hills around his hometown of Ramallah in the West Bank. Ramallah lies north of Jerusalem in a landscape that has supported olive tree cultivation and grazing animals for centuries, thanks to careful attention to the delicate ecology of the slopes. The term he uses for his trips is sarha, an Arabic word literally meaning “let the cattle out to pasture in the morning” that now also means to “wander aimlessly, not restricted by time and place, going where his spirit takes him.”
Shehadeh starting his walks after returning from law studies in the UK. In Ramallah, he began representing fellow Palestinians when the Israeli government sought to seize their family’s land for settlement. The hills became a refuge from the frustrations of the city. “It took a while before I began to have an eye for the ancient tracks that crisscrossed them and for the new, more precarious ones, like catwalks along the edge of the hills, made more recently by sheep and goats in search of food and water,” he recalls.
Palestinian Walks writes against the many Westerners who have dismissed Palestine as a wasteland, from William Makepeace Thackeray (“a landscape unspeakably ghastly and desolate”) to Herman Melville (“crunched, knawed and mumbled—mere refuse and rubbish of creation”). These white travelers’ accounts helped create the idea of Palestine as an empty place in need of civilizing.
Instead of a wasteland, Shehadeh writes of a landscape where thousands of years of cultivation on high-pitched slopes have harmonized with the local flora to create hidden gems in the hills, uncovered as a walker enters one sheltered valley after another. A hike takes the form of close encounters with small scenes rather than broad, dramatic views. Turning a corner, he surprises a small herd of gray gazelles or finds himself face to face with a huge owl. It’s a way of interacting with nature I can understand from growing up among the river bluffs of eastern Missouri.
In one spot, he uncovers a garden growing in one farming terrace, full of roses, cyclamens, and asphodels. Looking up, he sees another terrace-garden, and “yet another garden above, one garden hanging on top of another and another, going up as far as the eye could see.” While moving stone to farm the land, some families built qasrs, a word meaning castle but in this context referring to relatively small shelters that provided refuge from the elements to people working their fields—somewhat similar in purpose to a Scottish bothy.
Exploring the landscape around Ramallah inevitably leads to confrontations with history and its violent legacies in the present. After years of believing one mountain-path was an ancient route he alone had rediscovered, a friend tells him it’s marked out on a precise British Ordnance map, dating back to when the United Kingdom ruled Palestine from 1920 to 1948. “The British wanted to know the name of every hillock, every wadi, every spring … a prerequisite for conquest, which came some years later, was for the conquering army to know the ways of the land, its features, its secrets, its names,” Shehadeh writes.
British colonial rule paved the way for Israeli conquest in 1948, which displaced at least 750,000 out of 1.9 million Palestinians, and the decades of land seizures that followed. Villages mentioned in the Bible were at special risk of takeover—which is partly why Ramallah escaped this fate. “It was a parvenu village, historically and religiously insignificant,” Shehadeh writes. “How I rejoice at this omission.”
But his beloved hills change over the course of the book’s seven sarhat (the plural of sarha.) Israeli courts take ancestral Palestinian lands through various legal loopholes. One of them makes use of a thorny shrub called natsh (Scarpoterium spinosum.) Israeli lawyers argued that if a field had natsh growing in it, that means it’s uncultivated and therefore ripe for settlement. “Never has a weed been more exploited and politicized,” he writes.
Alongside legal justifications for Israeli settlement, new roads provide a framework for future construction. Some of it draws on lessons from segregation in the U.S. “Highways are more effective geographic barriers than walls in keeping neighborhoods apart,” Shehadeh writes. Unlike historic Palestinian villages, built in the shelter of valleys and tied to agriculture, the Israeli settlements rise up on easily defensible hilltops. Roads link the settlements to create larger and larger “settlement blocs … depriving more villages of the agricultural land they depended on for their livelihood.”
As seizures and restrictions on the free movement of Palestinians increase, Shehadeh faces greater dangers on his walks: heavily armed settlers, patrols of Israeli soldiers, military checkpoints, and even Palestinian police using distant hikers as impromptu target practice. For years he had dreamed of walking “from the Ramallah hills to the coastal plain and the sea. Now it was too late”—a new wall blocked the way.
Yet Shehadeh continues his sarhat—as a personal form of protest, in one sense, but also as a way of knowing his beloved home, reconciling himself to its changes while recognizing its persistence through time. The crumbling fortresses of Crusader armies from the Middle Ages provide a broader historical view. “Empires and conquerors come and go but the land remains,” he reflects. His close relationship with the persistent ecosystems of the Ramallah hills reinforces his political imagination. He pushes against political half-measures that don’t restore true freedom to Palestinians, trying to see past occupation and apartheid towards what could be.
Plant of the week: Beach pea
Thanks to its floating, water-resistant seeds, beach pea (Lathyrus japonicus) has a native range extending all around the Northern Hemisphere. Blue-purple time in the wildflower calendar continues with this stunning violet-colored pea with large, dark-green leaves (large leaves for a pea species, that is.)
Beach pea grows along ocean dunes as well as the Great Lakes, though its populations have diminished from loss of habitat in the Midwest. In Indiana, where the plant is endangered, Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore successfully reintroduced a population of beach peas in 2008.
Sand dunes have a limited set of plant species that make it home and help protect the slopes from erosion. Among dune dwellers, beach pea represents the Fabaceae family (legumes, beans and peas) and specifically the Faboideae subfamily, which includes the peas in your freezer. The subfamily’s flowers are “papilionaceous,” meaning built like a butterfly: a large “banner” petal over pairs of “wings” and “keels.” Once you learn to recognize this basic flower shape, you’ll start seeing it everywhere.
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Possum Notes is a weekly newsletter about wildlife and landscapes around where I live. It’s produced on occupied Massachusett and Wampanoag land.