It’s raining again. For years, I’ve been thinking every spring, ‘did winter happen?’ Growing up in Santa Cruz, winters were always gloomy, soggy, and days often started with dad checking the rain gauge. Through more recent years of drought, those memories seemed like a dream, a warped memory even. Until now.
We don’t have a rain gauge, or even a physical thermometer, 2023 full of up-to-the-minute weather information I can call up on my phone via NASA apps and weather services tweets. Still, it’s mainly my ears that tell me whether I should be concerned about the rain as I listen vigilantly to the intensity of certain drips off the roof and the amount of water spraying up on the undersides of passing cars outside.
Becoming a better listener is another of life’s work, if one so chooses. I’ve been honing my listening abilities that much more not only through analyzing the rainfall, but by continuting to learn to identify birds by ear. With spring now both official and in evidence, the birds have been singing with full voices during every break in the storm. I’m not only picking up more subtleties in their song, I’m ever more cognizant of how much noise there is in everyday suburbia. Leaf blowers and power saws, heavy trucks, clanging doors, shrieking children. It’s a loud and varied soundscape out there.
Last week I was in Pasadena — my s.o. travels there for work many weeks out of a year and I periodically go along for a few days — and I spent an afternoon at the Huntington Library, Museum and Botanical Gardens, enjoying the grounds as much for the many birds there as the thousands of varieties of plants on display. Between the Australian, Desert, Japanese and Palm Gardens and Lily Ponds, it’s not only a beautiful place to visit, it’s a great place for urban birding. It was a cloudy and not particularly warm day on my visit, but that didn’t seem to phase the many hummingbirds, raptors, swallows, sparrows and more who were flitting, calling and buzzing through the blooming trees.
Founded in 1919 by Henry Huntington, a wealthy railway baron, land owner and art collector, on the site of his large estate in San Marino, CA, the Huntington’s grounds, library and galleries are impressive. The research library alone contains more than 11 million items, among them hundreds of thousands of books and millions of photos, including presidential manuscripts, early drafts of Thoreau’s Walden and Audubon’s Birds of America.
Like so many institutions, the Huntington is steeped in patriarchal privilege. As I wandered through the library and galleries, my thoughts ping-ponged between ‘how great this is all on display for the public’, and ‘wow, all this concentrated wealth amassed by one man’ and ‘jeez so much white, male perspective in general.’
“A lot of portraits of a bunch of slave owners,” I heard another visitor say to his companion as they exited the European gallery. As I took a cursory look at the pasty European subjects of many of the paintings, I surmised that such might be the case.
I definitely looked at the large and storied Audubon book on display in the library with a jaundiced eye. John James Audubon, early conservationist …and racist. Just a day earlier, the news broke that the National Audubon Society had decided in a board vote to keep its name, despite it coming to present-day light that the famed naturalist had been a slave-holder. Despite the National Audubon Society themselves stating that they were committed to diversity and inclusion. Despite the fact that its own staff union, The Bird Union, had readily changed its own name to more accurately reflect its values and intentions and called for the NAS to do the same. Despite the fact that many local chapters have begun to drop the name (here in the Bay Area, GGAS is currently surveying members to make a decision). Despite the fact that Audubon himself didn’t even found the Audubon Society. Despite even the fact that ornithologists change bird names all the time to reflect both advances in scientific knowledge and social awareness. Facepalm. Ugh.
More disappointing was seeing the divisive commentary about the decision — many members were happy the name wasn’t changed, missing the point completely… or simply choosing not to listen to a different perspective….
Back at The Huntington, the current curators appear to be steering the ship toward more balanced representation, bolstering their Asian-American history collection and coming up with a strategic plan for diversity, equity and inclusion. A current exhibition of collage-based portraits by Nigerian-born, Los Angeles–based artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby was curated by Hilton Als, and a gallery hallway and outdoor loggia contained ceramic sculpture by Mineo Mizuno, a helpful tonic to all those bewigged subjects.