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The Birds Seen at the
Bird Festivals
2010 Festival
2009 Festival
2008 Festival
2007 Festival
2003-2006 Festival

Mail Check to:
Great Salt Lake Bird Festival
PO Box 618, Farmington, UT 84037
(Price includes shipping)

Remarks from Terry Tempest Williams

Author and Naturalist
Terry Tempest Williams

Terry Tempest Williams was unable to join us this year and was kind enough to send her remarks:

15 May 2010

Dearest Friends of the Great Salt Lake Bird Festival:

I am so sorry not to be with you at this celebration of all we hold dear –

the birds, the Lake, and the ongoing ritual of spring.

To Neka, to Wayne, to Ella, to Genevieve and Don, to Al Trout, and to

the Friends of Great Salt Lake, especially Lynn de Freitas, to the Nature

Conservancy and the Great Salt Lake Audubon Society, to Davis County,

and of course, the Festival Committee Members – I want to thank you

for all you do in the name of community to honor and respect this

magnificent place called Great Salt Lake – in all its mystery and sparkling

presence.

My heart is with you. And it has never left the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge

with all its blessed birds, the Burrowing Owls among them.

Last fall, when I was out at the Refuge, I sat for a long time on the edge of the wetlands watching avocets and stilts, these long-legged birds I regard as family. These were the birds I dreamed of as child, long before I saw them as I poured over the colored plates in Peterson’s Field Guide to Western Birds. I thought about my grandmother Mimi and the years we watched them together. And I thought about the nature of change.

The world feels so tenuous, at times. Today, we hear on the news that the oil spill

in the Gulf of Mexico is ten times worse than what British Petroleum or our government originally told us. And I wonder about the oily fingers that will reach into every nook and cranny of the wetlands within its reach and how it will impact

the ibises, the storks, the spoonbills, and rails, all of the creatures who inhabit the

gulf coast and beyond.

I think about the photographer Chris Jordan and his images of albatross on Midway

Island in the heart of the Pacific Ocean. How he has documented the dead, bearing witness to the baby birds who were fed plastic by their parents, unable to distinguish fish from bottle caps, toothbrushes, plastic lighters, and dildos, which is

what they ingested in the floating gyre of plastic and brought back to their young, regurgitating to their young, not food, but plastic, which would kill them. What

remains on the shore of Midway is distingrating birds, decomposing birds with bellies of plastic, a nest of feathers and bones harboring turquoise pieces of plastic, red bottle caps, flesh-colored lighters and the rubber core of golf balls that will never die. The birds, even in death, show us who we are.

We must acknowledge the world we are creating.

It is easy to look away.

The power of the Great Salt Lake Bird Festival is that we are saying we will never look away, that we will never walk away from the birds of this inland sea. We are standing together as part of this Avian community of avocets and stilts, snowy egrets and great blue herons, long-billed marsh wrens and red-wing blackbirds, yellow-headed blackbirds, coots and redheads, canvasbacks and teals. We are renewing our commitment to this place, this special place, saying that as long as white-faced ibises and long-billed curlews inhabit the grasslands adjacent to Great Salt Lake we have reason to be hopeful. We are saying we choose to define community as both human and wild with a responsibility to care for both, because one without the other is only half a community.

We who gather and support the Great Salt Lake Bird Festival are saying we will never look away but make yearly vows to keep our eyes wide open for the change and constancy of wetlands that sparkle and sing from Layton to Farmington to Bear River and beyond.

We are standing together on the edges of Great Salt Lake acknowledging change is

the only thing we can count on – but let it be a change in consciousness – not habitat, or dwindling populations of eared grebes or rising mercury levels that threaten the integrity of the ecosystem. Let us be brave enough, strong enough to ask the question, “What might a different kind of power look like, feel like, and do we have enough resolve and compassion to extend our empathy and regard beyond our own species?

Today in Castle Valley, I washed our windows, all of them. I was so proud of how clean they were, how it felt like we were suspended in this sea of sage, embraced in

the redrocks. And then, a chipping sparrow flew into the window and fell, stunned on to our stone porch.

I worried the Cooper’s Hawk nearby might take it, and so I quietly walked out and held the wee, little thing in my hands until it calmed and settled and took back its own strength in time. And then, he flew. I witnessed painfully, clearly, how my joy in seeing out drew this sparrow in, a deadly deception. Within the hour, two more birds hit our window, one stunned – a female northern oriole – and another killed, a male yellow-rumped warbler. That was enough. More than enough, I walked outside, wet my hands in red dirt and streaked the glass in penance. We are all complicit in the world’s suffering.

May we never forget the unequal power between us, humans and birds, and the responsibility we hold to minimize the suffering of others.

May we keep our eyes open. May we not look away. May we remain alive, alert, and aware of all that is happening around Great Salt Lake. May we be fearless in protecting Great Salt Lake’s integrity which protects the birds, the brine, and the

health of our community.

I remember when I asked Mr. Roger Tory Peterson to sign my “Field Guide to Western Birds” many years later. He obliged. With pen in hand, he signed his name and one word: Joy.

And joy they are – these Avian beings that grace the planet on their wild wings day after day, season after season, year after year, absorbing our shocks, and adapting to change, be it oil, plastic, or glass. Thankfully, mirrors of welcoming habitats such as Great Salt Lake and the surrounding wetlands welcome the migrating birds home like a mother. The birds remind us again and again that life is beautiful and given half a chance will not only endure, but flourish, if we as humans continue to commit ourselves to acts of love on behalf of all that is wild.

The Great Salt Lake Bird Festival is such an act in the name of a community that not only cares but supports and sustains “a reverence for life.”

Please know of my love, my solidarity and my gratitude for the history we share

and all that binds us together, especially our affection for the blessed birds of Great Salt Lake.

Respectfully,

Terry Tempest Williams