
Register for the 12th Annual
Great Salt Lake Bird Festival
May 13-17, 2010
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The Birds Seen at the
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Mail Check to:
Great Salt Lake Bird Festival
PO Box 618, Farmington, UT 84037
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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.
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.
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.
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.

