What's 'Endangered'?—You Have to Get Up Close and Personal With It to Get It

09/24/2009

The balding, nerdy-scientist guy on TV was doing a love dance with a whooping crane. He ran alongside it, chest puffed out, bobbing, weaving, throwing sticks, and well…whooping. The bird did the same back to him. If she'd had hair she would have been flipping it.

 

It was clear—this was chemistry. Frat guys across the country would be envious.

 

Watching it with my three-year-olds the other night, I had to ask, "What the ffff…I mean heck, is going on?"

Cut to the next clip, from 1982: Johnny Carson was asking this same scientist, the ornithologist George Archibald, pretty much the same question. Archibald answered that male whooping cranes did nothing for his crane-love, Tex. Only Archibald's mating dance could jangle her hormones intro producing eggs, one of which hatched into a male chick they called “Gee Whiz,” the first whooping crane ever born in captivity.

It was a victory that helped bring back the species from the brink of extinction, and the reason why Archibald was featured on this Science Channel program, "Jane Goodall’s Heroes."

Still, noted the narrator, though the whooping crane's numbers have grown to about 400 today, from 15 in the 1940s, the bird remains endangered.

One of my three-year-old twins, Punk, turned his head, looked at me. "Danger?" he asked.

"Not danger. Endangered." I was glad he was watching.

I've been putting on educational TV for grown-ups lately, trying to swap it in for some of the screaming kid TV that’s driving me and my husband up a tree. It's been hit or miss, so this was good.

But now Punk asked the killer question.

"What’s…N’dangered?"

Oh man. How do you define endangered to a three-year-old?

"Uh. Well. It's when a species of animals or plants that lives on Earth…gets in danger of…not existing anymore. Like it might be gone. Soon."

Response from Punk: Blank stare.

Well of course. Why would he get it? He has no context.

To Punk, "wildlife" is the sparrow or pigeon he sees on a city street during the walk to school. Luckily he hasn’t seen any of the alley rats. Yet.

As a kid, my context was different, rich. For one thing, I was born—and until age nine—raised in South Africa. For another, my dad is a wildlife nut, and were always road-tripping to one exotic African nature park or another. Half the wildlife documentaries I see on TV, I think, yeah, I was there.

And we lived in Cape Town, a city right on the tip of Africa that, with its jagged mountain peaks, cliff-side coastal drives, and sprawling white beaches, is arguably one of the most awe-inspiring places on the globe.

This is going to sound disgusting. But on an average weekend morning there my father would say, "So what should we do today? Go to the beach? Climb a mountain? Tour a vineyard? Drive to Cape Point and see the fynbos [indigenous South African plant life]? Go to Boulders and cavort with the penguins?"

Tough decision. Somehow we always managed to choose, and it was always an adventure.

But one day, the adventure was different, and for me, life-changing.

The night before, my father announced we are going on a quest to find…THE RED DISA. He had me right there. I mean, the name alone is right out of film noir.

What was it? A flower. But not any flower. A rare and endangered flower.A tri-petal orchid whose habitat was being depleted by agriculture and development, but that could still be found in the craggy crevices of Table Mountain, Cape Town’s flat-topped natural wonder.

The next day, by God, we were going to climb the mountain and capture ourselves a red disa—on film. I stepped out in our back garden, looked at the mountain jutting straight up to the sky, its sandstone edifice ghost-lit from below. Finding a tiny little flower up there seemed hands-down impossible. Which made it all the more exciting.

It’s about a four-hour haul to the top on rocky, crumbling trails, populated, as it turned out, by puff adders (grumpy, poisonous snakes), among other ominous creatures. Didn't matter. Aside from pausing every so often to swoon at the ridiculously gorgeous view of Table Bay below, we were focused.

And then one of us—don't remember who but it had to be my father; he would have known where to look—spotted it. A positively blemish-free specimen of The Pride of Table Mountain. Nodding in the breeze. Basking in a beam of sunlight that infiltrated the shadows.

We were quiet. Transfixed. We just stood there and watched as my father photographed it from every angle.

And I wondered, why has it come to this? That a flower gets so wiped out that it retreats to the crannies of a mountain too harsh and rugged too build on. It's about as pathetic as a middle-aged man doing gymnastics in hopes of coaxing a bird to reproduce.

Right in front of me was the definition of endangered. I didn't need any more explanation than that.

So now, I need to do the same for Punk. Can anyone tell me—where can I can take him on a quest to find a whooping crane in its natural habitat?

Good-Bye to Sex and the City Literacy

09/03/2009

Sometimes, when you least expect it, you’re reminded how out of it you’ve become.

That’s how it was, recently, when I went to lunch with two svelte, single, child-free girlfriends. One of them escorted—more like pulled, I didn’t realize there were stairs—me into a chichi sushi restaurant I’d never heard of, and marched right up to a hostess she appeared to know.

“Don’t YOU look fabulous,” said the hostess, stating the obvious. This girlfriend, who I’ll call GF1, was decked out in a white empire-waist mini-dress with three-inch heels, a matching umbrella, and coiffed, cropped hair.

 

I sidled up, I hoped unnoticed, in my orthopedic Dansko's, khakis, and brown tank smeared with deodorant and milk. The deodorant was a result of my poor aim and chronic inability to remember to apply it after I get dressed.  The milk was from Punk’s morning ritual of testing his bottle’s spray arc.

Once seated, GF1 said she would have the usual, and didn’t bother opening her menu. I, meanwhile, sweated over hundreds of options and babbled about how I’d eat sushi all the time if I could.

Right then, GF2, also spectacularly attired, breezed in. And the conversation proceeded as follows:

GF2:  You know, I’d also eat sushi all the time, except I don’t want to end up like Jeremy Piven.

GF1: Ha ha ha ha ha.

Me:  [Blank]

GF2:  Yeah, we were all set to see Speed-the-Plow on Broadway when he pulled out.

GF1:  Oh please. Like he really got mercury poisoning from sushi. Whatever.

Me: Umm. Who’s Jeremy Piven?

[Pregnant pause]

GF2:  C’mon. You know who Jeremy Piven is.

GF1: [To the rescue] Entourage. From Entourage.

Me: Uh. I don’t watch Entourage.

[Longer pregnant pause]

To help me save face, the girlfriends launched into Piven’s filmography. The Kingdom? Nothing. RocknRolla? Nothing. Grosse Pointe Blanke….from like 1997? Vague flicker of recognition.

OK never mind. The conversation turned to GF1’s recent girls’ trip to South Beach:

GF1: It wasn’t DC, for sure. Our hotel had a topless bar on the roof.

GF2:  Must’ve been lots of plastic at that bar. And not just in the credit cars buying the drinks.

Me:  Blank.

Me:  Is South Beach in Florida or California?

I can’t even describe the looks that comment prompted: a mix of pity and horror.

Look, sorry, but I’m a journalist. I will always ask the stupid question.  Always.  I think people are often amazed at the stupidity of my questions. I’m sure they’re thinking, “For crying out loud. I would never ask that out loud. How embarrassing. I would just go home and Google it.”

 

I just ask the question. I don’t care. I’m not going to sit there and pretend I know something I don’t. If I weren’t a salt-aholic I would ask what that white stuff is.

Still, pre-kids, I was respectably pop-culture savvy—I could quote whole scenes from Sex and the City—so I felt pretty square after that lunch. To test my level of fossilization, I posted a question on Facebook: Am I the only person on the planet who doesn’t know Jeremy Piven got mercury poisoning from ODing on sushi?

Within seconds, I got this response from three different people: “Yep.”

I thanked them for the vote of confidence.

The comments continued, with a co-worker saying I needed to hang out in her office more, and me casually responding that, being a mother of two three-year-olds, I am seriously in need of anti-Teletubbies intel.

Within minutes, there was flurry of responses from parents. Apparently, I am not the only parent suffering brain rot from kids’ programming.

 

The gist of the comments was this: First, no more Teletubbies. Banish them from the house. Do the same with any Barney or Boohbahs. One friend noted that comedian Lewis Black said he went back for a second vasectomy after seeing Boohbahs.

Second, the parents said, get yourself HBO and get yourself some Entourage.

Sheesh. I thought I’d get an outpouring of support—sympathy for being sentenced to watch a barrage of under-five programming and being screamed at to change the channel when feebly attempting to view adult shows. From my three-almost-four-year-olds, the charge is always, “It’s too scareeeeeeeeee!” And it’s hard to argue with that.

But these parents were telling me to take back the television. Trouble is, I have no idea how.
Maybe the parents’ point is that, after the kids go to bed, we should stay up and ram in every possible popular program—Entourage, Mad Men, Weeds, you name it—so we can talk the hip talk as needed.

For me, not gonna happen. The kids exhaust me, so I go to bed right after them. And if I do happen to stay up a bit later, I go for geeky nature and medical shows. Or the Weather Channel. I freakin’ love the Weather Channel.

So, what parents like me need is some sort of pop-culture coach. Or a Web site—a Cliffs Notes on pop culture for parents of small children. I, for one, would be on there all the time, orthopedic shoes propped up on my desk.