I surround myself with extinct birds because it's a reminder of what was.
I can think about the history of those birds, but I can also connect the history of those birds
to my ancestors, who worked some of these fields and who helped to build this country
as bondaged people... who probably looked skyward to see endless flocks of birds
that provided inspiration, in many ways, for liberation.
I grew up in a little county in the western Piedmont called Edgefield.
Edgefield is nestled against the Savannah River, and I grew up on a family farm, so...
birds were best friends and confidants.
To imagine that bird flying through the air for thousands of miles
and as that bird's flying, it's being pulled by memory, by instinct, by stars...
by all of the things that we know and many that we don't know that causes it to settle, or to go on.
That "whimbrel's-eye view," that whimbrel could look down and see Deveaux Bank,
and recognize that landscape as a safe resting place,
as a place to refuel for the rest of the trip, so that it can make more of itself.
That – that's an emotional thing to me, and it's something to be proud of
and it's something for us to to hold on to, it's something for us to fight for.
Part of the miracle is that these birds can travel thousands of miles, that they're dodging
storms, and peregrine falcons, and all kinds of things that they've been built for...
They've been built for that. What worries me are those factors that they haven't been built for.
We think about the past and what must have been, of evening skies being darkened
by whimbrel and plover and other shorebirds coming in to roost in a place.
That we marvel over tens of thousands, that at some point in time, there were hundreds of thousands, and millions...
means that we've exacted an enormous toll on our environment.
When I think about that bird, all of that time and effort – that evolutionary miracle – compressed
into that whimbrel... it delivers a different sort of motivation for wanting to conserve.
Part of the reason that it's important for me to work for home, for my Southern home,
is because I believe it has to happen here. I believe recognition, reconciliation
and repair — reparation — has to happen here. It has to happen here:
the recognition of what occurred, that the nation was built on the backs of others
and on this pain... It wasn't just a Southern thing, but here in South Carolina
it was so evident, and it still exists on the landscape.
The repair comes, the reparations come, in seeing — in part — the nature that exists,
on top of that pain and despair; that nature is reclaiming what was torn apart.
That the birds are sort of these wonderful messengers that help us resolve to be better,
that we can gather around those birds and we can say, "this is what was. It was terrible.
"We ought never let that happen again."
That instead of seeing brown backs bent over furrows,
we can watch the feathered backs of birds probing crabs from burrows.
I want us to gather around nature in these ways.
If it happens here, in the South,
then there's hope for everywhere.
The disparate histories of – of black and white, of enslaved and free,
of land owner and being bound to land by force... that history can't be denied,
it can't be shut out, and we can't just watch birds without that history in mind.
And so it's important from time to time to take your binoculars down, and to see the wider view.
The wetlands we conserve, the forests that we conserve — there ought to be a way to inspire people
to understand that partnerships with people matter, culture matters.
Those great rice fields and rice marsh in the South Carolina Lowcountry, in the ACE Basin,
are places of great pain...
in some ways now are redeemed as places of great beauty, where birds fly free.
And so that flyway is tied together not just in space but in time,
And it's up to us now to determine what happens in the future.
We have some of that control, and it's our obligation to exercise it.
To go from one to a dozen to tens of thousands is jaw-dropping.
It's overwhelming in the best way, because
I didn't know that that still happened, that that still existed for something like a whimbrel.
Seeing this is like some great discovery, it's – it's sort of almost like a de-extinction.
Emily Dickinson talks about hope being "the thing with feathers..."
This is the prime exemplar of that.
I don't think there's anybody that doesn't love a beautiful thing,
and what those tens of thousands of birds are... you can close your eyes, and those calls...
And you have to be amazed, you have to be astounded.
And you have to be proud to know that that's here.