The Attack of the Killer Rhododendrons (10 page)

I
HAD TRAVELLED
a couple of thousand kilometres to see the last North American Crested Mynas, and despite my best efforts I had been completely shut out. That isn’t really much of a story, and a bit depressing. But then I got a lucky break. I heard a rumour about a Crested Myna held in a wildlife recovery centre north of Vancouver on the Sunshine Coast. My older brother, Reagan, lives on that part of the coast, and I put him on to it. He called back a few minutes later, explaining that he had found the bird, and that its keepers would be willing to see me.

Surely there is a special place in Heaven for people who devote themselves to the aid of distressed animals. If so, then Clint and Irene Davy will be strolling through passport control at Heaven’s gates while waving heartily at sinners. Sick and injured animals are presumably not the only things in Clint and Irene’s lives, but they represent a pretty good chunk of it. They operate a wildlife rehabilitation centre out of their home just off the highway that runs up British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast. There may be a type of injured animal that they would turn away, but I cannot imagine what sort of beast it would be. Perhaps a three-legged skunk with tapeworms.

One animal that they had not turned away was a Crested Myna that they had named “Morris” … as in Morris the Myna … as in Morris Minor … as in the car. I am not a real big fan of puns. In anticipation of my visit, Clint and Irene had dug through their files to find out exactly when Morris had come to live with them. It was May 31, 1986. Morris had been brought to them as a youngster, along with a sibling that had died shortly afterward. The Davys had been living in Richmond, on the mainland, at the time, and when Morris was healthy enough to release, they had been advised
against doing so by folks at the Vancouver Natural History Society, who reasoned that with the Crested Myna population dropping so quickly, Morris could do a lot worse than to live out his life in captivity. Although there is little data available, the record for longevity in a Crested Myna in North America appears to be that of a banded individual who held out for eleven years and two months. Morris was demolishing that record.

Although other rescued birds were put safely away in cages, Morris flew freely in the Davys’ “bird room.” He was particularly keen to perch on a tree branch toward the ceiling, out of the reach of the strange person who had just arrived to invade his world. It wasn’t hard to lure him down, though; I just had to extend my left arm with a mealworm on my palm and then look away as if I wasn’t the least bit interested in him. Morris had beautiful shiny feathers, a clean vent and nostrils, and clear eyes. Clint and Irene put Morris’s great health at such an advanced age down to good nutrition. He was given an endless supply of grapes, bird seed, mealworms, and dog and cat food. He was noisy to the point where at times it was impossible for us to hear each other speak. There was an air of superiority about Morris. But then, I suppose he had a reason to feel a bit lofty. As far as I or anyone else could tell, he was the only representative of his species for many thousands of kilometres, and he wasn’t likely to ever see another bird quite like himself.

A
LL OF MY CONTACTS
in Vancouver promised to stay on top of the story and to let me know if Crested Mynas were seen again. If a few weeks went by and none of the 4 million eyes in the area spotted one, I felt it was pretty safe to consider them extinct in the wild in North America.

And then, exactly two weeks later, I was roused from my well-deserved Saturday morning lie-in by a long-distance telephone call from my younger brother, Ross. “Weren’t you looking for Crested Mynas?” I explained that I had been, and asked him why he felt it necessary to wake me up to confirm a rather minor detail. “There
is an article in this morning’s
Vancouver Sun
that I think you might be interested in.”

According to the article, a Vancouver store for bird enthusiasts had a strange visitor in mid-February, exactly the same time I was searching for the last of the Crested Mynas. Employees of the store guessed that this fellow was in his fifties and said that he spoke with a German or eastern European accent. He claimed to have found the bodies of the last two mynas at the warehouse location. General speculation was that one bird had been hit by a car while foraging on the street, and that the second individual kept returning to the spot until it was also struck and killed. The folks at the bird store asked the mysterious stranger what he had done with the corpses. He claimed that he had buried them together in a quiet spot in Stanley Park. Even though they didn’t get the gentleman’s name or contact details, employees of the store were inclined to believe him.

There were no further sightings of mynas in Vancouver, and it seemed safe to assume that the species was represented in North America by Morris alone. As healthy as he was, he couldn’t last forever, and passed away in September of 2007. In a way, Morris was an icon of the changing face of North American avifauna.

REASON NUMBER FIVE FOR INTRODUCING A FOREIGN SPECIES: BECAUSE MY PREVIOUS CROP GOT WIPED OUT BY A DISEASE.

I
N THE FIRST MUZZY MOMENTS
after waking, I could make absolutely no sense of the world around me. Lisa was on the other side of the king-sized bed, which virtually guaranteed that I had not died and gone to hell. Instead, it started to look as though I might have landed in Heaven. I spied a package of anti-malarial tablets on the bedside table, and so assumed that we were somewhere tropical. Wherever it was, we had gone in style. The room, five-stars or close to it, was decorated in dark wood and brass. Over the dull hum of a ceiling fan I heard the crash of surf, and after retrieving my eyeglasses I spied palm trees. Wherever we were, it was very exotic. All I needed now was a good book and a nice cup of tea.

When it comes to an easy-reading book, it is hard to beat the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. When Doyle got tired of writing about the great detective, he turned his attentions to a dazzling array of other short fiction—dazzling mainly because it is so blindingly awful that even undergraduate students of English
literature are not required to read it. As evidence, I offer up the short story “De Profundis,” written by Doyle in 1892. In “De Profundis,” a man dies at sea from smallpox and his body is tossed overboard by his shipmates. A couple of weeks later, his corpse pops to the surface just as his widow sails by. She spots her husband’s corpse an instant before it is devoured by a passing shark. To me this is a shockingly bad storyline.

However, in “De Profundis,” Doyle also wrote about the production of tea in Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon, and is frequently quoted by persons proud of that industry. He wrote,

It is a shame that such a good quotation comes from such an awful piece of piffle.

I had been drowning in tea since childhood, but I really didn’t know much about the life of tea before it hits the hot water. And so, when the opportunity came to attend the wedding of friends on the island of Sri Lanka, coupled with a trip to see tea in a field instead of just a cup, I couldn’t resist.

Charu Chandrasekera has enough personality for three people. She has deep copper skin and broody eyes, and I have never seen her in a mellow mood. When she arrived at the University of Calgary to begin graduate studies in medical physiology, the match between Charu and her supervisor was gritty, bordering on incandescent. After consulting with a graduate student advisor, Charu was directed to speak with my wife, Lisa, a little further along in her graduate degree. Knowing many of the pitfalls, Lisa helped
Charu avoid some of the nastier ones. Charu came to think of Lisa as a big sister, and me as a big brother by extension.

Charu eventually took up with fellow Sri Lankan Chaminda Basnayake, who was working toward a Ph.D. in engineering. Chaminda has an unfair advantage over other males; he is impossibly handsome, but in a boy-like unthreatening way. Chaminda saw Charu in all of her moods and loved each of them. The fullness of time saw them married in Prince Edward Island, but something was left unfinished. The marriage wouldn’t be quite complete until it was solemnized by a wedding in Sri Lanka. And we, as honorary brother and sister, were invited.

D
ON’T BOTHER LOOKING
for a direct flight to Colombo from anywhere else you might be because there isn’t one. Instead, Lisa and I took a flight to London, followed by a long layover in Heathrow’s Terminal 3. We then made a jump to the United Arab Emirates. The departure lounge for the flight to Abu Dhabi was, by far, the most boisterous I have ever encountered. It was a carnival of shouting—one passenger to another, through cellphones, and at the television screen broadcasting BBC One sports highlights. When the call came for passengers in the first three rows to board the plane, almost everyone rushed the gate.

Lisa and I couldn’t afford tickets in the Diamond Zone, or even the Pearl Zone. No precious or semi-precious stones for us; we were to be seated in the Coral Zone, but judging from the stampede of kittens that tried to get on the plane ahead of us, it was a misspelling of “Corral Zone.” The flight began with a prayer in Arabic. I was praying that the flight attendants would manage to keep the kittens in line without having to throw any of them out.

At Abu Dhabi International Airport, the gentleman attending the X-ray machine that scanned our luggage passed the time by burning his hand with a confiscated cigarette lighter. We faced a fourteen-hour layover. As pretty as the airport is—based on a blue desert-flower motif—no one would want to spend fourteen hours there, so a travel agent had arranged for us to spend the layover in a local hotel. We
were rounded up and handed from agent to agent in a tentative way that suggested that this sort of arrangement had never been tried before. Eventually we found ourselves on a bus to the hotel.

At an intellectual level, I had always realized that the United Arab Emirates is in the desert. I have been to deserts before, but somehow I wasn’t ready for the full enormity of the desert that blankets this part of the planet. Once away from the well-watered, tree-lined avenue from the airport, the world was sand. Not scrubby vegetation clinging to the ground wherever it could find a bit of water, but sand. Great mounds of the stuff as far as the eye could see. We rolled past small communities composed of identical white houses in the style of Scottish castles. Each community had its own mosque, but not a lot of chlorophyll-based life forms.

Poor Lisa. As I caught some sleep, she came to terms with gathering nausea, probably the result of the inflight meal, which had contained a lot of garlic, which Lisa’s stomach doesn’t tolerate. Instead of sleeping, she stared up at the orange sign on the ceiling, which indicated the direction of most holy Mecca.

And so after my first, very brief, trip to the Middle East, we faced a jump across the Indian Ocean. As we approached Sri Lanka, we were told that “Health regulations require spraying of the air before landing. We will be doing this shortly.” There was no mention about what the spray contained. DDT? Arsenic? Lemon-scented furniture polish? We were advised that, should we wish, we could cover our mouths and noses with handkerchiefs. Who carries a handkerchief anymore? Lisa and I did our best with tissues but were the only ones to do so. Flight attendants marched up and down the cabin emptying aerosol spray cans, discharging what smelled like hair spray. Perhaps this was Sri Lanka’s contribution to ozone depletion. It all led to bouts of sniffing and coughing. I’ll bet the rich snobs in the Diamond Zone didn’t get that sort of treatment.

Airport arrivals always remind me of cattle ramps at livestock auctions, with each new arrival getting the undivided attention of the assembled throng. This applies to Colombo International more than most. Behind a barrier on the right as we passed customs
were thirty-six eager chauffeurs, each holding a placard with one or more surnames. As Lisa and I glanced toward them, all thirty-six cards went up, like thirty-six chicks begging for a meal. On our left, behind another barrier, were 250 people awaiting the arrival of friends and family. The scene was very orderly, particularly for four thirty on a hot and sticky morning. In Colombo, waiting had become a spectator sport.

There was no sign of Charu and Chaminda, so we took the opportunity to have a little look around. There was a sprinkling of Christmas decorations, including what can only be described as multicoloured disco balls. We found a very liberal air-conditioning unit to stand under. Time passed without any evidence of our friends. We had slept just a few hours in the past forty-eight, and the heat and humidity were washing over us like an incoming tide. The grind of endless bodies was starting to make me dizzy. What does this country look like after it has woken up?

And then our hosts arrived, their faces full of joy and welcome. They reclaimed their cab, and we headed from the airport, through Colombo, and south toward our hotel in the community of Mount Lavinia. We got little more than impressions in the predawn light, but those exotic scenes made my eyes dance. Even at that ungodly hour on a Monday morning, buses were disgorging workers at garment factories. It was raining and some people had umbrellas; the remainder didn’t seem to care about getting wet. Traffic was crushingly heavy, with an equal mixture of buses, minivans, commercial trucks, three-wheeled taxis, motorcycles, and bicycles. Few of these vehicles had headlights. Pedestrians were shown no mercy. Stray dogs showed no mercy. I felt swelling motion sickness for the last thirty minutes of our seventy-minute journey. I needed a cup of tea.