Lessons from Nature: Life Can Be Unfair

  Warblers are tiny birds weighing in at about 6 grams for an American Redstart, to about 16 grams for a Northern Waterthrush, both of them species I found around the camp on Manitoulin Island. In the tree in front of our cabin, a Black and White Warbler flitted about, often descending the tree trunk like a nuthatch. I noticed that the Black and White Warbler was feeding a juvenile Brown-headed Cowbird that was almost four times it size. 

   Brown-headed Cowbirds are brood parasitic passerines. They never make a nest, nor do they incubate or feed their young. The female lays an egg in the nest of another bird, often that of a tiny warbler. It is opportunistic and is not picky about the nest it chooses to invade. The adult Cowbirds watches the host nest and if the host bird tries to destroy the Cowbird egg, the Cowbird will destroy the host's eggs in return. This is unacceptable behaviour on every level, yet it is a native bird and is one of several brood parasite passerines found around the world. The Black and White Warbler worked constantly to feed the large Cowbird fledgling and I never saw any young Black and White Warblers around at all. 

   This is just a small representation of the injustice found in the world. How do we address unfairness, inequity, particularily the ill-treatment of children and youth?

   In nearby Manitowaning, the Assiginack Museum documents life in this settler community, the oldest European community on Manitoulin Island, established in 1836. Across Manitowaning Bay is the present-day Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory. 

Assiginack Museum, Manitowaning

   In front of the museum this year was a group of childrens' shoes, representing the deaths of Indigenous children in residential schools across Canada between 1828 and 1997. While the horrors of these schools were investigated between 2008 and 2015 by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, the recent discoveries of unnamed bodies in unmarked graves around the old residential schools has shocked the nation again. The generational traumas experienced by survivors and their families continue to this day. One of the books I read while on vacation was Five Little Indians by Michelle Good. It was painful but important book to read. I cannot even imagine how I could have coped if my children had been forcibly removed from my care when they were young.  

   The Government of Canada, as well as the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches who ran the schools, have much to account for. As I watched the Black and White Warbler, I admired its diligent care of the interloping fledgling that belonged to a bird of another species. There are many kind and compassionate humans who would act in the same way, but sadly, kindness is not a consistent human trait.    

   Life is not always fair. We must do what we can as individuals, communities and nations to seek justice for those who are vulnerable, abandoned and traumatized due to racial, economic and sociological inequities.