My mother’s lesson lasted a lifetime
There are people in Connecticut who think the most beautiful song in the bird world is the song of the wood thrush — a flutelike heard at dawn and dusk in spring and early summer.
Wood thrushes migrate north in May. You can hear them singing in Connecticut well into the summer. But to do so, you have to work harder than you used to. The wood thrush population in the state has fallen by 2.4 percent a year, for 50 years.
Do the math. That’s a 73 percent overall drop. Basically, three out of every four wood thrushes have disappeared from the state.
That would be appalling even if it were an exception. But it’s not an exception. Depressingly, it’s become common. In 2019, a report in the journal Science showed that over the last five decades, North America has lost 30 percent of its birds.
That’s 3 billion birds. Gone.
As one of the authors of the Science report, ornithologist Peter Marra of Georgetown University, put it, after a revelation like that, conservationists can’t just go back to business as usual.
Luckily, there’s a chance now in Washington, D.C., to avoid going back to business as usual. A bill before Congress would
In 2019, a report in the journal Science showed that over the last five decades, North America has lost 30 percent of its birds. That’s 3 billion birds. Gone.
provide states with an extraordinary tool to help bring back birds and other wildlife.
Earlier this year committees in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives passed the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act. This bill is at the top of conservationists’ agenda and for several years has been supported by members of both parties in Congress.
Its beginnings go back to 2006, when Congress mandated that each state must write a Wildlife Action Plan and submit it for approval to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
But a plan without the money to carry it out is meaningless.
The Recovering America’s Wildlife Act would provide $1.3 billion a year from the U.S. Treasury to a fund to be distributed to the 50 states to carry out their plans. Connecticut’s share is estimated at $11.8 million per year.
Most wildlife conservation money now comes from license fees and taxes paid by hunters and anglers. It is spent to protect and increase the number of game animals. The Recovering America’s Wildlife Act would provide money to protect wildlife you can’t hunt, including Connecticut’s birds.
In other words, the pieces are in place: the need (3 billion birds gone), the blueprints (federally approved state Wildlife Action plans), and the money ($1.3 billion a year).
In Connecticut, it isn’t only wood thrushes that are vulnerable. The number of scarlet tanagers — colorful songbirds that nest in the forest canopy — has plummeted by 65 percent. Federally threatened piping plovers are hanging on only through extraordinary conservation efforts. Saltmarsh sparrows seem headed toward extinction within decades because of rising sea level.
Funds from the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act could help all those birds, and many others.
There are broader-scale benefits to passing the act as well. Connecticut Audubon showed in its recent “Connecticut State of the Birds” report that there is an extraordinary opportunity to improve habitat to both help bring back bird populations and get closer to the state’s climate change goals.
As explained in “Connecticut State of the Birds,” about 80 percent of the state has been identified as having high value for birds and high value for capturing and storing the carbon that is responsible for global warming.
It includes vast forests in the northwest and southeast of the state, urban and suburban areas throughout Connecticut, and tidal marshes along the coast.
Protecting and restoring those lands would bring Connecticut almost onequarter of the way toward its carbon reduction goal.
Funds from the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act could be used for the habitat restoration work that would make that happen.
This is an unprecedented chance to do something that is good for wildlife and also good for people. And it is too important to miss.
Connecticut Audubon has made a strong recommendation in its 2019, 2020, and 2021 “State of the Birds” reports for passage of the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act.
The time for the U.S. Congress to do so is now.
Bart Giamatti, the former Yale president and my predecessor as commissioner of Major League Baseball, often asked why there is no fourth base in baseball. Why is the final base called “Home” and not numbered like the other bases?
The concept of “home” is deeply rooted in our literature from Homer and “The Odyssey” to classics such as Thomas Wolfe’s “You Can’t Go Home Again” and many others. The theme of the departure from home and the struggle to find the way back is perhaps a reason the baseball terms have remained so vibrant. The only time one “counts” in baseball is by getting “home.” When I get “home” to my youthful neighborhood of New Haven, I recall things that have counted.
Home is where family shared my every day, and so I think of parents and grammar school teachers and trying a cigarette with older boys and taking a 5-cent candy bar from a local store shelf while “forgetting” to pay for it. The store owner gently alerted my mother, and she knew just what to do. I was about 10 at the time.
When my mother sat me down to explain why stealing a candy bar was a serious matter and not simply a “mistake,” I knew her topic was a big deal because she had me sitting in the same chair at our dining room table where I sat when she explained where babies came from. She chose a formal setting to warn me her message required my full attention. She was stern and wearing her schoolteacher face.
She explained the harm to the store owner to whom I was ordered to apologize while paying for the candy. I was told how that man depended on the store income to support his children. She explained that stealing a small candy bar was the same as stealing another boy’s baseball glove. Some things were just not done. I was silent.
She emphasized the most serious damage I caused was to the faith in me that she and my father shared. I had betrayed them and myself. I felt shaken and shamed. She warned me the loss of my self-respect occasioned by my misconduct was a major form of punishment and urged me to learn my lesson. Her point lasted my lifetime.
My ancestral East Rock area of New Haven is now a bit gentrified and more racially diverse, but the old Marlin gun factory still stands on Willow Street, and Blake Field, where my father umpired softball games on muggy summer nights, is still in use. The houses are the same threestory Victorians with tiny yards and ancient garages in the rear. I recall the area warmly, but it has no special meaning to me now.
So why do I feel the tug to go “home” when the occasion arises. I believe one learns at a young age the set of values that will govern through life. I also am convinced mothers are the essential ingredient to the teaching of those values and surely in my case I was fortunate. I return “home” to remind myself of what counts in life, and it is the noble values of intelligence, curiosity, discipline and honor that began to develop in New Haven with my mother in charge. My hope for this nation lies with our young mothers.
Connecticut native Fay Vincent was commissioner of Major League Baseball from September 1989 through September 1992. He previously served as chairman of Columbia Pictures and executive vice president of Coca-Cola.