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All images ©2005 Joy Fatooh
Writing
My parallel freelance writing career facilitates working with writers on illustration projects, or sometimes doing writing and editing along with illustration:
Bishop Field Office Sensitive Plants Guide, 1994: Editing, layout and illustrations
Eastern Sierra Scenic Byway interpretive displays, 1997-1998: Wrote, edited and/or illustrated several panels
Motor Touring in the Eastern Sierra, a guide promoting tourism and environmental ethics, 2001: wrote and illustrated
This project was recognized with the 2002 national BLM Excellence in Interpretation award (given to Jim Jennings, who originated the concept).
To be published in 2008: the Mono County companion guide which I also wrote and illustrated.
Other published writing:
Weekly arts feature for The Inyo Register, 1985-1989
Feature articles on arts and wildlife for Mammoth Sierra magazine, 1985-1989
Publicity features of Inyo Council for the Arts, 1985-1989
Reintroduced Pronghorn: 12 Years Later, proceedings of North American Pronghorn Workshop, 1994
It’s a Wild Life, past bimonthly feature for Eastern Sierra Audubon Society newsletter The Sierra Wave
Editing:
BLM Bishop Resource Management Plan, 1990-1993
All text for new Eastern Sierra InterAgency Visitor Center
Current editor of The Sierra Wave
In progress:
A biography of Demila Sanders and a collection of essays
A sample from my Audubon newsetter feature It's a Wild Life
The Kestrel and the Oriole
The kestrel hovers and hovers but sees no prey. Beyond her sight two downy nestlings wait, growing weak for lack of food and unprotected from hungry raven or heavy rain. Her mate disappeared a week ago. It was a long, cold, dry winter; prey are scarce, and her hunting luck has been bad. She spots a sagebrush vole but it darts into a hole. She ventures over a hill and cautiously approaches a spring-fed aspen grove outside her usual range.
The aspen grove is delirious with birdsong. The kestrel positions herself on a high branch at the edge of a small, grassy clearing deep within the grove and waits, desperately alert. An anomalous motion catches her eye: a fledgling Bullock’s oriole is beginning its first wobbly flight across the clearing. Instantly she assesses its drooping trajectory and launches her ballistic course to intercept it. Wham! – despite an erratic wobble at the last split-second, she succeeds in knocking it to the ground.
Alive but disabled, the fledgling oriole lies stunned on the wet grass. The kestrel moves to pick it up – and quickly changes course. More bad luck. A human has entered the clearing. The kestrel dodges into a tree and watches, waiting for the human to flounder obliviously onward as humans usually do.
But the human is looking directly at the fallen oriole. The human looks from the fledgling to its alarmed parents that have arrived noisily on the scene, back at the fledgling on the ground. The human takes a step forward.
What happens next?
If you are the human you can write your own ending. If you know proper wildlife rescue procedures and feel a strong personal moral imperative to save the lives of weak, sick or injured animals, then I would never try to dissuade you from following your personal moral imperative.
If you are undecided, you may consider these facts as you stand at the clearing’s edge:
Everything that lives dies.
Everything that dies gets eaten. Something will eat it, be it predator or scavenger, charismatic as a kestrel or inconspicuous as an insect or microscopic as a microbe. Even if it’s consumed by flames, its ashes will add nutrients to the soil where a plant may grow.
A wild creature that dies in the wild will be eaten by another wild creature that will, therefore, live.
Ecosystems are powered by life and death, kept in balance by constant small adjustments, one life at a time.
Evolution is powered by life and death. The reason we have such a diversity of creatures is that, under various diverse circumstances, some live and some die.
When I step into a clearing and see something about to die, I stand in awe of all of that. And I wonder what is about to eat and live.
Something about to die because, for instance, it hit my windowpane might be a different story.
Because this is a true story, I can tell you my ending. I don’t know the beginning – how desperate the kestrel really was, whether it did indeed have nestlings or how long they had been hungry. I saw the fledgling oriole’s flight, the kestrel’s sudden strike and retreat. I saw the American kestrel – magnificent little falcon with graceful wings and lovely patterned head – eyeing me from the south edge of the clearing, and the adult Bullock’s oriole pair – brilliantly colored songbirds returned from the faraway tropics – calling their alarm from the north. Because my business there was a breeding bird survey, I took a gentle step forward to verify that the bird on the ground was indeed a fledgling Bullock’s oriole.
Then I followed my personal moral imperative: quickly and quietly I left that clearing, thrilled to have witnessed a rarely-seen drama of life and death and life.