Revista Elite Magazine - Atlanta, GA

I could imagine the small bird fluttering its wings, brushing up its plume, chirping (does it chirp?), not at all fazed by its new captors. You see, this bird has never seen a human face before; it was recently announced as a new species, therefore being a new discovery for us authoritative humans.

Then again, how do we know it’s not the other way around; how do we know the bird hadn’t, in fact, seen a human face before the good people at the Bulletin of the British Ornithologists’ Club (which first published the findings) came to capture it in the mountains of Colombia?

I guess it’s all relative; new bird species are rare, apparently (and according to ornithologists) only about three are made every year, which begs the question: if on average there are three new bird species every year, why is that considered rare?
What I find rare is that — and I’ll put my tree-hugger hat on now — we humans have the notion of fullness, of having seen and lived it all; as you may recall, the dodo bird was made extinct by hunters.

“The description of a new bird is a rare event,” Blanca Huertas of The Natural History Museum in London told Reuters news service. “However, this is just the first of several new species that we will be describing from the Yariguíes mountains [of Colombia], including several new butterflies.”

Ms. Huertas is well-intended; I can safely assume she is doing a job she loves very much in a place she might hold dear. But she reminds me of a colleague of hers, a fellow by the name of John Blair, an aspiring Ph.D. candidate from Duke University.

Perhaps Ms. Huertas had a chance encounter with Blair; after all, they’re both dedicated to studying Colombia’s vast and varied pool of bird specimens found throughout the mountainous jungle of the cordillera. Both are foreigners in a strange land, plagued by civil conflict, where it is only until now that so many native children have fled, that true nationalism (with a hint of state-sponsored patriotism) is creeping out from the cobwebs of our memory.

We do remember the Himno Nacional. But only after muttering the first few bars and trying to sing it out loud so as to retrain your ear to hear it in the silence of yesteryear until finally, you can sing it all.

Then again, both Ms. Huertas and Mr. Blair live in a fictional world, one where the magical only happens outside what we think is real. On the one hand, Ms. Huertas can only take on her research with funding from a British institution, can only hope to publish her paper on foreign academic journals, and can only spread the news of her finding through foreign media.

The story might’ve been picked up by the Colombian press; I don’t know, I didn’t bother to look. As of now, it probably was reduced to a side-note headline; buried online somewhere after only a few hours on the homepage of the newspaper of record, behind sensational news about some child rapper, or a pregnant 11-yearold, or the exclusive nude photographs of that kitsch música de carrilera singer.

Boy, the people commenting on that story online sure had support for the woman; after all, it’s what Colombian society has trained their young women to do. Strip, smoke, pop a pill or two, and have plenty of sex. But where’s the taste?

That’s the kind of fiction Ms. Huertas lives in; Mr. Blair on the other hand, resides in a more traditional ambience of fictional Colombian jungle, fictional MURC revolutionaries, fictional Nisex, or New York Stock Exchange; John Blair is a character in a short story (“Near extinct birds of the Central Cordillera”) by American author Ben Fountain, from his forth-coming short story anthology, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara.

The parallels between Blair’s fiction, in which the Chairman of the fictional New York Stock Exchange, Thomas Spasso, pays a visit to the MURC guerillas in the midst of Colombian jungle (who are holding Blair captive); and Ms. Huertas’ fiction, in which a very real Richard Grasso, the very real former Chairman of the very real New York Stock Exchange, or NYSE, held meetings with FARC rebels, are astounding.

The main difference being that, of course, Ms. Huertas is not being held captive (kidnapped) by the FARC; she’s being held captive by what’s holding the near extinct birds in Blair’s fictional Colombia. It is a sense that community is not being built because it has never existed; and even though you grew up in society feigning community, the birds in Blair’s fiction had sanctuary up until the rebels sold out themselves for cash.

But in the end, is it really that much different?

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