Birding Babylon: A Soldier's Journal from Iraq

Tom Valtin, for the Sierra Club Planet: How long were you stationed in Iraq?

Jonathan Trouern-Trend: I was there about a year, from February 2003 until February 2004. The first three weeks I was in Kuwait; the rest of the time I was stationed in the Sunni Triangle. Kuwait was a dead zone so far as birds were concerned, but once I got to the base inside Iraq, birds were plentiful.

Planet: I was surprised to read that there were so many birds to be found in a war zone.

JTT: The birds were largely unfazed by the turmoil. I'd read about how in World War I, as soon as the artillery stopped the birds began singing. I was lucky to be stationed near water in Iraq. There were ponds nearby, a couple acres each, that were created to drain the huge air strips on our base.

Planet: Has the environment in Iraq been devastated by the war?

JTT: Well, the country had been through a lot even before this conflict, with the Iran-Iraq war, and Saddam Hussein's draining of the southern marshes in the late 1980s and early 1990s-it was a form of collective punishment against the Marsh Arabs, because they participated in Shiite uprisings. But the U.N. has a marshlands observation program that produces weekly satellite images, and vegetation in the southern marshes is back up to 50 percent of pre-drainage levels; it was down to 7 percent at one point. A group called Eden Again, headed by an Iraqi who studied in California, is now bringing together a proposal for marshland recovery, focusing on sustainable development.

Planet: What's it like to be an environmentalist in a war zone? What do you do with your environmental consciousness?

JTT: At times it seemed like a conflict to have an environmental consciousness in a war zone, but a lot of people may not know is that military lands are often in very good shape, at least in the U.S. Bird species are doing very well on military bases. In Iraq, the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers were basically dumping grounds before the war-the environment wasn't something people were giving a lot of thought to. One thing I noticed is that there were no set-aside areas or nature reserves in Iraq, and no national park system-just hunting reserves. This isn't so in neighboring Iran, which has lands set aside for conservation, and Iran participates in biodiversity conferences and the like. I think Iraq was just so dominated by Saddam's cult of personality for 20-plus years that it stifled this kind of activity. Unfortunately, many of Iraq's large mammals were disappearing by the 1920s, and this only accelerated when people started getting cars and guns. But hyenas and jackals and wolves are still there-not large wolves like in North America, but small like coyotes. And the birds have been incredibly resilient. When the southern marshes were reflooded starting in 2003 the birds returned to breed. There's a big marsh on the Iranian border that's a refuge-the area has expanded to six times its former size just in the last three years.

Planet: How did your military colleagues react to your birding and keeping a birding blog? Did you take a lot of grief?

JTT: It ran the spectrum. The hard-charging 19-year-olds who suffer from testosterone poisoning thought it was a girly-man pursuit. But some of the doctors would go out with me sometimes. Keeping the blog helped me interact with a lot of people, including Iraqis. I got an e-mail from a southern Iraqi birder, a father like me, so there was that commonality as well. The blog actually helped me keep in touch with my kids while I was in Iraq. I shied away from things that would worry them; I'd write about visiting children in a neighboring village, not that we got bombed today and four people were killed. But so far as my military colleagues were concerned, I think the blog helped soldiers see things with new eyes. Every time they found a weird bird or bug they couldn't identify they'd let me know about it or bring it to me. I have a collection of insects from all over the world, and I collected bugs while I was in Iraq. I'm giving talks about insects now that I'm back in the States. People who are stationed in Iraq have been in touch with me ever since I arrived back home. A woman who's a helicopter pilot-she flies huge transport choppers-just wrote to me about seeing flamingoes.

Planet: How does birding in Iraq compare with birding in the U.S.?

JTT: The Iraq list is actually about the same as in Connecticut in terms of numbers-over 100 species-and you find many of the same species. The chaos is pretty focused around Baghdad, and even so, people still get out of the city and into nature. There's a long appreciation of wildlife and nature in Iraq, especially in the north, in the Kurdish areas. And even in Baghdad, from the street you might see little evidence of nature, but go inside, off the street, and people always have a nice little garden. There's a big bird market in Baghdad, and Arabs from the Gulf States still come to Iraq to go waterfowl hunting. The outbreak of bird flu has slowed this, but there are still plenty of safe areas.

In spite of the war, good things are happening. Thirty-five environmental organizations are registered in Iraq now, working together-groups like Greenpeace of Kurdistan and the Iraq Nature Conservation Association. They have roundtable meetings to develop capacity to do projects together, and they continue to do their thing even when the country is beset with problems, like it is now. The Palestinian Authority has been handing out brochures to farmers about bird conservation. I started a Wikipedia page on Iraq fauna, letting people know how they can help. Western NGOs can do some real good in areas like community organizing, women's issues, and environmental health. And getting children involved is really important. The hopeful thing to me is that many of the people I met were very positive, resilient, can-do, well educated. They'll be the next generation of leaders, including environmental leaders. I'd definitely be willing to go back and do a bio blitz with environmental groups if the State Department says it's OK-people would be amazed. There's an interesting story to be told in that this is one of the places with the longest history of human-animal interaction anywhere. Now that I'm back in the States I'm giving talks at schools on this subject, and I'd love to do the same in Iraq.

Planet: Did you have a favorite bird sighting in Iraq?

JTT: My favorite, I think, was the white-cheeked bulbul; I had many sightings even when it was 120 degrees out. We'd be wilting in the heat, and these little birds were flitting around like it was nothing. And there were birds I saw all the time on the base that I'll always associate with my time there. We had barn owls nesting in our bunker.