1. Stop here and now with the fall clean-up of your garden, should you be lucky to have one. Leaf blankets, flower stalks, withering vines all provide much needed survival help to pollinators and birds, many of whom have not had the easiest of times. (One exception: clean vegetable patches IF they had some serious pest issue. You don’t want to give those critters a chance to overwinter in place.) If you don’t trust me you can read more professional explanations here and here. “Wild” gardens provide many more food sources and places for shelter to the birds in winter. Drop the rake until February…

2. Besides the avian beneficiaries of inaction we humans benefit as well. Here is a neat study showing that the exposure to the sight and sound of birds improves our wellbeing. In case you need scientific evidence for that.

Bird and Their Songs Boost Our Mental Health, Study Finds

3. All this came to mind when listening to a podcast about birds. A special bird, in this case who turned out to be a hybrid between two different bird species, a truly rare event. Hybrids occasionally happen between close cousins (1 in 10 000,) but the two parents of the bird under consideration hadn’t shared a common ancestor in over 10 million years. The specimen was a mix between a rose-breasted grosbeak and a scarlet tanager (whose song he sang, while the looks were more like the grosbeak mom.)

The scientific assumption is that these “evolutionary experiments” confer a survival advantage to the hybrid, which in turn might shore up an avian lineage that is endangered. (Contrary to popular belief, hybrids can breed – if the hybrid mates with another hybrid, or with the same species as one of its parents.)

“It allows… independently evolved groups to share, that they’re, you know, sort of trading information back and forth on solving problems that the environment presents to them. So this might actually be important for adaptation to climate change, for example.”

4. Which brings us – you must have been waiting for it already if only as proof that my brain is back in action – to hybridization as a religious and political issue. As any number of nationalist Christian websites will tell you (and no, I am not linking to them) G-d does not want animal species to mix, or human bloodlines to merge in ways of racial intermarriage. This Divine command is found, they claim, in verse after verse in the bible – all conveniently and selectively cited – and originated as a punishment for transgression against Noah by one of his sons, the dark Ham, who in perpetuity is condemned to be inferior and whose descendants are to live in slavery. Japheth, the second son, is an idealized and blessed form of humanity superior to Ham in every conceivable way, representing Whiteness, and Shem is an archetype in between. In one foul swoop you have: an established hierarchy between White and Black, the former superior, prohibition of intermarriage, and a justification of slavery on divine authority. (In fairness many other Christian websites point out that this is false biblical interpretation.)

Note, these are not considerations of the American Antebellum South, when they were prominent. Or occurrences of the 1950s and 60s, like Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia citing the Bible in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or Reverend Jerry Falwell attributing the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision to Chief Justice Warren’s failure to know and follow God’s word, or Mississippi Senator Theodore G. Bilbo explaining that “miscegenation and amalgamation are sins of man in direct defiance with the will of God.” Ref.)

Race separation as a Divine decree and the dominion of Whiteness are making a comeback in ever louder public voices and votes here and now in 2022. Consider the issues of the constitutional right to intermarriage: some weeks ago, 157 House Republicans voted against the Respect for Marriage Act, which would enshrine marriage equality in federal law. Senator Mike Braun of Indiana explicitly stated that not banning interracial marriage was a mistake. Regulating racial boundaries has been a main topic for international right wing forces, as heard in Hungarian PM’s Victor Orban’s speeches against mixing races, which were loudly welcomed by right wing audiences in the U.S. As the conservative legal movement grows more emboldened, are there any protections that we can unquestioningly rely on?

5. I am writing this on the day this Supreme Court is hearing arguments about Affirmative Action at a Public University. You can figure out for yourself why that came to mind in my hybridizing thoughts.

Better go watch the birds on my leaf-strewn lawn.

Ham, Shem and Japheth’s story in music here.