IsraelOne man was unwilling to let the country go on without the
requisite mascot. Yossi Leshem, a wild-haired ornithologist from Israel’s International Center
for the Study of Bird Migration at Latrun, orchestrated the national campaign
with his colleague Dan Alon. “You always need crazy ones to get anything done,”
he says, offering an explanation for why it took so long for Israel to pick a bird. In this
case, crazy is code for supremely dedicated, and Leshem, behind his kind eyes
and rumpled t-shirts, has a Protean energy and organizational flare that has
been serving Israel’s birdlife since the moment he banded his first nest of
buzzards, an experience he claims that “choked my soul.”
Israel
is heaven for people who love birds. The twice-annual migration attracts 500
million specimens from 540 species. If not for its troubled history, Israel would be another Costa Rica, with British twitchers
looking up in the trees rather than Southern Baptists looking down at the old
stones. Consider the kingfisher species alone: There’s the Asiatic Smyrna
kingfisher, the pied kingfisher from Africa,
and the European common kingfisher, all in the same place. Leshem knows how
good he has it: “We are at the junction of three continents,” he says. “From a
political point of view, this is disastrous, but for birds it is magnificent.”
The
biodiversity only added to the difficulty of choosing a single bird to
represent the whole country. The concept of a bird representing a country--any
country--is inherently ridiculous. Birds mock borders. They are the epitome of
statelessness. Which means that Israel
has had to pick a representative stateless animal for a state created by one
stateless people and that rendered another people stateless. The
decision-making process has been typically Israeli, democratic but fragmented
and confusing. A panel of Israeli ornithologists whittled the list down to 10
species, the only requirement being that the birds nest in Israel. One quarter of the vote
came from schoolchildren at various schools throughout the country, one quarter
from the army, one quarter from a panel of public figures, and one quarter from
general voting on the website of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel.
No
doves made the list and no hawks either, though several birds of prey were
possibilities. In interviews before the vote, Ehud Barak stumped for the lesser
kestrel, but it’s not surprising that he would be prejudiced in favor of a
pint-sized deadly striker who drops out of nowhere on its prey. The other
predators were serious long shots. The white owl is an ancient icon of wisdom
but does little more than kill and mate. The griffon vulture feeds on the dead.
Through no fault of its own, a local sunbird with a gorgeous blue sheen--just Israel’s color--bears the official name of Palestine sunbird. So that
was out. Other birds were problematic because of their behavior. The
yellow-vented bulbul is a lovely passerine, but it makes its nest by stealing
from other birds’ homes. Also, its name is used by both Palestinian and Israeli
children to refer to the penis--potty mouth knows no borders. Many of the other
potential candidates, while less controversial, also seem far less powerful.
Are the European goldfinch, the spur-winged lapwing, or the white-breasted
kingfisher really Israeli? Israel,
land of the white-breasted kingfisher?