The First Shall Be Last: West Peruvian Dove

Before every trip I’ve ever made to a new country, or a new state, a new wildlife refuge, a new garbage dump, or just about any other new place, I’ve always speculated about what the very first bird I’d see would be. I knew my first Peruvian bird would not be an Andean Cock-of-the-rock, a Marvelous Spatuletail, or an Andean Condor. It was equally unlikely to be a toucan or trogon. One of the common hummingbirds wasn’t entirely out of the question, but I arrived in Lima at midnight, spent that night in a hotel right across the street from the airport entrance, and had an early morning flight to northern Peru, so my first bird was obviously going to be an urban species.

Sure enough, the first birds I saw in Peru were on the tarmac at the airport in Lima. They weren’t House Sparrows, Starlings, or Rock Pigeons, the species I most often see at airports, and they also weren’t any of the gulls, though the likely gulls in Lima were species that would have been lifers. No, the very first species I saw in Peru was, appropriately enough, the West Peruvian Dove. I got a quick look before it flew off, so I'm sure that's what I saw—it had a plain back and a distinctive white edge to the wing. A few minutes later we found doves again, and I took some crappy photos through the window as we waited for our flight, but I was thrilled—pictures of my first LIFER in Peru!

Unfortunately, when I got home and studied the pictures, I could clearly see little dark markings on the back and on the face that made the photographed birds Eared Doves—not a lifer at all! I'd already seen that species in Ecuador in 2006. I'm still certain that the first bird I saw at the airport was a West Peruvian Dove, and I saw plenty more later that day and the next, but am both disappointed that I don't have a photo of my lifer and disconcerted that I misidentified the Eared Doves in my photos.

If I’d gone to Peru any time before 1997, the West Peruvian Dove would not have been a lifer—it used to be considered a population of our own White-winged Dove, which I’d first seen in Texas back in the 70s, and have since seen in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Florida, and Kansas, as well as in Mexico, Guatemala, and Costa Rica.

The ones in Central America remain in the same species as the White-winged Dove, but those of the Pacific lowlands from southwestern Ecuador south to northern Chile were split into a separate species based on their song, some morphological differences, and mitochondrial DNA. The species is also called the Pacific Dove and, in Peru, the cuculí for its lovely and distinctive song.

Living up to the name, we only saw West Peruvian Doves on our first and second days in Peru, when we were in the lowlands west of the Andes, and our final morning in downtown Lima. Like our White-winged Dove, the West Peruvian Dove has adapted well to urban life, so it was very easy to see right in the city. That final morning, back in Lima after six spectacular and full days of birding, we strolled a quarter mile or so from our downtown hotel to an urban park overlooking the coast. From there, I added nine more lifers—Red-legged Cormorant, Peruvian Pelican, Peruvian Booby, Blackish Oystercatcher, Belcher’s, Gray-hooded, Gray, and Kelp Gulls, and Inca Tern. Those birds were all distant, and it was difficult and frustrating trying to get identifiable photographs of at least some of them in the low morning light. But two other birds, both lifers on our first day—the Scrub Blackbird and West Peruvian Dove—spent the entire time we were there walking about just a few feet from us. I took about 450 photos that morning, but the best ones were of those two nearby birds, and the last bird photos I took in Peru were of that one confiding West Peruvian Dove in downtown Lima.

Information about the species is pretty sparse: the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Neotropical Birds website has nothing at all about its behavior or much else except noting that it’s expanding its range south thanks to being so well adapted to agriculture and urbanization, so some individuals are now being reported as far south as Santiago and some have crossed the Andes to northwest Argentina. The authors speculate that this dove may spread in arid zones throughout the southern cone of South America.

Cornell makes it easy for birders and ornithologists to upload information, photos, and recordings about Neotropical birds, as does Wikipedia, but I suspect that most people working or birding in the tropics feel more urgency to focus their attentions in habitats and on species that are more vulnerable. The West Peruvian Dove is common and increasing, so easy to overlook, as even I noticed when I was taking hundreds of pictures of distant lifers but just a handful of the beautiful dove right in front of me—one that had been a lifer just six days before!  Even though I did not pay it the attention it deserved, it stuck around me more than I deserved. I’m very grateful that the beautiful little dove that was my first Peruvian bird was also my last.

Alimentary, My Dear Hoatzin!

One of the most peculiar of all the birds in the world is also one of the coolest. The pheasant-sized Hoatzin, a bird of the swamps, riparian forests, and mangroves of the Amazon and the Orinoco Delta in South America, is the only species in the family Opisthocomidae, named for the Greek, “Wearing long hair behind,” referring to the long feathers that form its funky, loose crest.

But where this unique family falls in relation to other birds is still disputed. Right now, the checklist the Cornell Lab of Ornithology uses places it in the order with cuckoos and roadrunners, but all kinds of factors, including DNA, keep this under dispute. Some taxonomists place it as the only member of a unique order, but even they aren’t sure where to place that order in relation to other orders. It may be somewhat related to those cuckoos, or to cranes, or to shorebirds, or to doves. The more evidence we gather about Hoatzins, the more it contradicts evidence we already had, and the more confused ornithologists grow.

Hoatzins are unique in several ways. Unlike virtually all birds, they efficiently digest leaves, which comprise over 80 percent of their total diet. Leaves are far more difficult to digest than just about anything, including fruits and seeds, thanks to the cell walls that distinguish leafy plant cells from animal cells.

Cell walls make leaves, by their very nature, harder to digest than fruits or, once you get through the outer coating or shell, seeds, or any part of animals. Mammals that digest grasses or other leaves have specializations. Those rodents that feed on grasses have special grinding molars; larger mammals that feed on this plant matter digest it through fermentation. Ruminants such as cows, sheep, goats, deer, and giraffes do this in their foregut, continually regurgitating portions of food called cud that they chew all over again. Ruminants have a four-chambered stomach. Hippopotamuses have a three-chambered stomach. Horses, rabbits, and rhinoceroses have a single-chambered stomach, but an enlarged and well-developed cecum—an offshoot of the intestines—where fermentation digests the cellulose. Then the food returns to the intestines to be digested all over again.

To allow flight, birds require a light digestive system both in terms of their internal digestive equipment and in terms of passing all indigestible food out of their systems as quickly as possible. Only a very few birds, such as turkeys, chickens, and grouse, have well-developed caeca where fermentation of leafy matter or woody buds takes place, and these birds have large bodies and fairly limited, short-distance flight. Nighthawks and their relatives also have well-developed ceca to help them digest the chitin in insect exoskeletons, but most of the insect matter they eat is more digestible. The anaerobic bacteria in any bird caeca make droppings that include caecal wastes extremely smelly.

Geese feed on grass as well as all manner of more easily digested plant and animal material. But they aren’t specialized for digesting grass, so most of it goes in one end and comes out the other, which is why goose droppings are so very noticeable wherever geese are found. People don’t realize how lucky we are that geese aren’t specialized for digesting all that grass, or those copious, slippery droppings would also be horrifically smelly.

Baby geese can already digest some leaves, but eat more high-protein bugs at first.

Unlike all other birds, Hoatzins are specialized for digesting leaves in their foregut by fermentation, in a way fairly similar to that of mammalian ruminants. Instead of a multi-chambered stomach, Hoatzins have an unusually large crop, folded in two chambers, and a large, multi-chambered lower oesophagus. Their stomach chamber and gizzard are much smaller than in other birds, but their crop is so large that it displaces the flight muscles and keel of the sternum, making them extremely poor fliers. Fermentation in that oversized crop is smelly, giving Hoatzins their nickname, the stinkbird.

When I was working on my ill-fated Ph.D. studying nighthawk digestion, I took an avian physiology class in the University of Minnesota’s College of Veterinary Medicine taught by one of the world authorities in avian digestion, Gary Duke. Our midterm included a few essay questions, one about bird digestion. In a bolt of whimsy, I titled my answer, “Alimentary, my dear Hoatzin,” which tickled Gary’s fancy, so he gave me extra credit, making the Hoatzin even dearer to my heart.

If their digestive system weren’t enough to make Hoatzins exceptional, they are famous for the two claws that young birds sport on each wing. These well-developed claws help the awkward youngsters scramble through trees until they get more coordinated. The claws atrophy and disappear as the young birds mature.

In the tropics, most slow-flying birds the size of Hoatzins are endangered thanks to excessive hunting, but Hoatzins have a longstanding reputation for having bad-tasting meat due to the offensive odor of their digestive system. They also benefit from living in such wet habitat—deforestation in their range occurs in upland forests that can support heavy logging equipment, not the wetlands along the Amazon and its tributaries. So unlike many tropical birds in their range, Hoatzin numbers remain fairly strong.

Before this month, I’d seen Hoatzins three times, all in the area around Sacha Lodge in eastern Ecuador along the Rio Napo, back in February 2006. Hoatzins concentrate in the vegetation overhanging rivers, so we saw them only from boats. The huge birds stayed within the foliage, and in the unsteady boats, my only photos turned out to be exceptionally poor.

I was extremely hopeful about seeing Hoatzins in Peru, but we didn’t get out into any rivers by boat, and were only in Amazonia for one day, at the very end of the long dry season. Everywhere we were, the water levels were so low that the shorelines had retreated far from the vegetation. A half-hour before sunset on our final day, as we rode in our bus back to our lodge after our final birding spot, our guide explained why we hadn’t seen them on this trip. We were of course disappointed, but I was still basking in the thrill of having seen a Marvelous Spatuletail and one species we hadn’t expected but that I’d desperately wanted to see, the Andean Cock-of-the-rock. I reminded myself that it wasn't like the Hoatzin would have been a lifer. We were talking about how tricky birder expectations are when one birder glancing out the window saw not just one but a whole flock of Hoatzins! 

This was a narrow two-lane road, but our driver managed to turn the bus around and we piled out. And in the subdued lighting just before our final sunset in Peru, there they were—at least 20 Hoatzins who didn’t seem to mind getting their photos taken at all! What a magical way to end the final evening of a magical trip.

Peru! Traveling to Fight Climate Change

Every year, two million people from around the world head to Peru specifically to visit Machu Picchu. Some of them want to see South American wildlife and enjoy a wonderful experience at one of the genuine wonders of the world, but their visits don’t require protection of anything outside of this area. Indeed, the sheer magnitude of them has caused a lot of development of the area.

Meanwhile, every year barely three thousand people from around the world head to Peru specifically to see its amazing wildlife. This surprises me because Peru, a little smaller than Alaska and not quite twice the size of Texas, is home to such astonishingly magnificent biodiversity. At current count, 1,824 bird species are found in Peru, almost double the number seen in all of North America north of the Mexican border! And some of those birds of Peru are wondrously amazing, including the national bird—the Andean Cock-of-the-rock—and the mind-boggling array of 123 different species of hummingbirds, including the Fiery Topaz and the Marvelous Spatuletail. I was shocked to learn that the number of people visiting Peru to see an archeological site is three orders of magnitude larger than the number who visit Peru to see its amazing biological wealth.

Many people concerned about climate change of course see the relatively small number of birders visiting Peru as a good thing: airplane travel accounts for about 4–9 percent of the total climate change impact of human activity. For them, the fewer people flying to Peru, or any other place, the better.

It’s absolutely true that climate change is the hugest issue facing humans right now, and the birds that we treasure as well. The trick is that as serious as airplane travel is in the overall picture, tropical deforestation is at least equally critical, contributing at least 10 percent of the total climate change impact. And agricultural byproducts, especially from beef production, contribute over 12 percent, exacerbating the effects of deforestation wherever forests are replaced with cattle farms.

We talk about how horrible deforestation and large-scale cattle production are in the abstract without coming up with specific alternatives. People struggling to get by and just feed their families in impoverished counties often have no alternative but to lease or sell their land for logging and then for large-scale cattle or sun-grown coffee production until the soil is depleted. And the soils of tropical rainforests and cloud forests are singularly devoid of nutrients, which are locked up in the vegetation. When the forest is cut, the loss of vegetative-driven humidity in combination with the low-nutrient soils make regeneration slow—it can take centuries to replace a cut cloud forest, and many scores of years for even sparse ground cover to take over.

Meanwhile, local climate change effects due to the loss of the carbon-sucking, humidity-enhancing forest are exacerbated by patches of bare ground. Loss of relatively small amounts of rain or cloud forest leads to bigger losses in rainfall and cloud cover over a more widespread area, leading to more plant and wildlife deaths in a horrifying spiral. Many people don’t realize that the overall rainfall and cloud cover patterns in tropical forests are not mostly due to typical weather systems but are a self-generating set of local conditions because of the forest vegetation itself. When a tropical forest is cut down, climate change is exacerbated by more than the loss of carbon-sucking vegetation.

The Monteverde Cloud Forest of Costa Rica, which I visited with my daughter Katie in 2001, grows increasingly less cloudy as more and more landowners cut down their own forests. It's the trees themselves that create this cloud cover.

Right now, poor people in the Peruvian countryside make what little money they can by logging and agriculture. Some wise, forward-thinking Peruvians have worked tirelessly to try to persuade them to feed their families with money earned from hummingbird feeding stations and other ecotourism ventures that protect rather than cut down the forests.

Some environmentalists think it’s mere selfishness for birders to want to conserve species for their own sakes in the face of the massive destruction climate change promises, but protecting cloud and rain forests is an essential component in the fight against climate change. And the only way to do that is to give the landowners alternative ways of making a living without logging. Some kinds of ecotourism really do that.

Several landowners in northern Peru have started promoting conservation just in the past couple of years, since they discovered that they can get more money, now and into the future, by letting birders see rare hummingbirds on their property than they can earn by logging their land. Now they take pride in getting more and more hummingbirds at their feeding stations,. Their hummingbird numbers are directly related to the quality of diversity in nearby forested land as well as their own property. So they are not only protecting their own land but also encouraging their neighbors to preserve their land, too—a win for birds and biodiversity, a win for birders, a win in the fight against climate change, and a win for the planet.

The government-sponsored fam tour I was on this month was led by the co-founder of a fantastic small Peruvian company called GreenTours—their mission is embodied in their true commitment to their social and environmental responsibilities. They compensate for their own CO2 footprint via a conservation project of the Tambopata National Reserve, and are certified by the Green Initiative to be a carbon neutral company. The lodges and hotels where we stayed on our trip had much softer impacts on the environment than the huge 5-star resorts near Machu Picchu. Genuine eco-tourism is an entirely different thing than tourism in general.

Ecotourism specifically by birders supports the people who are directly preserving quality cloud and rainforest habitat, which has an even greater impact in the climate change equation than air travel does. So visiting Peru to see its birds, even for purely selfish reasons, may be much more important for fighting climate change than sitting home.

Of course, those of us who understand some of the complexities know that even with respect to deforestation, travel is still a huge driver of climate change. To compensate for my own trip to Peru, I made a contribution to the Rainforest Trust, to ensure that the fuel burned by the airplanes and other vehicles transporting me around would be offset by reforestation to absorb that much carbon. The World Land Trust is another good organization to support for carbon offsets. But I feel good that the individuals who are protecting their land so that I and other birders can see those Marvelous Spatuletails and Emerald-bellied Pufflegs, Sparkling Violetears and Sword-billed Hummingbirds, have prospects of earning an income long into the future not by cutting down their forests, but by protecting them.

Splitting the Yellow-rumped Warbler

In May 1975, the year I started birding, I saw 5 species of warblers. In the summer, when I took my first ornithology class, I added 4 more. And then in the week leading up to Labor Day, Russ and I headed to Port Wing for a little break before fall classes began. And even with my novice skills, I managed to find three new warblers, including one that in retrospect I’m surprised I didn’t figure out in the spring, because it’s the most abundant warbler of all, the Yellow-rumped Warbler.



Yellow-rumps have a soft, fairly unobtrusive song that they seldom sing until they reach their breeding grounds, so I’m not surprised I didn’t learn the song that first year. But they have a very distinctive chip note that sounds rather like the tsking of an annoyed math teacher, and they are so very abundant, and arrive noticeably earlier than the other warblers, so it does seem odd that I never picked one out in the spring. If I had, I’d have listed it in my lifelist the way it was listed in my trusty Golden Guide and my Peterson Guide—as the Myrtle Warbler. But by September 2, when I saw my first one, I’d already taken ornithology, where I learned that the Myrtle and Audubon's had been lumped into a single species, the Yellow-rumped Warbler. So that’s the way it appeared on my lifelist from the start.



1975 seems so very long ago, but the one constant is that the Yellow-rumped Warbler stayed a constant single species. Research published in 1973 led scientists to believe that Myrtle and Audubon’s Warblers belonged to the same species, because the two hybridize fairly often in the narrow area where their respective ranges overlap.



Now, 43 years later, a new paper has been published in The Auk reporting that those hybrids, like mules, aren’t genetically fit enough to reproduce, so hybrids have never spread and melded the two forms genetically. The researchers conclude that the two forms are, indeed, fully separate species as people originally believed.

One of the researchers, David Toews, did the genetic work as a post-doc at Cornell, so I got it on very good authority in 2009 when I worked there that the species was going to be split in the near future, but solid peer-reviewed research takes time. And the results turn out to be even more interesting than I thought.  Based on significant DNA as well as several behavioral differences, there are actually three unique species bundled into that yellow-rumped group. North America’s Myrtle and Audubon’s Warblers are what people originally thought—two distinct species—but another separate population, found only in and very near to Guatemala, also deserves full species status as “Goldman’s Warbler.” A fourth distinct population, fairly closely related to Audubon’s Warbler genetically, is restricted to the mountains of Northern Mexico. When taxonomists examine the data, they will probably make that one, the Black-fronted Warbler, a subspecies of Audubon’s Warbler rather than its own species.

The paper was published on August 24 in The Auk, the premier, peer-reviewed journal of North American ornithology. But that doesn’t mean that those of us who have seen both Myrtles and Audubons get to add a new species to our life lists just yet—that will have to wait until the next time the North American Classification Committee meets to create the next AOU Checklist supplement, something that happens just once a year. But next year, one morning I’ll wake up, check the news, and discover that without having gone anywhere, I’ve added a brand new lifer—one of the unexpected joys of birding.

Fall Migration Update, and Hawk Ridge Weekend!

I was in Peru for a week, and between preparing for the trip and getting ahead on work deadlines, I’ve not been able to keep up with fall migration here. Even 4,000 miles away, in the jungles and cloud forest of darkest Peru, I was getting emails about huge numbers of Blue Jays coursing over Duluth, and could only imagine what else was happening. 

Karl Bardon, the Count Director at Hawk Ridge, wrote on the Hawk Ridge blog that, as of September 12, the counters had tallied over 10,000 raptors and over 100,000 non-raptors since August 15, with peak numbers yet to come! Sure enough, the very next day, yesterday the 13th, they almost doubled the total raptor count.

On August 25, they counted 2603 Cliff Swallows; on September 9, they counted 6651 Cedar Waxwings. These migrating birds are capitalizing on the wealth of food available to fuel their flight, such as the 100,000 dragonflies documented winging along the Ridge on August 30. That was the very day I photographed mating dragonflies in my own backyard. 

People often seem most excited about the huge numbers of Broad-winged Hawks that pass over the Ridge in mid-September. Our biggest day so far this year was yesterday, September 13, when the counters tallied 8,163 Broad-wings, but this is not yet the peak. On our biggest day ever, September 15, 2003, an unbelievable 101,716 Broad-wings were counted at the main overlook. 

Hawk Ridge Bird Observatory times their biggest annual event to coincide with the peak of the Broad-wing flight.  This coming weekend, September 16-18, is this year’s Hawk Ridge Weekend. Of course, the timing is necessary but not sufficient to ensure a big flight—weather holds the final key—but no matter what happens, there will be lots of birds here in Duluth this weekend.

If the wind has any kind of westerly component and it’s not raining, hawks will definitely be flying over the Ridge. Duluth may be the best spot in the Midwest to view many migration events, but if it’s raining with winds from the east—the worst case scenario for Hawk Ridge—birders have our best chances of spotting jaegers down on Wisconsin Point.



Warblers, thrushes, and sparrows are passing through in large numbers, which are most easily tallied at observation points such as Hawk Ridge, but these birds are not just flying by—they visit bird baths and fruiting trees and shrubs in backyards, too, so even if we’re stuck at home, we can enjoy them.

Many events are planned for the weekend. On Friday afternoon, I’ll be one of the leaders of a fun and popular train ride along the St. Louis River—last year we saw quite a few cool birds on this trip, which kicked off the weekend. Friday evening’s after-dinner program will feature Chris Wood of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology talking about “Bird Migration, Birding and Conservation.” Before dinner, I’ll be there with Archimedes, the Eastern Screech-Owl—a rare chance for people to get to meet my now elderly but still healthy little education bird. 

Both Saturday and Sunday there will be more field trips as well as lots of events for both adults and children at the Main Overlook. Saturday night’s keynote will be by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Biologist Nathan Rathbun, talking about “Masses of Migrants: Visualizing the Movement in the Sky.”

For details about any of these events or more information about this year’s flight, check out the Hawk Ridge website at www.hawkridge.org.

Peru! Andean Cock-of-the-rock!!!

When I was a teacher in the late 70s, one of my students was fixated on the Andean Cock-of-the-rock, the national bird of Peru. The funky males are an improbably glowing orange or red on their head, back, and underside, with shiny black wings and tail, and rectangular, soft- gray scapular feathers running down the edge of their wings in the center of their back. The forward-sloping rounded crest, on both sexes, virtually covers the small bill and gives the head an oddly bulging shape. The glittering white iris forms a perfect circle around the black pupil, all surrounded by that lovely tropical orange.

I’d been birding for a few years back when I was a teacher, but I’d certainly never seen a cock-of-the-rock, and had no more concept of Peru than that Michael Bond’s sweet Paddington Bear came from deepest, darkest Peru. As I got more into birding and started learning about birds from beyond North America, I started wishing I could see a cock-of-the-rock myself, but it seemed improbable at best that I’d ever make it to Peru.

But in late July, I was asked to go to Peru for a week on a “fam tour”—I’d be shown several of the top birding spots in northern Peru with the assignment of writing about them. My very first thought was—was it possible I’d see an Andean Cock-of-the-rock there? I received an itinerary a few weeks ago, and instantly saw that it wasn’t listed as a target species. When I went through the eBird checklists for the places we’d be going to, it was listed on two of the checklists, but I realized that meant my chances were poor at best—the sightings from there might have been in the wrong season or the bird just too rare or too shy for an easy sighting with a group.

The cock-of-the-rock is an extremely secretive bird of a highly endangered habitat—tropical cloud forest. One of the most important dangers facing cloud forests in South and Central America is that the clouds are dwindling. Between the heat and droughts associated with climate change and the massive destruction of the forests, the land is warming, the clouds above it dissipating.

Other species associated with cloud forest, such as the Resplendent Quetzal and many trogons, toucans, and hummingbirds, are also dwindling. I tried not to get my hopes up about seeing a cock-of-the-rock, but that is of course easier said than done.

But last Tuesday, September 6, on our drive between two birding lodges, our guide Wilson Diaz (from Green Tours) told the bus driver to stop in a spot that looked pretty much like every other stretch of that mountain road, and we piled out. 

He started down the road a short ways, me scanning the forest floor on the downslope, when what to my wondering eyes should appear but a brilliant orange blob of color hurling through a tiny opening in the trees. It was the briefest of sightings, and I didn’t even see the shape of a bird—for all I knew for sure, it could have been someone tossing away a rather large bowl of orange sherbet. But there is nothing else that color that occurs naturally there, so we stopped and scrutinized. 

After just a few minutes, someone spotted a female Andean Cock-of-the-Rock, and soon we noticed a second one, lurking in the shadows far below us. 

And then, what to our wondering eyes should appear but a glorious male. He was mostly hidden by foliage—even with a spotting scope, it took minutes before anyone could see his glittering eye and funky crest. 

Conditions were horrible for photography—the forest was dark, and the bird so far away that he was hard to locate in the camera viewfinder, much less to actually focus on. But I got took hundreds of photos, refocusing over and over hoping that a few would turn out. And suddenly he fluttered over a couple of branches, and for a few glorious minutes we had him in full view. Photography was still tricky with the low light and distance. About sixty percent of my photos didn’t turn out at all, but of the ones that did, thanks to the miracle of Adobe Lightroom, a few look pretty darned good, at least as memories of a magical moment.

After my heart attack last year, I’ve pretty much scaled back my hopes and dreams for what I can do and see and hear in my remaining years. Just being in Peru, walking on ground that I knew cocks-of-the-rock had also walked upon, breathing air molecules that had been breathed by cocks-of-the-rock was wonderful enough. Spotting an orange blob hurtling through the air was wonderful enough. Seeing females in the shadows was wonderful enough. Seeing pieces of the male behind the foliage was wonderful enough. Actually feasting my eyes on this beautiful bird in full view for many minutes was a greater gift than I could have dreamed of—one that will stay with me every day I’m given on this beautiful earth.