In August of my freshman year, I made my first visit to Dee’s Bait and Tackle in Fairhaven. I’ve been fishing all my life, and I had spent many slow afternoons at my sales job back in Kansas on Google Maps, ogling the lakes and streams of southern Connecticut and reading trip reports on the state’s stocked trout streams. I knew about Dee’s, too—I’d found it on one of my boredom-driven virtual sojourns—but I just stopped by to buy a license. I had brought all of my gear with me.

Dee’s occupies a south-facing storefront at the triangular intersection of Blatchley Avenue, Monroe Street, and Clay Street. It doesn’t look like much: the rest of the building appears vacant, and even the storefront windows are so scuffed and dusty that it’s hard to tell that there’s anything inside. 

But the drab storefront conceals a lively scene: there’s almost always a line at the register. A bulletin board near the entrance is covered with pictures of grinning customers and their fish; if they weren’t all tacked on top of each other, they’d paper the whole room. At the register, Pete DeGregorio, one of two brothers who operate the shop, asked if I wanted a combined freshwater and saltwater license. I told him I’d prefer to save the five dollars; Pete wouldn’t let that slide. The fall striper run was just about to start up, and he didn’t want formerly-landlocked me to miss it.

Every fall, he told me, striped bass—“stripers,” colloquially—migrate south from the colder waters off Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts to the warmer waters of the Southeast coast. Along the way, they run upriver from Long Island Sound into Connecticut’s shallow tidal estuaries, looking for baitfish like Menhaden that school in the riverbeds. Fishermen follow closely on their heels, hoping for a chance to battle the hard-fighting sport fish, which usually range between 20 and 35 inches in length. You can catch stripers all year in Long Island Sound, but the fall and spring runs make targeting them far easier and more exciting for shore fishermen: at no other time can you catch fish so big in water so small. 

The lecture worked: I walked out of the shop with a saltwater license, a brand-new ten-foot rod, and a few bags of rubber swimbaits. Pete had told me that’s all I needed to hook a striper. I had big plans for that fall.

But when I started my freshman year, I got busy and forgot; the saltwater rod gathered dust on my dorm room wall.

***

I finally picked up the rod this October, after another conversation with Pete DeGregorio convinced me to get my act together. In my first three years at Yale, I certainly hadn’t avoided fishing entirely—I’d caught plenty in freshwater lakes and rivers outside of New Haven—and I’d been back to Dee’s for the occasional gear resupply. But still, I told Pete, I was too intimidated by the salty waters closer to my doorstep. Again, he didn’t let that slide. It would be easy, he assured me, if I did what he told me to do and went where he told me to go.

I began my first night of striper fishing at the first spot he recommended: the Sackett Point Road bridge over the Quinnipiac River in North Haven. I arrived at 3:30 AM, but a fisherman in a battered Dodge had beaten me to it. He hadn’t caught anything that morning and was on his way out, but he suggested I throw my swimbait upriver where a streetlight lit the incoming tide—“the fish seem to like the light.” I tried a few times, working the lure quickly through the murky water, feeling a bit silly about the locale I’d chosen: I was perched on a rock between a dingy pool bar and junkyard, and the water smelled nasty. It didn’t seem like the place to find a trophy fish.

But on my fifth cast, I hooked a striper. I wasn’t ready—my drag was set far too low—and within a few seconds the fish had run far enough that I couldn’t see where my line met the water. I’d rigged a flashlight above my reel so that I could see the water, but it wasn’t much use once the fight was on and my rod tip started flailing: any cars passing on the road above must have been treated to quite the light show. After a minute or so of push and pull, though, I managed to land it. As stripers go, it wasn’t huge—probably 26 inches—but my hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

The next two hours made the first fish seem like beginner’s luck. After a while, I left the bridge and tried a few of Pete’s other spots: the bank behind the Target in North Haven, Q River Grill near Grand Avenue Bridge, and Criscuolo Park in Fair Haven. No dice. Still determined to find the fish, I headed to the last spot on my list: a bit of bank on the Mill River north of the old English Station coal plant.

 I could hear stripers in the river even before I made it to the bank of the Mill. The warehouses and auto shops and rail bridges of Fair Haven are quiet at 5:30 in the morning, but the fish come alive in the pre-dawn tidewater. I stopped in the dark and bounced my first cast against the eroded wall of the Amtrak rail bridge. Immediately a striper hammered my cheap rubber swimbait and ran upriver, nearly pulling me in with it. I fought it quickly, wary that the frenzied fish would find a way to weave itself through the industrial debris of the riverbed and break me off. Within a minute, I had it lipped, de-hooked, and back in the river. 

My hands didn’t stop shaking with adrenaline for the next two hours. From the same overhanging beam of the old bridge, I hauled in twelve more stripers from the same twenty foot wide stretch of river. By 6:00 a.m. my right thumb was scored and bloody, but I hardly noticed.

About the time the fish stopped biting and the sun came up over I-95, a New London bound train broke the spell, and I finally got a look at the spot I’d found on Google Maps the night before. In the light, I saw that I had been fishing from the remnants of a rotted-out beam at the base of an old wooden rail bridge. The tide lapped at my shins. Foul-smelling steam from a nearby sewer pipe cut through the cold morning air. On the bank, rats picked their way through oyster shells and shreds of muddy plastic. 

The sun and train had woken up neighbors that I didn’t know I had. Across the river, a half dozen people were stirring in sun-faded tents set up above the abutment of the old bridge. A woman tidying up the camp dumped the night’s refuse into the river, and the smell of urine drifted upstream. 

***

Regardless of NO TRESPASSING signs, steep banks, and stinking tidal mud, fishermen take advantage of every available stretch of riverbank in the New Haven area. Even when I find myself alone on a secluded bank, I always find signs of use: there’s always a rusty hook, a bit of line, or a few crushed beer cans to keep me company. When I run into other fishermen, they’re always happy to share real estate, as long as our lines don’t cross. Often I’ve stood feet away from strangers at three or four in the morning, exchanging tips and tricks and cigarettes and leads on the best spots. 

Earlier this fall, while looking for water around 2:30 a.m., I met a strung-out man in tattered clothes on Quinnipiac Ave in Fair Haven who saw my rod and offered to show me some spots along the river if I promised to give him some cash. “Those guys are always fishing behind the bar and grill,” he told me. “They do alright.” He walked me there, talking my ear off about the fishing he’d done as a kid. A week later on the same stretch of road, I ran into another man who stopped me to offer advice on cold-weather fishing. “There’s oysters down there,” he said of a bank downstream in the Quinnipiac, “so they feed year-round.” Urban fishing has its upsides: there are a whole lot more people around to wish you luck.

Many of the people I meet on the rivers of New Haven are hobbyists—they might keep the occasional fish, but they’re really in it for the thrill. They stop by the water for an hour or two, often on their way to or from work, and see if they can land a decent fish. I run into this category of fishermen at spots like Sackett Point Road, which is quickly accessible from I-91—at sunrise in mid-autumn, their cars fill the gravel lot by the bridge. Middle-aged suburban dads with neoprene waders and fishing vests cast beside chain-smoking old guys with surf rods rattling around in the beds of their battered work trucks. These hobbyists, myself included, are excitable and easily impressed, and they’re as quick as new grandparents to show you photos from their camera roll. 

Others are true sportfishermen: hooked on stripers, they’ll fish all night, armed with an arsenal of baits and leaders and rods. Back at Dee’s, the truly committed are household names, and serve as invaluable information-sources on the status of the run. When one such sportfisherman, a Fairhaven local named Jose, stops catching inland fish sometime in late November or early December, Dee’s declares the run over. 

Useful as these experts may be, Pete DeGregorio cares more for the newbies. “I want you to catch fish,” he told me one evening while he sorted sandworms. “And I go out of my way to tell you how.” Pete spends every day passing along advice. “There’s nothing like, you know, when somebody comes back and says ‘look what I caught!’ and you showed them how to catch it. And that’s probably the most exciting thing about it.” 

There’s no substitute, he believes, for the knowledge-sharing community that a local tackle shop provides; Walmart or Bass Pro Shops can’t fill the void. Without the tackle shops and the expertise that they provide, he says, beginners have a harder time catching fish, and the sport suffers. “They get a bad taste in their mouth, and they just don’t go out again.” I, for one, have avoided that bitter feeling of getting “skunked” largely thanks to Pete and his brother. On slow mornings, I call them up, and receive a much-needed course correction: “Try the Ferry Street bridge.”

***

But Pete sees a few ongoing threats to the health of the community. Especially for beginner fishermen, access is a problem. Some of the best fall striper fishing in New Haven can be found in dilapidated stretches of post-industrial water, hidden behind chain-link fences or obstructed by highway interchanges. “It makes it tougher,” Pete told me, “because I’m skeptical of who I send where.” Although New Haven is built around its waterways and oriented towards its harbor, industrial development and urban renewal have alienated the city from its water. Now, many of the New Haveners who use local waterways access them with difficulty or even illegally. Fishermen at the popular Long Wharf Pier, for example, have to pass a sign that reads “NO FISHING AT ANY TIME” on their way to the water. 

From Pete’s perspective, strict regulation of the recreational fishery in Connecticut also poses a threat, particularly to low-income and immigrant communities in New Haven. To protect the overall health of fisheries in Long Island Sound, the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection imposes a complex set of regulations, updated annually, that limits the recreational harvest of fish. Fishermen can only keep one striper a day, for instance, and it must measure between 28 and 31 inches.

For many fishermen, annual adjustments to these take restrictions can be life-changing. Especially along waterways within the city of New Haven, many are just trying to put food on the table. But it’s these fishermen who take greatest advantage of the city’s waterways.

Subsistence fishermen are some of Pete’s most reliable customers: they fish in any weather, and their habits are less tied to the migration patterns of sportfish like stripers. It’s these low-income subsistence fishermen, Pete says, who are hurt most by the complex and changing list of regulations imposed on the recreational fishery. Although he sells more licenses than anyone in the state, for example, DEEP never sends him enough regulation booklets. “They expect everyone to go online,” he said, “but a lot of people can’t go online.” 

He told me that regulations on the recreational fishery fail to take underserved communities—and the value of subsistence fishing—seriously. He cited limits on porgy implemented by DEEP  as a particularly glaring example. Porgy, he explained, are mostly targeted by Black and, increasingly, Latino fishermen in New Haven. They aren’t an exciting fish to fight, but they’re easy to catch and good to eat, so they’re a staple food source for some families. For years, there were no minimum size or daily creel limits on porgy harvest. Pete fought tooth and nail against porgy limits, in part because he thought that the state was taking the wrong people into account: “Is it a class thing? I don’t know. But I’ll tell you one thing: it’s awful funny that they attack the porgies.”

If anyone needs to cut back, he said, it’s the commercial fishermen. Commercial outfits must also follow stringent regulations, but their methods—particularly draggers and gillnets—catch and often kill fish indiscriminately. Pete thinks the commercial fishery is given more regulatory leeway because it’s viewed as a food source. But the recreational fishery, he reminded me, feeds many of his neighbors. He knows that not all of the subsistence fishermen follow catch limits, but he struggles to blame people for it. “You’ll see people taking small fish. But they’re feeding their families. It’s not right, but you know you see the commercial guys . . . what the commercial guys destroy is unbelievable.” As long as the water is there, people who are hungry enough to hop fences and breathe a bit of sewer gas will fish it.

***

On a recent November morning, I drove over to a little unused scrap of tarmac on the West River, just north of the Kimberley Avenue bridge, to try my luck. I’d been fishing since midnight with relatively little to show for it—I’d hooked three undersized stripers—so I figured I’d use my last bit of energy on a new stretch of river.

I parked in a spot that seemed public enough, next to an old boarded-up structure with a sign that read “COAST GUARD AU—”—the rest had chipped away. While I was setting up my rod, two old men puttered up in a battered Suzuki Grand Vitara, handicap tag fluttering beneath the rear-view mirror. They produced a few surf rods from the trunk, rigged them up, and started making their way down the trash-covered, unmaintained trail through the underbrush by the high-tide line. The older man, maybe seventy, picked his way under the bridge with a wooden cane, clutching two surf rods in his free hand and struggling on the slick rocks exposed by an outgoing tide. The younger man, maybe sixty, carried buckets.

“What are you looking for?” I asked. 

They responded in good but rarely-practiced English: “Stripers, blues, porgies, you know, anything. Something for dinner.” 

They set up by the water, threw out a few lines, and waited. I tried my luck for a while, didn’t get a bite, and left them to it. I’d caught my fish for the day. They would probably be there a while.

The post FEATURE: Under the Rail Bridge appeared first on Yale Daily News.

“Heavenly Father, I thank you for this evening of having us in your house of worship,” Jimenez-Diaz says. “Thank you for our volunteers in Imani, thank you for the food so that we can be nourished… in the name of our Lord Jesus, amen.” 

Jimenez-Diaz is a facilitator for the Imani Breakthrough Project, a church-based treatment program for substance abuse recovery which focuses on community support as a mode of healing. It is just past 6 p.m., the start time of each week’s session, which lasts until 8 p.m. This group of participants is on week 6 of 22. Jimenez-Diaz tells me that sometimes over 25 individuals come to the nightly sessions––even though the sessions are capped at 25 people, with only those registered receiving a $10 stipend for attendance at each session. All ten churches across Connecticut that host programming from Imani have the same cap on participant numbers; the project’s creators designed it so that groups could remain tightly knit. Jimenez-Diaz still ensures, however, that all who attend are allowed to participate, eat a plate of hot food and warm up.

Jimenez-Diaz’s co-facilitator,  Xavier, joins him at the front of the room. “I love you guys,” Xavier says. “I’ll be here for anything you need.” He steps away to watch Jimenez-Diaz deliver today’s workshop. Later, he tells me, “I like seeing people smile.” 

Jimenez-Diaz moves a large, poster-sized legal pad to the center of the room and flips to a new page. Today’s topic is social awareness, which he writes and underlines with black marker at the top of the page. His voice is calm and warm as he asks the participants what the elements of social awareness are; the audience calls out answers. As he speaks, he interweaves discussions of each point with advice and faith. As he writes congregation, he says, “Being selfless speaks volumes. One thing that God does is be selfless.” As he writes #1) sacrifice, #2) commit, he notes, “It will be negative 20 degrees Celsius soon. If our friends don’t notice, it will be 1 o’ clock, and they will be freezing. The drugs will warm you for some time before, but make sure you get to a warming center by nine.” 

Quickly, the session melts into a conversation. Participants add on to what Jimenez-Diaz says; others voice agreement. Some share anecdotes from prior experiences that leave the room in attentive thought. Lulls occur as the room considers particular memories and stories. As Jimenez-Diaz continues building the theme of social awareness, he fuses biblical allusions with his discussion of how substance use affects one’s mind: “The Devil puts thoughts in your head: you can’t go in that church… you smell… you’re homeless. The gospel that we teach says differently. We pray for you; we receive you. That’s the God that we serve.” He addresses one member in the audience, discussing how they received him; conversation flows, back and forth, and envelops the room. 

‘Developing skills of how to live’

The Imani Breakthrough Project is a treatment program for individuals using opioids, alcohol, and other drugs held in churches across Connecticut, with some of its first partnered churches located in New Haven. Weekly workshops are run in church spaces across denominations for local residents who are in recovery, open to all who register within the first five weeks. These 2-hour workshops, led by pastors and Imani-trained facilitators who are themselves community members already active in the churches, encompass teachings that are followed by discussions in which participants can share their own experiences. 

Some facilitators, like Jimenez-Diaz, integrate faith directly into their teachings, allowing biblical scripture to heat their words about self-definition and healing, but not all––each church adapts the particular style of their teachings to their participants. Such wraparound services aim to buoy the independence of those in recovery, addressing the complex social and economic struggles they may face; the design was born directly out of continuous conversation with Connecticut community members throughout the years. 

Imani was created by Chyrell Bellamy, director of the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health and professor in Yale’s department of psychiatry, and Ayana Jordan, an addiction psychiatrist and assistant professor adjunct in Yale’s department of psychiatry, in 2017 to address disproportionate death rates of people of color––particularly Black and Latine communities––in the opioid epidemic. In the five-town region composed of New Haven, Hamden, North Haven, Woodbridge, and Bethany, the overdose death rate for Black residents was 71.0 per million residents; for Latinos, 63.2; and for white people, 51.2, in 2023, according to a report from DataHaven. Bellamy and Jordan sought to understand how to best address the root causes driving these disproportionate death rates for people of color living in Connecticut; to do so, they had conversations with the community to hear exactly what would serve them best. 

Through a six-month period, Bellamy and Jordan, alongside their mentor, Larry Davidson, a clinical psychologist at Yale, began to connect with New Haven community leaders who worked closely with individuals in recovery. One of these leaders was the Reverend Robyn Anderson, who continues to serve as the liaison between Yale researchers and Connecticut-based religious leaders today. Anderson hosted a series of roundtable conversations in Midtown open to any Connecticut residents with interest in the topic of how to create effective treatment for substance use. Through those conversations, which many people of different experiences attended due to the open invitation, they learned that people of color in these local communities who were using substances often lacked the financial ability to access traditional psychiatric care. Furthermore, Black and Latine individuals felt mistrust towards their psychiatry providers if they did seek out professional help, due to a history of the medical establishment not properly addressing the needs of Black and Latine patients, as well as the lack of sufficient representation in the demographic of Connecticut-based psychiatrists. Another cause Imani directly aims to address is the social stigma amongst Black and Latine communities associated with speaking about one’s substance usage and openly seeking treatment. 

“Speaking to the level of secrecy that happens in Black and Latine communities, there are so many vulnerabilities that people are experiencing, related to those social determinants of health,” Bellamy said. Sylvia Cooper, a facilitator at the Varick Memorial A.M.E. Zion Church in New Haven, also noted that many men of color grow up being socialized via substance usage, which leads to difficulties exiting social circles oriented around ignoring health challenges produced by usage. This, she speculated, contributes to the high proportion of male participants in her groups. She also told me anecdotes about how many who struggle with substance use can find themselves unemployed, unhoused, or incarcerated, which disturbs their independence and can fuel a cycle of usage, which in many ways are also affected by racial bias in hiring, housing, and criminal justice. 

Through these conversations, Bellamy, Jordan, Anderson, and other psychiatrists and community leaders involved in the creation of Imani concluded that treatment for substance use must not only be accessible beyond a doctor’s office, but also address psychological and spiritual issues as well as physical ones. This group of initial founders developed Imani’s structure with hopes of addressing these social determinants: for example, they chose to host programming in community churches because they were already centers of refuge for many Black and Latine individuals, particularly those seeking a sense of spiritual healing. 

“A lot of people, especially people of color, feel safe in the church,” Anderson said. “They feel that the people facilitating the Imani group are also persons in the community… It’s really about healing, transformation.” 

SOAR is the first program that Imani’s founders developed. Designed to last 22 weeks long, SOAR features weekly sessions that include teachings on wellness and workshop-style discussions, where people share their own experiences. The latter half of the program also features individualized coaching to help participants create and reach personalized goals. In recent years, Imani has also received federal funding to create a second program, ImaniYOU, which runs for 24 weeks. ImaniYOU adds onto the key elements of SOAR with telehealth meetings with psychiatrists of color, urine testing, and additional medical services. As many participants have faced financial and logistical barriers to meeting their basic survival needs, such as  receiving steady income to purchase food, Imani provides a variety of  services at their sessions: many churches also double as warming centers, clothing closets, or needle exchange sites, and serve hot food to attendees. 

“We understand that when people are using substances, that bridges might be burnt, and relationships are splintered,” Bellamy said. “How can we help people feel like they can gain skills and focus on their dreams? Some of these are recovery-oriented goals – reuniting with family members and children. How can we help them move towards those things?” Through Imani’s coaching, participants often set goals such as rekindling familial relationships or finding suitable employment. 

Imani’s facilitators are already involved with the churches and known by many attendees; many of them have directly experienced or observed substance use’s effects in the community. Jimenez-Diaz told me that he was once a part of a gang, and that when he returned as a church leader, he was a “completely different man.” Part of ImaniYOU’s success comes from the fact that psychiatrists of color are chosen. 

“This is the first time that these people have actual doctors they are able to access and have conversations with…and that look like them,” Anderson said. 

Facilitators are trained in understanding the harm reduction model in order to address the psychological needs of community members in recovery. Focusing on encouraging safe and limited substance use instead of imposing full abstinence, the model aims to support individuals in a way that feels appropriate and doable at their current stage in their recovery journey –– it is a healthcare approach and philosophy that focuses on “meeting people where they are,” Bellamy emphasized. “By saving lives, we give people another day to hold onto hope, and perhaps that’s another day we get to reach them in some way.” 

This idea of giving individuals the ability to generate and share a sense of hope –– and continuously bolstering their sense of independence and agency –– underlies Imani’s philosophy of care. Historically disproportionate death rates reflect the lack of attention previously paid to this approach: the harm reduction model is unique in its capacity to walk beside people instead of in front of them. Rather than enforcing a diagnostic hierarchy, Imani’s horizontal support structure helps humanize.

“[We are] focused on bridging people back to their communities,” Bellamy said. “Harm reduction is about teaching people how to live, how to develop the skills of how to live. That’s something that takes place over time.” 

Concretely, facilitators are trained rigorously for three days on the philosophy of the harm reduction model, where they are taught practical skills like narcan administration and urine testing for fentanyl, as well as two particular psychological frameworks that they are told to concretely plan their teachings around. The first is the 8 Dimensions of Wellness––a model created by the psychologist Peggy Swarbrick in the 1990s, which includes emotional, environmental, financial, intellectual, physical, occupational, spiritual, and social health. The second is the 5 R’s of Citizenship, which stand for rights, roles, resources, responsibilities, and relationships. 

They are not taught explicitly to include faith in their teachings, Bellamy told me, but she says each church has developed their own style in the workshops, some of which explicitly include biblical text. To leaders in Imani, spirituality is something far larger than, for example, belief in Christ. 

“It’s love,” Cooper said simply, explaining to me the precise reasons why Imani has had such an effect on community members. “You can feel it.” Jimenez-Diaz told me that he includes every name of each participant he has ever worked with in his personal prayers to God; he writes them down on a list and prays for them — but religion is more a vehicle for Imani’s goal of connection than its foundation. 

Imani’s spirituality is not defined or enclosed by traditional religion; rather, it arises from a deep intimacy with one another and the self. The church serves as a space for this togetherness to emerge, but it is the people who make the program what it is. 

‘The right words for the right moment’

Creating a space that thaws the distance between people is a responsibility that rests heavily on the shoulders of the facilitators. As they lead workshops over the course of 22 to 24 weeks, depending on the program, they are tasked with becoming closely acquainted with each participant and ensuring that the environment they exist in is welcoming. Something that is not scientifically definable is the key cause of success in this psychiatric treatment program: the interpersonal bonds formed are what bring people back, week by week.

At the Casa de Oración y Adoración in New Haven, the church where Jimenez-Diaz works, senior pastor Hector Caraballo will sometimes start workshops with sermons written for the participants. When he first moved to New Haven, he said, it was “overwhelming” to see all the participants in recovery with the responsibility of responding to their needs. But when I spoke to him and others leading the events, their eyes were firm, unquestioning, and lit with desire to understand others. 

“It’s a big responsibility,” he says, of writing words to be delivered to those going through recovery. “You want to be able to have an impact––to deliver the right words for the right moment. It’s a burden; at the same time, once you start writing, and you have the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, everything works together.” 

The effort placed into responding to spiritual needs has fostered love for the program among participants. Many participants lack jobs and are unhoused, and sometimes enter and leave the prison system; as such, a significant proportion of alumni do not have personal phones or periodically change their phone numbers. Despite these difficulties, many participants have tried to stay connected with the program. At the Varick A.M.E. Church, for example, alumni from past years will attend the graduation of the newest class, where the most recent graduates give comments. Cooper tells me how moved she is by this. “I get texts,” she said. “They’ll come back, asking me how I am.” Cooper herself recalls these participants with fierce compassion: she tells me about bringing her group to a class field trip to the Shubert Theatre in New Haven, where one man watched a play for the first time in his life. 

Sometimes, she said, losing participants to overdose during the course of the program happens. People have the space to share their grief––to let it live, and watch it move towards and away from themselves. 

Post-graduation, word-of-mouth referral from alumni is often the main channel by which new participants  are recruited to Imani. According to Bellamy, at least 70% of individuals coming into Imani programming are not receiving any professional substance use treatment. Imani’s rapid growth over the years is a testament to its ability to reach individuals––and continue reaching those they know––in communities normally distanced from the medical establishment: it has graduated 1,500 participants in Connecticut since its inception in 2017, and expanded to 11 churches in the state. Four Black churches were the first to pilot the program: Varick in New Haven, 224 EcoSpace in Hartford, Mount Aery Baptist Church in Bridgeport, and the Burning Bush Family Life Center in Waterbury. 

One year later, expansion occurred to 4 Latine churches––New Beginnings Baptist Church in Hartford, Casa de Oración y Adoración in New Haven, Prince of Peace in Bridgeport, and Oasis of Blessings Christian Center in New Britain, although the New Britain partner has since changed to Greater Harvest Church. Beyond the 8 initial programs, expansion has occurred to Mount Olive African Methodist Epispocal Church in Waterbury, the Blackwell A.M.E. Zion Church in Hartford, and the Spottswood AME Zion Church in New Britain, both serving predominantly Black communities. According to Anderson, they were chosen “because they were working in the community,” aligning with Imani’s harm reduction model. Expansion occurred to Rhode Island in 2021 and Louisiana in 2022; a third church in New Orleans recently completed its training. 

Imani’s longevity — now at seven years of operation, with more participants registering each week, and new churches being trained in different states –– is unique. Frederick Altice, the director of the Yale Center for Community Research, which assisted Imani with advice on community engagement in its earliest days, told me that a common but problematic feature of Yale’s community-oriented programming is known as “parachuting,” in which Yale researchers will begin healthcare initiatives in New Haven, often with good intentions, and then allow the programs to peter out. Funding structures with limited terms of two to five years can prevent further extensions. But Imani’s earlier success allowed it to receive the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s U01 grant, which now funds ImaniYOU. 

“We talked to the people who were going to be using our framework,” said Mark Costa, a Yale research scientist who is a co-investigator for Imani. Having reviewed the results of the earliest roundtable conversations from 2017, he assisted with the design of the project and the collection of the data on recovery, where baseline intakes are compared with qualitative interviews three to six months out. “Many times, people design a solution for people without consulting them, and when it doesn’t work, they blame the people. That’s structural racism.” 

The fact that  word-of-mouth is Imani’s dominant means of attracting participants speaks to the capacity of feeling –– of love –– to bring people through its doors, to feel transformed, and to tell their loved ones to do the same. This fluid, person-to-person transfer reflects well on Imani’s style of treatment. 

‘There’s plenty more’

As Jimenez-Diaz’s session draws to a close, a chorus of amens rises from the crowd. He encourages all to seek freshly-prepared food from the kitchen. Church members lay out the food on the back counter––steaming yellow rice, crisp servings of salad, freshly sliced bananas, vanilla and strawberry cookies, and hot coffee. Participants take rolls of bread from white boxes labeled Imani. As plates are handed out, participants settle back into their original seats. 

The music, still faintly playing from the speaker, is now overlaid with  murmurs of interaction. Participants make small talk with their tablemates; they offer each other resources they no longer use. Hot steam rises from the plates of rice. They drop off and pick up items from a communal resource table, where warm clothes, and even two boxes of makeup, are laid out. I hear laughter on top of the music, and the sound of Spanish and English rising and falling. The words run together, like honey. Threads raised from the workshop are re-opened, wrestled with, and re-knit. I have forgotten the January chill outside. 

“Half of these people don’t eat,” says a woman helping serve the food, referring to the food insecurity faced by many who struggle with substance use in New Haven. As we speak, a participant walks up, asking for more. She smiles at him. “Of course, there’s plenty more.”  

After some time, the number of participants  begins to dwindle; it is already past  8 p.m., the session’s end time. They take covered plates of bananas to-go and tuck away hoodies from the communal table. They re-adorn their hats and scarves. “I love you,” several say, to one another and to the facilitators, as they leave the room. One by one, they slip through the doors. 

As the room mostly empties, I hear the cadence of Spanish. One of the participants is still sitting at the front of the room with Jimenez-Diaz, discussing the Bible. Jimenez-Diaz is reading verses from his phone; he moves from chapter to chapter, citing lines and interpreting them for the participant, who responds. They are rooted there for several minutes, timeless. Finally, when they part, it is with a fist-bump and a handshake. 

I walk outside. The tall red cross on the beige exterior wall of the church is there, but I do not notice it. Instead, I see a participant singing Hallelujah to himself as he bikes away into the night. The lamplight catches his red knit cap and sets it aglow.

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I meet her in the green, sunlit classroom space in East Rock’s Trailbridge Environmental Center. She’s stern, sarcastic, and in love with her city — which she’s lived in since 1998. Clad in blue-rimmed glasses, a suit jacket, jeans, and hiking boots, she’s there for the Saturday volunteer group arranged by the nonprofit Friends of East Rock Park (“FERP,” as she calls it), where volunteers shoulder routine park maintenance tasks — from picking up litter to repairing trails to pulling invasive plants.  

For now, Herrick’s task is to man the classroom: refilling a steaming pot of coffee, cutting slices of sweet potato pie onto floppy paper plates, and swinging the door to the center open for passers-by. Outside, all is October and aflame, sugar maple trees dripping red, sun hot and orange, children chasing each other through piles of fallen leaves. 

Last spring, when the daffodils came to College Woods, I first began spending every weekday afternoon on East Rock. Wrapped up in asphalt and highways, the 425-acre tangle of elms and oaks became a refuge for me. Green spaces like East Rock are all across New Haven; a study conducted by the Trust for Public Land finds 96% of New Haven residents live within a 10-minute walk of a park, and 12% of the city’s total area is parkland. For comparison, in the similarly sized Syracuse, only 76% of residents live 10 minutes away from a park, and only 4% of the city is parkland. 

And yet, New Haven Parks has half the funding of Syracuse’s parks, a third of similarly sized Springfield, Massachusetts’, and a quarter of Richmond, Virginia’s. 

For the needs of a city

“The fire department, you really can’t cut easily. Police, you can’t cut easily. So what do you have left to cut? Parks,” says Herrick. Since 1998, when she first moved to the city, the park’s budget has fallen by $1,294,61 — equating to a near 50% drop. 

“If you look at a map of New Haven, it’s got two huge highways. You go downtown, it’s full of courthouses, and churches, and cultural institutions. And then there’s Yale,” explains Herrick. “None of that is taxable. So New Haven, as a city, is poor.”

Herrick whisks me on a tour of East Rock’s ranger offices, down the hallway from the Trailbridge Environmental Center’s classroom. She points out photos from 2022’s East Rock Park photography contest, detailed hand-drawn posters of the park’s geology and trail system, and “about a million bird books,” stacked in a free library. 

The Friends of East Rock side of the Center, Herrick explains, was renovated just two years ago using a pocket of funds from the American Rescue Plan. The walls were painted green, the courtyard was cleaned of weeds, picnic tables were put up, and a garden was planted near the entrance. 

Herrick then leads me to a dimly lit room, crammed with piles of fishing rods and snow shoes, a taxidermied screech owl, and a shelf of bones and snake skins.

“[This] is the rangers’ half, don’t ask about it,” she says, gesturing to the shelved evidence of what was, two decades before, a blooming Parks Department.

Three years ago, the city made a controversial choice to combine the Public Works and Parks and Recreation departments. This left the department without a designated Parks director — and facilitated a further cut in funding. Organizations like Friends of East Rock Park and Yale’s Urban Resources Initiative (URI) have since emerged to fill the void of park maintenance and sustainability management.

When there are declining resources in city budgets, the public becomes more critical, says Colleen Murphy-Dunning, director of the URI. For nearly thirty years, the Yale-based initiative has not only employed New Haven residents and Yale students to construct community green spaces and plant trees, but it has also become increasingly essential to the survival of New Haven’s parks by providing funding, staff, organization, and expertise to nonprofit organizations like FERP.

Murphy-Dunning — who begins by saying she prefers thinking of work as “getting to do things” over “having to do things” — keeps things optimistic. City maintenance “still mows the lawns” no matter how many people are on staff, she clarifies. “But that means they can do less of the big things, like maintaining trails or cleaning trash.” 

The decentralization of park management also brings an unexpected benefit. Instead of park staff bureaucratically allocating funds and planning out park spaces, community members can now be part of the decision-making process. “They have agency and control and decision-making and feel empowered to make a difference,” says Murphy-Dunning. “And they do make a difference.”

For the love of a city

David Shimchick, the lead volunteer of Friends of East Rock, doesn’t like the outdoors. 

“I don’t like bugs. I don’t like hiking,” he tells me from behind a tangled red knot of serviceberry shrubs. “I swam as a kid, I guess that’s something.”

With a bucket of litter in one hand and a car tire in the other, he steps through the shrubs back onto East Rock Park’s English Dr. It’s hot now, and Shimchick and I clean sweat from our brows as we work our way up the road. 

“The weirdest thing I ever found while picking up trash here was half of a Ski-doo snowmobile,” Shimchick says. He’s responsible for weekly litter pickups along the park’s most traversed roads. So far, we’ve found an assortment of the typical culprits: an entire fence, a broken mirror, a pair of sweatpants, half a briefcase, and a complete Corona six-pack. 

“I never get tired of picking up people’s trash. I pick up the trash up and down my street almost every day,” he explains. “I like making things look nice, I like knowing other people will enjoy it, even if I don’t.”

A lifetime schoolteacher, Shimchick retired into his role as leader of Friends of East Rock Park. As we walk, drivers shout out thanks, and runners pause to ask why we are there, at 10:00 a.m., pulling tires from the leafy mats that cover the park floor. In response, Shimchick always chants, “FERP — Friends of East Rock!” He proudly points out several sparkling new benches framing College Woods, fresh mulch for the playground, a newly installed fence, and the tightly kept garden at the Center’s entrance.

That Saturday, volunteer Kimberly Gibson is fighting an equally endless battle against the surge of East Rock’s invasive plants. She’s the unofficial invasive plant wrangler for the park: armed with a blue Patagonia hiking pack and an 8-inch saw blade, the short-haired molecular scientist takes on the park’s most stubborn vines and shrubs. 

I meet Gibson a little further up the road, as she’s sawing the lowermost branches off a red-crowned invasive euonymus shrub. 

“Who needs a gym membership when you can just go into the woods and rip out invasive species?” she says.

According to Gibson, the greenery in some corners of East Rock is nearly 80% invasive  — a relic of the park’s use in providing timber and fuel for the city’s first factories. Japanese barberry, garlic mustard, mugwort, and patches of invasive monocultures join the quilt of park greenery. 

“When an ecosystem is destroyed, generally the first things to re-populate it are invasives,” she says, pointing to the thousands of glimmered red berries gathered at the tips of the euonymus shrub’s branches. In the shrub’s red shade, a young ash tree grows, its pointed leaves reaching up to the heavy October sun. With the shrub spreading its ceiling above it, the native tree wouldn’t last a year. 

“I often feel like it’s just a losing battle,” she says, running her fingers through the young ash’s translucent green leaves. 

Last year, the Urban Resources Initiative surveyed community perceptions of New Haven parks. “Nature breaks in a city environment,” writes an anonymous New Haven resident, responding to the question, “What do you love about New Haven’s parks?” 

Each spring, invasive plants and trees will blow their seeds onto the banks of the Mill River and eat away at East Rock’s remaining few natives. Every day, cans will be thrown from car windows, and tinfoil sandwich wrappers will be left in the shade of maple trees. Already, birdsong has left the park, as have the Connecticut cougars and old-growth trees. The city has sunk into the bounds of the park’s glowing red basalt and its green roof. It takes a firm line of defense — Shimchick pulling litter, Gibson cutting trees — to keep East Rock Park as is. 

It takes time and effort to maintain East Rock — resources that other parks in the city may not have. 

Not every park gets the same amount of attention in New Haven. Parks in poorer neighborhoods are much smaller and less well-maintained, Herrick says. We sit down at a table in the Trailbridge classroom, with Gibson, all of us sipping coffee from mugs with Donald Grant Mitchell’s face printed across. 

Our conversation rapidly spins into one about housing; neither Gibson nor Herrick owns a house in New Haven’s East Rock neighborhood. According to her, most places near East Rock Park are priced at more than one million dollars. 

Access to quality, large green spaces depends on class — which in turn provides one with the resources and voice required to maintain these spaces. As we picked up garbage, Shimchick alluded to demands made by East Rock residents during the pandemic to close East Rock’s Farnam Drive to car traffic. Shimchick, who has a general distaste for hiking, points out the closure means there’s less litter to clean — and fewer people who are now able to use the park. 

“It’s predictable,” Murphy-Dunning says, laying it out for me: Most of the maintenance of these parks tends to hinge on one or two people with enough time and care in their hands. While there will always be volunteers like these in wealthier neighborhoods, smaller, poorer parks become run down so much faster if the few volunteers who maintain them move away or pick up a new job. 

However, there is a small green pocket in the city where this isn’t true: Beaver Pond.

For the love of fixing broken things 

I meet Friends of Beaver Pond President Park Nan Bartow beneath a clump of young willows, at what used to be the city’s dumping ground. Ten years ago, Beaver Pond Park was a swamp of burn-up cars and chunks of asphalt, home to the city’s trash and most nefarious invasives. Pressed up against the Dixwell neighborhood, where incomes dip to half that of East Rock’s, the park was left behind. 

Understanding they did not have the staff or funding to maintain Beaver Pond Park, the city’s Parks and Recreation Department was in the midst of slowly converting the park to a football field for James Hillhouse High School when Bartow, Friends of Beaver Pond Park, and Yale’s Urban Resources Initiative stepped in. 

Over the past 10 years, volunteers have transformed the “throwaway” urban swamp into what Bartow calls an “Urban oasis.” Yellow warblers, robins, and song sparrows interrupt our conversation; bees flit between the densely grown patch of native wildflowers, and young sugar maples glow in the morning sun. Bartow shows me some of the park’s ongoing projects — a patch of dirt where a co-volunteer at Friends of Beaver Pond plans to design and build a playground and a line of native trees planted by past Urban Resource Initiative volunteers. 

Having spent her childhood in the woods in Massachusetts, Bartow didn’t think New Haven would have enough “open spaces” for her to stay. 

She’s now been in New Haven for nearly 60 years. I understand why.

“Having this area here and watching us return it to what it should be — it’s just been a wonderful experience knowing that we’re leaving it in much better shape than we found it, for the people who come here,” she says. 

Bartow, however, is direct about the challenges that New Haven Parks faces. While she agrees with Murphy-Dunning’s belief in the magic of neighborhood-fueled action, she also believes that a stronger central leadership in the Parks and Recreation department is necessary for equity and a truer unity between New Haven Parks and Recreation and city folk.

Some simpler conveniences come from a better Parks and Recreation Department. Bartow shows me piles of cut branches and weeds from a clean-up project two summers ago that still have not been picked up by the department. Shimchick, as we walk the green tunnel of East Rock, points out degraded trails, haphazard steps, and a fallen “No Parking” sign. 

Last year’s Yale’s Urban Resources Initiative survey on New Haven Parks showed that volunteers alone cannot shoulder everything the city’s green spaces require. Many respondents asked for improved “rule enforcement” in the parks — rangers to fine dumpers, crack down on drug use, and institute park hours. Others asked for adequate bathrooms, fixed roads, and new and improved play spaces. While Bartow continues to care for her field of goldenrods, she cannot fulfill most of these requests; only the Parks Department can improve large-scale facilities. 

Improvement, to Bartow, will come from untangling once again the recently-merged Public Works and Parks departments. 

“When Mayor Elicker combined the departments, the guy who ran public works was suddenly then in charge of parks,” Bartow says. “We didn’t have a leader that knew parks like we know parks.”

Bartow believes change is coming. Last spring, the Urban Resources Initiative, Friends of Beaver Pond, East Rock Park, and a smattering of other groups came together to work alongside the Mayor in rethinking park funding. The discussion succeeded in bringing about the un-merging of Parks and Public Works. The extent to which this decision benefits New Haven Parks will be unclear until the Mayor officially hires a new Parks director. 

This doesn’t mean that public volunteer groups like Friends of East Rock and Beaver Pond, or the Urban Resources Initiative, ought to disappear entirely. While having the secure backbone of city government is important, it remains essential to give groups like Friends of Beaver Pond the opportunity to decide what the land should look like and steward it, says Murphy-Dunning.

Before leaving Beaver Pond Park, Bartow insists on taking me to a small circle of stone benches, set beneath a cyprus and cedar tree. The benches, she notes, were built from granite brought across the city by a park volunteer and put together by Friends of Beaver Pond over the past year. Some lean haphazardly, one heavy slab of granite balanced on two rocks, wedged with woods and slivers of limestone. Others sit firm, seemingly grown from the ground itself. 

“This is where we have our group meetings,” she tells me. Friends of Beaver Pond Park has ballooned to thirty strong since Bartow activated the group, and she is proud and resolute of this fact. Tucked beside the benches, a flower garden throws its scent into the hard wind. 

“All of our volunteers have kids. And this, for years, has been their garden. They immediately gravitate here,” Bartow says. “As they grow, they keep coming back — they get water from the pond, check on their plants and how they’ve grown.”

The post FEATURE: In Search for a Green Place appeared first on Yale Daily News.

I shuddered walking down Hillhouse Ave, recalling that battlefield, that slaughterhouse. My fingers balled up deep within my pockets. There was no undoing what I had just done. The splayed legs, the awkwardly craned neck parts. I could imagine the crimson path I left as I walked—bloodied stains on the soles of my sneakers stamping the pavement with each step I took.

It was just a lanternfly, I repeated like a mantra. I’m supposed to squish them. But the finality of murder weighed heavily upon me. 

I’m a killer.

The spotted lanternfly is a beautiful creature. Introduced from the forests of East Asia, they are roughly the size of your thumb joint and marked with dots resembling bled-out ink at the tips. Viewed from the side, the lanternfly looks like a pink-tan teardrop. In resting position, their wings fold up side-by-side like a moth; unfurled, they are a flare of black, white, and red.  

Striking as they are, lanternflies are invasive to the Northeast. They are incredibly fecund insects that deposit thousands of eggs in camouflaged masses. Given time and ample food, spotted lanternflies can quickly overrun an ecosystem. 

Governmental agencies across the Northeast, like the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, began recommending people destroy egg masses and report sightings to curb their spread. Killing lanternflies became sensationalized: a quick TikTok search for “crushing lanternflies” reveals hundreds, if not more, short clips of environmental vigilantism. But not everyone caught on. In 2022, Bobbi Wilson was stopped by the police as she exterminated spotted lanternflies with a homemade concoction of water, dish soap, and apple cider vinegar. Wilson was only nine years old at the time — and Black. Wilson’s exterminating, and the subsequent media storm around her encounter with the police,  granted her fame and prompted several interviews and an invitation for her to come visit the Yale School of Public Health. Wilson’s spotted lanternfly specimens, carefully pinned and labeled, remain on display in the Peabody Museum’s collections today. 

As an aspiring ecologist, I was inspired by Wilson’s act of young bravery. I followed climate and environmental news closely, despite living in Los Angeles, thousands of miles away from the nearest lanternfly infestation. Amidst an internet dive on the issue, I came across a video of children killing the mottled lanternflies by the dozens. The tree bark rippled with the fluttering and shuffling of dull-gray wings. The children were smiling as they pulverized the insects with their little shoes. They grinned ear to ear, proudly displaying the spoils of their playground menacing. I was horrified and fully enraptured.

Few bugs have met their end on my account. Frankly, I always hated the sound and the mere thought of the crushed insects’ texture. It felt immoral and disgusting, even, to subject any lifeform to torture and subsequent disintegration. With the exception of mosquitos. Those could die.

My aversion to extermination created a pastime that filled my windowsill and desk with bottles and jars. For years, I built microbiomes for roly-polies, sometimes taking them out to hold and cradle their little bodies gently as they rocked back and forth in my palm. I had a mantis-raising stint for a couple of years in high school and wrote numerous college essays about how I don’t kill spiders. But fuzzy, googly-eyed arachnids are different from tree-sucking lanternflies. Spiders are inquisitive creatures that eliminate undesirable pests. Spotted lanternflies, on the other hand, are prolific, malignant bodies. As I crushed the latter, visions of the future — gloriously green and lanternfly-free — filled my mind. I was doing good for the world. 

But it turns out my vigilantism may have been for naught. I spoke with Peabody staffer Nicole Palffy-Muhoray, Associate Director of Student Programs, and Larry Gall, Senior Collection Manager in the Entomology Division, for further insight on the usefulness and morality of my actions.

According to the entomologists, by the time the public knew about the spotted lanternflies and their havoc, it was already too late. “Once the news spread, [spotted lanternflies] were already well established. And because they eat so many different kinds of trees, we weren’t able to just track them to single locations and eradicate them in a single location,” Palffy-Muhoray said. “Killing one out of 10,000 is not really going to make a difference.”

Palffy-Muhoray told me that she had not killed any lantern flies — she didn’t “see the purpose” in doing it. “And even if there was a purpose, does that justify it to me? That’s not clear.”As we spoke, Gall and Palffy-Muhoray showed me the collection’s insectile artwork — made not of bugs, but from them. Butterfly and moth wings trimmed and glued into the vibrant image of two swooping cranes. Scarab beetles carved out and turned into gold jewelry. Even whole specimens themselves usually aren’t accumulated post-mortem. Collectors often go out with traps, nets, or an apparatus like a century-old Chinese rice wine bottle and return from the field with hauls of newly deceased critters. This freshness allows for a high-quality pinned specimen. 

Something confused me about this approach; curators would not catch living mice or tear off songbird wings for display. This I easily chalked up to intelligence: birds and mammals are smart; insects are not. It feels more wrong to kill something that thinks or feels. While murder may be wrong regardless, killing a being of relatively higher cognition is, in a sense, a step closer to killing one of us. But Palffy-Muhoray disagrees. “The idea that [insects] are not intelligent is based essentially on only looking at intelligence when it’s similar to human intelligence. While they don’t have the same brain structure, that doesn’t mean that there’s no other path to some kind of higher cognition,” said Palffy-Muhoray. The research on the full extent of how insects think, feel, or perceive the world is catching up, but it’s slow.

Gall also mentioned that entomologists are unconcerned with collecting because insects are highly capable of reproducing. Ecologically, collecting a few specimens here and there has little impact on the population as a whole. Plus, insects have a rapid life cycle and are capable of producing numerous young, whereas vertebrates typically put more care and investment into their young. In that sense, Gall said, “The impact of doing sampling for research on insect populations is radically smaller than the same kind of approach on a vertebrate population.”

So, does having more offspring reduce the worth of each individual? Palffy-Muhoray’s best answer to my ethical perplexity was, “It’s complicated.” She continued, “People might buy vegetables with pesticides sprayed on them, but then they might not be willing to kill a lantern fly, and there’s sort of an inherent contradiction there, right? Or maybe people don’t like spiders, and they’ll kill a spider in their house, but they think the lanternfly is pretty so they don’t want to kill that. So I think it’s an endless conversation.”

Feeling desolate and unsatisfied, I trudged back down Science Hill. I passed by seven lanternflies (yes, I counted). Two had already met their flattened fates, now mere remnants of wings and leg-bits. The other five were wholly intact. With my iNaturalist mobile app, a budding ecologist’s staple, I snapped several pictures, tagged their location for other casual naturalists to see, and forced my feet to keep walking.

That night, I did what any Yale student deep in the trenches of existential and ethical crises would do — email a professor of moral philosophy and normative ethics. Shelly Kagan, Clark Professor of Philosophy at Yale, was congenial enough to speak with me on Zoom. 

Kagan sees environmental ethics as a constant act of weighing various factors, akin to the costs and benefits of economics. In 2019, Kagan published his book, “How to Count Animals, More or Less,” which set forth a hierarchical view of life forms, one that places humans at the top and “lesser beings” such as insects at the bottom. 

“When kids capture insects and then pull off the wings, we have this kind of knee-jerk reaction that [the act] is wrong,” Kagan said. I grimaced, remembering how it felt to step on that lanternfly. “Do [insects] count because they’re sentient, or are we projecting sentience on them in the absence of really good evidence?”

He then explained that, historically, the deliberation between what life forms “count” has broken down into three methods of thought: rationale, sentience, and agency. Rationality divides the objects of the universe into people and things, and things don’t count in their own right. “If you were to take a cat and douse it with gasoline and then light it on fire for the fun of watching it die, Kant has a hard time explaining what’s wrong with that,” Kagan said. “Most of us think there’s something wrong with that. And that suggests that we think that things can have moral standing or moral claims, even if they’re not rational beings.”

Sentience acknowledges that “things” that feel pleasure or, in the cat’s case, pain have moral standing. Kagan used an unnerving but effective example to express this to me. “Pull an arm off a squirrel…that’s going to cause agony to the squirrel, and if the squirrel would have gone on to have a tolerably pleasant squirrel life, not only have you caused the pain, but you’ve robbed it of all the pleasure that would have come its way. [Sentience] says squirrels count because they feel pleasure and pain.”

The third perspective, agency, is sympathetic toward all things with intention or purpose. Agency, loosely defined by Kagan, is how you want “your life to be going, what you want to be doing, what you want to be happening to you. [Like] having a will, as we might put it.” In this sense, the cat and the squirrel all have agency, as do snakes, flies, bacteria, and, yes, spotted lanternflies. While these lanternflies use their agency to destroy ecosystems, the basis of that destruction is survival. And people kill for survival all the time—they cut down trees for shelter, they kill elk for hide, they uproot vegetables for consumption. Things deemed nuisances or invasive are simply doing the same. 

Far from an ecologist, Kagan considers his method of thought to be ethical individualism—concerning each individual animal or plant rather than desiring to protect the ecosystem as a whole. “If you go individualistic, which is the way I go, then you have to ask, ‘Do plants count morally, or is it merely animals?’ The victim that you most directly described for the lanternfly is that it’s killing off certain trees. Do trees have moral standing?”

Collectivistic ethics, which places the group before the individual, says that a forest should have legal protection. In 2021, the Ecuadorian government granted the Los Cedros Protected Forest the Rights of Nature, which includes the rights to a healthy environment, water, and environmental consultation. Like the Ecuadorian tropics, Northeastern forest systems provide a multitude of ecological and economic services. Lanternflies disrupt these existing processes—but whether that’s enough to lose their moral status is up to the individual.

However, I agree with Kagan: environmental ethics should be individualistic. I feel satisfied knowing that I am of the same carbon as the fertile soil, or of the same nitrogenous compounds of the billowing kelp. On this colorful, multilayered planet, there are bits that hop, fly, croak, and lie still; there are bits that crash into each other and bits that rebuild the fragments. We are of this artwork, as are the roly-polies, the mice, the scarabs, the squirrels. We organisms are so interconnected, yet, will we ever know how the world looks from the eyes of the spotted lanternfly? 

Until we know for sure, I will discontinue my pest-crunching, and transform my “save the trees” goodness into an “every being matters” goodness. The spotted lanternfly can carry on with its life, and I will with mine.

The post FEATURE: The Bodies up on Science Hill: The Spotted Lanternfly and My Qualms on Killing appeared first on Yale Daily News.

“Then you kill them, and that’s it.”

After my conversation with Feng, I had to wonder — what is it like to hold life and, in some cases, mete out death with your hands?

–

Odessa Goldberg ’25 worked with mice, not rats. On Beinecke Plaza on a busy Friday, she comfortably discusses how she used to slice mice brains as a part of research to discern how physiological conditions and changes to those conditions affect brain function.

Slicing brains was Goldberg’s main job at the laboratory, though she occasionally fed mice, too. The intact brains were stored in negative-eight degrees Celsius freezers, packed in boxes like the ones “you get cheap jewelry in,” wrapped in tinfoil, and coated in a gel that preserved their integrity. Once Goldberg took the brains out of the freezer, she would have to slice them quickly, but carefully. The brains could not melt, but she also needed the samples to be viable — that is, cut well. With a gray, bladed machine called a cryostat, she cut brain samples while keeping them frozen at negative-twenty degrees Celsius. Then she would place the freshly cut slice onto a slide for further detailed analysis.

Goldberg had “practice brains” that were, in fact, real mouse brains — they were just not meant for research data. A mouse brain contains “powerful information that you don’t want to be wasteful with,” she says,  “and you want to treat it with the respect it deserves.” Throughout her time at the lab, she became focused on perfecting the practice of brain slicing. But, as she repeated the process over and over again at her job, the slicing became rote; her body did the work automatically.

She broke the routine on her twentieth birthday. As she was cleaning the cryostat, she forgot the machine was still on, and it cut off part of her pinky finger.

“And my first thought was, ‘Do I need to keep studying this?” she says, laughing a little bit in retrospect. However, the moment changed the way she thought about slicing mice brains. “It made it feel very much more real.” She became very cautious and aware of what she was doing after that experience.

Goldberg no longer works at that laboratory. She now conducts research that uses human models, which she prefers. She does not work with humans the way that she worked with mice, to say the least; she does not slice human brains. Animal testing “doesn’t feel like a great moral activity,” she says. But, she concedes, “then again, I’m not a vegetarian. I consume meat, and it’s not even for the higher purpose of science.”

By working at her former lab, she gained a new respect for mice. “I don’t really think of them as a pest or something,” she says. “Except, you know, I had many mice in Branford.”

–

“You and the rat are the only thing in there,” says Feng. “And you just look at it, and it looks at you.” She did not kill the rats herself; her job was to habituate them for six months in a basement room at the Yale School of Medicine, which she describes as a “clinical,” windowless white box that played white noise. 

Over the months, Feng grew closer to the rats. She learned to differentiate between them according to their particular quirks and behaviors. Some rats looked at her with more intimacy than others. Some appeared more confident or displayed more anxiety. They were named in a kind of code. “We’d be, like, SU6 is really smart.” Feng says. Through playing and socializing, rats relied on her and the other researchers for comfort.

And then she watched them die. “You’re like, oh my god, I’m a terrible person,” she recalls thinking.

Feng maintains that animal models were necessary for her research, as well as for other neuroscience projects: brain systems are simply too complex for synthetic models to produce viable, scientifically significant results. She mentioned examples of treatments for diseases that could have only existed because of animal testing; one such is guanfacine, which was developed in the Arnsten Lab, and which now treats hundreds of thousands of cases of ADHD and schizophrenia. The development of guanfacine used macaque monkeys as research models.

I ask Feng if she might assume the rats to be more “human” than they actually are, that we might attribute familiar emotions, feelings, and thoughts to them because they display some social behavior. She doesn’t think that rats have the same level of consciousness as humans, but acknowledges fundamental similarities between human and rodent brains. 

“After you do research, you’re like, ‘oh, they have the same brain areas as us,’” she says, “and then at the end of the summer, you’re like, ‘oh wait, they have the same brain areas as us.’”

Via text, Feng told me that some researchers have quit shortly after working with animals, due to feeling uncomfortable with the process. Working with very human-like animals, such as macaque monkeys, can be especially hard and is more likely to push away researchers. However, there remain many researchers who accept the emotional difficulty and still work with animals. Dr. Stephen Latham, Director of Yale’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, analogized the situation with his wife’s family’s neighbors in rural Scotland, who raise Highland cows for beef. They raise the cows with great care, even though they’re going to slaughter them. If a mother cow dies, they bring the calves into their kitchen and feed them from a bottle. Dr. Latham personally knows lab technicians who love the animals they test on. “They’re incredible,” he says. “They work so hard to keep the animals comfortable.”

–

When I was speaking with Goldberg, she recalled the disconnect between the animal-research training that she had to complete and the slicing of the brains. “I had gotten all this training not to kill them,” she says, “and then I’m slicing dead mice.” If all goes well, Goldberg’s research will have helped make people’s lives better. But how does one think about the distant future when mice brains are right in front of you, sliced into pieces?

The post FEATURE: FLOWERS for SU6 appeared first on Yale Daily News.

His second arrest — at a rally on May 1, his twenty-second birthday — was unexpected. While the rally was on Alexander Walk, police issued a warning calling for protesters to leave. Since several police cars had surrounded the protest at that point, Birckhead-Morton approached a police officer to ask where it would be convenient for protesters to disperse. He was immediately arrested and then charged with two counts of first-degree criminal trespass and one count of disorderly conduct.

Birckhead-Morton is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. He is still connected to Yale and the ongoing protests, both in spirit and by necessity. He returned to New Haven on September 19 for a court hearing in which his charges from May 1 were dismissed and his first-degree trespassing charge from April was lowered to simple trespass. He has no criminal record.

Since last October, pro-Palestine student organizers at Yale have set up multiple encampments on university property, staged rallies, and organized teach-ins to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and protest the University’s investment in weapons manufacturing companies. Students who support Israel have hosted counterprotests and demonstrations. Many students have held memorials for the hostages killed and taken by Hamas, as well as spoken out in national media about antisemitism at Yale. 

Photograph by Yalies4Palestine

Though students are generally united in their hope for global peace and security, sympathies on Yale’s campus are split between two sides of the same war. 

But other forms of ideological bifurcation have emerged from the past year of student protests. Disagreements about activism at Yale often go beyond taking sides in the Israel-Gaza conflict; instead, they highlight fundamental disputes surrounding Yale’s role in society and its duty to students as an educational institution. As Yale gears up for another year of activism, student activists are confronting the tensions of campus activism head-on — to contradictory and at times hopeful results.

What is Yale’s role in society?

Yale’s endowment totaled $40.7 billion in June 2023. Within the 0.3 percent of the endowment which is publicly disclosed, the University has invested more than $110,000 in military weapons manufacturers through exchange-traded funds (ETFs) as of February 2024. In their rallies and encampments, student groups like Yalies4Palestine and the Endowment Justice Collective have consistently demanded Yale to disclose the entirety of their investments and divest from weapons manufacturers. According to an Endowment Justice Collective Instagram statement, without a formal policy on investments in weapons manufacturers or transparency mechanisms, there is no way of knowing whether Yale and its shell companies are investing more in the weapons industry.

Their detractors, however, believe that divestment needlessly complicates Yale’s purpose in society. It “introduces so many restrictions into the academic focus that Yale should be having,” said Isha Brahmbhatt ’24, former chairman of the Tory Party at Yale. She believes that the University’s global impact comes from its education of globally-minded students; the ethics of Yale’s investments or its stance on social issues are less consequential. 

Within an institution that has educated much of the political elite of the U.S., including five U.S. presidents, a Yale education is still seen by many as a jumping pad for future global leaders. Elven Shum ’24, former vice-chairman of the Conservative Party at Yale, argues that Yale students are positioned uniquely to “amass their own power or influence” and eventually influence national policy. In the time before most students achieve “world leader” status, Shum advocates for volunteering at the local level: “Serving people at a soup kitchen is probably just as, or more impactful, compared to your individual add to whatever protest at Yale.” 

Photograph by Christina Lee 

Shum and Brahmbhatt’s concept of Yale as a politically neutral, academically intense cradle that fosters future changemakers is partially shared by the University. In early September, University President Maurie McInnis announced the establishment of a committee to recommend whether Yale should refrain from commenting on matters of public significance. This move comes as many universities nationwide, including Harvard and Columbia, have adopted versions of institutional neutrality amidst a rise in student protests this year. Institutional neutrality, a concept which was first introduced in the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report, aims to protect free speech on campus by preventing the censure of minority voices who do not agree with the public view. 

But Yale’s celebratory attitude towards its history of student activism suggests that being strictly politically neutral may erode some elements that the University prides in its education. A quote from anti-apartheid activist and first president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, is carved on the granite wall north of the Beinecke Library — “YOUR FREEDOM AND MINE CANNOT BE SEPARATED.” The sculpted monument is, per the epigraph, “dedicated to the people of South Africa who were supported in their struggle for freedom by members of the Yale and New Haven communities.” 

Photograph by Christina Lee

The memorial refers to the student protests of 1986, when student activists installed a shanty town on Beinecke Plaza calling for Yale’s divestment from companies doing business in apartheid South Africa. After ten days, campus police dismantled the encampment and arrested over 70 students. According to the Yale Investment Office’s website, the University did eventually adopt divestment policies in the early 1990s — but only after Congress had passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act in 1986 and many multinational companies had already withdrawn from South Africa.

Despite Yale’s efforts to shut down the anti-apartheid student movement in the 1980s, it now celebrates these protests’ success in one of the most prominent campus spaces. The University continues to broadcast its students’ historical involvement in campus activism; last year, the Sterling Memorial Library hosted an exhibition commemorating campus protests in support of New Haven’s Black Panthers on trial.

These commemorations indicate that the University considers civic engagement part of its education. But Yale’s endorsement of activism has always been retroactive. 

An education in activism?

In student activist spaces, education goes beyond seminar readings: it consists of learning from others’ lived experiences. Over the past year, pro-Palestine activists at Yale have organized through means other than mere disruption of campus life. Through teach-ins, reading weeks and screenings, they seek to educate themselves and other students on the situation in the Middle East.

During the ten-day occupation of Beinecke Plaza in April, at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, protesters held a zine-making workshop and conversation with Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, professor of anthropology at Bard College. Omnia El Shakry, professor of history at Yale, hosted a teach-in about anti-colonial revolt and the Palestinian condition. James Forman Jr. LAW ’92, J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law, spoke to students about his experience organizing with the anti-apartheid student group Brown Divest/Free South Africa during his undergraduate years at Brown. 

“You should constantly be asking yourself, are we taking the time to learn from people who were doing it before?” Forman advised an attentive crowd of more than 70 student protesters on April 19. While students can be on the vanguard of activism because of the lack of established institutional structure, he said, this also means that it is hard for them to learn lessons from previous experiences and connect to the lineage of activism from decades ago. 

Photograph by Giri Viswanathan

Still, Yale institutions have shut down educational forms of student activism. Danya Dubrow-Compaine ’25 is an organizer with Yale Jews for Ceasefire and J Street U. To her, these organizations are spaces for those who feel alienated from mainstream Jewish institutions because of their views on the war; they also offer opportunities to educate the student body on Zionism and its history.

Dubrow-Compaine and others in J Street U planned to screen a documentary named Israelism at the Slifka Center for Jewish Life in December 2023. The documentary, which follows two young American Jews as they learn about how the version of Israel they were taught in Jewish institutions differed from Israeli policy and people in the Middle East’s lived reality, was controversially received in the States and on college campuses like Hunter College, where campaigns were held to stop the film’s screening. 

At Yale, the Slifka Center’s Board of Directors originally approved the screening before reversing the decision one week before the event. Students held the screening in the basement of Silliman College instead. In a conversation with Uriel Cohen, the executive director of the Slifka Center, Dubrow-Compaine learned that the approval was retracted because of concerns regarding external backlash from donors and Hillel International. (In an email to the Magazine, Cohen wrote that donor contributions do not change or impact Slifka Center’s mission, values or methodologies.)

Jewish students’ endeavors to screen Israelism at the Slifka Center illustrate how activists attempt to disrupt the ideological status quo at Yale through education, both among the student population and within Yale’s official institutions. “Israelism is a documentary making very well founded mainstream critiques of settlements in the West Bank, and yet it was deemed to be beyond the pale in a way that right-wing speech on Israel specifically is just often not,” said Elijah Bacal ’27, who is involved in J Street U and Yale Jews for Ceasefire.

Shutting down the protests: for student safety?

Photograph by Christina Lee

While student organizers maintain the value of campus activism within an educational institution like Yale, the University has often taken action to quell ongoing protests and prevent future rallies from evolving into larger occupations.

On April 22, 48 protesters (44 Yale students, a Yale employee, and three New Haveners) were arrested by Yale police and charged with criminal trespassing after police raided the encampment on Beinecke Plaza. On May 1, four people were arrested (two Yale students, two New Haveners) towards the end of a demonstration on campus; the arrest of a non-Yale affiliate involved the use of disproportionate force. The University claims that these arrests were made in order to protect students’ safety. 

Right after the arrests, former University President Salovey wrote in a statement to the Yale community that student protesters had chosen to end conversations with Yale deans, rejecting offers to end the protests and meet with trustees. At that point, the administration determined that “the situation was no longer safe,” as they “became aware of police reports identifying harmful acts and threatening language used against individuals at or near the protest sites.” 

Following the police reports, Chabad at Yale released a statement on April 21 condemning “brazen antisemitism” during the period of Beinecke protests: “The situation came to a head last night, when unauthorized protests blocking common areas led to a hostile and dangerous confrontation for Jewish students on campus. A dear and beloved student leader of Chabad at Yale was surrounded and struck by a sharp object and ended up in the hospital.” The student wrote about the incident in The Free Press and spoke on national media about it; her account has since been questioned by other journalists and outlets.

Rabbi Meir Chaim Posner, the Jewish Life Advisor of Chabad at Yale, noted that at Yale, protests have mostly not devolved into violence, nor has he been afraid for his physical safety despite his being “visibly Jewish.” But physical safety is not the most pressing issue at hand, he said. “The issue is, is it okay to delegitimize a people on campus at Yale and not suffer any repercussions?”

Eytan Israel ’26, a Jewish student, wrote to the Magazine about his uncomfortable experience as a “visibly Jewish” person who wished to witness and document happenings at the Beinecke encampment. At the encampment’s perimeter, he had a student marshal step in front of him to prevent him from passing, he said. He criticized how some faculty members moved their classes to the Beinecke encampment, which was “not a place many Jewish students felt safe going to” due to chants like “Resistance is justified when people are occupied,” and “Globalize the intifada,” which he and other Jews understood as being justification for Hamas’s attacks and a call for a global revival of the 2000–2005 Intifada in Israel. 

“Despite these slogans that were present at the encampments, almost every group chat in Yale was filled with messages that if you care about humanity and morality, you must come to support the encampments,” he said.

Given the accusations of antisemitism plaguing protest spaces, some Jewish student activists believe that it is even more important for them to speak up about the Gaza war. To Dubrow-Compaine, Jews for Ceasefire is “a way for Jewish students to shoulder some of the organizing labor for the Palestinian cause”: “People aren’t necessarily going to label us as antisemites in the way that they would label non-Jewish pro-Palestine activists.”

“The idea that arresting dozens of students peacefully protesting makes any of us safer is insane,” said Bacal, citing the necessity of freedom of expression and assembly on campus. “It’s true that individual Jewish students expressed feeling unsafe during the encampments, and I would never challenge the validity of their experience,” he said. “But the only thing the arrests made safer is Yale Corp’s bottom line.”

But when a second encampment was assembled on Cross Campus on April 28, more concerns started to arise 

Photograph by Yalies4Palestine

about whether antisemitism was ideologically embedded in spaces of pro-Palestine activism. Organizers erected a sign listing “community guidelines” of the encampment, which included committing to “Palestinian liberation and fighting for freedom for all oppressed people” and a no-tolerance policy for antisemitism, Islamophobia and racism. A protest marshal told the News in April that if pedestrians chose not to support the community guidelines, marshals offered to escort them to the other side of Cross Campus.

In response, Salovey wrote in an email to the Yale community that “to claim control of a shared physical space and to impose an intellectual and ideological litmus test are not in keeping with our bedrock principles and values.” Eytan Israel agrees: “It doesn’t matter that there are Jews that were part of the encampment,” he said.

Yalies4Palestine told the Magazine that when organizers received feedback that people were “not feeling included and represented,” the coalition “collectively” took the guidelines down. The group also stated their belief in the difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism: Zionism is an “imperial, colonial political ideology that was created in the early 20th century to justify the genocide and displacement of Palestinian peoples from their ancestral land,” they said, while anti-Zionism opposes that ideology and is “completely separate” from antisemitism.

“We are constantly striving to make our spaces feel welcome for people of all different backgrounds,” the group said, highlighting their collaboration with Jewish activist groups. “A part of that is constantly examining our messaging, and Jews for Ceasefire has been very helpful in collaborating with us and helping us create safer spaces.”

To Rabbi Posner, trying to establish a difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and then excluding Zionist Jews from accessing campus spaces, is equivalent to having a “plausible deniability that I’m only targeting ‘this kind of a Jew,’” he said, “which doesn’t fly.” Zionism is the belief that Jews have a right to self determination in the land of Israel, he explained. “The moment someone believes that Israel is not a legitimate country, then that is antisemitic, period.”

Still, he believes that a version of “pro-Palestine” protests on campus can coexist with respect for Jewish people and non-antisemitism. “Even though it’s complex and I can’t say I agree, it would be a movement that sees Israel as legitimate, sees Israel as engaged in a legitimate struggle, and believes that the answer to that is through diplomatic negotiations.” These peaceful discussions happen in many Jewish communities, he said.

Photograph by Yalies4Palestine

Antisemitic actions at pro-Palestine protests are not the University’s only safety concern. Administrators have expressed unease about the “danger” of non-Yale affiliates participating in Yale protests. Salovey wrote in a University-wide email on April 22, after the arrests on Beinecke Plaza, that it was “concerning” that “some of those who joined students at Hewitt Quadrangle (Beinecke Plaza) in recent days were not members of the Yale community, and protesters were trespassing on campus overnight.” 

Following police arrests in the morning, hundreds of protesters moved to blockade the intersection of Grove and College Streets, causing traffic to divert and Schwarzman Center, including Commons dining hall and the Elm cafe, to close for two days. 

Afterwards, Pericles Lewis, Dean of Yale College wrote an email to Yale staff which was then leaked to student protest groups: “According to law enforcement, the core of the group holding the intersection outside Schwarzman are non-Yale protestors with a known history of violent confrontation with the police,” he wrote. “We have found that the presence of such outsiders has greatly increased danger at recent protests.” 

A few hours later, Lewis retracted his words in a statement to the News: “My email regarding the protest at Grove and Prospect was mistaken and I apologize for the suggestion that the protesters might turn violent,” he wrote. “I was repeating speculation I had overheard and I should not have done so.”

Activists from non-Yale organizations — like those from several Muslim Student Associations in CT, chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, and the Connecticut chapter of American Muslims for Palestine — also participated in the Yale protests. 

Protesters were dissatisfied with the University’s response to their efforts in coalition building. Birckhead-Morton views the University’s statements as a strategy to “break up the movement by racializing and demonizing the communities which are acting in solidarity with student protestors.” This tension comes at a time period when the Yale administration is making consistent efforts to foster town-gown relations, including by increasing Yale’s voluntary payments to the city, establishing a commitment to offset the city’s loss in tax revenues, and helping fund public school tuition; Salovey’s Baccalaureate Address to graduating seniors in August 2023 also focused on the importance of community engagement in New Haven.

Yale won’t budge. What’s next for activism?

On April 17, at the peak of the first Beinecke Plaza occupation, Yale announced that the Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility (ACIR) had concluded

Photograph by Christina Lee

that “military weapons manufacturing for authorized sales did not meet the threshold of grave social injury, a prerequisite for divestment,” meaning that Yale would not be divesting from military weapons. 

On September 28, three students advocating for Yale to disclose and divest from weapons manufacturers met with a member of the Yale Corporation for the first time. In the meeting, they presented a proposal for the University to disclose the percentage and dollar amount of Yale’s endowment that is invested in weapons manufacturers and suppliers; the trustee did not commit to the terms of the proposal.

In 2018, even with considerable student voices calling for divestment in Puerto Rican debt — including a movement occupying Cross Campus for three days — Yale concluded that divesting was unwarranted, suggesting that the University’s decisions are fairly independent of student pressure.

Beverly Gage ’94, John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History, reasons that the failure of student activism to truly change the distribution of power of the institution is due to the fundamental disadvantages that students have compared to Yale itself. “The administration has been here for a long time, and The Yale Corporation not only operates in relative secrecy, but is a long-standing, permanent site of power… Most substantial change takes a really, really long time to make it happen.”

Yet even if campus activism seems futile in the moment, the hands-on education it provides may prove valuable to aspiring organizers. Sunrise Movement, a student-led organization in the climate movement, mainly consisted of campus activists who formerly advocated for divestment in fossil fuels as a theory of change. But as they grew more experienced in leftist advocacy, they saw the shortcomings of divestment, revamped their organizing strategy and eventually partnered with Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez to create a national campaign for the Green New Deal that stretched beyond divestment and economic incentives for industries to cut carbon emissions.

Photograph by Christina Lee

Still, to many student activists, the act of organizing at Yale is essential. Lumisa Bista ’25, an organizer in the Endowment Justice Collective (EJC) at Yale, organizes around awareness regarding Yale’s investments in exploitative industries and applies pressure on the University to divest. “It is a privilege to be able to separate ourselves from this war, but it is our responsibility to recognize that Yale is just as complicit in the atrocities,” she said. “Given that our education is tied to this corporation, it is our responsibility to challenge its wrongdoings.”

If campus protests are unable to force change at Yale, at the very least, they disrupt campus life, said Bista. During the Beinecke occupation, students were unable to pass through the Plaza without witnessing the swaths of protesters calling for a ceasefire, or the erected pop-up bookshelf, or the sign “ASK YOUR TOUR GUIDE ABOUT YALE’S INVESTMENT IN GENOCIDE.”

Student activism remains in the limelight this semester: as violence in the Middle East rages on, students have held a community gathering on Beinecke Plaza during Family Weekend, handed out “Yale Divest From War” pins to performance groups at Yale, and rallied with community members in solidarity with Lebanon. Both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine groups are hosting vigils and rallies around October 7th, 2024, the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s attack on Israel.

“The status quo hums along inoffensively and self-sufficiently due to its nature. Activism comes in and is, by its nature, loud and disruptive,” said Bacal. “I think people just have to understand that these things don’t arise in a vacuum.”

Correction, Oct. 14: This story has been updated to clarify that a student wrote their account of antisemitism in The Free Press, not the Yale Free Press.

The post FEATURE: What’s in a Yale Education? appeared first on Yale Daily News.

But when I visited one morning in early October, the hawks weren’t flying. So instead of standing at the hawkwatch, I headed towards the beach. Despite being possibly the last warm Sunday of the season, the beach was abandoned to seagulls. There were seven Herring Gulls, who were starting to replace their crisp breeding plumage with ratty winter feathers. One Great Black-backed Gullstood a few feet apart—a hulking, caped giant. A few Laughing Gulls, thin and graceful, flew over the water. The rest of the beach was taken by about thirty Ring-billed Gulls. These little ones, with their rounded heads and big dark eyes, were dwarfed by their larger cousins. By contrast, the herrings seemed all angles, giant proportions, and long sharp wings: they looked almost raptorial. The hawkwatchers, staring up at empty skies, were missing out.

“Most birders don’t care about gulls at all,” Andrew Birch, a prominent Southern California birder I’ve known since high school, told me. “Even among experts there’s a shocking lack of interest.” Birch, however, has spent years watching gulls, and when I asked him why, he smiled and said with no hint of irony, “They’ve got great personality! They’re maybe the only family of birds that are really playful.” 

Yet it is precisely their playful antics that are reviled by much of the general public. My dad calls them “rats with wings.” Asked about gulls, a friend shook her head: “They steal my food… Also a seagull peed-slash-shitted on my cousin’s head.” And for ornithology professionals these days, gulls are a risky subject. Yale ornithologist Liam Taylor, who recently submitted a paper about the history of gulls in the United States, isn’t sure if he hopes it’ll be published or not, because if it is, he and the coauthors might face ‘negative consequences.’ One of his coauthors, Wriley Hodge, agreed, with a wink, that if it’s published, “the Seabird Institute will never hire [them],” and they might both be “blacklisted” by East Coast waterbird researchers.  

Gulls, I have learned, are inherently contradictory. Their lives are webs of violence, yet they care for their partners and chicks with affection. They’re smelly, fishy, trash-eating, aerodynamic wind-dancers. They feel fury, and, apparently, have fun. They are loved and hated. I struggle to describe them in any meaningful way without equivocating: they are a bird associated with such intensity, yet for many people, they are nothing more than set dressings for a beach. 

I entered the world of gulls this May, when I spent a month studying a Herring Gull colony in New Brunswick, Canada, at the Bowdoin Scientific Station on Kent Island. My first impression of the colony was its magnitude: thousands of gulls crammed together on a mile-and-a-half long island, fighting and courting and feeding and swooping and all of them, at any hint of disturbance, screaming. The other researchers and I were offered hard hats for protection when the gulls dove at and kicked us with – literally – stunning strength, though the hats did little to protect us when the gulls shat on us from above. On my second day, a gull bit my hand badly enough to leave a scar. Even when I wasn’t being assaulted by gulls, Kent was freezing and wet and perpetually windy; the rocky, muddy, jagged beaches were alarming to maneuver across; I was disturbed to discover the ground littered with gull bones, evidence of the brutality of their lives there. I don’t even like nice beaches. Why had I decided to spend my summer studying seagulls?

Out of necessity, though, I settled into the rhythm of research. One of my assignments was to track the development of a single nest: every day, I visited it and recorded the growth of the developing embryos. I became familiar with its parents and the aggressive rituals they’d display while I worked. They looked comically furious, throwing back their heads, puffing out their necks, and bellowing a “trumpet” call. The eggs hatched on my last day at the station, and I marveled to hold the chicks in my hands. They were little more than mops of spotted fuzz, still damp from their eggshells. I was sorry to leave them and their parents behind.

I met Wriley Hodge months later. A student at the College of the Atlantic – a college in Maine prone to producing gull-enthusiasts – Wriley had spent the past three summers researching a similar Herring Gull colony at the CoA field station on Great Duck Island, Maine. When I asked them why they loved gulls, they turned reflective: “You can have all these preconceived notions about them as a nuisance. And then you live with them, and you see them building their nests, flirting with each other and raising their young and being such good parents… I think that when you live with something, like a colony of gulls, it’s hard not to fall in love.”

I had gone to Kent Island to perform research with the aforementioned Liam Taylor, a doctoral student in Yale’s Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department. I first met him on a cold day last winter, while looking for a field biologist to do summer fieldwork with. He fit the bill: bearded and beanied and prone to soliloquies, he wears sweaters in earth tones, orange-khaki pants, and a big waterproof watch.

When we met, Taylor explained that he studies a particular aspect of gull adolescence: delayed plumage maturation. Gulls don’t breed until they’re a few years old, and during this time, the young molt through a series of distinctive immature plumages before growing the definitive feathers of breeding adults. The purpose of these plumages is not known, as gull adolescence has received “shockingly” little attention from ornithologists. Taylor, who had witnessed young gulls visiting the Kent Island colony despite not breeding themselves, believes their feathers might function as social signals. By signaling their age, young birds might deflect aggression from breeding adults, giving them space to develop social skills necessary for colony life. Essentially, their immature plumages say Don’t mind me, I’m just here to learn.

On Kent Island, we used plastic birds painted like different Herring Gull age stages to test this social signaling hypothesis. We’d walk to a stretch of beach, place a model close to a nest, and record the response of the parents. We used gull decoys at three different ages, plus a goose decoy as a control, so we returned to each nest once a day for four days to present each model type at every nest. 

It was hard work. The first day of experiments began discouragingly. After lugging the models through a cold drizzle a mile down the beach, all of the first twelve trials involved the younger gull model types. Every nest reacted differently. Some gulls seemed unconcerned, some attacked the decoys, a few attacked us instead. We began our first trials with adult models in terse silence, but to our amazement, almost all of the adult models were swiftly attacked by the breeding gulls. Already, our results supported Taylor’s hypothesis: the gulls were more aggressive toward the adult models than toward the immatures.

We conducted hundreds of trials over the next month, with promising results: adult models were attacked twice as often as young models. Our sample size is not quite statistically significant, so we plan to perform another round of trials next summer, but they are encouraging. It seems young gulls really must develop social skills at colonies, and immature plumages pave the way for them to do so. 

The same age-related variations in plumage that Taylor studies make gulls some of the most difficult-to-identify birds in the world. Gulls also have a tendency to hybridize, smudging the already blurry lines between species. But Andrew Birch is part of a small community of birders – the gull enthusiasts – with a special dose of dedication, verging on obsession, that drives them to brave landfills and pour over gatherings of gulls in search of rare species.

For Birch, it is the very challenge of identification, the “mental exercise” of “sorting through many birds and trying to find one different one” that makes gulls so exciting. Because so few birders undertake the challenge of gull-watching, much less is known about their basic demographics and movements than for other birds. This “frontier aspect” also draws Birch. Unlike other birds, he says, “it feels like there’s maybe some discoveries to be made… [Gull identification] is still very much in its infancy.”

I tried to take Birch’s enthusiasm to heart. The next time I visited Lighthouse Point, I paused with the clump of gulls. I considered all the subtle features necessary for gull identification – the shades of their coverts, the angles of their bills, the quality of their wingtips. I found no rarities that day, but I could understand the appeal of gull-watching. With gulls, each flock is a puzzle. The more you look, the more you learn, and the more you see. 

But Birch’s primary reason for watching gulls is not to challenge himself: it is simply to enjoy observing them. Even when describing the time a Herring Gull stole his daughter’s ice cream cone, he seemed less annoyed than amused by the gull’s gumption: “It didn’t spill a drop!” He told me about their often-inexplicable behaviors. “They play with tennis balls, you see that a lot,” he said. “I’m anthropomorphizing, but there seems to be a lot of play. They remind me of my dog.”

I had noticed a similar playfulness on Kent Island. On windy days, the gulls would lift up into the air and hover in place, apparently for no reason other than to enjoy being buffeted. It seemed clear that they were doing it for fun, but the mere idea of fun is a controversial one for animals like gulls. 

Back at Yale, I hesitantly asked Taylor how he felt about the word anthropomorphism. “All biologists agree that humans are animals,” he said after a pause. “Where they split is that some biologists think that believing a human is an animal means that we can denigrate humanity into a set of animalistic principles, like lifetime reproductive success, fitness, evolution by natural selection. Those people are anthropomorphizing, in my opinion – they’re making the shape of an animal exactly the same as the shape of a human. And they’re doing that by dragging human experience down to the level to which they attribute animal experience. All I’m doing is accepting the same premise, which is that humans are animals, and then saying, human animals do these wild things. Who am I to believe, a priori, that other animals don’t do interesting things?”

It is a perspective not without risk in the world of biology. Six months ago I would have hesitated to even bring up anthropomorphism with another scientist. Among gull researchers, it seemed, a new kind of science – trashy science, if you will – was possible. 

Even those who grant animals subjectivity don’t tend to go looking for it in gulls. A few high-profile conservation organizations actively engage in gull “culling” to protect other species, as Taylor and Hodge recently described in their paper awaiting review – including the National Audubon Society’s Seabird Institute. In the 1970s, the Seabird Institute, then known as Project Puffin, began a decades-long initiative to coax puffins to found new island colonies in the Gulf of Maine, where they previously did not breed. Maintaining those colonies requires killing predatory gulls to protect the vulnerable puffins. 

Though this initiative was framed as a “restoration” of historic puffin habitat, the little surviving evidence from those islands before European colonialism suggests puffins had never nested there in high numbers. In fact, the evidence suggests all of the seabirds nesting in the Gulf of Maine today – including gulls – are likely new additions, brought about by the conversion of the historically forested islands to grassy fields by sheep farmers in the 1800s, as well as by the extinction of predatory sea mink.

After the sheep industry briefly increased their numbers, gulls were targeted by the millinery trade in the early 1900s, and their population plummeted. Thus, along with other species used for the hat trade, gulls became a key focus of early twentieth-century conservation movements, including the first local Audubon societies. Indeed, as Hodge pointed out, the National Audubon Society states on its website that it was founded in 1905 for “the protection of gulls, terns, egrets, herons, and other waterbirds.”

But gulls’ time as icons of conservation was short-lived. As conservation increased their numbers in the region again, fishermen complained that gulls competed for their fish; berry farmers in Maine said gulls ate their crops; beachgoers didn’t like their mess. In the 1940s, the federal government sponsored an initiative to reduce gull numbers in the north Atlantic. The effort involved killing gulls and destroying upwards of a million eggs by spraying them with oil. The goal, Hodge quoted from an archival document, was not to eliminate them but simply to “reduce their populations until they no longer posed a serious menace to man’s interest.” Today, that effort continues in practice if not in name and is why, ironically, a century after it was founded to protect them, the National Audubon Society is “one of the biggest killers of gulls in the United States,” Hodge says.

According to Hodge and Taylor, we kill gulls not because puffins are any more natural or even significantly more threatened than gulls – Herring Gulls have themselves declined steeply since at least the 1980s. We kill gulls, ultimately, because we like puffins more: because unlike puffins, gulls sometimes eat at landfills, sometimes steal our food, sometimes even poop on us. I can’t help but feel that the traits that annoy us about gulls are the very traits that make them similar to us: their commonness, their boldness, their adaptability. Indeed, Hodge says, we hate gulls because we see them “as these trash birds, that benefit from all of the things that we are ashamed of.”

Taylor primarily studies gulls and manakins, both birds considered to be instinctual rather than socially intelligent. Their social behaviors are innate, meaning they can’t learn behaviors like songs from each other, as songbirds can. Traditionally, biologists only define “culture” in species – like songbirds or humans – that learn from each other; instinctual birds like gulls have none.

Hodge, though, believes that gulls do have culture. They have been “continually astonished” to observe how distinct individual gull colonies are. Some colonies are tolerant of human visitors, some aggressive, some particularly nervous. What would those inter-island differences be if not culture?

And Taylor, similar to Hodge, is generous in bestowing sociality to gulls, even while acknowledging the innateness of their behavior. While gulls might lack the kind of culture defined by evolutionary biologists, that definition of culture is not the one understood by “normal human beings.” Gulls, Taylor says, do have a culture – just like us, they have fear and joy, beauty and attraction, anger and confusion, conventions and idiosyncrasies. They are not born knowing everything they will ever know. They develop their sociality, they find mates, they discover how to raise chicks. 

On reflection, the difference between gull culture and our own is that theirs is remarkably stable. For millions of years gull society has looked much the same. It reassembles itself with consistency, having landed on a system that works. Each year, the young gulls feel themselves drawn to the windswept beaches. They stumble into gull towns, full of adults who do not care to teach them a thing. Each year, gull society rediscovers itself. 

I told Hodge, since leaving Kent Island, that I can’t help but seek out gulls wherever I go. They assured me they felt the same, preferring to watch gulls over more traditionally charismatic birds. “You can watch [gulls] everywhere. And when you find the magical in the mundane, there’s just so much to see in the world… I think that, in some ways, the world is a more beautiful place if you love gulls.”

When I visited Lighthouse Point in October, the gulls ignored me. No longer breeding, they didn’t care if I approached; there were no trumpet calls, no kicks to my head, no swirling clouds of gull-fury. Whatever was going on within and between them was invisible to me – their winter culture, if it was a culture, was oblique. What were they thinking? What drew me to them, even as they loafed silently on a nondescript beach? What did they think of me?

One young Herring Gull, just a few months old, wandered away from the crowd. It stepped into a puddle of water at the edge of the neighboring parking lot and drank a few sips. Then, for no discernable reason, it started stomping up and down in place. Its feet made a small pattering sound in the water. Later, I learned that gulls stomp on the ground to hunt worms. Their taps mimic the vibrations caused by moles hunting for them underground, which draws worms to the surface in a misguided attempt to escape. Perhaps this young gull hadn’t yet realized that stomping on concrete wouldn’t win it any food. 

But the noise did seem to summon the other gulls, who quickly crowded into the puddle. No one else joined in the stomping, but the little Herring Gull persisted, every so often erupting into another splashy burst. Elsewhere in the park, someone was playing cheery festival music. The gull could have been dancing along.

The post FEATURE: Trash Birds appeared first on Yale Daily News.

On survey, I look down to avoid crushing the pink and blue and purple flowers, or else I look across the valley at the mountains colored by the clouds on the horizon; Jeremy looks down at the GPS, or else at the bushes for birds. He identifies the species by song. I record it on a clipboard. He told me the birdsongs we heard from golden-crowned sparrows might be unrecognizable from members of the same species a few hundred miles south. They have regional dialects, accents, he says. These birds are song-learners: they pick up their song from adults of the same species when they are young. Geographically separate populations, if apart long enough, sing different songs.

—

I ate dinner with John A. Nash in Fairbanks in late May, a few days before we went into the field. We were both on our way north to look at birds; John to Utqiakvik, Alaska (the northernmost town in the United States) to study nesting shorebirds, I to a field camp in Noatak National Preserve to count migratory songbirds. I was headed to Noatak to ask questions about bird science, John to answer them. He reminded me to keep an eye out for the gray-headed chickadee, presumed locally extinct in the Western Hemisphere but last sighted in Noatak in 2016.

Since last summer John has, like me, returned to Yale for his senior year. He co-published a paper in the International Journal of Avian Science with other ornithologists including Richard Prum, author of The Evolution of Beauty, presenting evidence that a pigeon collected on Negros Island in the Philippines in 1953 constitutes its own unique species: Ptilinopus arcanus, the Negros Fruit Dove. John and four other scientists gathered this evidence through analysis of DNA collected from the toe pads of the preserved bird, the only known sighting of the species, which is held at the Peabody Museum.

John, the sweetheart of Yale’s ornithology department (due in equal parts to his outsized contributions to the field as an undergraduate and his epic mullet), says that one of the most important debates in genomic analysis right now surrounds the species as a base unit of taxonomic analysis. The most widely shared definition, called the biological species concept, holds that two organisms belong to the same species if they can reproduce viable offspring. But John says that definition doesn’t account for species like the Brewster’s warbler which, though morphologically distinct from its two parent species, the golden-winged and blue-winged warblers, can breed back into either of its parent species, and is also viable on its own or with another variation known as the Lawrence’s warbler.Biologists, including ornithologists, have a hard time agreeing on what constitutes a species;  reproductive isolation, geographic isolation, morphology, and behavior are all individually insufficient to differentiate species. 

Physical characteristics can diverge very quickly within the same species in response to changes in environment, remain very similar in isolated populations without species divergence, or even converge from distant evolutionary paths based on evolutionarily-conserved structures. The February 19, 2024, New York Times article “What Is A Species, Anyway?” addressed the discordant ideas in the field. Newer biological inquiry, John said, increasingly focuses on the subspecies because less is known about the finer distinctions. “A bogeyman in evolutionary science is defining ‘what exactly is a species?’… there’s not necessarily agreement over what that threshold of difference is.”

—

The airstrip, where we were dropped off and made our camp, showed off a smattering of purple flowers which had cropped up on the stems of the low rhododendrons. They were delicate and thin-petaled with woody sprawling stems. They made the place feel less hostile to life, but the stems only escape the incessant grazing of Caribou because the leaves are toxic. The rhododendron family is an empire of species, its thousand-plus members extending across much of the arable land in the world. Here they are low and crawling, punctuating gray-green grasses. Labrador tea, an aromatic shrub in the rhododendron family, is common. 

The process of classification by which all rhododendrons have come to be associated under one genus isn’t particularly recent; taxonomy as we know it has been around since 1735, when Carl Linnaeus articulated the binomial latinate naming system which we still use. Taxonomy, for plants and animals, relies on the observation of physical characteristics and behavior, properties of reproduction, and similarities in the structures of organisms. For hundreds of years, taxonomy was the best available scientific tool for classifying organisms in the natural world. But recently, with the introduction of genetic analysis, a new field of classification has emerged. Genomics, which seeks to track the evolutionary origin of organisms through DNA, often aligns with taxonomy and has been incorporated into the existing categorization system. While taxonomy was about understanding the natural world, genomics seeks to advance our understanding of evolutionary history.

Compared to taxonomy, genetic analysis aims at a deeper, clearer understanding of the natural world—“evolutionary history is not necessarily the accumulation of externally perceptible differences,” John told me. Genomics can help expose evolutionary history that may not present itself to the human eye. Still, John reminds me, “there’s no such thing as a perfect [phylogenetic] tree.” All the best analyses rely on assumptions and inferences, including the level of difference at which a group of organisms qualifies as a new species, and the level—species or something smaller—at which the organism is worth studying. These are human decisions, subject to incomplete understanding.

—

In Alaska, Jeremy, Jared (a field technician) and I start the count before 3 a.m. To the north, the sun is still sinking towards a high ridge, boiling in the clouds over the continental divide. As the morning gets on, the temperature drops. The light does not change. By 3:15 the process slows, reverses, and the sun imperceptibly begins to rise. It is always cloudy over that ridge to the north, so it does not warm until nearly 6 a.m., by which time the survey is nearly half done. We walk back to camp as the sun climbs the hill to the west, away from the notch to the north that marks solar midnight. When the surveying day is done, Jared’s eyes stay glued to his binoculars, hoping in vain for a little gray-headed flash in the shrubs. 

Jared told me that his dream vacation is to go to Argentina and look at Pumas. Pumas, he said, are the same as mountain lions, which are the same as cougars, and they have the widest geographic range of any terrestrial mammal in the western hemisphere. Linnaeus, our original taxonomist, creatively called it Felis Concolor, which means ‘uniformly-colored cat.’ It holds the world record for most names given to a single species, at over 40. Early genetic analysis in the ‘80s discouraged the idea that there were multiple species, but divided the existing population into six geographically-defined subspecies, including the Florida panther (which is not a member of Panthera).

But genetic testing has advanced a lot in the last few decades. “If you did [additional] genetic testing,” Jared said, “you might find that the ones in Argentina are different enough from the ones in North Carolina which are different enough from the ones in British Columbia to be considered multiple species. But for now, we’re in a beautiful moment where they’re all one species in a huge diversity of ecosystems and climates.”

—

On a ridge up the valley from camp, past the 1982 US Geological Survey marker, there is a midden of rusting steel barrels painted army green. They predate the survey marker and the National Preserve designation. And, because they were discarded more than 50 years ago, there is no imperative to remove them. Such is the rule on federal land: if it’s been there long enough, it’s a part of the landscape. So, the trashed fuel barrels of a bygone petroleum prospecting expedition have joined the caribou skulls, willow shrubs, and marine fossils as federal property. Dave Swanson, a soil and vegetation ecologist with the Park Service who joined for a part of the survey expedition, was born around the time the barrels were emptied and tossed. “I better retire soon,” he told me, “before there’s litter from my early career that I’m not allowed to pick up.”

Land conservation designations are as impactful, and as human-delineated, as the fine grained species questions. Both make subjective, relational experience more concrete and universal. “Phylogeny always has a purpose… especially as the Tree of Life [the evolutionary history of all organisms on Earth] gets worked out, there wouldn’t necessarily be a reason to just keep sequencing,” John said. But we’re still at a point in our understanding of phylogeny that finer and finer analysis is useful to biologists.

A plant that was common near our camp has recently been reclassified as a kind of rhododendron, or else is no longer considered a kind of rhododendron, I can’t remember. Nothing about the plant changed in the process. It happens with birds, too. Some of the birds we saw may be genetically distinct enough from other, more southern populations to be distinguished at the species level. But without thorough genetic testing, it’s moot. According to current scientific classification, the Siberian tit and the grey-headed chickadee are both subspecies of Poecile cinctus. But in Alaska, the grey-headed chickadee is presumed extinct, while the Siberian tit is still common in Europe, which via the Bering Strait is not all that far. Depending on other thresholds for genetic distinction, the two might be independent at the species level. If so, the grey-headed chickadee would likely be treated far differently.

—

The morning we flew out, it was calm and sunny, and the pilot brought a bigger plane to get us in one trip, rather than the three it took to drop us off. It was his first time landing the 1953 De Havilland Otter on the grass Kelly Bench strip. We loaded gear and steel food barrels, tubs of data sheets and finally ourselves. We plugged our helmet headsets into the overhead jacks. The pilot taxied down to the end of the bench, the plane canted up toward the sky, its tail dragging on its wheel. We sat a moment. The pilot reached down for the throttle and we began to move. The wind was ahead, blowing down the Kelly River valley and across the bench and under the Otter’s wings. The throttle and the wind were barely enough. We neared the end of the strip. The bluff approached, and the pilot pulled the throttle forward, and forward. The plane pitched forward as the rear wheel lifted, and we saw that we were approaching the edge. The bumping lessened then ceased and the wheels left the ground. The pilot’s voice fuzzed over the headsets: “looks like we had about 25 feet.” He laughed. The Anchorage airport, 600 miles south, is named for Ted Stevens, an Alaska senator who died in a plane crash, in the same kind of plane.

In three weeks we had seen 50 kinds of birds. Golden plovers, jaegers, and whimbrels made nests on the tundra near our camp. Harriers dive bombed us, defending their nests. We saw short-eared owls and rough-legged hawks hunting for lemming in the little trenches the rodents make by their constant running. We counted sparrows and warblers and bluethroats and other singing birds in the shrubby creek bottoms and on the barren ridges. We saw bears and caribou and a porcupine; we didn’t see the gray-headed chickadee.

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The birdwatching trip I had planned was not your average, walk-through-East-Rock, see-one-or-two-birds-affair. No, I was tagging along with a team of skilled birdwatchers as they took part in the Mega-Bowl, an 11-hour bird-watching competition that takes place throughout Connecticut each February. The competition is held by the New Haven Bird Club, one of the nation’s oldest birding organizations.

Chris Loscalzo, a Professor at the Yale School of Medicine and an NHBC member since 1990, would be my guide. He was also the competition’s organizer and the one who founded it eight years ago. He’s ranked 60th in the state on E-Bird — an app where birders track the number of species they’ve seen. 

So, armed with less than 6 hours of sleep and the tenacity of a (newly turned) 21-year-old, I woke up at 8:30 AM and got ready to find some fowls. Joining me on the trip were my friends (and Mag editors) Audrey and Gavin. Chris had texted me to meet him and his birding team — the “Winter Wrenegades” (badum-tss) — by the Amistad Schooner Replica’s home pier at Long Wharf. One quick breakfast stop later, we arrived. We get out of the van and look out at the rocky coastline and the Herring Gulls (yellow-beaked and gray-winged birds) swooping overhead. Audrey wonders out loud which of us will be the first to get pooped on. We make our way towards the pier, walking past a man surrounded by a flock of about thirty or so gulls. He tears off palm-sized chunks of a baguette and lobs them into the waiting crowd. 

Chris and his three teammates — Marianne Vahey (his wife, 76th on E-Bird), Judy Moore (71st on E-Bird), and Jack Swatt (58th on E-Bird) — have already set up at the pier’s end, where the narrow path broadens into an outlook. With them, they have two spotting scopes, low-powered tripod-mounted telescopes that birders use for spotting otherwise indistinguishable birds. One is pointed out towards the horizon, and the other is pointed towards three birds rocking on the waves, about 50 feet away.

As Audrey, Gavin and I approach, Chris introduces us to the team and launches into an explanation of the competition’s rules; Mega Bowl competitors are tasked with finding as many species of birds as possible within the hours of 6:00 AM and 5:00 PM on a designated day. The birds range in point value, with the most common valued at only one point and the least common valued at seven. “And then seven — touchdown! Seven points is if you find a bird that’s, like, never been seen in Connecticut, in February, before,” Chris tells us. On the scorecard, the 7 point slots don’t even have birds listed next to them. They all read “7 ______________.” 

Chris gestures towards the scopes. He takes a look in to adjust the lens for us. “Might be able to see — oh, wow — there’s a whole flock of birds that are called lesser scaups.” They are black-headed ducks with wings striated in black and white. “That’s a three point bird,” he adds.

For each point that a team earns, Chris and Marianne donate 50 cents to an organization of the team’s choice. By the end of this year’s competition, they’ll have donated 1,050 dollars to various organizations including the Connecticut Audubon Society, A Place Called Hope (a bird rehabilitation center in Killingworth), and the New Haven Bird Club itself. 

Having logged all the birds at this location, the Wrenegades pack up their scopes and begin walking back to their car. Along the way, I ask Chris how long he’s been birding. “I started 50 years ago, I’m 64 years old.” 

“I was about 12 or 13 years old, and I lived near a horse farm,” he says. “Anyways, there’s this little old lady who owned a horse, and she couldn’t take care of it. So she asked me and a friend ‘Hey, can you take care of our horse for us?’ We said ‘Sure, of course.’ Anyway, as a way of thanking us, she invited us to her house […] and she had bird feeders. She was putting birdseed in, and I was amazed at all the different birds right there. I’d never seen so many birds.”

He goes on to tell me about his spark bird — the species which got him invested in the activity. “It was probably the Red-bellied Woodpecker, and after that it was Evening Grosbeak. That was the one that really got me going. A really spectacular looking bird.” Later, after getting home, I google the Grosbeak. It is a small, terrestrial bird of gold and black. A yellow line traces across its forehead, and its mustard underbelly comes up into sharp, black wings. I forget, sometimes, that there are things more vibrant than paint.

We head next to the Sound School —  a self-described “regional, vocational aquaculture center” located 1.5 miles away — and see a few Red-breasted Mergansers, black ducks with long, red beaks and mussed feathers along their heads. “Doesn’t it look like they’re having a bad hair day?” Chris says. 

We stay for a few more moments, and then we pack up and head to Oyster River Point, a suburban street that comes up right against the ocean. A woman living in the neighboring house comes out to ask what birds we’re seeing. 

“I only see the ones closer because I have regular binoculars,” she says.

“You can come and see him in my scope right now,” Chris replies. He waves her over, and she begins to look at a few Wigeons — brown ducks with black-tipped wings and brilliant green streaks across their heads. They bob on the waves, occasionally tipping their body over to search for food underwater. 

While Chris points out more features, Marianne waves me to the other scope so I can get a look. I ask her about how she and Chris met, and she tells me they met in medical residency. At the time that they met, Marianne was not a birder. However, a few months into dating, Chris began to pish — a bird call used to bring out hiding birds — while on a walk. An Eastern Towhee jumped right out. It was (birding) love at first sight. 

Our penultimate stop is Merwin Point in Milford. We get out of the car to find ourselves in yet another suburban neighborhood on the coastline. Black rock juts out along the shore like it was made of liquid and frozen midair. 

I walk with Judy along the shoreline as the others go ahead. She began birding later than Chris and Marianne. “One day I left my son at nursery school, which was right next to the woods and a park,” she tells me. “It was early and I just sort of stepped inside the woods, and all of a sudden all these birds surrounded me and we had what we call a fallout of spring warblers.” A fallout is when many birds descend from the sky and onto land, usually caused by rain. “There must have been species of these…and I was just smitten,” she says. 

Suddenly, Judy points in front of us. “Sandpiper at the very tip of that rock.” 3 points. 

Chris and Jack dash to set up the scopes to see if they can spot it, and Jack realizes that there’s actually a whole flock of them lurking on the rock’s other side, only visible from further back. 

We wait for a few more seconds to see if they’ll walk out to the front, but they refuse. So the scopes are packed and we begin to walk back to the cars. 

About a street away, a brown streak shoots overhead. “Cooper’s Hawk!” Chris shouts. 

We rush around the corner, hoping that the whole team will be able to see it, but it isn’t there. 

*****

The next day, I walk out of LC to find Cody Limber, my ride to the celebratory dinner who’s ranked 55th on E-Bird. On the 27-minute drive to the dinner held in Derby, he told me about his research as a PhD candidate in Richard Prum’s Ornithology lab. Cody had taken his love of birds full time. 

By day, he researches the categorization and development of feather cells in chickens, and by night and by weekend (and sometimes by day, instead of work), he chases birds. “Birders do very silly things, and sometimes that means driving like an hour each way to see one individual bird,” he said. In fact, that’s what he’d been doing before he picked me up. He had driven an hour north in search of a Hermit Warbler which another birder had spotted and was returning victorious. 

As we drove, Cody craned his head close to the dashboard each time a bird passed overhead, pointing out each one. I asked Cody how far away he could identify a bird from. “Depends on the birds,” he answered, before admitting, “Yeah, pretty far.”

We arrived at the dinner’s venue, the Kellogg Environmental Center. Inside, past a small, wood-paneled lobby, laid a large room filled with taxidermied birds, wooden, whale models and, curiously, a small pond. In it, two turtles — one the size of my palm and the other the size of my head — bobbed around. 

We walked past the turtle pond and into the center’s banquet hall, just as Chris was telling everyone about the food. Marianne had made it all: rice, meat and vegan chili, vegetable stir fry, pumpkin soup and chicken noodle soup for about thirty people. Flannel, as well as patterned shirts and puffer jackets, was popular among the gathered birders. I was one of the only people of color. Later, Chris attempted to find out who the oldest and youngest birders in the crowd were. When he said “keep your hand up if you’re over 60,” half of the crowd’s hands were still up. 

These demographics aren’t news to Chris. The day before, as we walked along Merwin Point, he’d told me “It tends to be somewhat affluent, Caucasian people that tend to be birdwatchers. You know, it’s hard to be a birdwatcher if you’re just working every minute just to make a living and put food on your table. Yeah, it’s a privilege to be able to do this on a day off and have fun.” 

In addition to a difference in free time, birding’s lack of diversity also seems to stem from the racism of its pioneers. John James Audubon, a pioneering naturalist and the Audubon Society’s namesake, was a slave owner. William Cooper, the namesake of the Cooper’s Hawk, was also a slave owner. That’s why, last November, the American Ornithological Society announced that it was taking Cooper out of the hawk, along with changing the name of every bird named after a human. They hoped this change would “engage far more people in the enjoyment, protection, and study of birds.” 

Although the change isn’t without its detractors, Chris instead sees it as an opportunity to give birds more appropriate noms de plume. “Some of the best bird names give you a clue as to either what habitat they like, color, or, you know, plumage feature. They have a purple head, you can call it a Purple-Headed Warbler.”

Cody and I sit down at a table near the front of the banquet hall, next to other birdwatchers who were friends of Cody’s. There’s a bowl of m&ms in front of us, and I feel a bit like I’m eating birdseed as I pick up a few in my fingers. The three birders begin to chat about owl feather evolution, before switching topics to chicken plumage and then to bird banding. 

Soon, Chris comes to the front of the room and begins a small speech about the competition’s history and where this year’s donations were headed. Then, he moves on to the competition’s results. Cody’s team — “Egrets, I have a few…” — had won one of the top prizes. The rest of the room groaned in response to the announcement. This was a yearly occurrence, I guessed. 

After Chris hands out the prizes — bird paintings and suet feeders — for the top teams, he thanks everyone for coming, and people begin to pack up. At Chris and Marianne’s insistence, I pack some food to go while Cody talks about his Costa Rican birding experience with Chris. 

*****

Campus is cold compared to the warmth of the birding dinner — indoor heating and people who know each other. The generosity of the birders is not lost on me. Allowing three college students to tag along on their birding expedition and pelt them with endless questions is a kind act. These birders, like anyone else, want more people to love what they love. Despite this kindness, though, I don’t know how long it might take to feel part of this community. There are the facts of representation, racial or otherwise; and there are the facts of dedication. If I started now, I would be 71 by the time I had as much birding experience as Chris. Maybe this will just be the story I tell myself in 20 years when I try to remember how I spent my 21st birthday — I saw some birds, I met some people, and I tried something new. 

A few days later, the weather is nice enough for running, so I slip on my sneakers and jump outside. The birds — tucked, out of sight, on some tree branch — are especially loud today. I pull out my phone and open MerlinID, a bird call identification app. I press record. American Bluejay. I try looking for their blue feathers again, but I can only hear their caw.

The post FEATURE: Birdwatcher Watching appeared first on Yale Daily News.

“Everything in here was found in the dumpsters,” Jason Bischoff-Wurstle says, pointing to a blown-up image of Dimitri Rimsky’s art studio. In the photo, a mustachioed man in a fedora pokes his head past the edge of a convex mirror, casting his expectant gaze across a room strewn with a joyous excess of furniture: a disco ball; a bamboo plant; a microphone; several barbershop chairs. This is a photo of the inside of the New Haven Clock Company Factory at the corner of St. John and Hamilton Streets, east of Wooster Square, taken sometime in the 1980s. The image hangs on the orange walls of Bischoff-Wurstle’s FACTORY exhibit at the New Haven Museum.

The exhibit takes visitors through the history of the factory, from life to afterlife. To say the factory has an eventful history would be reductive. Clocksmith Chauncey Jerome, who helped turn clocks from luxuries into everyday consumer goods, built the factory in 1842. It was bought by the New Haven Clock Company in 1853. In the early 20th century, it came under the direction of Walter Camp (better known for revolutionizing American football) who launched the factory into the production of wristwatches. Half the factory was destroyed during New Haven’s urban renewal of the 1950s and 1960s, when much of the surrounding housing was razed and population displaced to make room for a highway. 

But when the Clock Company went out of business in the 1950s, the building’s activity didn’t cease. After a couple decades of holding companies leasing individual rooms, Tony Yagovane, a New Haven resident, bought the building in 1980. Here the building was born anew: out of a deteriorating semi-vacant space arose a lively home for artists and weirdos of all stripes.

Yagovane offered the space to people on the cheap (Dimitri Rimsky reports paying 100-200 dollars a month for 1400 square feet) as long as the occupants took care of installing gas, water, and electricity. The low rent attracted an eclectic mix of tenants. Yale School of Architecture students hosted an annual “sex ball” in the factory, complete with murals of intersex people. A mime troupe (Rimsky’s “Petaluers”) worked there, as did Paul Rutkovsky and Beverly Richey’s Papier Mâché Video Institute (a dissident activist art group). Brick ‘n’ Wood (an R&B club) and Kurt’s (a gay bar) also operated from the building.

In later years, the Bad Ass White Boys (a white supremacist biker gang) took up a wing on the second floor, and a cockfighting ring sprung up in the other wing. Traffic slowed through the 2000s, especially in the wake of Yagovane’s death in 2005. In 2011, Occupy Wall Street’s New Haven branch briefly considered taking over parts of the factory. The last official tenant (a strip club) was finally evicted after a court battle in 2019. These last few years, according to Bischoff-Wurstle, are the longest the building has ever been vacant.

Listing the history of the factory building like this usually elicits interest, but it’s a rather boring way to tell a story, as Bischoff-Wurstle well knows. The challenge, he says, was to find a way to bring out the history vividly without devolving into chronological narration. Bischoff-Wurstle worked urban renewal and the factory’s history as, well, a factory, into the exhibit. But he designed the exhibit to celebrate the factory’s afterlives. He dug up images of the factory, documents from the urban renewal period, and artifacts from the various inhabitants, and by interviewing Rutkovsky, Richey, and Rimsky at length: an attempt to move the factory’s more recent (and more off-beat) stories into the realm of official “history.” 

What is displayed in museums has been deemed worthy of exhibition. In a way, museums, by assembling records and lending institutional weight to what they display, decide what is and is not history. The factory’s post-clock history isn’t all that old, but Bischoff-Wurstle thinks that by bringing it “into the canon,” it will prevent this “weird nexus place” from being lost forever. Bischoff-Wurstle described the factory as a “place of encounter” and “accidents.” The exhibit, though curated, sought to capture the factory’s spirit of spontaneity, which Bischoff-Wurstle feels has slowly drained from the world we live in. 

Photos by Etai Smotrich-Barr

Bischoff-Wurstle is the Director of Photo Archives at the New Haven Museum. He began arranging the FACTORY exhibit in 2018 in collaboration with Gorman Bechard, who helped found the NHDocs documentary film festival, and Bill Kraus, the owner of a firm that focuses on redeveloping historic buildings. Kraus has worked in commercial real estate for over three decades, primarily dealing with rundown buildings that haven’t delivered on their economic potential. The exhibit, which opened in February 2020, was supposed to be the last of three major factory-related projects spearheaded by Bechard, Kraus, and Bischoff-Wurstle. Bechard and Kraus were jointly working on a yet-to-be-released documentary about the factory and its afterlives. At the same time, Kraus was working with the Oregon-based Reed Development Corporation to turn the space into affordable housing for artists.

What exactly “artist housing” meant was a bit of an open question. In the early 2000s, Kraus spearheaded the conversion of an old department store in downtown Bridgeport into 61 “affordable artist live-work” units, which, he said, has been the “catalyst for a renaissance in downtown Bridgeport,” drawing in “hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in follow-on development.” It’s not public housing—it’s the “private market with public subsidies.” At the time, this kind of reuse project wasn’t in fashion: cities preferred to clear the sites and build something entirely new. But Kraus, who had nearly a decade of experience restructuring failed real estate projects at Citicorp, understood that these old buildings have potential: he saw economic potential where others saw impediments to economic development. But, Kraus explained, it’s not just business: “I fell in love with old buildings when I was 10, and it’s stayed with me as a passion,” he said. “My mother was a preservationist. I do this in part because I love these buildings and all these stories.” When Kraus came to New Haven and learned about the factory, around 20 years ago, he saw similar potential. He found that the factory had both the right historical significance and physical dimensions to be his next project. 

Back in the museum, Bischoff-Wurstle vouched for Kraus: “Bill’s not full of shit,” he said. And indeed, Kraus has probably been more committed to seeing the building through the next phase of its life than anyone else. After the death of their father, Tony Yagovane’s daughters sought Kraus’ advice in doing “artist live-work as an homage to [Yagovane].” Kraus described Yagovane as an “outgoing and fun kind of guy” who had been aiming to convert the building into something like artist live-work housing since the 1990s. Yagovane’s dream, and the work he’d started in 1980, was to create horizontally organized spaces cared for and lived in by artists free from institutional pressure and high rent. From the start, Kraus was a believer in preserving that legacy of the building as much as the building itself. Over the years, he’s tracked down the former residents of the factory to figure out coolness. Kraus is largely responsible for reconstructing its latter-day history based on the memories of the Yagovane children and on physical artifacts found in the building. 

After determining that a redevelopment project was feasible, Kraus conducted a survey of artists to gauge interest in living in the converted factory. The survey, distributed by the Arts Council of Greater New Haven and the New England Foundation for the Arts, among others, received 300 respondents. Kraus called it the “biggest, most successful artist survey [he’d] ever done.” 

When looking at the survey results, however, Kraus was surprised to find that only ⅓ of the respondents were artists of color in a city with a population that was ⅔ people of color. What Kraus found is that New Haven’s established arts institutions, often affiliated with Yale, were alienating to artists of color. “There really is a lot of racism in New Haven around arts and culture, which was a surprise to me because I had not encountered that elsewhere,” Kraus said. He envisioned targeted outreach to artists of color to secure housing for and promote visibility of the non-white arts scene in New Haven. The goal was for the area and its eventual residents to make themselves known as an alternative to the New Haven arts establishment. “No one,” Kraus said, “[would] ever…be able to say ‘we don’t know where the artists of color are.’” They would be in the factory.

To understand why people live where they do, it is helpful to look at histories of local development. The area around the clock factory didn’t used to be a distinct neighborhood. In the 19th century, Wooster Square was a broad term that included both sides of what is now I-91. The area around the central green, what we now call Wooster Square, was home to several businessmen and shop owners, including James English, a major financier of the clock factory. Wealthy and influential men like these lived in homes designed by prominent New Haven architects like Henry Austin. Because it was convenient to have labor near the factories, Italian and Irish immigrants were housed in the area when they came to New Haven. As wealthier residents moved away to escape what had become New Haven’s industrial center, Wooster Square transitioned into a fairly dense “little Italy.” By the mid-20th century, it retained its architectural heritage—but not the wealth that came with it. When urban renewal became the order of the day, highway construction was imagined as a way to connect New Haven to a new commercial network and to revitalize the city in the face of industrial collapse. Faced with this supposed imperative, New Haven had to decide: which areas would be sacrificed on the altar of economic progress? Where would the highway be built?

When the area was slated for clearance after World War II, residents began to organize around Wooster Square’s architectural heritage. In the late 1950s, Ted DeLauro (father of Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro) worked with Yale architecture students and the newly formed New Haven Preservation Trust to make a case for Wooster Square’s historical value. The NHPT succeeded in routing federal funding for urban renewal into home repair in Wooster Square. That is to say, “redevelopment” money that had for decades been used to clear housing was used to maintain and renew the older townhomes. The townhomes on the other side of I-91, as both Kraus and Bischoff-Wurstle said, were often no different from the majority of the ones in Wooster Square. In the 1971 form nominating Wooster Square for the National Register of Historic Places, the delightful homes on Court Street were described as “tenements which were the worst housing in the area.” But because wealth was inscribed architecturally in the homes of men like James English, the residents of Wooster Square were able to move the highway a few feet east, and spare their own neighborhood.

Because the homes on the wrong side of I-91 were razed, they never got the chance to become “historic.” While what gets deemed historic (as opposed to say, shabby and expendable) in the housing market has everything to do with profit, these designations emerge from a historical process that unfolds along class lines. If the exhibit and the documentary use the language of historical preservation, then, so too does the housing market. Pointing to a picture of the neighborhood around the clock factory before urban renewal, Bischoff-Wurstle identified a row of now-destroyed homes as a place that today would be deemed “historic” and make the landlord a pretty penny.  “Who picks what a slum is?” Bischoff-Wurstle asked rhetorically. “The banks and the government do.” 

This is a short and simplified version of events. It can be read as a victory: the Preservation Trust modeled the economic potential of saving rather than destroying old buildings. But ultimately, what was demolished and what survived is telling. “History” is associated with wealth. Historical preservation is also self-perpetuating: when Wooster Square was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1971, part of the reasoning named this very historical preservation effort as a reason Wooster Square was a historically significant place. 

One of the only other things to survive the clearances of the 1950s and 1960s was a public housing development known as Farnam Courts. Farnam Courts was built by the then-newly established Housing Authority in the 1940s with money from the federal government. This form of public housing began “as a big housing production program post the world wars,” said Karen Dubois-Walton, the Executive Director of the Housing Authority. “It was supposed to be federally supported middle-income housing,” until the federal government shifted tactics and began pushing for suburban housing. 

The result? What was at first a nominally racially integrated development with hot water and built-in community space saw its better-off (and often white) residents leave for West Haven and Hamden. The construction of the highway right next to Farnam cut it off from what had been its neighborhood and left it as some of the (if not the) only housing between I-91 and the Mill River. As the federal government pulled more and more money away from traditional public housing efforts like Farnam Courts, they fell further and further into disrepair. In 2012, the Housing Authority, through the nonprofit Glendower Group, relocated the residents and began tearing down Farnam Courts to rebuild it as the mixed-income Mill River Crossing. 

Kraus argues that the practice of tearing down old buildings is counterproductive. Not only does it destroy something of historical value, it also stymies further economic growth. “These [historic] buildings are the engines of development,” he argued. In this sense too, Kraus is seeking to restore the factory—if its first life was as an industrial economic engine, its next one can be an economic engine as a housing development. 

But Kraus’s vision of affordable housing for artists of color fell apart a few years ago, as Reed Community Development and its affiliated holding company, Taom Heritage New Haven LLC, began to neglect the site. A 2016 report found that the factory had unsafe levels of radium  attributed to the paint used in wristwatches during the Walter Camp era. Connecticut’s Brownfield Municipal Grant program has set aside $700,000 for cleaning up the factory site. In 2018, the city of New Haven approved a redevelopment project with money for environmental cleanup and a tax abatement for construction, but since then, the city has claimed that Reed failed to pay what taxes it did owe and allowed the site to fall into further physical disrepair. In August of 2023, the city agreed to buy the foreclosed property from Taom Heritage. 

Now, the city has passed the site to the Housing Authority of New Haven, which is hoping to recover the site with “most of the remediation done.” Karen Dubois-Walton, Executive Director of the HANH, is eyeing the site for conversion into up to 100 units of mixed-income housing. Dubois-Walton explained that the present-day model of housing began in the late 1990s with the demolition of Elm Haven, then the oldest public housing development in the city. Elm Haven was replaced by Monterey Place, a mix of market-rate, partially subsidized, and low-income housing. 

This mixing, Dubois-Walton said, creates “more vibrant” communities and “doesn’t just segregate poverty” in the same way traditional low-income housing like Elm Haven and Farnam Courts does. Crucially, mixed-income housing is easier to get funding for. “Lower income public housing ties the Housing Authority’s hands on funding,” she added, noting that you can’t raise capital via federally backed mortgages for these developments—the federal government will not back projects that are composed solely of affordable housing. 

In an astonishing reversal from the urban renewal period that saw highway construction and home demolition as an economic winner, today’s vision casts housing as the catalyst for community development and economic growth. Dubois-Walton described the process as a sort of spillover effect—when housing gets built, it can “spark and spiral out and pull in other investments,” according to her. The clock factory site sits diagonally across from Mill River Crossing, a 2018 HANH development of just under 100 units-cum-retail space. Dubois-Walton is hopeful that connecting the new factory housing with the existing Mill River Crossing can create “synergy” and turn “one product into so much more.” 

New Haven needs more housing—according to Dubois-Walton, the city faces a severe “underproduction of units”—but the institutionalization of housing and its centralization under a government agency seems to run counter to the ethos that Yagovane and then Kraus sought to implement. Instead, issues of plausibility and financing dominate discussions and low-income housing tax credits and historic restoration tax credits cover the costs. Kraus admits that if he “could have waved a magic wand, what he would have liked to do, what the family would have liked to do, is create artist condominiums…and sell them so it really belongs to the artists.” But we’re short on magic wands, and so all that’s left of the vision is “millions and millions of dollars” in the red column on the balance sheet. If the “dream” was artist-owned co-op-style housing, it was always, given the need to create a well-financed sustainable project at-cost, impossible. 

At this point, everyone’s hoping the building stays standing. “Time beats the hell out of these things,” Bischoff-Wurstle said, and he’s right. Parts of the building that were functioning businesses five years ago are now crumbling brick walls with giant holes. The building has survived improbably, impossibly, even when there was no one to defend it. The factory, as both Kraus and Bischoff-Wurstle have it, played host to the best days of some people’s lives. The latter spoke bleakly of what he called the “ouroboros,” the snake eating its own tail, the process by which coolness springs up in shady places, hidden from power—only to be consumed by wealth, time and time again.

Separating history from wealth is a difficult task. But for Bischoff-Wurstle, that’s the point. The factory is a weird, skeevy, unsanitized place, a “place of innovation and fermentation,” and it is that spirit of innovation and irregularity he wants to preserve. It is the spirit of hiding the bed in the wall when the fire marshal comes by because you couldn’t have residences in an industrially zoned area. It is the spirit of being able to make art without worrying about paying the bills: as Bischoff-Wurstle said, “New Haven has been called the cultural capital of Connecticut. If people can’t afford to do culture, what are we?” It is a spirit of youthfulness, instability, care, and spontaneity. But all of those things, at least in the context of the factory, are history now.

The post CHANGING HANDS: The New Haven Clock Factory and Urban Development appeared first on Yale Daily News.