Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

Magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Julian Hoffman is the author of The Small Heart of Things and Irreplaceable, the fight to save are wild places.

He lives in a mountain village beside the Prespa lakes in northwestern Greece,

where the world's largest colony of Dalmatian pelicans

has drastically declined the recent outbreak of avian influenza.

As the wetlands fall strangely quiet,

he senses the poorest boundaries between our health

and that of the ecologies we inhabit.

The islands are mantled with dead pelicans, like a late fall of snow.

In the low light of a March afternoon, I'm standing on a small hill that commands clear views of the wetland and its dense reed beds.

By now, the great surging clamour of the world's largest colony of rare Dalmatian pelicans should be in full swing. Birds continually lifting

from the lake waters or lowering on vast wings through the thin mountain air to jostle for space

on the increasingly crowded aisles. Instead, the dark water is whitened

by a mass of floating carcasses. In the islands of detached reed-bed, on which some 1,400 pairs

of this remarkable species typically breed are saddled with slack birds. They seem strangely flat from a distance,

as though life has been pressed out of them by a great immovable weight.

When the first dead Dalmatian pelicans were discovered on Lesser Prespa Lake in northern Greece,

they numbered only eleven. A large enough figure to take note of,

but not be unduly alarmed by, given that deaths from natural causes are a common fact of life

in busy wetland breeding colonies. That was February 17, 2022. A week later, mortalities had reached 209.

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