High Island People & Conversations

My first full day roving the trails at the High Island sanctuaries, I met a woman on the trails, showing her a few species of birds that were around, and mentioning that I was in town with Swarovski Optik. After chatting a while, we continued in opposite directions down the trail. About 20 yards later, she turned around and asked if I was Tiffany. Yes! It turns out, she had already heard about my project and was following my blog. She explained that she appreciated what I was doing; that she recently lost both her husband and her father and was suddenly now birding solo as an Asian woman during a time of so much racial hate in America. I gifted her an alarm. We exchanged contact information, and I’ll be guiding her in the Rio Grande Valley in a few weeks as well! 

Throughout the week, I had the absolute pleasure of meeting many amazing Houston Audubon staff. Among them, I spent a fair bit of time with seasonal field technicians Phoebe and Sarah, both birders spending the majority of this year helping with Sanctuary upkeep and invasive species removal. A few days later, I also met Lark, visiting in town for some birding. She held the same field tech position two years ago. 

As a volunteer for Houston Audubon, I stayed in a cute little trailer onsite at their operations center. The site had a fire pit, so we spent a few nights around the fire during my week there. One night, the four of us, among others, were around the fire. I didn’t want to put the girls on the spot, with all the men around, but eventually conversation broke into groups, and I took the opportunity to explain my project to the women. I handed each of the three alarms. The conversation that followed was phenomenal. 

Lark shared with me that she, too, had spent time traveling and camping solo in Arizona, and on multiple occasions, she felt the need to connect with strangers in order to feel safer sleeping at night. On one occurrence, she asked two older men if she could sleep in her car near their campsite, and on another occurrence, she found a family of people camping, and asked if she could set up her tent nearby but out of their way. 

Her experiences resonated with me and tears filled my eyes. What human  experiences are we as women missing out on due to fear? I thought back to my February trip to Madera Canyon, where my friend gave me GPS coordinates to primitive campsites just a few miles off the main path, when out of fear for my own safety I ended up sleeping in the back of my tiny car in a parking spot at the campground restrooms. 
In the interest of self-preservation, we as women are repeatedly missing out on solo experiences that have the power to make us feel fully alive.