Travelers of the Sky: Birds

    The birds that dwell and strive in South Sudan are plentiful. Some may help pollenate plants, hunt insects or fish, and some tell a story that travels down the generational ladder by word of mouth. South Sudan is home to an impressive number of species of birds that vary from residents, that stay all year around, to breeding birds, that spend a good part of the growing season in South Sudan to raise their young, migrants who pass through South Sudan with the seasons, to wintering birds who like to spend a good part of the winter in South Sudan to escape colder conditions up north. 

Black Coucal

    

Black and White Cuckoo

  There are approximately 952 species of birds that live in South Sudan. The species are very diverse due to South Sudan's landscape. You can find  waterfowl and wading birds, a large suite of song birds, raptors, game birds, swifts and nighthawks, etc., many of which occupy several ecosystems simultaneously, as they fly to and from forests, meadows, shorelines of waters, cities and urban green spaces. 

   

Black-Headed Batis

 

Paradise-Whydah (male)

  As a fact to help you remember South Sudan, their national bird is the African Fish Eagle. Beyond the birds living their every day life, some may carry a distinct meaning with their presence or even tell a story. Stories often portray birds as emissaries of urgent and important news. They can reach places that are not avaliable to other story characters, both good and bad. They bridge the gap between characters and desired destinationsSentinels are soldiers on guard and birds in some African stories stand up as such to prevent fatalities. African people believe that the appearance of certain types of birds symbolizes or warns of danger or even death.

Do you know how many birds live in you hometown? You would be surprised, give it the thought and check it out. Keep Exploring! Till next time.

The Cosmos of the Nuer

    Hello fellow explorers! I am back on from a bit of a researching hiatus from my last post on the homeland of the Nuer. This weeks topic I have been running into a bit of difficulty on my discoveries and research. Might I say, there is quite a bit of intersecting ties in Africa. The topic is the "Cosmos". In other words, the way the Nuer see the world around them. So let me get started in our exploration.

    The Nuer people are mainly Christian, in saying that they have a fairly common view of the world, heaven, and hell. Lets talk about how this mindset came about. There was an especially active period of Nuer eastward migration began in the middle of the nineteenth century. This movement could have caused mixed cultural and religious views. But at the beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, British colonial policy in Nuerland was aimed at fixing boundaries between the Nuer and the Dinka, thus effectively halting dynamic process of cultural change that had been unfolding for centuries.

    The Nuer's religion of catholicism makes it very easy for catholics or any comparable religion catholicism to picture the current physical life as we walk the planet and the view of the afterlife. In the Nuer picture of God he is thus creative spirit. He is also a person. The  do not Nuer suggest that he has human form, but though he is himself omnicsient and invisible he sees and hears all that happens and he can be angry and love (the Nuer word is nhok, and if we here translate it "to love" it must be understood in the preferential sense of agapo or diligo: when Nuer say that God loves something they mean that he is partial to it). As a person he is the father of men.

    But though God is sometimes felt to be present here and now, he is also felt to be far away in the sky. However, heaven and earth are not entirely separated. There are comings and goings. Stories told by word of mouth that God takes the souls of those he destroys by lightning to dwell with him and in him they protect their kinsmen; he participates in the affairs of men through divers spirits which haunt the atmosphere between heaven and earth and may be regarded as hypostasizations of his modes and attributes; and he is also everywhere present in a way which can only be symbolized, as his ubiquitous presence is symbolized by the Nuer, by the metaphor of wind and air. Also God can be communicated with through prayer and sacrifice, and a certain kind of contact with him is maintained through the moral order of society, which he is said to have instituted and of which he is the guardian. But in spite of these communications and contacts the distance between heaven and earth is too great to be bridged.

    I am going to close on the words of religion. Think about how this view of the physical and spiritual world could be compared to yours. Our worlds are not so far apart, no matter the miles of land and ocean that separate us. Stay tuned for next week.