Yesterday a good friend reminded me how much of my skills I’ve lost. As I approach my 50th year as a professional safari guide the horrors of sentimentality led to outright embarrassment: it’s not really my age, it’s Alexa.
Gregg Painter, Carol Mantey and I were on our way into rural northwest Illinois to do a bird survey on a lovely piece of property that will soon be a part of our local conservation organization’s portfolio. Because it had no address, was off a dirt road and obscured by a final series of proper intersections whose signposts had been twisted 90-degrees by high school kids trying to find their way to college, Gregg and I actually went out a few days earlier to locate the spot.
How? With GPS coordinates using Google Maps, of course.
For birders who live where we do, Google Maps is an important tool, along with all sorts of relatively new tech like iBird, eBird, dashbird.birdlist, Merlin and so much more. It all lives in your phone, and that’s the problem, it replaces your brain.
In fact – personal admission – I use stuff like that on safari, too. Started with Garmin, then Mapquest and you could even get a microchip called Tracks4Africa that was remarkably helpful in the game parks. But then with time Google just got better and the others got laced with more and more advertisements, and when paired with EarthPro I can now even find elephant migratory tracks in Tarangire, 10,000 miles away in Galena!
So I’m hooked. If it weren’t for GoogleMaps I’d have never found my way out of the teeny-weeny, overcrowded, badly lighted streets of Port Louis. I would never, ever have found my way from the Purple Tea Farm somewhere in the Aberdare to the Aberdare Country Club for our overnight.
And so I wasn’t going to fiddle around all day long driving back and forth down dirt roads when Gregg and I went out to scope the place several days before the count. I just put the GPS coordinates from the forest survey into Google Maps and Alexa took us straight to the spot!
Now here’s the problem when Carol joined us for the real survey, yesterday. And this story, my friends, is not a safari guide’s tale, as both Gregg and Carol will vouch.
We got to the penultimate turn and I had no idea which way to go. Gregg – whose basic heroism has refused the use of mobile phones – said, “Turn left,” because he … remembered. I have little use for memory in such situations, now.
I turned on GoogleMaps, reinserted the GPS coordinates, and waited for Alexa to say, “Continue for a mile and a half then turn right.”
“I think we should turn left,” Gregg said, but who do you believe? An old man or Google?
We headed straight. It was a dirt road, but pretty wide, and I think recently grated. Looked for all the world like the new track into Seronera from the Maasai kopjes. Nothing else looked familiar, though. Predictably, a little while before the advised future turn Alexa said loudly, “In a thousand feet, turn right.”
“I think we should have taken that left,” Gregg mumbled much more softly than Alexa.
I turned right onto another gravel road, this one not so well grated and much narrower. We proceeded for a while I guess while Alexa was madly sifting through old maps on the top shelf of one of her basement closets before she finally proudly announced, loudly still, “Proceed to the end and make a U-turn.”
I looked at Gregg plaintively.
“Do we have to go to the end?”
So with exceptional difficulty on this very narrow dirt road I turned around.
“In 500 feet make a left,” Alexa said as if she’d done nothing wrong.
About a mile later Alexa confirmed Gregg’s memory, “In 1000 feet take a right.”
Twenty years ago this would never have happened to me. But I’ve replaced my mind with Google apps and my mind remains on the side of the protestors in Paris and has already mapped out my next vacation to the Bahamas.
Meanwhile, I’m petrified by the fact that Alexa was wrong and vow never to go on a remote bird count again without Gregg.