Note: Transcripts may contain errors. If you wish to re-use all, or part of, a transcript, please contact CBC for permission. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Copyright © CBC 2018

The Current Transcript for August 6, 2018

Host: Laura Lynch

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: This particular point seems really crowded actually for somewhere that's so special and so unique. It's actually a bit disappointing to see it full of tourists, but then people need to see it, I guess.

LAURA LYNCH: Need to see it or want to see it? This tourist visiting a remote part of Iceland was not happy to find himself surrounded not by wildlife, but by fellow visitors. Many parts of the world that were once seen as exotic or far away have become much easier and cheaper to reach and that's brought with it crowds, noise and resentment from the locals. Also today.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: The name Adler has been in the back of my mind for many years. Without Mr. Adler, my father wouldn't become the kind of professional musician as he is.

LL: Mr. Adler was a Jewish refugees who fled to Shanghai China to escape the Nazis. He was also a gifted musician and mentor and he left a lasting influence on Fang Sheng's family and Chinese musical culture. He also left behind a mystery. Coming up in half an hour, the CBC's Sharon Wu sets out to tell his story in her documentary, Finding Mr. Adler. Plus, in a Mexican marketplace, the lonely-hearted can try to win someone's love by buying a charm. What's not so romantic is that the charms are made of dead hummingbirds.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: They are used for love. The hummingbird is a bird of love. It is the bird that opens the channels so that people will like them.

LL: That story coming up in about an hour from now. I'm Laura Lynch and this is the summer edition of The Current.

Back To Top »

Too many tourists? Rethink how you travel or risk ruining destinations, says expert

Guests: Anna Pollock, Rochelle Turner

SOUNDCLIP

[Music]

VOICE: I thought this was just a tourist area. I honestly had no idea people lived here.

LL: Ah, Venice. The city of romance and despite that tourist misconception, a place where people actually live. The 51,000 full-time residents of Venice host some 25 million tourists a year and many of those residents are simply fed up.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: It's not the mayor who owns the city. It's not the police and not the tourists either. It's the people. Are the people that live in Venice, which own the city. And today we demonstrated and today we showed that we have the right to have a free city with a free entrance. The problem is not to leave the entrance to tourists. The problem is to give more houses, more homes, more apartments to the people, to the Venetians. To the people who want to live here. Venice is dying.

LL: That's the group No Grandi Navi or "no cruise ships," holding a protest in May of this year after Venice installed turnstyles as a way to divert and control the crowds coming into the city. And it's not just Venice, where residents are pushing back on tourists.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: All these tourists end up drunk. They piss in the doorways of buildings and in the staircases. Residents trip over drunken people lying in the stairs. It's all about the pissing in the streets. The vomiting at bus stops.

LL: Anti-tourism activists in Barcelona have attacked tour buses and marked walls with graffiti reading, "Tourists go home." The city of 1.6 million had 30 million visitors in 2017. The influx is also causing a housing crisis in the city, an issue that's becoming a problem right here in Canada. B.C.'s Haida Gwaii archipelago is a world away from the bustle of Barcelona, but the islands have seen a boost in tourism in the past five years and with more and more homeowners renting out their places through sites like Air BNB, the mayor of Queen Charlotte City, Greg Martin says housing is becoming a critical issue there.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: We are facing a housing crisis. It's a crisis in that people that want to live in Charlotte and we need to live in Charlotte, young people that are about to start their families, they can't find a place to live and so they move on. The restaurants are having trouble and the other service industries in finding staff, so the restaurants have limited their hours. They're really having trouble feeding all the tourists and all of us. And people were saying they don't know how much longer, you know if they're going to get “renovicted” out. If they only have a short term rental, if they're going to get booted out for the tourism season. So people are very worried and anxious. They do not feel secure. Be careful what you wish for. We've got our increase in tourism now, but right now it's kind of overwhelming our infrastructure and our service capabilities.

LL: Some cautionary words from the mayor of Queen Charlotte City, Greg Martin. Clearly, tourism is a source of friction around the world. To help us look at some of the issues at stake, I'm joined now by two guests. Anna Pollock is the founder of the tourism consultancy company, Conscious Travel and we reached her in the West Midlands, England. Rochelle Turner is Research Director at the World Travel and Tourism Council and she is in London. Hello to you both.

ANNA POLLOCK: Hello.

ROCHELLE TURNER: Good morning.

LL: Rochelle Turner we'll start with you. What were you thinking as you heard those clips of residents protesting against tourists?

RT: Well, thanks for having me on. This is a topic that we have heard and seen a lot of in a number of destinations all over the world over the last few years. Travel and tourism currently at 10.4 per cent of GDP has been growing faster than the global economy for each of the last seven years. And in a number of destinations unfortunately, we see this tourist growth as being unplanned. And in unplanned centrally and you know sometimes that's due to weak governance, sometimes it's just due to lack of thought as to what tourism actually involves.

LL: Anna Pollock, what did you think? Were you surprised to hear how resentful residents seem to be in Barcelona and Venice?

AP: No. On the contrary, not at all surprised. I've been writing about this now for the last 10 years or so. It's to me, it's just a logical result of being a highly resource intensive industry. A people intensive industry. But when you've got such phenomenal demand, we've barely touched the surface of it globally and we only have a finite number of places for people to visit and it's finite because some places are more popular than others. Then this is a problem that's been ready to burst for some time to come. I should say.

LL: Right and we are talking about established tourism locations like Barcelona and Venice. Now according to the U.N. World Tourism Organization, tourism grew by 7 per cent in 2017. 1.3 billion people dragging their suitcases around. How can this be socially and environmentally sustainable or is it just not, Rochelle?

RT: Well I think what's interesting about the figure from the U.N. World Tourism Organization, the 1.3 billion, is it doesn't include any domestic tourists. So if we add in the domestic numbers and of course we're looking at phenomenal numbers, up to six, perhaps seven billion international visitors and domestic visitors that can come to a place. And what we're not seeing is this sort of central planning of what tourism is and the destinations with a vision of what they want to be and how that vision then can be supported through planning, through consultation with the people that live and work in those destinations. And really understanding through management and measurement of what the issues are. So that infrastructure, if it is possible to be built, can be built. Or numbered if they need to be capped, can be capped. And all of this requires a strategic approach that in some of the places where we see some of the greatest problems, that probably hasn't happened because the growth has been so quick over the last few years that the authorities have just not got around unfortunately, to taking the big and difficult decisions on the basis of the data that they did have available to make those decisions.

LL: Well there we are talking about the larger places, but in Anna Pollock, we also heard from Greg Martin, the mayor of Queen Charlotte City, a very small place, offering up a warning about the impact on his town. And what does that tell you about the current state of tourism that a place as isolated as Haidi Gwaii is feeling the effects of over tourism.

AP: Well I think tourism now is in virtually every square metre of the planet almost. Even the Antarctica is now receiving tourists and it's the smaller places that are actually in many respects, more vulnerable than some of the larger cities. I take Rochelle's point that you know we definitely do need an awful lot more strategic thinking than we've had in the past. We need more careful management, but we also need to recognise that people need to understand what the consequences are of attracting more and more visitors every year.

LL: But you think those things go hand in hand, I mean Rochelle you've already talked about this. What does management look like? What does strategy and planning look like when it comes to tourism?

RT: Well I think there is a certain need to build that fact-base. To start questioning what kinds of people are coming to this place. Where is the marketing going? Who is doing that marketing? What is attractive about that destination? What are the resource capabilities of the current destination and what is going to need to be planned in order to cope with future. It needs to involve all sections of society, as I said. You know, what do local people really feel about other people coming into their communities and staying in the houses of the neighbours next door, if they are rented out, on sharing economy platforms. You know what do the local businesses feel if either businesses are just converting into tourist shops. And how is this change, how is this strategy to be funded? And I think that's an important question that often gets overlooked. Who is going to pay for moving people to new areas to help showcase new destinations or develop new attractions to help take some of the pressure off some of the places that are currently very, very busy?

LL: Right, but there's also a fine balance in that these very areas also depend to a large extent on tourism for people's livelihoods. 1 in 10 people in the world depend on tourism for their livelihoods. So what's the risk involved when you're trying to make these kinds of changes, Anna?

AP: Well I think you know the real problem is we've defined success in tourism as having more tourists. And the reality is that there probably are, as I said earlier more tourists than there are space to hold them all. And the places that are receiving tourists really don't distinguish between those that are international and those that are domestic. They just need a space to occupy. But my sense of it is that we have to really start at the community level to a much greater extent than we've done in the past. What I hear Rochelle saying is terrific. It's funky. It's new. In the past, the industry has tended to promote things like the number of visitors, the number of jobs, the proportion of GDP, etc., as all the benefits, when the real experience of having visitors come into your community is of course experience by the local resident. And we haven't necessarily prepared them or equip them with the knowledge to cope with this increase in number.

LL: What about what Thailand and the Philippines have done, they've banned tourists from certain islands. Is that the kind of action that needs to be taken?

AP: Well in some places, yes, I think it may be necessary. Sorry I didn't want to jump in, but I do think that may be necessary. I just think we really have to start to think more strategically about the net benefit that we're generating for the community and really focus on that, rather than just the sheer number. Dispersing is currently a tactic that's also being used. You know we've got too many here, let's spread them out. But in the long run, that's just passing the problem down to future generations because it doesn't deal with the system, the problem at source.

LL: Rochelle you wanted to get in there?

RT: Yeah sorry, I think it's just, I completely agree with what Anna is saying here and I think one of the things that's absolutely key is understanding what those dynamics are that are at play. So in some destinations and we heard it on your clips that's it about alienated local residents. In what's happening in the Philippines in Boracay Island and in Thailand, where the islands have been closed that's due to a damage to nature and the environment in those places, where waste and effluence have been allowed to just go straight into the bay and that's affected the destination's sustainability from an environmental perspective. So understanding where are dynamics, what is actually happening in these places. I mean you are absolutely right that tourism is contributing huge sums of money and also jobs and many of these jobs are going to small communities in places where there is no other infrastructure or there's very little other industries that can take part. And I think that's part of the reason why we are so passionate about making sure that the changes that happen in the future that destinations really get to grips with understanding the kind of destination that they want to be and how everyone in those places can really take part in helping to frame that and make sure that that's where it continues to be as tourism continues to grow.

LL: Of course there's another aspect to all of this and I want to go back to Venice. We spoke with Venetian resident Barbara Warburton Giliberti who had this to say about living in her city.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: It's no longer possible to walk through the streets and enjoy the views. Now even the most simple things, to do the morning shopping, is is hard work now. So I'm very upset about the disrespect that has been thrown on to Venice. Venice is unique. It should be treated as a jewel and in fact, it's just a litter dumb.

LL: That's Venice resident Barbara Warburton Giliberti and Rochelle I want to go back to you, given what she's saying about the way visitors treat her city, what responsibility do tourists have in all this?

LL: Well I think at the very start of your program, you had a really interesting clip from a tourist that was in Venice who said and I think she, I quote, she had no idea that people lived there. And I think there is a responsibility. Yes on the tourist and certainly on the businesses that are selling travel and tourism to those tourists, but also on the media as well. To make sure that these top 100 places to visit before you die or best places to visit and top 10 lists and bucket lists everywhere, are taken with that responsibility that we are going as tourists into places where people live, on the most part and we have a responsibility and a need for respect for these places that we're visiting. And I think there is a movement and certainly among our members at WTTC that we're seeing more and more businesses having this conscious recognition that they have a greater role to play in society, in framing these discussions where the discussions are not happening. Helping to educate the visitors, but also there are other roles for other stakeholders as well in each of these destinations, in each of the places where people are travelling to.

LL: Anna Pollock, your consultancy emphasizes conscious travel. How would conscious travel make a difference to a place like Venice?

AP: Well obviously, being conscious is being more mindful and I do believe that it is incumbent upon visitors to become a little bit more mindful about their choices. Learning more about the place before they go in order to be more respectful. But I tend to work more on the host side, on the supply side and I genuinely believe that the industry itself, that is the commercial suppliers that are involved and the various countries that have been very active to have this influx of additional spending, additional jobs and so on, which look great on your portfolio, to be much more vociferous about some of these issues than they have been in the past. The lady in Venice, Venice has been protesting about influx of tourism and the loss of their sense of identity and their sense of affordability and liveability in Venice for well over 10 to 15 years and they've only just recently got the kind of mainstream attention because this term over tourism has been introduced. The reason we're in the problem we're in is that tourism is an industrial, run on industrial lines of production and consumption. And Venice or a beach or a beautiful island in Thailand is a resource, a commodity to be exploited. And we have in the past over done promoting the benefits at the national level of jobs and income and taxes, without necessarily really being honest and talking to the extent that Rochelle is talking now, which is fantastic, about some of the costs and who pays and so on. So the conversation does need to be enlarged and the responsibility I believe needs to be taken initially by the tourism sector, the visitor economy itself.

LL: I want to play you both another piece of tape. We spoke to Taleb Rifai, the former secretary general of the United Nations World Tourism Organization. Here's what he had to say.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: UNWTO defines tourism as a human right. Just like your right to education, your right to free speech, your right to help. You have a right to see the world, to enjoy it, to do business, to get education. To simply enjoy your time.

LL: Rochelle, what do you think of this idea of tourism as a human right?

RT: Well I don't know that WTTC would completely agree with what Dr. Rifai is saying there. I think tourism is a privilege and tourism has to be treated with respect and there needs to be more of that in both the business side, the tourist side and also governed by the strategic side within administrations. To make sure that that can and remain and tourism can thrive for the future to come.

AP: Anna, we've been talking about other problems. What are some of the places that are actually getting tourism right?

AP: Well the one common characteristic of the places that I think are moving in the right direction are all ones that are really involved the community and in trying to get involved in saying what kind of this do they want to welcome. How many do they think they can accommodate. Where are they going. Two examples of Jamaica, which is mentioned in the WTTC report, commissioned from McKinsey, is an example that put a lot of energy into community tourism. The island of Pulau is another very interesting one. Obviously a small island in the Pacific that had a problem with rapid growth in tourism from an overseas market, where they actually realized that they were losing complete control of the industry. The benefits were not necessarily staying at home and they rewrote their strategy around public ownership by Pulaun people. They now invite their visitors, every time they apply for a visa, to actually sign a pledge where they're informed and through various media of the impacts of tourism on these sensitive islands and how to behave appropriately in them. There are a number of small communities in Ireland now that are starting to say, look we know tourism is "good for us," but we want to be able to say just how you know the form it takes. You know, they're all individual examples, but I wouldn't say there's any one destination that's got it right, just yet. I'm just thrilled they're starting to ask the right questions.

LL: Well, we will have to leave it there. I'm sure we haven't answered all of the questions. Thank you to both of you for your discussion today.

AP: Thank you very much for having us.

RT: Thank you.

LL: Anna Pollock is the founder of the tourism consultancy company, Conscious Travel. Rochelle Turner is Research Director at the World Travel and Tourism Council and we've reached them both in England. The CBC News is coming up next. Then the music and mystery of a Jewish refugees who shaped the lives of a Chinese family. Sharon Wu's documentary, Finding Adler, after the news. I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

Back To Top »

Finding Adler: The music and mystery of the Jewish refugee who shaped the lives of a Chinese family

Guest: Fang Sheng

LL: Hello. I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

Still to come, we'll meet the man known as the "Sherlock Holmes of bird crimes" and hear about one of his more colourful cases. Pepper Trail is a forensic ornithologist in Oregon and one day in 2013, he was sent a mysterious box full of dead hummingbirds. Investigating what happened to those birds and why leads to Mexico, where tiny hummingbirds are sold as love charms. We'll hear the whole story and what the trade in hummingbird charms means for this delicate species in about half an hour from now. But first, Finding Adler.

[Music]

LL: Fang Sheng always knew music was an important part of his family's history in China, but there was a mystery about how that came to be. It turns out there was one man, a refugee, who played an important role in not only introducing music to Fang Sheng's family, but to many others in China. Now living in Toronto, Fang Sheng wanted to finally trace that family history and find out more about the mysterious musician. The CBC's Sharon Wu followed his journey and brings us her documentary, Finding Adler.

SOUNDCLIP

Documentary: Finding Adler

VOICE 1: Okay, here we go my old buddy. I haven't seen you for 30 years. Hey, you sound pretty good. I need to re-learn how to control my fingers and where to put them in the right places. I learned violin with my father, until when I was about 15-years-old, I kind of stopped learning the instrument in a professional way and so I didn't become a career musician.

VOICE 2: Fang Sheng is unusual in his family. His mother, brother and a father are all professional musicians, but not him. Fang chose language over music and to studied to be an interpreter.

VOICE 1: Classical music is always in my life. I always love listening to it, love going to concerts, but you know for over 30 years not really touching the violin is really putting a toll on me because my fingers, my hands are all becoming so stiff. As you could probably hear from the sound, I'm so shaky.

VOICE 2: But now he's picking up his violin again because he's trying to piece together his father's history with classical music. He wants to know more about how an orphan in China ended up as one of the founding members of China's National Symphony Orchestra. He knows pieces of the story. It involves the second world war and a Jewish musician who fled to Shanghai to escape the Nazis. A musician whose work with children had a long lasting impact on classical music in China, but he only has a last name for that man, Adler.

VOICE 1: I think the name Adler has been in the back of my mind for many years. Basically, I would say that without Mr. Adler, my father wouldn't become the kind of professional musician as he is later on. So I think Mr. Adler is a very, very critical role in the whole history of our family and that's what I really want to find out because I feel that there is a lot of information missing. It's like a jigsaw puzzle that I still can't piece together at the moment.

VOICE 2: What Fang Sheng does know is that the story of how Mr. Adler became such a big part of his family's history starts in the late 1930s.

VOICE 3: Already there are over 100,000 war refugees in Shanghai.

VOICE 2: They were known as the Shanghai Jews.

VOICE 3: Yet Jewish refugees from Germany are swelling the number. 4000 have landed and more are on the way.

VOICE 2: About 20,000 European Jews fled to Shanghai, one of the few cities in the world, where a landing visa was not required. Mr. Adler was among them, a professional musician from Austria. He soon became a counsellor to master of the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra. But more importantly to Fang, he would also teach orphans like his father, how to play classical music. In China there have been movies made and the books written about these war orphans and how they became the backbone of Chinese classical music, but their Jewish teachers were hardly ever mentioned.

VOICE 1: At first I couldn't even find Mr Adler's first name. It was only after a long and deep research, did I find out that his first name was Ferdinand. The Adler project, our story, Ferdinand Adler, musician, Jewish refugee, my father's violin teacher. I am looking for this man.

VOICE 2: To find more information, last year Fang turned to Facebook.

VOICE 1: Before and during World War II, tens of thousands of Jewish refugees.

VOICE 2: Launching the Adler project.

VOICE 1: I have so many questions about them, particularly Mr. Adler. How did he flee Europe? What was his life and career like before he had become a refugee?

VOICE 2: He posts the only picture he has of Adler, a black and white photo showing 11 boys, all wearing tattered shirts. In the back row is a smiling middle-aged Austrian, wearing a suit, that's Ferdinand Adler.

VOICE 1: And with my father and his colleagues in their mid 80s, I feel very pressing need to look for Mr. Adler, as a way to rediscover this part of the history, with a perspective to pay tribute to the dedication, the kind hearts, the humanity that ultimately triumphed. Please help me friends.

VOICE 2: Fang's first stop on his journey to find more information is the home of his elderly parents in Beijing.

VOICE 1: My father is turning 86-years-old this year. He has retired from China's National Symphony more than 20 years ago. His hearing has been deteriorating quite badly, especially in recent years. So for him to play his instrument has become really hard.

VOICE 2: He may not remember how to play music perfectly anymore, but he easily remembers the people in the grainy photo Fang posted on Facebook, even though it was taken more than 70 years ago.

VOICE 4: Fang's father describes the people in the photo.

VOICE 2: Fang's father, Ming Liang Sheng, was 12-years-old when he first met Ferdinand Adler. He was living in an orphanage with his younger brother when an official from the Shanghai government came to visit. He was looking for children to attend to China's first youth music school. It was being set up with the help of European refugee musicians. Both brothers were chosen. Fang's uncle to study cello, Ming Liang was placed in Mr. Adler's class to learn violin.

VOICE 1: So do you remember what type of person Adler was like in class? Was it a strict teacher?

VOICE 4: Adler was very nice and a patient with a loving heart. We were just a bunch of poor kids. He was the concertmaster for the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra. He could charge a lot of money for teaching students in Shanghai. We were in Changzhou, Adler and the three other Jewish musicians came to teach once a week.

VOICE 2: Changzhou is about 200 kilometres from Shanghai, a six-hour journey on an old train with many stops along the way.

VOICE 4: So why were they willing to travel all the way from Shanghai to our small town to teach us? Because they believed this group of poor kids was really committed to learning music. These Jewish musicians considered teaching as a way of returning a favour to the Chinese for their kindness.

VOICE 2: Ming Liang said although Adler only spoke German, he didn't feel any language barrier at all.

VOICE 4: He used his hand to show me how to position each of my fingers on the strings. It seemed that this was a natural way to teach and to learn violin, the same way a Chinese teacher would do with beginners.

VOICE 2: Ming Liang may not have spoken any German, but back in Toronto, Fang is taking classes. Still hopeful that somehow he will get in touch with someone in Europe who can tell him the rest of the story about Ferdinand Adler. Fang constantly searches online for any information. Then one day, a headline from a Chinese newspaper jumps off the page.

VOICE 1: Shanghai Symphony Orchestra touring Europe meets family member Austrian woman brings old city memories.

VOICE 2: During a stop in western Austria, a woman approached the concertmaster.

VOICE 1: The discoloured album start with old Shanghai newspaper clips, concert programs and photos, slowly Christina tells us her father's story. Mr. Ferdinand Adler was Shanghai Symphony Orchestra's concertmaster from 1939 to 1947.

VOICE 2: Adler has a daughter in Austria. Finally a leader for Fang.

VOICE 1: I was very surprised, but very, very excited. So immediately I tried to reach out to the Shanghai Symphony and trying to find out how to connect it Christina, but unfortunately I didn't get any response from the symphony.

VOICE 2: Now at least he has a name Christina, but not much else to go on. Months go by with no response to his social media plea, until one day a particular click of the "like" button gets his attention.

VOICE 5: My name is Paul Rosdy. I am from Vienna, Austria. I'm a filmmaker.

VOICE 1: That's I would say the most amazing thing that happened out of this Facebook page.

VOICE 2: 20 years ago, Paul Rosdy made a documentary about the Austrian Jews who fled to Shanghai.

VOICE 5: From the approximately 250 Jewish musicians, a number of them find employment in the City Orchestra, as well as in hotels and nightclubs.

VOICE 2: His research led him to Ferdinand Adler's daughter, Christina.

VOICE 1: When I first read Paul's e-mail saying learn he personally knows Mr. Adler's daughter, I got blown away because I felt quite stuck and then all of a sudden this simple click of "like," opened an amazing door.

VOICE 5: Austria was next Germany in March 1938. After this period Jewish people were arrested and put into concentration camps. So Ferdinand Adler at some time was arrested and put into a concentration camp and spent several months and the only way to get out was if you can prove that you leave the country. And I know from Cristina, that his wife at the time, got the ship tickets to Shanghai. And so she got him out of Dachau and they went to Shanghai.

VOICE 1: Through Paul I got Christina's email. Dear Christina, My name is Fang. My father, Ming Liang, was a student of your father, Mr. Ferdinand Adler. I am so pleased I can connect with you.

VOICE 6: Dear Fang, Thank you for your email from the 2nd of March. I was born at the end of 1945. When my parents returned home in August 1947, I was not even 2-years-old and just as my father died in Vienna on February 21st, 1952, I was only 6-years-old.

VOICE 1: Yet, there is very little known about Mr Adler in China. I have been trying to find out more.

VOICE 6: Everyone was only allowed to take four dollars and my dad took all of his capital in the form of his violin case. He went on a job search immediately after arrival in Shanghai and initially played in a band in a Viennese Cafe. From August 1939, he was concertmaster in the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. My mother always said that their time in Shanghai had been the best time of her life.

VOICE 1: I would like to visit you and talk with you about our fathers, about the amazing stories they went through. Best regards, Fang. I think it's more than just the answers that I wanted. What I wanted actually to reconnect with that part of the history, to reconnect with Christina, which makes it really real.

VOICE 2: To really connect, Fang needs to go to Austria. Fang hands over his ticket to the compacter to scan. So close now to his destination. Christina Adler lives in Kufstein, 400 kilometers west of Vienna, nestled between the snow capped Alps and the Kaiser mountain range. It's Palm Sunday. Hundreds of people are marching along the cobblestone streets passing by houses. The crowd heads up the hill, towards the church, originally built in medieval times. Fang follows the procession, he didn't plan to have this meeting on a big Catholic holiday, but the celebrations only add to his excitement.

VOICE 1: It's very much a big day for me. I feel very anxious, very excited, emotional. I am very nervous.

VOICE 2: Fang weaves his way through the crowds, back to his hotel, where he is to meet Christina. Christina has dark short hair, glasses sit over her rosy cheeks. She's 72-years-old and wears a pinkish-orange skirt suit, with a dark green sweater underneath. She's carrying a big stack of photos and albums. Her friend has come with her to help with translation. Christina was a little quiet at first, but Fang breaks the ice by asking her if she wants to meet his father through video chat. She agrees.

VOICE 1: My father just said that hello, my name is Ming Liang Sheng. I have always been grateful for your father teaching me. I always been missing your father ass my teacher. I see your face, your face already reminds me of your father. I see that you're in good health. I'm very happy for you. I prepared a photo album, I'd like to show you. So this is my father, after the very last lesson. Mr. Adler requested to take a photo just with his own students.

VOICE 7: Through every single contact Christina has learned something new about her father. You are the best proof of this because you could tell her about the orphanage because before that she hasn't heard about her father teaching orphans at any point.

VOICE 2: Fang turns to the second page of his album, pulling out another old photo. It's a close up of a young musician, deeply engrossed in playing his violin.

VOICE 1: So this is when he was performing in Warsaw and people praise him for his good posture. He says this is the art of the posture.

VOICE 7: So it looks very similar to the picture that Christina has of her father playing the violin.

VOICE 1: I can put these two together, oh my God, unbelievable. They look very similar the way they hold the violin.

VOICE 7: They say the same thing, so I don't have to translate. You say the same thing.

VOICE 1: Oh my God this is so amazing. How old was your father then?

VOICE 2: For more than two hours, Christina and Fang share stories and photos, filling in details of their father's lives. Fang also wants to understand how Ferdinand Adler passed away before reaching his fiftieth birthday. Doctors believe her father had a heart attack while on vacation in Kufstein. A few weeks later he went back to Vienna to perform with the orchestra.

VOICE 7: So on February 21st, was the very first time after the heart attack, that he would attend a rehearsal at the opera house and apparently during the rehearsal, the conductor made a sharp remark to her father and said something about his style of playing at the moment. During the rehearsal with the violin in hand fell from that chair.

VOICE 1: Oh my God.

VOICE 2: Life was tough for Jewish artists coming back from exile. The Vienna Philharmonic invited musicians to come back, but most did not return. Fang has one more thing to show Christina before they say goodbye.

VOICE 1: I have a small surprise for you. I have brought a special violin first to show you, then hopefully I could play a little bit. So in 1952, my father and some of his young fellow musicians were performing in Europe. He bought this violin Bulgaria.

VOICE 7: Christina is now also touched by the fact that over more than 70 years that has passed since her father left Shanghai, people still value his impact and his professionalism in Shanghai as a musician and this touches her as well.

VOICE 7: Has your daughter already play the violin?

VOICE 1: She has interest in music already, but I'm going to have violin or piano lessons for her.

VOICE 8: I might mess up with this.

VOICE 2: Fang Sheng's journey to piece together the parcel of his family history is complete. Finding Christina Adler was closure for him and his father. But the story of music in his family, doesn't stop here.

VOICE 1: Please show daddy where to put your fingers.

VOICE 2: Fang is inspired to keep working with his five-year-old daughter.

VOICE 1: Where's the note.

VOICE 8: You have to go here and then I can do it by myself.

VOICE 1: Looking back, there are a lot of people that went through sufferings, went through a lot of a hard time, but there was also a lot of triumph. The triumph of survival, the triumph of music, of arts and the triumph of the humanity, of human love.

VOICE 8: Done.

VOICE 1: That sounds nice. High five!

LL: We have been listening to Finding Adler, produced by the CBC's Sharon Wu and The Current's Liz Hoath, with technical support from Gary Francis. We first brought you that documentary in June. Coming up in our next half hour, the Sherlock Holmes of bird crimes takes on an unusual case, unraveling a secret trade in hummingbird love charms. I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

Back To Top »

Meet the Sherlock Holmes of bird crimes investigating the black market for dead hummingbirds

Guests: Devin Manky, Pepper Trail

LL: I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: So this is a bird in the trap and we use this hummingbird de-elevation device. So here on Grouse, we have our hummingbird feeders about ten feet off the ground on poles and the reason for that is we have lots of local black bears that would love to eat the sugar water as well. So when we do catch a bird we have to use this hook on a stick to lower the trap down, take the bird out of the trap and then we put the trap and the feeder back up top.

LL: Devin Manky is the wildlife manager for the Grouse Mountain Refuge for Endangered Wildlife in North Vancouver. Part of his job is this hummingbird monitoring program over the summer months.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: As you can see when we take the bird out of the trap, I just gently close my hand around it and prevent the bird from flying away. And then we have a special way of holding them. That’s kind of like holding a pencil. You put a finger on each wing so that again they don’t injure the wing. They don’t get their wings out, so it’s a safe way to carry them.

LL: He is carrying this delicate bird to his workstation, so he can take some measurements, observe and put an identifying band on it. It's part of a North American program to learn about hummingbirds, their migration, their breeding patterns and the health of the population. Our producer, Jessica Linzey, went into the field with Devin Manky to learn more.

SOUNDCLIP

DEVIN MANKY: We've had a good morning so far. We've caught 13 birds so far and we have number 14 and 15 here waiting for their bands. We put them in these little hummingbird straight jackets, we call them, are a little hummingbird blankets that just prevent them from injuring their wings while we were bending them. So the reason we're banning them is because the populations of Rufous hummingbird seems to be declining, and there's no concentrated study except for the one we're participating in to look at numbers and what they're doing year to year, to see if it's a natural trend or if there's a definite decline and we have to take some serious conservation steps to make sure that we don't lose our hummingbird's. So the first thing we do is put the band on her here and we have this little leg gauge. So all the different sizes for all these different species of hummingbird and we have these little bands here in wax that we've pre-prepared. So this is three different sizes. Believe it or not.

JESSICA LINZEY: [Laughs] I was going to say three different sizes but those are so tiny.

DEVIN MANKY: Yes. So then we carefully get her leg up and we put the band on. It's a bit of a scale of banded probably, several thousand hummingbirds of this... So our bands on. We take measurements. We measure their build, their wing. We look at things like if they have pollen on their body which would tell us about what resources they are using, what flowers they are feeding on. We do things like we count the little throat feathers, the iridescent throat feathers because it's quite individual how many they have. This girl here just has maybe about one two three four five six seven eight nine. So she's got nine sparkly feathers. We write that down on her.

JESSICA LINZEY: How do you see those individual feathers?

DEVIN MANKY: Four five six seven eight nine. Years of practice just having a handle handled and worked with many many birds over the years. So this is actually interesting. So her abdomen is swollen which means she's in the process of egg making and egg laying. So it's a sign that she's breeding probably right here up on Grouse mountain before we release her we give her a little bit of sugar water. She's under CDC. Her throat going up and down there. She's having a a good drink. Last step that we do is just we put them on a scale and we weigh them and she's four point one. So that's all the other birds were weighing this morning, for example, were three point three, three point four grams and she's four point one. So she's got something else going on inside. So now we're going to release her.

[Sound: Hummingbird flies off]

LL: That was fast. Let's hear her fly off one more time.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Humming bird flies off]

LL: OK. As optimistic as Devin Manky may feel setting free a pregnant hummingbird, he knows the challenges the birds face. Hummingbird populations are in decline all over the world. Researchers point to a number of reasons for this: climate change, loss of habitat, rapid urbanization in areas where hummingbirds breed and then there is a human appetite for love. Yeah, you heard that right. In 2013, a box of dead hummingbirds turned up at a lab belonging to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Special agents with the service have been trying to crack an unusual case, a black market trade in hummingbird love charms. And to do that they needed the help of a man who has been called the "Sherlock Holmes of bird crime." Pepper Trail is a forensic ornithologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. For five years he's been at the heart of the ongoing investigation into the trade and what it means for fragile hummingbird populations. Anna Maria Tremonti spoke with Pepper Trail from Ashland, Oregon in June.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Before we do anything else we just have to talk about that little bird. You just heard that little buzz away. There so tiny and delicate, huh?

PEPPER TRAIL: Yes. They're an amazing combination of fragility and vitality. They're so tiny but they're so full of life and their skills in the air just unrivalled. So they're extraordinary birds.

AMT: I had no idea they were the target of criminals or that there was such a thing as a forensic ornithologist. Tell us what you do.

PEPPER TRAIL: Well my job at the National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory is to identify birds and bird remains that are seized as evidence in wildlife crime investigations. So the Fish and Wildlife Service has about 200 special agents and about 200 wildlife inspectors who are in the field conducting investigations. And when they find evidence that federal wildlife law has been violated they often send the evidence to our laboratory for further analysis. And if it's the remains of a bird or a whole bird it comes to me to identify the species.

AMT: And are you called to testify sometimes in cases?

PEPPER TRAIL: Yes I'm called usually, at least once a year, to testify in court.

AMT: Okay, well let's get to the strange case of the hummingbird love charms. Take us back to that day in 2013 and the beginning of this investigation.

PEPPER TRAIL: Yes it was in March. And when I get evidence, the evidence is checked into our facility through a very controlled procedure to maintain the integrity of the chain of custody. So I don't always know what's coming. So I go down and I check it out and then I go back to my workspace and examine it. And I was just shocked. I had never heard of such a thing. But these were the intact dried bodies of hummingbirds, the whole body. They were placed inside a red paper tube which was then wrapped in red satin threads and the whole thing was in a little bag with a printed prayer in Spanish. So I had no idea what I was looking at or what the background of these was. But between 2013 and now I've now worked 30 cases of these sorts of objects with over 300 individual birds. So it turns out to be quite a significant trade that we're really trying to understand and have a impact to stop.

AMT: I have so many questions but let's first start, the first box you get. How big is it? How many birds are in there?

PEPPER TRAIL: In the first submission. I think there were about 75 birds and each one is in its own individual packet. They're sold as an individual Love charm. The Association of hummingbirds with love goes all the way back to the Aztecs in Mexico. So it has a very long tradition and at some point along the way that association was transformed into the selling of these of these love charms and the prayer that comes with them is very interesting. It is a combination of very old traditional beliefs calling on traditional god like figures, with calling on the performer of the or the owner of the charm to perform Hail Marys and Paternoster as well. So it's a combination of traditional Catholic beliefs that's associated with the use of these love charms.

AMT: And they have a special name, don't they in Spanish?

PEPPER TRAIL: Yes they're called Chuparosas which I'm told in colloquial Spanish means flower liquor or flower sucker. And that's sort of a colloquial Spanish name for hummingbirds in Mexico. They're often called Chuparosas and the charms are called Chuparosas so you can trace this back to the days of the Aztecs but did you know where that box of hummingbird's came from when they gave it to you. Well it was seized in Fort Worth Texas. Our investigator was based in Texas so most of his work was there. We believe that all of these charms are produced in Mexico. They are then brought into United States and they're sold in barrios or botanic goes these shops that sell traditional herbal medicines and other remedies to the Hispanic population in those communities. And so we've now found them very widespread throughout the Southwest, even up into the rest of the Lower 48, Minneapolis, New York. We believe that this trade is extending to Hispanic communities all throughout the U.S.

AMT: Well we sent a freelancer to one of the markets in Mexico City where hummingbird loved charms are sold. It's called the Sonora market. Let's listen to a conversation with one of the vendors.

SOUNDCLIP

VENDOR: They are used for love. The hummingbird is a bird of love. It is the bird that opens the channels so that people will like them. You have to put them in a red loot bag. If we have a special person that we want to attract then we write the name of the person on the paper, put it in the bag with the hummingbird and wear it around the neck. You have to bait the hummingbird with the other person smell. On the first day of the month, you have to bait them with their perfume.

PRODUCER: How much does the hummingbird cost?

VENDOR: The prepared one costs 290.

PRODUCER: How do you prepare it?

VENDOR: We need to see the name of the person. We need to know who you want to attract. And the only thing the person must do is bathe with the perfume of the person they want to attract, nothing more. It's fast. 10 minutes exactly.

PRODUCER: Well what about the hummingbirds? Should they have a different size?

VENDOR: No no no no. The animal comes in many size. The size doesn't matter. The hummingbird is just for love, no matter the size or color. There are some that have a little green breast and there are others that have a little blue one. But it is all the same.

PRODUCER: Those, they no longer have their beak, right?

VENDOR: What? No that's normal. When he dries out it falls off normally.

PRODUCER: Who are the people requesting or buying them the most?

VENDOR: Before, it was a lot of young people. Now it's all ages. There is such a lack of love that everyone wants the hummingbirds, young and old. And before it was almost exclusively women. But now it's both men and women.

PRODUCER: And has anyone returned to tell you that it worked?

VENDOR: Yes many people, many people.

AMT: Well that is from the Sonora markets in Mexico City. Pepper Trail so that vendor would be selling what you described; the hummingbird in the red cone in the satin thread and the poem.

PEPPER TRAIL: Exactly yes. It's very interesting to hear that clip. The one thing I would mention is that the gentleman when he said that the beak falls off normally, I think he was doing it old salesmanship there to sell some damaged goods because we almost never see them without the beak.

AMT: And I noticed too they said it was prepared one costs 290 pesos, which in Canadian dollars is just under 19 dollars.

PEPPER TRAIL: We've found in the U.S. they're usually being sold for around 20 dollars.

AMT: What have you discovered about how they actually kill them?

PEPPER TRAIL: Well we are not sure how they're all killed but one of the surprising findings that we've made at our laboratory is we begin to routinely X-ray the bodies of the birds and we've found that between 20 and 30 percent of them were shot. Believe it or not I can only imagine it's very difficult to shoot a hummingbird. But there's a very very fine birdshot almost as fine as, let's say poppy seed. I mean just a tiny little lead shot that we find in the bodies of about 20 to 30 percent of these hummingbirds. So we believe some of them are killed with slingshots based on talking to informers, that small boys go out with slingshots and get them that way, and some may be caught in nets or with the use of something called Bird lime which is a sticky substance that can be put on the perch around where the hummingbirds are feeding and the hummingbirds land on their feet, get stuck and they capture them that way. So probably a variety of ways.

AMT: And the actual shooting, so they actually have something that can shoot like some birdshot that's small. What's the significance of the fact that they're using some kind of a weapon like that to kill them?

PEPPER TRAIL: Well to me it suggests that this is a pretty well organized operation. It's not just village boys going out with slingshots and getting a few birds. But it's somebody who has a, as you say, a weapon that can shoot those and probably goes out deliberately to collect them in large numbers. And these charms that we're finding are usually- they bear evidence of mass production if you will. They come with a printed prayer. The prayer is always in the same wording a lot of these actually have those little Hecho in Mexico, made in Mexico, stickers on them. So this is not just something that a few people are doing in their villages in the remote interior of Mexico. This is an operation which is more organized and therefore has the potential to have a serious impact on populations of hummingbirds at least in local areas.

AMT: And can I just clarify this is illegal to bring these dead birds into the United States.

PEPPER TRAIL: Yes it's illegal in several different ways, potentially. All hummingbird's, as a group, are protected by an international treaty called the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species [unintelligible]. So they're all protected by that. And therefore to cross a border with hummingbirds, living or dead, you need to have paperwork that permits you to do that. And of course none of these are coming in with any kind of paperwork. In addition, most of the birds, 70 percent of the ones I've identified so far in my cases, are species that occur in the United States as well as Canada and are protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. So those are strictly protected within the United States. So this trade is illegal in a couple of different ways.

AMT: Now when we mentioned the importance of the hummingbird in certain Latin American cultures. We spoke to Jean Jerome Baudry the president of Consejo Cultural Yoruba of Canada in Toronto, a group that practices or promotes awareness of their spiritual belief system and it considers hummingbird's sacred. Listen to what he says.

SOUNDCLIP

The Hummingbird has a very tight, it was like a messenger between the spirit world and the world of - not your ancestors - but spirits that have a knowledge of the elements of witchcraft and magic in our world. In some cases the hummingbird is used as part of an offering or sort of a secret ingredient in a preparation or consecration of certain spiritual entities, allowing almost that particular divinity to essentially, for lack of a better, walk the earth and interact with its realm in a more direct fashion. So one of the key elements is the hummingbird for those ceremonies. It's very selective and it's only when it's prescribed by divination or in terms of the ritual practice of bringing that divinity to life. I am far, far, far more concerned about the stresses on the ecosystem and the disappearance of entire species because of the ecological neglect and disregard than I do from religious practice.

AMT: So Pepper Trail what do you say to that?

PEPPER TRAIL: I certainly agree that the number of threats facing the hummingbirds are many and that the kind of highly selective use that is described there is not as significant as some of the other threats. But from my perspective, as a biologist not as a practitioner of any of these traditional beliefs, I understand the special feeling that people have about hummingbirds. There are extraordinary. And I understand why there are beliefs that are associated with them. It's just unfortunate, and I would hope ultimately reversible, that that belief translates into killing the birds in order to celebrate their special qualities. It would seem possible to me and maybe it's culturally naive but it would seem possible to celebrate their special qualities without killing them. And I would hope that that would be possible.

AMT: You know we heard on tape, at the beginning there are the Grouse mountain scene in B.C. where they're part of a study to track hummingbirds along the coast. How concerned are you about the decline in the population?

PEPPER TRAIL: Well hummingbirds perform an extremely important ecological role as pollinators and so many of our wildflowers are adapted to be pollinated by hummingbirds, most of the ones if you go out to look at wildflower displays most of the species that have long trumpet like shapes and often are red. So all those beautiful colourful red long throated flowers have evolved specifically to attract and reward hummingbirds and the hummingbirds return the favour by pollinating those flowers. And so if you lose pollinators you lose the populations of those wildflowers in a way that they have been able to thrive in the presence of hummingbirds. And so I'm very concerned about hummingbird populations because I love hummingbirds and because also they have a very important ecological role to play. And hummingbirds are in decline. Certain species very, very much so the Rufus hummingbird that is the main species you have in Canada has declined significantly. So any threat that impacts some populations has a potential for a wider effect. And the magnitude of what we're seeing suggests that certainly if collecting is concentrated in particular areas, which is likely because of just logistics, those local populations are probably being impacted and the knock on effects of that are going to be quite serious I'm afraid.

AMT: Why do you love them?

PEPPER TRAIL: Well I love them because they are they're often described as flying jewels. I mean they are uniquely colourful. They're iridescence is remarkable and they are uniquely masters of flight. I mean there's no other bird that can fly backwards which hummingbirds routinely do, as they go back and forth between flowers. And they are just so full of vitality and yet also so tiny and fragile that they bring forth in me feelings both of admiration and awe and protectiveness. I mean I do feel that I want to protect them because they are fragile as well as beautiful.

AMT: So how hard is it to track down who's behind the trade?

PEPPER TRAIL: Well as always when we're looking at trade networks, for any illegal activity, whether it's wildlife trade or the drug trade or any trade like that, you make your seizure and you have the suspect who is caught in the act so to speak. So in our case, in the hummingbird cases, we are finding these in the stores where they're being sold. And so of course the owner of that shop is the suspect. But to trace the full chain of supply back to the people who produce the objects and there of course the kingpins, if you will, that's very difficult especially if it goes across a border. And certainly we believe that all of the people who are involved in the production of these charms are in Mexico. And so we have not unfortunately been able to make a whole lot of progress at tracking down the full network that supplies these charms. But in the case of the folks who are selling them, the penalties can be fairly severe. There's only been one case that has been sentenced so far of these 30 cases that I've been working on. But in that case the suspect, the person who owned the shop where these were being sold, was sentenced to pay four thousand dollar fine in additional thousand dollars in restitution and got a four year term of probation. So the penalties are serious enough that we hope there a strong disincentive to selling these objects and as the word spreads through the community where these are sold and used that that will be a disincentive to continuing this trade.

AMT: I'm just wondering you make the point that there's just something really special about these little birds. I'm wondering how hard it is sometimes to- you said you've looked at 300 of these carcasses of little hummingbirds. How hard is that to see that for you?

PEPPER TRAIL: Well the my job is sometimes quite sad. It's looking at the results of humanity's inhumanity to wildlife every day. And so it definitely does become difficult sometimes and especially with hummingbirds. When they're dead they're so they're so tiny. They're so delicate and vulnerable that it is, every now and then, it certainly does affect me deeply. When you look at a lot of them of course you kind of it becomes a bit, I guess you can say, become a bit hardened to the spectacle but every now and then that it strikes you anew how sad this is and how unfortunate that these beautiful little birds are being killed in the name of love. I mean it's to me it seems very ironic that an animal so full of vitality is being sacrificed in a vain hope for some kind of human connection.

AMT: Does it get personal sometimes?

PEPPER TRAIL: Yes. We have a hummingbird feeder at the lab you know a little humming bird feeder outside of our windows and it's a very strange feeling to be sitting in front of a table of dead hummingbirds and look out the window and there's the life hummingbirds zipping around and chasing each other and full of life and beauty, and then to go back to my work. So it does certainly affect me personally.

AMT: You know it's interesting because they come with a prayer or a poem and I understand that you're a poet.

PEPPER TRAIL: I am. I sometimes write poems about my forensics work, not too often because as you say it's sometimes difficult to write about. But I did write one poem about the true purpose of trade. Would you like to hear?

AMT: Yes I would.

PEPPER TRAIL: It's called Chuparosa, the heir of the [unintelligible] is heavy with chillies and dust. Within the dim glass case a ragged row of packets stencilled with hummingbirds bright red, hovering before bright red flowers. Each holds a true hummingbird a Chuparose dead, dried, bound within a paper tube, the head exposed encircled by a tassel of satin threads red as blood. Each a charm promising love from anyone, even a married woman, even a young girl, anyone you choose. It is all written out there in the [unintelligible] with a price. There are many ways to die for love, to leave the light, to exchange the taste of sweetness for the taste of dust. Here is one, 500 pesos, 20 dollars, whatever you have.

AMT: They really do affect you, huh?

PEPPER TRAIL: They do.

AMT: Well it's important to hear what you had to say. Pepper Trail, thank you.

PEPPER TRAIL: Thank you Anna Maria.

LL: Pepper Trail is a forensic ornithologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He spoke with Anna Maria in June from Ashland, Oregon. That's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q and remember you can always take The Current with you to go on the CBC Radio app. It's free from the App Store or Google Play. Now after our look at over tourism in cities like Venice today, let's end the show off with some music from Spirit of the West.

[Song: "And if Venice is Sinking" by Spirit of the West]

LL: This is "And if Venice is Sinking." I'm Laura Lynch. Thanks for listening to the summer edition The Current.

Back To Top »

Provide Transcript Feedback

CBC would like to acknowledge the support of the Broadcasting Accessibility Fund.

Aug. 6, 2018 episode transcript

More Stories Like This