A Small Difference
Ucross, Wyoming, population 25, is situated just east of the Bighorn Mountains, on the western edge of the Powder River Basin. It’s 20,000 acres of high desert sagebrush, rubbing up against wetlands, grasslands, and riparian habitat where the Clear and Piney Creeks run. It’s ranchland, dotted with cows and emptiness, studded with boulders tossed from space; there are pockets of petrified wood and lots of cool birds. And the news this fall is that all of this land is now designated an IBA— Important Bird Area—a designation made after careful review by the Audubon Society and the American Bird Conservancy. 20,000 acres of protected land where birds can breed or migrate through unmolested, is not much in the grand scheme of this planet. But for a few key species—the Greater Sage Grouse and the Long-billed Curlew —these 20,000 acres is a big difference, perhaps the difference of survival.
Ucross, Wyoming, population 25, is situated just east of the Bighorn Mountains, on the western edge of the Powder River Basin. It’s 20,000 acres of high desert sagebrush, rubbing up against wetlands, grasslands, and riparian habitat where the Clear and Piney Creeks run. It’s ranchland, dotted with cows and emptiness, studded with boulders tossed from space; there are pockets of petrified wood and lots of cool birds. And the news this fall is that all of this land is now designated an IBA— Important Bird Area—a designation made after careful review by the Audubon Society and the American Bird Conservancy. 20,000 acres of protected land where birds can breed or can stop on migration, is not much in the grand scheme of this planet. But for a few key species—the Greater Sage Grouse and the Long-billed Curlew —these 20,000 acres is a big difference.
Fall of 2010 I had my first leave from teaching at Bard College and in that marvelous expanse of time, was able to finish my book, My Reach, while in residency at Ucross. Ucross isn’t a town—there’s no deli or saloon or even a post office. It’s really just the residency, run by energetic, smart people who have created their lives wedged between the vast empty silence of Wyoming and the busy neurosis of grateful creative people who flow through.
While at Ucross, I confess it was hard to push myself indoors to write in my clean, cosy cabin. There was so much outside that I wanted to see—the proghorn and rattlesnakes, but especially the birds. When I arrived, I was but four months into a bird-obsessed life (which continues without slackening). I hardly knew a sparrow from that Loggerhead Shrike but I was out every day getting to know my Vesper Sparrows and Townsend’s Solitaire. One evening I made a trip to a nearby reservoir and in front of my car strolled four birds that looked like goofy chickens with black bellies. Sage Grouse! The landscape I hiked and explored seemed to be filled with unexpected treasures. Soon enough, the Grouse vanished into the sage brush.
Ucross is the child of a visionary oil man from Minnesota, Raymond Plank, who bought the land and refurbished historic homes and schoolhouses to provide a place where artists and writers could realize their potential. Now, he’s providing land where birds can reach their full potential. He tells his story in his memoir, A Small Difference. His relationship to the land, both drilling for oil and protecting it, reveals the complexity of our relationship to land. These two things can co-exist. And it is exactly such moves of protection by Wyoming landowners that we are counting on to save the Greater Sage Grouse.
This fall, the Sage Grouse was under consideration for Endangered Species status. This was hotly debated because to protect the bird would mean to limit all kinds of activity on the land, especially drilling. Trying to avoid a blanket of restrictions that comes with the Endangered listing, landowners and conservation organizations have been working together—just like at Ucross—to provide habitat for the bird to breed. According to data compiled by the U.S. Fish and wildlife Service the species is doing well enough—a breeding population of 432,000— that it was not listed. Usually this failure to list would put me in a funk, but the work of Ucross makes me believe that “do it yourself” land protection might in fact work. I suspend my skepticism because Ucross, after all, is a place where an oilman believes in artists and in birds.
I know that some will remain skeptical that our government fell short. They may have. But Ucross—they’ve made a small difference. Let’s keep adding up those small differences all across the country. For birds. For all of us.
Ovenbird: A singer everyone has heard
There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again
--Robert Frost
Even if you do not know the Ovenbird, you know the distinct, emphatic song of this little warbler: Tea-Cherr, Tea-Cherr, Tea-Cherr. Teacher teacher teacher is the mnemonic, so I think of it as my bird.
There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again
--Robert Frost
Even if you do not know the Ovenbird, you know the distinct, emphatic song of this little warbler: Tea-Cherr, Tea-Cherr, Tea-Cherr. Teacher teacher teacher is the mnemonic, so I think of it as my bird.
It’s the sound I listen for in spring, one of the early warblers, and in those leaf-less days, I have a chance to see the little bird with its brown speckled breast and white eye ring that makes it look in a perpetual state of alarm. Once the leaves come in, I give up hope of a look, satisfying myself with the un-warbler-like song that echoes, flat-footed through dense forests.
So this morning it came as a complete surprise when on a dirt road in a deep woods an Ovenbird came to greet me. I had been walking the sunlight dappled road, listening to the lazy teeyay, tayo of the Blue-headed Vireo, the gravelly song of the Black-throated Blue Warbler, the zee zee zee zo zee of the Black-throated Green Warbler and the music of the Black and White Warbler, which always makes me think that someone is playing one high note on a very tiny violin. Amidst this morning symphony, the Ovenbird appeared, buoyant and unafraid, not more than ten feet from the road. It was not singing. It was dancing. Its white eye-ring made it look, not startled, but wide-eyed, full of curiosity. Its white throat was outlined in brown, like a long mustache that then ran into a brown streaked breast. The streaks were twigs, the bird blending in to the woods. It hopped from a low tree limb, to a bush, across a moss-covered stump. There it stopped, cocked its tail wren-like, and asked: Do I look like a diminished thing?
Frost ends his poem on this note (full poem below) and as poets are wont to do, he makes this tilt to the end, toward our lives in decline, our lives turned to dust. It is easy to be pessimistic if we read the bird forecasts—diminishment is the story. Populations are down for songbirds in particular. But not, I am happy to say, for the Ovenbird, where over the past years in un-fragmented forests, like the one I was walking through, populations are up.
There was no dust in these woods, only the rich, dark soil of white pines and hardwoods, layers of time and rot blanketed with too-green moss. And it was to the ground that the little bird hopped. There it negotiated the territory between ferns and leaf litter, nearly vanishing in its miniature obstacle course. It then popped out not more than five feet from me—too close for me to get a photograph! —splayed its wire-thin legs, tilted its head to show the dapper mustard-brown racing cap that graces its tiny head, and bounded off.
Was the bird defending its ground-level dome-shaped nest? Perhaps, but if so, it was not making the usual agitated chatter of a bird distressed. And, it was doing a poor job of luring me away. For ten minutes I watched as the bird circled near me, up and down, in and out in a spunky mid-summer greeting.
It is always a disorienting, even mournful, moment right after migration. The rush of birds is over. Birding in New York in June requires a different lens, one that favors the familiar, the every day; I don’t expect any new bird, only hope for a fresh view of a familiar friend. So I pay attention to the sally of the Phoebe, the near-maddening song of the White-eyed Vireo and I focus on every whip, bleep, pink, seep, ple-bleep, whink, whip, sot, sip, and chep that emerges from the woods. In this intimacy of the daily, I come to know the birds better. And now, I know the Ovenbird, not just its song, but in its vibrant, mid-wood, mid-summer dance.
The Ovenbird
There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
Rusty Blitz
Yesterday I celebrated the first day of the Rusty Blackbird Blitz by walking out into the snowy Tivoli Bays to look for a Rusty. I knew full well I would not see one in the still frozen landscape of the bays. Even the Red-winged Blackbirds have not yet returned. Still, I had to go out on snowshoes to roll out the carpet for the Rusty should it decide to stop over later in the spring.
The first time I saw a Rusty Blackbird was three years ago on the muddy causeway of Cruger Island Road. It was the second spring of my bird-obsessed life, when every bird felt a miracle. My friend Peter introduced us: “Look now,” he said, “this is a bird that will be extinct in our lifetime.” What I saw was an ordinary enough bird, black overall, with a bit of brown rust at the nape, and then eyes, white as if they were bottomless. The bird had a grating song, like a squeaky hinge. At that time I doubted Peter’s pronouncement—it felt too full of doom—but research proved he might be right: Rusty populations have plummeted in the past century, with an 88% population reduction. Though scientists estimate that somewhere between 158,00 and 2 million remain, this once abundant bird is in a population free-fall.
Yesterday I celebrated the first day of the Rusty Blackbird Blitz by walking out into the snowy Tivoli Bays to look for a Rusty. I knew full well I would not see one in the still frozen landscape of the bays. Even the Red-winged Blackbirds have not yet returned. Still, I had to go out on snowshoes to roll out the carpet for the Rusty should it decide to stop over later in the spring.
The first time I saw a Rusty Blackbird was three years ago on the muddy causeway of Cruger Island Road. It was the second spring of my bird-obsessed life, when every bird felt a miracle. My friend Peter introduced us: “Look now,” he said, “this is a bird that will be extinct in our lifetime.” What I saw was an ordinary enough bird, black overall, with a bit of brown rust at the nape, and then eyes, white as if they were bottomless. The bird had a grating song, like a squeaky hinge. At that time I doubted Peter’s pronouncement—it felt too full of doom—but research proved he might be right: Rusty populations have plummeted in the past century, with an 88% population reduction. Though scientists estimate that somewhere between 158,00 and 2 million remain, this once abundant bird is in a population free-fall.
158,000 to 2 million? Let’s put this into numbers people pay most attention to: who wants 2 million dollars? $158,000? But that’s as accurate as it gets because we know little about this bird. Part of it is that the Rusty breeds in inaccessible areas: boreal bogs. Tagging and re-finding those tagged birds has proven near impossible.
A 2010 article in The Condor is titled Rusty Blackbird: Mysteries of a Species in Decline. I can like a science article that admits to the mystery. Is it not all a mystery? That the birds are here at all? That I am here to watch them? that the planet continues to spin?
But the mystery that these scientists are mulling over is why the decline. There is no one simple answer. There’s habitat destruction—that’s almost a given with any dramatic species decline. The woods the Rusty needs on their wintering grounds in the southeastern United States have been transformed into agricultural land. The boreal wetlands where they breed have been lost to peat production, timber harvests, oil and gas exploration—the list is the usual nauseating one that makes me blur over. And then there’s mercury, which the Rusty encounters on both its breeding and wintering grounds. In acidic wetlands, mercury converts to its toxic form, methylmercury. This would likely kill the embryos of the Rusty.
Yet as important as understanding the bird’s breeding and wintering grounds is information on migration. Where do these birds rest up, gather fuel? This is what the Blitz, now in its second year, is about: scientists and conservationists want to understand the challenges this bird faces during migration. So during the next two months they want birders to focus on the Rusty by logging their sightings into eBird.
On my walk, it was quiet except for the crunch of snowshoes and the stop and start conversation with my friend Kate, who is game for any outing that involves snowshoes and birds. As we walked out Cruger Island, I pretended I really could see a Rusty even though there was not a bird in sight. And that possibility, this effort at tracking such an unassuming bird, made me insanely happy. So often it seems that the birds we want to save are the charismatic ones, the ones that are half myth, like the Whooping Crane. Don’t get me wrong, I love that the Whooper is being protected, but I worry that the less exciting birds are left behind. This Blitz gives me hope that we care for all of the birds. Thousands of birders will be out, logging the Rusty’s faint pathway north. Yesterday I did not add to the data, except to say that I tried.
As we left the causeway, a fluttering in some trees caught my attention. I turned my binoculars to see small birds bobbing from the end of branches, working dried seeds pods that looked like flat tin pennies. I tromped past the brush that lines the causeway and walked closer so I could see the little red caps, the white wing bars. Common Redpolls. I watched the birds gather an afternoon meal, wondering what their story might be, then continued on my way home.
Whoop!
In January of 2007, my father and I drove west from Pennsylvania to Arizona together, stopping in Kentucky, Louisiana, Texas. He ate oysters, while I took walks, and together we marveled over our vast country by reading aloud billboards, commenting on the mesquite, the ugliness of strip malls, the trash by the side of the road. The one place he wanted to stop was Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on the upper Texas Coast. Why? To see Whooping Cranes on the bird’s wintering grounds. My father was a novelist, a bookish man, not a naturalist. But the Cranes captured his imagination and he wanted to see them. Aransas, established in 1937 to protect migrating birds and especially the Whooping Crane, is a reliable place to see the birds in winter.
In January of 2007, my father and I drove west from Pennsylvania to Arizona together, stopping in Kentucky, Louisiana, Texas. He ate oysters, while I took walks, and together we marveled over our vast country by reading aloud billboards, commenting on the mesquite, the ugliness of strip malls, the trash by the side of the road. The one place he wanted to stop was Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on the upper Texas Coast. Why? To see Whooping Cranes on the bird’s wintering grounds. My father was a novelist, a bookish man, not a naturalist. But the Cranes captured his imagination and he wanted to see them. Aransas, established in 1937 to protect migrating birds and especially the Whooping Crane, is a reliable place to see the birds in winter.
So we stopped in Aransas. And we walked one trail, giddy over the alligators that lazed so close to the trail and marveled over the Roseate Spoonbills. We drove a beautiful 15 mile loop through grasslands and there I saw something take off, something large and white, like a sheet moving through the air. I knew little about birds at the time so I called it a Whooper, but I knew I was lying. Could easily have been a Pelican or a Great Egret. I needed to go back to see those elegant white birds.
This trip of 2015 started in San Antonia in rain, in gray, and well, it pretty much stayed that way through the week. Texas was supposed to be warmer than New York in January and it was—but just barely. My friend Teri and I started by driving the loop at Anahuac, which was like a bird safari, the Coots on every bit of open water, but also Reddish Egrets, White Ibis, and every species of duck that I know. A few days later we were further along the coast. We had passed some of the prettiest and some of the ugliest landscapes we had ever seen. Don’t mess with Texas? The beaches were loaded with garbage. And the views from our rental car roller-coasted from protected refuges to blazing, otherworldly oil refineries.
Just before Aransas we decided to drive south along a sand-dirt road near Collegeville. The land there was extraordinary, salt marshes with grasses in shades of red, orange and yellow. We were alone on that isolated road, seeing Crested Caracara, those dignified looking raptors with flat heads and orange face masks perched on fence posts, and Long-billed Curlews shy in the grasses. And then I heard them: Sandhill Cranes. It’s a call you never forget. I pulled over and we looked at the gray long-legged birds through the scope as they moved in a flock through the grasses.
We continued down the road, both of us pointing left, then right at one bird after the next, a bit dizzy from it all. “Egret,” Teri said pointing left. They were the standard long-necked white bird of the trip. “Wait,” I said, noting the birds were bigger, holding themselves not Egret-like. I stopped, pulled out the scope, saw the dark heads of the Whooper and started to tear up.
The Whooping Crane is one of the rarest birds in the United States. In the 1940s populations dropped to 15. From that tenuous number we have climbed to around 600, some in captivity. The return of the Whooper is one of the celebrated acts of conservation: if we put our money, time, and imagination to the task we can do this. The most imaginative part of this is raising chicks using Crane puppets and then teaching the birds to migrate using an ultra light craft.
If only we gave all bird species that are endangered this kind of attention, this much love (and money and dedicated researchers). But rather than lamenting that, I stood there on that lonely dirt road grateful we have done this one extraordinary act of protection. The big white birds in the distance grazed about, unaware of my awed excitement. Because they were such a surprise sighting, they felt like my birds. And this, I realize is one of the great joys of birding: finding the unexpected. Or rather in this case, finding the expected in an unexpected place. That it was such a special bird added to the thrill. This all combined to give me a keen sense of discovery, such a rare experience in a world so fully discovered.