It’s been a year since I left for an adventure in Southeast Asia. With the extremely tardy completion of a small book I made for those who supported my Kickstarter campaign for the trip, I started feeling like I’d never be on the road again. Modern expectations, the realities of money, and my desire to be a part of a stable community all seemed to be working against me, pulling me down. Yet, instead of dragging myself down the anguished path of the grounded traveler, I decided that some careful reflection was in order.

This year I’ve been a lot of places, there’s no doubt. From the temperate land I call home to the Asian tropics. To the crest of the Sierras and down to the Great Basin. Consciously or subconsciously, mountains played an undeniable role in my explorations. I was in the the shrub steppe of Steens Mountain in Oregon, the forests and alpine of Mt. Lassen in California and Mt. Rainier in Washington, the elfin evergreens of Doi Inthanon in Thailand, eruption scarred Gunung Sibayak in Sumatra, and the ancient oaks and tree ferns of Gunung Kinabalu in Borneo. In my home I wound through the high desert of interior western North America, the temperate rainforest of the Pacific Northwest coast, the snow of the Cascade range, and the mosaic of forests in the Sierra Nevada. Abroad I traipsed the lowland rainforests of Borneo and clambered about the monsoonal forests of Thailand. I drove to the summit of Doi Inthanon, the tallest mountain in Thailand, and hiked halfway up to the tallest mountain in Southeast Asia, Gunung Kinabalu.

I was captivated by small natural wonders in my own backyard (literally) and stood in awe of a bull elephant thousands of miles away. Birds were held, eyes were met with Orangutans. Animal and plant life always figure highly in my explorations, communities shaped by the landscapes I learned in my wend.

That’s the key. My excitement and passion for this world result from a desire to learn. Curiosity rules my spirit, anyone reading Wingtrip will know that.

Below I’ve compiled a long (yet also very punctuated) series of images from my year in the natural world. If you are curious about the stories behind them please ask or follow a few of the links I’ve provided above (unfortunately, through a flaw in the program I upload photos to Flickr with, literally hundreds of the photos in other entries linked to above are not visible right on wingtrip though still on Flickr – when I have time to sit down to this arduous task, it’ll be fixed). There’s so much worth working to save, these images should remind us all of that.

In short, I’ve got nothing to complain about. I hope you enjoy these shots. May you all have a fruitful year of discovery.

Who the hell set my alarm for 3 AM?

Right. That was me.

Four hours later I was in Ephrata, Washington, doubting my sanity.

There were two cars in our caravan. Five demented birders. We had about twelve hours of driving from Seattle, Washington to Palmer Lake near Loomis, Washington and back. Where is Loomis? That’s what most people say.

A steel gray morning broke as we climbed onto the Waterville plateau, out of channels of basaltic flows that blanketed out over 4 millions years ago. When lava began to periodically sweep over the landscape millions of years before this, it was lush and wet, a polar opposite of the now arid high desert.

The sun wasn’t yet strong enough to budge the hard frost, an elegant tinsel about the trees lining the few farm houses dotting vast fields of cultivation. Agriculture reigns throughout this part of Washington like many others. We power through it and the small towns heading north. Bridgeport, Omak, Okanogan, Riverside, and finally, after almost five hours, Tonasket. Turn off to the Loomis-Oroville highway things start feeling rustic, exhilaratingly obscure.

If I’d told you we made a 10 hour drive to see one bird, would you think me crazy? Not just any bird, but a gull that without careful observation, most wouldn’t notice as particularly striking in basic (non-breeding) plumage. What about the dozens of other birders clustered around Lake Palmer squinting across the water, shivering and straining through scopes? My non-birder friends would hardly be surprised, but that doesn’t mean they get it. Yet, across the water was a gull that inspired this frenzy of driving. With a vague hue of pink, like the pale sunrise hours before, there sat a Ross’s Gull (Rhodostethia rosea), Washington’s second.

This bird is not only rare here, it is a sought after species in normal range.  This is a truly unique and superbly adapted species, exciting enough to see in its own landscape, let alone Washington. If you want to see a Ross’s Gull, typically you head to Barrow, Alaska in October for migration, or to Siberian or Northern Canadian marshy tundra during the breeding season. If you are truly demented, you could peruse the edge of arctic ice flows during winter. Spending one day with hours of driving across Washington and back, with the strong possibility of dipping on the gull, was odd. Yet, here we all were, some of the hundreds who visited the lake tucked away in the precipitous mountains of north central Washington, thousands of miles away from this bird’s home.

Named for James Clark Ross, an English naval officer who explored the arctic and the antarctic, the Ross’s Gull is monotypic (but certainly not unique in being named after a dead white man). Sole membership to the genus seems immediately appropriate when one is adorned in striking alternate (breeding) plumage. Despite their beauty, there is no accurate count of populations I’ve ever heard, or extensive information on their natural history. Territory on the edge tends to restricts our knowledge base. Their summer diet revolves around insects, abundant for the punctuated profusion of arctic summer. Winter is spent scraping by on algae and likely whatever else is found.

At first the atmosphere was reserved. When we arrived around 9 AM, they’d seen the bird. The deer carcass sustaining the gull’s vagrancy was still iced over; it had flown. Only certain portions of the lake were accessible or visible and there was concern that it would settle in an obscured corner. Thankfully, we didn’t have to drive the frigid lake shore for hours. The chase was fruitful.

A chase was exactly what this was. We saw the bird, watched it for about an hour, and then left. In many ways I was happy to leave. This didn’t feel organic or entirely enjoyable. Thirty birders huddled around watching one bird. Seeing it was a pleasure, how it flew and jumped above the drift ice in foraging behavior that seemed particular to a bird that winters on the edge of arctic ice. We had diagnostic views of dark underwings, a pinkish wash, a wedge shaped tail, and a small dark bill, but it never came close.

Yet something wasn’t right. Without sounding like a hermit or agoraphobic, I don’t relish this aspect of birding. Too many people vying for room, vying for attention to their ego. A crowd is still a crowd, even looking at a cool, rare bird. I didn’t need to hear the woman shouting out every little detail about the gull, as if she was announcing a horse race. I didn’t need to hear the pretentious discussions of binoculars, cameras, and trips. Too much showing off, too little reserve, appreciation, time spent learning, and ultimately, respect. Call me negative but this wasn’t what I looked for in a community. The numerous pleasurable people I spoke with were overshadowed by this miasma of obsession. I was reminded why I don’t always chase rare birds, despite admittance of enjoying adding them to my life list.

What was the point of driving all this distance, using these resources, to see a bird almost certainly destined for death far from home? This little gull had probably gotten lost, arriving here in attempts to find food. As I’ve grown older, this internal battle has raged, largely because I know the value of birding isn’t housed in vagrant species. Yet a part of me is still giddy in the chase or discovery. Some aspects of it warrant intellectual pondering, postulating on the why and how. Yet, the most benficial part of traveling to a remote locale for birding is that it can have a positive economic impact on the communities visited. Very simply, more habitat will be saved if a community sees gain in catering to nature oriented visitors. This works well around the world, a strong basis for local driven conservation efforts.

Passing through Loomis I considered all this. We’d seen other captivating things this day but had to rush by. Two ram Bighorn Sheep, crossed the road in front of us and stood veiled behind bare Douglas maples eying us from mere feet away. A deer kill, I’d guess from a Cougar (they tend to return to a kill and eat, incapable of devouring in the manner of wolves), was covered in Black-billed Magpie, Common Ravens, a young Golden Eagle, and two adult Bald Eagles. I counted a dozen Rough-legged Hawks between Palmer Lake and Seattle, wintering from the north.

The day ended with a beautiful sunset over Cle Elum and the eastern Cascades. I felt justified in having taken this trip but I still felt uneasy about aspects of it. How much of birding recklessly ignores impact in favor of valorous exploits? Does this make our pastime, in extremes or not, any better than something sneered at as explicitly impactful like say, snowmobiling? Did anyone learn anything in seeing the Ross’s Gull or did they just get their check mark?

Nature even distracts me from other nature. I can think of a particular time, seven years ago, when just that happened.

I was walking with my fellow Spring Ornithology students down a mountain road in a range of mountains adjacent Ashland, Oregon. There was an air of excitement about the group, we were finding birds new to many of us. Several hours later we saw a Great Gray Owl, plopped stately on her snag topping nest. Yet, what caught my eye and drew me away was a delicately bent lily, emblazoned by filtered afternoon light. Everyone else walked off in search of a Hermit Warbler and I suddenly no longer heard its sweet chip notes from high in the conifers above.

This plant was captivating, the light fantastic, and I bent take a shot. Facing the ground, the base of the petals and the reproductive interior of the flower were a deep magenta. I’d never seen that pigmentation in a wild plant before. Following my eye, I captured an image that still sits among my favorites.

One of the follies in attempting to capture an ecosystem with photography is that the photographer is necessarily ignorant of some aspects. I was a naturalist and a birder long before a photographer but that doesn’t cover all bases. Even when I remind myself that I need to identify everything I manage a decent shot of, it takes a tremendous amount of effort when you are starting at zero. This was most evident in my recent time in Asia. My guess is that there are many so called “conservation photographers” that still don’t have a very complex understanding of the natural world they are immortalizing despite decades of experience (that’s ok though, they still produce valuable work). I’ve photos spanning a decade which I include species I am yet to put a name to. This lily until a few weeks ago was one of them.

Fawn-lilies, trout-lilies, dog’s-tooth violet, adder’s tongue, avalanche lily. All names for the same group of plants in the genus Erythronium. Plants are even more confounding than birds when it comes to classification and naming schemes. Depending on who discovered them and what colloquialism they ascribed, you can end up with any number of names for the same group of plants. Plant classification and names appear to change even more than the elastic and dynamic rearrangement of the class Aves. The pendant like flower I knelt to photograph was most certainly a lily, I knew that at the time. I thought it’d be in my trusty Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast by Pojar and Mackkinnon, a staple for naturalists in my region.

Nope. And that was the end of it for several years.

This summer I decorated the wall of my room in the Sierras with various photos. I kept staring at this image and wondering. A summer of wondering past and back in Seattle, I asked my mother what she thought it might be. She knew it was a Erythronium, a fawn-lily, a native perennial. With small edible bulbs, they have delicate and attractive, pendulous flowers that are often early spring bloomers. After a bit of poking around in books and on the internet I figured it out: Henderson’s Fawn-lily, Erythronium hendersonii.

E. hendersonii is a fairly restricted species. In fact I was smack dab in the middle of the sole range of the plant, the Kalamath-Siskiyou mountains of Southwestern Oregon and Northwest California. While they are locally common and it’s amusingly silly, I felt a twinge of excitement in unwittingly photographing a pretty plant that was endemic to the small area I had been in (instead of it being an invasive or widespread plant). Walking through their typical habitat of open, dry woodland composed of Garry Oak and Ponderosa Pine, I’d stumbled upon a unique beauty.

The Siskiyou mountains specifically, are noted for their endemic plants and broad diversity. Wedged between the coast and the cascades with isolated peaks and a complexity of climates, it’s not hard to see how a wide variety of plants could have developed here. There is also a fair amount of serpentine that has been exposed for at least 5 million years. Soils over serpentine minerals are generally thin, poor in nutrients, a noted paucity of calcium, and rich in growth retardant, toxic elements. Serpentine plays a complex role in endemism around the world, from places like Mt. Kinabalu in Borneo and throughout California. Eventually specialized plants develop that can handle the poor soils, filling a niche and diversifying. I’ll leave it at that for serpentine, I’m no expert. The takeaway is that it’s no surprise I stumbled upon an endemic plant in these mountains.

Wait a minute though. Henderson? Who the hell was this Henderson? There’s thousands of old white men whose names are affixed to a myriad of organisms. Henderson happens to be well known for his role in Pacific Northwest botany.

Born in 1853 in Roxbury, Massachusets and attending Cornell University, he didn’t arrive out west until 1877 when he became a high school teacher in Portland, Oregon. From that point on, he started botanizing throughout much of Oregon and Washington during free time. He then successively Moved to Olympia, Washington to be a state botanist and forester and then to Moscow, Idaho as the University of Idaho’s first botanist professor, founding their herbarium.

Even after initial retirement in Hood River, Oregon in 1911 he didn’t falter in his passion for plants. He eventually became curator of the University of Oregon herbarium’s native plant collection, further enriching the existing collection. Strangely enough, he may have got this position by swimming across the Columbia River, a day before his seventieth birthday on September 8, 1923. The feat received statewide coverage and it may have caught the eye of the head of the botany department at U of O because he began a correspondence several days afterwords.  Who cares really – dude swam the Columbia river at age 70!

Not until a few years before his death did Henderson slow down. He passed in a nursing home in Puyallup, Washington in 1942 at the age of 88. His specimens number in the tens of thousands, filling the University of Washington, the Smithsonian, University of Oregon, and Oregon state herbariums, among others. Among his achievements, one of the most notable was that he was the first American botanist to explore the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state, a member of the 1890 Olympic Exploring Expedition. At least sixteen species of plants have been named after him, including some I’d already known but never considered a namesake. Included in these is a favorite, Dodecatheon hendersonii, Henderson’s Shooting Star, which he and his wife Kate found on a hike east of Portland.

I discovered all this merely prompted, more than anything distracted, by this one photograph and one flower. I can now see this “grand old man of botany of the pacific northwest” slowly stepping down hillsides and through valleys, stooping to enjoy a particularly beautiful specimen just as I had done. The appreciation of nature most definitely transcends human history.

Infrequently do I come across a video, a piece of writing, or a photograph that I deem worthy of sharing.  Reiteration isn’t something I think I can escape creatively by avoiding such props, I just don’t find it worth my time or very thought provoking.  Every so often however, I come upon something that is too good to pass up.  In the Auk (the journal of the American Ornithologists Union) this October, a paper was published concluding what most already knew, the Imperial Woodpecker is probably extinct.  But more importantly it also provided restored footage, the only images known, of this species.  This video is more than just another youtube clip, it’s a last documentation, a last glimpse of a bird that probably winked out thirty years before I was born.

At 22-24in long, this bird was nearly as long as a Common Raven, living among giant pines in rugged, treacherous mountains of Northern and Central Mexico.  A woodpecker this size of a raven is hard to imagine.  Because of typical human evils, that’s all we get to do, imagine.  Followers of Wingtrip know that I am a staunch supporter of museum collections and skins exist of these birds, but they do nothing to impress the passion of a live bird, knowing it in the vibrancy of animation.  You can measure, observe, pry details from the preservation but it doesn’t bring the bird back.

Out of human remorse, Imperial Woodpeckers are left as critically endangered on inventories by international conservation groups like Birdlife International and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature .  This is not a listing born of any information or real hope that these birds are still out there.  The 2010 expedition to the Sierra Madre Occidental of Northern Mexico (specifically Durango), where the film was made by dentist and amateur Ornithologist William L. Rhein gave little hope that any of these giants still exist.

Devastating logging practices long ago dealt with sizable stands of old growth pines in these mountains.  Even inaccessible stands, left alone in the onslaught of the 1940s-50s, are now being cleared to grow opium poppies or marijuana.  Birds of their size needed many acres (26 square Km) to sustain a pair, which simply don’t exist anymore.  Paired with massive habitat loss, these birds were considered useful in folk medicine, the nestlings a delicacy by the native peoples of the mountainous regions of Northern Mexico, and finally a pest to valuable timer needing extermination.   The last known bird was a recently shot individual in 1956, the same year this video was filmed.

Watch a female, her crest of curled feathers wobbling as she sidles up a tree.  The great flash of white on black of the flying bird.  This should be strong warning to my generation that we should not leave even less natural wonder for our children than our grandparents and parents did for us.

I’ll be thinking of the dead and the living this weekend, an appropriate thing to dwell on.

The dogs charged ahead of me. Switch backing down to Boeing creek, tearing through end of summer dust, leaving me a dirt curtain to huff. The creek itself pushes eventually down to hidden lake, carrying any available urban effluvia with it. Several weeks without rain hasn’t staid the flow and the lake has warnings about high levels of potentially harmful chemicals. Moisture crept about me as I descended to the bed, following a trail of growls and barks and splashes.

Despite all the dog noise, I felt the calm of a quiet place. Set aside by William Boeing when he purchased and built his mansion here in 1913, the habitat escaped some typical developments. Relict old growth Douglas fir and western hemlock plodded the slopes through the park. I twisted by them, looking up in childish awe, following redirected water over culverts. I kicked up glacial silt which the Puget Lobe ground into hills surrounding the current day Salish Sea, our Puget Sound. Fifteen thousand years ago, there would have been at least a couple thousand feet of ice over my head. A river would have been where the sound was before the continental ice sheet intruded and carved out the contemporary topography.

Lost in thought, enjoying lime sunlight filtered through devil’s club leaves, I realized I’d not heard the dogs in awhile. You may have misgivings about my dogs being off leash in a park. Sometimes I do too. Yet, there are greater evils in the world to worry about than dogs running loose in a half-wild city park. I agree with leashing dogs in true wilderness, but I enjoy the happy freedom of walking trails here with them bounding ahead. That said, they occasionally get into trouble, in the form of things not intended for consumption or things rubbed into fur that clashed with human olfactory sensitivities. When there wasn’t barking or jingling tags, I became worried.

Behind an indian plum, beneath a western red cedar, the dogs stood still snuffling. Something had caught their interest. Their noses directed at a pile of feathers. My first concern was that they’d killed something. However, sticks had been crossed atop a splayed corpse, alleviating my fears but also piquing my curiosity.

“Get. Go on, get. Lobo. Lilly. Get.”

Subservient glances, dropped wagging tails and ears, unsure backing away. I’d caught them before they’d rolled in whatever it was. Flies were swarming, their larvae writhed over dusky, brown and tan mottled feathers. Prodding with a stick, I uncovered identity. This wasn’t just any dead bird my canid friends had found, this was a great-horned owl (bubo virginianus).

How did it get here?

My extensive forensic training told me at least one thing, someone else had found this bird and put sticks over it, likely to deter future dog investigators. Another thing was obvious, this wasn’t a fresh kill. The body was slumped, pungent with decay, feathers soiled in rancid grease. It was in such a low, enclosed area that I could hardly see it having sat there in a weakened state, died, and fell to the ground.

Quite the mystery.

Did a person kill it? Was it sick?

I’ve got a theory. There’s been barred owls about the park. While I wasn’t around for their breeding season, I have reason to believe that they did breed there, based off what my parents told me. Barred owls can be extremely aggressive and while I’ve never heard of one killing a great-horned owl, I wouldn’t put it past them.

I’ll never really know. Yet, I like that it highlights how much nature can be in a small city park (at least two species of owls!).

Surreptitiously scooping up the body into a bag (to take to the Burke Museum or Seattle Audubon), I walked down to Hidden Lake. In November, bufflehead join the constant flock of mallards here. Stern warnings kept Lilly from trying to catch mallards in eclipse plumage, lacking flight to properly escape.

Sword ferns crashed aside as the dogs skittered up the hill, away from the lake. Distant lawn mowers hummed, a symptom of a dry day in Seattle. The disturbed land adjacent a playing field, now overtaken with invasive plants, was full of flickers, cedar waxwings, and house finches after seeds, fruits, and insects. Budlea, butterfly bushes, pleasant but still invasive, perfumed the narrow path. A Cooper’s hawk flew over with strong, rapid beats and the birds scattered for cover, unconcerned if the plants were native or not.

The dogs disappeared into the scotch broom. The leguminous seed pods popped in the heat, ready to disperse. People might then decide they needed to be pulled up, creating a perfect disturbed substrate for more reseeding and spreading. A feedback loop of failed attempts to control our mistakes. Scotch broom was great for stabilizing hillsides during road construction, but it’s a menace to those desiring the contrived purity of a native landscape. I can’t say I like it or want it choking out other plants, but sometimes I think we should focus time and attention on places that haven’t been spoiled. The area around Boeing creek is never going to be “pristine” again.

The bag of bones and feathers swung at my side. Inside it was a perspiring mess, fogging the plastic. As stomach churning as it was to think about a decomposing body fogging up a plastic bag, it also masked the occupant quite nicely. I didn’t really feel like explaining myself.

Lilly perked up as we entered a nice stand of second growth. She’s a hunter and while I don’t really mind her catching the occasional rat or gray squirrel, I always like to make sure it isn’t something else. A large black bird jumped from one truck to another, thankfully out of reach of my mongrel. A male pileated woodpecker. He flew off into the forest with an echoing call.

Skipping a cut back through the official off-leash area (because I had an owl in a bag), I took a side trail. We trod down again, through a glade of indian plum and hazelnut, mixed with non-native Hawthorne, cherry, and holly. We scared a hairy woodpecker up off a fallen log. Besides the scuttling and occasional playful snarl of a dog, it was a quiet afternoon.

Just before reaching the parking lot, we crested a hill with a clear view of the glacier carved, west side of the Olympic mountains. In several months they’d be constantly veiled by low slung clouds. In winter I typically only see the peaks. They stand higher than weather over the sound.

Disliking being pulled away from tasty blackberries, I leashed the mutts and got back into the car. The owl sat passenger, curled talons catching my eye. Maybe people killed this owl, a regrettable thing. Maybe they didn’t and it fell to something else altogether. People can’t control everything, trying to is how we create problems. Might as well make the best of it as is and protect what’s left.

Seasons are built to move fast. Drag yourself through the early mornings for months, but one day wake to realize you’ve missed beating the sunrises, standing in still, frosty mornings, trunks towering, grass glistening. Nothing envelops being like the quiet of a morning chorus with humanity pulled into the forgotten depths by nature.

The Northern Sierras came and went for me. The flash and chortle of a half recognized woodpecker, gone before I could acknowledge or even take the time to appreciate it. Some of us drift off to another adventure, perpetuating our desire to never step off the path. The foolhardiest drift back to flip-side of their duality, almost immediately longing for the woods. To the sweat. To the bugs. To the endless summer.

There are plenty of unfortunate aspects of being a field biologist. Few jobs have benefits or pay a reliable, constant, livable wage. Most involve exertion at indecent hours of the day in unpleasant conditions. Those of us who love being outdoors can easily forget all of this when something momentous happens. Three years ago I came upon a Coyote and her den; two pups eying me with the thinly veiled curiosity of domestic puppies. Everything I could ever dream up to complain about became irrevocably inconsequential for weeks.

So, it was a good season, it was a bad season. The weather was shit for a month, we battled late snow, worried about endless salvage logging, washed out roads, and illegal pot farms. Getting home, I can easily forgive and forget. This was a good job, benign, well paying. Unlike the multitude of projects out there that never make a dent despite the funds they wield, we collected data that actually contributes to the guidance of forest management. Without sounding too sentimental or jingoistic, the Western forests are one of America’s best renewable resources. Being a part of something like this is plain sensible, as opposed to helping a graduate student study something that might soon become a forgotten paper or deemed superfluous by a body of their peers or superiors. (A myriad of valuable studies exists and I’m lucky to know some fine young scientists driving them, but that said, there’s a lot of crap too. Sorry, it’s true).

Eight species of woodpeckers were focal to our work in these burnt Sierra peaks and valleys. Two more were occasionally noted. This is astounding when you recognize there are only twenty-one (extant) woodpeckers in the entire United States and Canada. Seen regularly in appropriate habitats, one begins to maneuver alongside their behaviors. Taciturn parents on eggs, wildly frenetic when feeding young. Some birds you never figure out or before you’ve realized it, they give you the slip.

The two Red-breasted Sapsuckers quarreling in stubborn willows, cut by a derelict skid road, seemingly with nothing better to do besides play chicken on narrow branches and gape absurdly at one another for thirty minutes. The White-headed Woodpeckers that carried food away but always avoided my careful observations. As soon as I learned something I was humbled by how little I’d gathered.

I wasn’t the best out there. One of our goals was to find cavity use, more data points are better. I found the least nests in use this year. During a second time around most self-respecting individuals look to improve. This wasn’t all for lack of effort (don’t believe a damned word they tell you), maybe I’m just not good at finding nests. Yet, I understand fires, the Northern Sierras, woodpeckers, and forest management better than ever.

Seasons run their course and at the end you half wish they’d continue. I probably won’t go back and live in Meadow Valley, California despite my admiration for this sleepy town. Before the season began, I crouched in the murky depths of springtime in the Pacific Northwest and plotted all the things I would do. Half of those things never happened, surprise events irrupting instead, one’s that I’ll cherish. Look at me, I’m so bloody sentimental that I’m thinking about going back in ten years to see what the burns all look like.

A seasonal study terminates when you can no longer collect good data on the focus of your study. In our case, once the male birds have provided their paternal input, via a cuckolding copulation or a devoted pair bond, they have no need for those heavy gonads and they dissapate. No hormones flowing and cock AMRO (American Robin) ceases the demented singing in the inky hours before other sensible diurnal animals believe in consciousness. What I’m saying in so many words, is that most birds cannot afford to sing year round. In temperate climes most don’t need to continue to hold a territory because they are snowbirding in the tropics, the land of plenty. The few that stick around are generally a reasonable lot and don’t bother. The MacGillivray’s Warblers I saw in desperate struggle for their adjoining territories stop caring once they’ve cemented their parental deals with a cloacal kiss, squirted out some nestlings of dubious patrilineage, and fattened up to fly to Guatemala.

Eventually we can’t find any active nests. We don’t know what birds are about because half of them aren’t making a peep. If we waited too long, the ones around might not be resident birds anyway, but ones in post breeding dispersal leaving the breeding grounds. Outliers exist and some birds keep singing even when we’ve stopped listening, but the real silence sets by the mid August. I returned home to Seattle only to the resident Bewick’s Wrens and Steller’s Jays hacking up over their lilac bush dynasties, their post forest slums, keeping them perpetually intact.

To finish up we banded those dispersing birds for a week. Verdant high meadows usher the birds of Western lands on their way to maturity and to the off season. Gathered with some of our nomadic ilk on the way to our off season, we touched some birds, gave them jewelery, and sent them on their way. Ring em and fling em.

Don’t believe what a satisfied field technician spouts about enjoying being a scientist or practicing method. That’s all a big hog’s wallow of nonsense. Sure we may be competent, some may even become visionaries for the future of their fields. The best of the best still are just curious, relishing the smell of sun baked Ponderosa while they spy on a Pileated Woodpecker grubbing away rectangular scars in a great decaying snag. Don’t be fooled. We’re all just a bunch of kids that couldn’t wait for our parents to kick us outside. No, no, they couldn’t find us because we’d already stole off to the bushes, watching the world turn.

Two years ago this stand was all dark trunks and loose soil, dusty with soot. The canopy here seems even more diminished, sun rays more harsh on my stubbornly and blindingly untanned appendages. Some things are the same as before, when I trip and catch myself from hurdling downslope on a tree trunk, my hand comes away black, which later I unknowingly smear about my face warding off thirsty mosquitoes.

An untrained eye might have seen a ravaged, sterile hill of trees marching into darkened oblivion. The reality is that life is abundant here, with equal or greater diversity to the nearby green forest. Seasons past have sprouted shrubs and a formidable herbaceous layer, keeping my nostrils clear of aerosolized charcoal, but more importantly providing nesting habitat for a bevy of sparrows, warblers, buntings, and flycatchers. Flowers are everywhere, Calliope Hummingbirds flourish. Woodpeckers rattle about in high numbers, more flycatchers and warblers, tanagers, and grosbeaks dine on the smorgasbord of insect delights. Snags have continued to deteriorate providing homes for woodpeckers, in turn coop-ted by bluebirds, American Kestrels, and potentially a few owls. To say the least, the dawn chorus is only rivaled by that of a riparian meadow in the profusion of varied voices.

Before Europeans flooded west of the Rocky Mountains, fire, high intensity or otherwise, was the predominant form of disturbance here. Some fires were set by aboriginal peoples to their hunting and gathering advantage, some sparked without human influence. I’d hazard that all should be considered natural. Science would have to work hard to find many climax forests that haven’t felt a few blistering licks of flame at some point in their history. From conifer cones that only bare seeds with heat, to the sporadic and profuse ecological communities taking purchase on a burn, the significance of fire in the natural Western landscape cannot be denied.

A bird of particular interest to those who study burns seems to be everywhere this year, clucking and squawking about the char. I felt especially lucky at such frequency two seasons ago. I still did, standing meters from of an apparently oblivious woodpecker, chiseling murderously and pointedly into a particular charred, decayed mast. They’ve expanded to take temporary advantage of the trees that are in a slow downward spiral. Debilitating beetles are amassing to bore their wayward paths through the tree’s living layers. These beetles play their role in the stable ecosystem here, not only as a woodpecker food source, but in maintaining the fitness of unhealthy forests, making way for a new one through years of natural succession.

Black-backed Woodpeckers (Picoides arcticus) are not a common species. Here in California we are in the Southern nexus of their Black-backed range, which extends from central Alaska, throughout most of Canada and portions of the Northern and Western US. They fill a niche that many others of their ilk have only generically flocked too; they have embraced burns as primary habitat. Their main source of food are the grubs of wood-boring and bark beetles of the families Buprestidae, Cerambycidae, and Scolytidae, which means they do also occasionally show up in areas where disease has struck such as dutch elm or in particularly nasty windthrows. The birds and beetles are both after large scale disturbances in forests, the beetles to lay their eggs there and the birds to eat the larvae.  In Washington, Oregon, and Idaho Black-backed Woodpeckers are designated as sensitive species. This is because burned forest of the right qualities isn’t common either. With fire suppression and post fire salvage logging what it is, priority is often in wood production and protection not woodpeckers population.

To provide an example before such practices, in the Rockies half the forest burned every 100 years and 35% of the forest was less than 40 years old at any one point. Fires resulting in stand replacement, ones with enough intensity to kill all the trees in a given area, happened 1.5 times more frequently. Forest that is left to regenerate naturally, when salvageable wood exists, is less and less common. Just having a fire in a forest isn’t the key to the importance to the many species that are using burns. For woodpeckers it’s about the intensity, which in turn dictates the number and size of the dead or dying trees, in turn affecting the infestations of their favored food items.

All woodpeckers that are common here in the Northern Sierras use burns to some extent. Even Pileatated Woodpeckers, whose size dictates older secondary or primary stands, will use adjacent burns for the excessively rotten cavities and roosts they prefer. Burned forest offers a good source of food and softer, decayed wood for cavity excavation. Both Williamson’s and Red-breasted Sapsuckers need partially living trees for their sap wells, so they are slightly less prolific dwelling on the edges. Yet the burned forests aren’t a homogeneous spread of charred trunks and dead canopy, they are a complex mosaic. Except in extreme cases, fire doesn’t sweep through a forest leaving uniformity behind.

I don’t really know if she had a nest or not. Sidling about the top of a half dead Jeffery Pine, she was scolding a Northern Pygmy Owl that already had its fair share of excited attendants. Her odd reptilian shrieks were spouted as she bobed her head pedantically, left and then right again. Woodpeckers often seem very tense to me. Wasting twenty minutes with the other disapproving rabblerousers, even on a threat like an owl, wasn’t what I’d expect from a responsible mother. Especially one that should either have eggs to incubate or nestlings waiting for a meal. Another twenty were spent spanning a series of trees, squeaking each time she jumped to a new trunk, and chasing a male Hairy Woodpecker who dared enter her glade. At the edge of a shrub field and the edge of my transect, she disappeared downhill, presumably to shriek and eat more bark beetles. I don’t believe she had a nest. Maybe the pygmy owl ate her male.

Dusty, charcoal is the defining plumage characteristic of the Black-backed. Again, in the burns they likely evolved alongside, this helps them blend in. Other species are easy enough to find in living habitat and to be clear, you find Black-backs in live forest as well, high numbers are almost exclusively in forest that’s been burned or disturbed. If it wasn’t for their frequent vocalizations and their relative calm tolerance of people, I doubt many people would see them because of how splendidly they blend into the bark of a burnt tree. A female is mostly charcoal black with only slightly contrasting ventrally with a dingy gray (white when clean).  The white moustacial stripe, black and white barred sides, white spotting on wings, and often concealed white outer tail feathers are easily missed, they look generally black, white, and gray. The male mirrors this, yet has a golden forecrown that is often tinged with the sooty product his lifestyle. Another thing that distinguishes them from most of their congeners in the genus Picoides is that they have three toes instead of the usual four zygodactyl, (think of an X with each point being a toe). The only other woodpeckers in the genus that share this trait are Three-toed Woodpeckers (of Eurasia and North America).

You can hear them throbbing, boring, scraping, pupating, the antithesis of a heartbeat. Pulsating pestilence. The wood-boring beetles, the bark beetles, taking advantage of the weakness a burn creates, they are still a part of the system. Those wormlike tracings of inner wood one finds from time to time, on a barkless snag or on beached driftwood are the tracks of these beetle grubs. Investigate a fresh forage mark on a tree; bark is chipped away in an oval, exposing gleaming cambium, with a smaller beak sized hole in the center. A tunnel extending from any which way, will probably terminate at this excavation. The beetle, eating its way through a dead or dying tree, met an end at the awl of a Black-backed Woodpecker or maybe a cousin Hairy Woodpecker. Whether they can avoid their demise I don’t know, but with obvious strength with which a woodpecker hammers in investigation, there is little likelihood a beetle grub can do much beyond bare wood-boring jaws.

Bark beetles may seem ominous, even malicious, the gruesome death rattle of a tree going out, but nature doesn’t trade in villainy and heroism. Woodpeckers also help degrade the forest, burned or otherwise.  Foraging is destructive, but also potentially spreads fungi. Like big pollinators, woodpeckers may act as vectors of wood degrading fungus. Imagine them spreading fungus unknowingly when visiting one tree with a fungal colony and then another without; they’d unwittingly get quicker access to wood best for cavities. Those wounds in the trees allow spores easy access to still live trees. This is a stunning example of a mutually beneficial behavior, surprisingly simple, and while it is elegantly plausible, it needs more research.

Their nests aren’t very easy to find just by looking. Searching for cavities is always most effective by watching behavior, but you can find cavities by looking for the right snags. You’d have to be supremely lucky to find one just marching through the forest, particularly a Black-backed who I’ve only found in dense stands of trees. Unlike their relatives the Hairy Woodpeckers or White-headed Woodpeckers, who usually like broken topped, well decayed snags with various species preferences, a Black-backed seems less picky, a half dead or fully dead tree with a lot of bark and branches is suitable. Even though they aren’t necessarily loud, they are talkative enough and easy to track down. In a further three or four years however, Black-backed Woodpeckers will likely have moved on from the burns I traverse in favor of more recent ones, both for food and housing.

A sensitive, enigmatic species, Black-backed Woodpeckers are the focus of many studies focusing on many aspects of a healthy forest and how we live with fire in this landscape. It is all too easy to look at a burnt forest as a wound, a loss of resources, but the exact opposite may be true. There is likely room for all the things we need from forests as well as what the birds need to maintenance their populations. Comprehension of all the swirling aspects that come into play is highly complicated, fire alone is enough to fill a lifetime of work. Yet understanding how a woodpecker uses a burned forest can provide measures to help forest managers keep our best renewable resource vibrant and productive as well as protect important species. I like to preach connectedness but I can’t squeeze all those ideas into a few paragraphs so I’ll leave with this: I simply enjoy noisy, odd Black-backed Woodpeckers. Their lives as irruptive, opportunistic species, makes for exciting variety to a casual observer and evocative study species to a researcher. They are enigmatic and specialized, the fact that they are so uncommon makes them all the more enticing. Next time you see a large burned forest, maybe devastation won’t be the only thought cross your mind, maybe a Black-backed Woodpecker will sputter through squawking.

Discussions of natural history can’t escape a parallel human history. Living in Western North America, shadows of the multifarious frontiersman haven’t slipped from the horizon. I’ve been dwelling heavily on these explorers, here for new opportunities, to claim land for their sovereignty, or to assess the biotic diversity held in vast “unexplored” territories.

In the past weeks I’ve had an inordinate amount of time indoors, to think, read, and write. I’m supposed to be outside working. Excessive rain, snow, and wind has kept our daily point counts of birds at bay. If your goal is to detect the full species array and individual abundances, counting in marginal weather will not give you accurate results. If you doubt that rain, snow, or wind can effect accuracy, or think that maybe I’m just being a wimp, go outside on a less than ideal spring morning and listen for bird song. You may hear some but compare that to a nice, warm and dry, spring morning. Then you’ll understand.

Because of all the time indoors, I’ve not had much face time with nature and it’s got me in a philosophical mood. As a modern field biologist, you are sometimes driven to your limits of endurance and forced to put up with uncomfortable situations. But when it all pans out, we still have it pretty easy compared to people who first started exploring the West in the name of science.

While I don’t wish to wholly glorify explorations in Western North America, which ultimately displaced and exploited hundreds of thousands of native peoples, they are certainly fascinating to the modern day natural historian. The most famous of all explorations in the West was of course the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Between 1804 and 1806, it penetrated the Northwest Territory overland, surveying in the name of the United States for what made up part of the Louisiana Purchase (of land that none of the parties involved owned). President Jefferson wasn’t just looking to survey a land grab though, he wanted the expedition to collect and record on pretty much any area of natural science they could. While neither of the party leaders were trained naturalists, they came back with a formidable collection of specimens and journals. I have occasional encounters with two charismatic birds that bear their names, Lewis’s Woodpeckers and Clark’s Nutcrackers. There’s no ignoring these explorers, especially in the Pacific Northwest, yet the biota of the west are riddled with the whispers of early scientific explorers.

Out my door, I can look across camp, through numerous Douglas Firs to a great sentry of a pine. It stands straight, with a smooth, even bark and massive branches, a good height above neighboring trees. A Scottish botanist by the name of David Douglas, described this formidable tree, Pinus lambertiana, the Sugar Pine. The sugar part of the name came from the sweet resin, the lambertiana for Aylmer Bourke Labert a British botanist who wrote a folio on the genus Pinus. When Douglas ventured into the Willamette Valley of Oregon during his explorations of the Northwest with the Hudson’s Bay Company, he eventually traveled far enough south to encounter these giants. Muir, perhaps the most famous of naturalists in California would later consider it as the “king of the conifers.”

Those Douglas Firs, among the most common of trees in the West, bear Douglas’s name, along with hundreds of other flora and fauna he first described. The etymology of plant and animal names world wide is one big weaving romp through a lot of dead white dudes, but Douglas as an actual explorer certainly stands out as one of the most interesting in the West. He endured real hardship in finding new plants for the Royal Horticultural Society, introducing over 240 new plants to England for cultivation and science. Jack Nisbet’s book The Collector is a fascinating account of David Douglas’s life, particularly if you are from Washington or Oregon.

During one of my foiled attempts at work last week, I was only a mile and a half from camp and decided that instead of hitching a ride with my partner, that I’d just walk back overland. I had a GPS with me, in case I got lost, but I was fairly confident I should have no trouble. As I slipped, tripped, and slogged my way back, I was constantly reminded of the hard work of early pioneers and explorers. Walking overland blindly isn’t an easy proposition, even with all my modern accessories and some knowledge of the land before me. Out of laziness, I didn’t put on my waterproof jacket or pants and wound up soaked. It took me an hour to make the hike, with several stream crossings, a 1000 ft down climb with a follow up 600 ft scramble. The whole time I was jumping logs, pushing through trees and brush laden with the morning’s rain. It wasn’t a simple stroll.

A dryer and a drawer bursting with clean, dry clothes was waiting for me. Early collectors, prospectors, fur trappers, and settlers had none of this. No fully waterproof coats (beyond oiled cloth), their clothes were mostly cotton and wool, and were often walking relatively blindly ahead even with the help of guides and friendly tribes. Unlike native peoples, they were often ignorant of how to survive off the land beyond hunting. In short, they were always on their toes. They traveled by horseback, wagon, and boat, so when mountains loomed ahead or large rivers weaved nearby they had to very careful about what routes they chose. I just look at a map and drive through land that must have been horribly daunting to travel, even 100 years ago. The Sierras are still indomitable mountains no matter how you look at them.

In California, European exploration began much earlier than the late 18^th century when the first major explorations in the Northwest happened. Spanish and Russian exploration in the mid 18^th century included members, mostly botanists, that were keen on the natural world. However, almost all of this was restricted to coastal regions and adjoining tributaries. No European or American travelers with even the briefest of training as a naturalist had breached the Sierras until 1844, only six years before California achieved statehood. The communities of the Northern Sierras, where I currently reside, were first settled by people of European descent during the time of the 1849 California Goldrush. Fourty-niners rushed into the region, founding the town where I live, Meadow Valley, in 1850. Before that the only people living in the region were Maidu Native Americans, residing in summer villages in Big Meadows (even they wouldn’t stay the winter), which is now Lake Almanor, a man made reservoir. Mt. Lassen, a reminder of the boundary between the volcanic Cascade range and the inert granite of the Sierras watches over from the North.

What I’m getting at in all this discussion of history, seemingly unrelated to birds and nature, is a two fold message; that we have haven’t lived this way all that long. Even a place so seemingly grooved out by humans as California hasn’t even been this way for 200 years. Its a reminder that the world still has unknowns, unexplored areas. We don’t know everything – how could we?

Equally I reminisce on how living used to be. I wouldn’t last a week alone in the wilderness in the Sierras and neither would most Americans. People 150 years ago did passably well (with the exception of the Donner Party), with skills that most of us have tossed by the wayside because our practical use for them is nil. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy my modern comforts, but it’s easy to forget as society persists, that we’re still privy to the elements and should know how to survive without electricity if need be! Not too long ago, Americans had to cooperate much more fully with nature to survive. In more ways than we likely know, we should still be paying more attention to how we with coexist with the world around us. Of all the things that scare me about being a contemporary human is that we are so easily blinded as to what our actions really mean when they can be so far reaching.

Yet, when I stand under that Sugar Pine or look down the Feather River, I still can’t help but marvel at how recently human history here happened, even the native people are relative newcomers. I don’t furrow my brow, languish in worry about the world, I just take in the chlorophyl bath and enjoy.  If you don’t know how to enjoy it, then how can you save it?

He’d been sitting there for twenty minutes, tooting at the young Red-tailed Hawk soaring over head.  The hawk was attempting to mind its business, but two Common Ravens were relentlessly dive bombing it,  drawing the whole forest below into a reel of uneasy glances and murmurs of displeasure. No one in the forest likes ravens or hawks.

I wasn’t bored, it was just time to start moving on and search for more cavities. Wrangling my pack, weighed down with rusty metal the pack-rat in me couldn’t resist, I slowly stood up on the old growth stump that had been my seat. Just as I was about to hop to the ground, he darted up, narrowly missing a surprise grab of a female American Robin. She turned at the last moment, spurting a single alarm and ducking away. Cowed, he landed nearby and hooted haughtily, pumping his tiny tail and flexing his oversized talons.

His intended prey didn’t think too much of him. She buzzed him once, alighting adjacent, squawking irately. Without a surprise, there wasn’t a chance to take a bird as large as himself. Silently, he flew off, the robin in tow, never relenting her display of displeasure. She was telling the whole forest about his existence. If it wasn’t for her, I might not have found where he had stooped to. In a snag to the left of his new perch, was an old woodpecker cavity. Filling its circumference was the full moon glare of a Northern Pygmy-owl, obviously disturbed from her incubation by this noisy thrush.

I’d found my first Northern Pygmy-owl nest!

Most naturalists have some intellectual struggles with society, now-a-days magnified by technology. All those gadgets ultimately create waste, distract from our need for a healthy world, and sometimes change our ways of thinking a bit too drastically. I’ve been vacillating a lot lately on this subject. There’s no arguing that I rely heavily on nature for subject matter alone. Yet there’s plenty of reasons that society needs nature around us. I never feel as alive as I do, even in capsize moments away from humanity. I’m never more focused, more creative, more jovial – more healthy.

Yet I love people and many of the interweaving cross sections of the urban, modern, technological life I live are near and dear to me. I am passionate about hip-hop culture (really an amalgam of the following), music, visual art (the greatest immersion of which is in a city), and the exchange of ideas that flows in a thriving community well cultivated in a larger populace. I’d have missed the point if I didn’t mention the internet, my personal use of a camera and a computer to convey what I find important and hope to be my lively hood. Much technology that is commonplace today I’ve never been without from adolescence on.

This pair of Northern Pygmy-owls were unveiled to me because I’m a city kid fortunate to have discovered passion for something other than video games and computer screens. Later, decompressing from a day in the field, I read an article by one of many authors I’ve been meaning to read, but haven’t yet. Richard Louv coined the phrase “nature-deficit disorder” in his popular book Last Child in the Woods. There’s a real and significant divide between many kids of the developed world and nature. The thing that struck me more than anything else, was Louv’s emphasis on focus. Time spent outside allows you to use your senses, to focus, instead of actively working to block out all the unhelpful distractions of urban life.

I didn’t bring Louv up to rally against technology or urban life, I think the benefits far outweigh the pitfalls. So as to not be misconstrued: of course the environmental impacts of technology are a problem and can be improved upon. People still need nature in their lives just as much as ever, even with the medical, educational, and creative advances all these bundles of circuits provide. Moving on.

Ruminating on what luck I’d had to come across such a rare sight, I realized it wasn’t just luck. I actively tracked down the owl because I heard it. I patiently watched it for cues and after a good wait, was rewarded. Throw in someone who spends their time glued to a screen and you would probably had different results, even if they were fit and had spent that time studying birds. As a teen I was out watching birds – my formative years gave me a gift. People can regain these sorts of deficits, but it’s likely harder to do once you’re older if you grew up devoid of them.  Just like learning a new language.  Although I’d never thought about it so directly, I am lucky to have the connection to nature, the observational, sensual skill that I have. Being able to notice, intuit, and as a direct result, enjoy nature is another thing for the laundry list of things I am grateful for. As a good friend of mine has said to me many times: “Some people don’t do anything.”

I know more now than ever what he means by that.

While I got my recording work done, the male owl watched me with an impressive impassivity. He was small, but I wasn’t going to take too many chances. I didn’t need an owl stapled to my skull. I trotted off through the lime green, post fire shrub layer, goose stepping over downed logs in search of more nests. Hearing a Hairy Woodpecker in the distance, I turned for a last glance at the fiery fluff ball and his nest. Once the coast was clear, he barreled down to make sure I hadn’t done anything irretrievably human.

I suggest you enjoy some nature every day. Einstein went for a walk in the woods everyday.

When the mercury dips, people who have the option head inside. It’s fairly obvious other animals don’t have that choice quite so readily available to them. Sure, I’d be happy to share my room with a menagerie of critters in a snow storm, but I have an inkling the Steller’s Jays and Northern Goshawks wouldn’t get along so well. Communicating my willingness to share a warm room would be difficult enough, let alone trying to keep the peace.

Birds can be hard hit by bad weather. Many are well equipped for extremes, more adept at staying alive in a bad storm than you or I. A Golden-crowned Kinglet (Regulus satrapa) lives its winter on the edge of existence. To not give up the ghost, they have to constantly forage, literally right from dawn to dusk. To save time, they stop where they end up at night and huddle in a group to survive the night.

There are plenty of wonderful examples of adaptation but what happens when those behaviors aren’t flexible enough?

I haven’t forgotten we are moving ahead from Winter, but maybe you have noticed that in much of the US, we’ve had a rocky start to what people who eat food call the growing season. A little over two weeks ago here in the Sierras, the first arrivals of Wilson’s and MacGillivray’s Warblers and the typical representatives of flummoxing Empidonax flycatchers appeared. It appeared that they were in full tilt arrival and passage just as the low pressure system decided to started lobbing moisture our way.

Can you imagine a fellow running a marathon, expecting to cross the finish line to warmth and platters heaped with gluttonous portions of chocolate cake, instead finding freezing weather and hardtack? That’s how I think it might have felt to be a Wilson’s Warbler last week.

Even at 4000 feet, the Northern Sierras had snow. What exactly, does a bird who leaves here in the fall, largely to avoid nasty weather, do? Having taken a stroll to see, swaddled in garb that would have simultaneously kept the entire Shackleton Expedition warm, I can tell you one thing – they don’t bother singing.

Male birds are so hopped up on testosterone this time of year and their sole purpose is the make sure they have the best territory. The best assurance of continuous ownership is to sing incessantly. That takes care of most competitors looking to secede your land – the rest you can chase off flaunting your fitness with bright, fresh plumage, and possibly superior bulk. When birds aren’t singing at the usual times or at all, one can presume they’re otherwise occupied. Besides eating and mating, singing is the only thing a typical male songbird should be doing this time of year.

A side note: even dainty, florid warblers will occasionally resort to physical aggression when a border cannot be properly established. I watched a rival MacGillivray’s Warblers (Oporornistolmiei), chase each other over a half an hour period until they finally started making colliding. Looking exhausted, their struggle culminated in a Manzanita; wrestling with splayed wings and clacking bills. The victor flew out and immediately started singing – the loser crept out, bedraggled, retreating to what I presume was inferior scrub. Resolved.

I don’t have an answer as to what these birds are doing besides trying to hold on. When birds get desperate for food or water, either during migration or a cold snap they’ll show up out of their normal habitat and make use of unusual food sources. Here, they likely arrived with low fat reserves and found little to eat – I can’t imagine insects do much better in freezing weather but maybe that’s conjecture. Food was still around, (how do you think the Kinglets survive?), but I have no doubt there was less of it.

I found some old communications (anecdotal briefs in scientific journals) circa the 1920s, suggesting that birds might re-migrate to lower or more southerly clines when arriving early to poor weather. A communication isn’t researched, statistically proved information. After all, how does one truly study unpredictable disruptions? Still this made decent amount of sense – if it’s too cold to live, leave again till it’s better. In the Sierras, I assume that higher areas where the snow won’t melt till August won’t have successfully breeding birds this year.

Birds, feasibly along with most extant species, have taken considerable time sleuthing seasonal patterns and do a pretty good job knowing when to migrate, breed, molt, etc. Unpredictable weather creates considerable stress. In high alpine areas of Southeastern Arizona, Red-faced Warblers have been documented to simply abandon nest with the advent of late snow (at a rate of 64%!). From a temporal standpoint, that’s adaptive – a pair could die trying to nest in bad conditions. But is this maladaptive in the long term? Climate change, as most educated people should know by now (but probably don’t), isn’t just about simple warming; the seasonal predictability of weather patterns are going the way of a Jackson Pollock painting. The instinct to abandon nests when snow comes late is great in the present. But if you and that hunky warbler hubby of yours keep leaving when things get a little crazy, there’ll be less and less Red-faced Warblers for demented birders to see.

Early arrival is strongly selected for in migrating birds – the earlier you get there, the better chance you have at laying claim to better land. Birds have always run the risk of late snow or bad weather, that’s nothing new. So far as I can tell, no one knows the entire story of what happens to birds when even their best efforts to time their arrival are continually foiled. For all I know many generations of birds in the Sierras have seen this kind of event before. I doubt it was overly disastrous. Really, all I wanted to say was that I felt awfully sorry for those Wilson’s Warblers in the creek behind my bunkhouse (as I sat inside, roasting with a hot toddy and a good book).