Archive for fire ecology

The Art of Blending

Posted in Birding, Birds, California, Conservation, Environmentalism, Field Work, Fire Ecology, Natural History, Science, Sierra Nevadas with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 9, 2011 by Brendan McGarry

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.

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(Historical) Explorations

Posted in Birds, California, Collecting, Conservation, Natural History, Reading Suggestions, Sierra Nevadas with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 10, 2011 by Brendan McGarry

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 18th century when the first major explorations in the Northwest happened. Spanish and Russian exploration in the mid 18th 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?

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Focusing on the Owl

Posted in Birding, Birds, California, Environmentalism, Field Work, Natural History, Reading Suggestions, Sierra Nevadas with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 1, 2011 by Brendan McGarry

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.


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Unseasonable Seasons

Posted in Birding, Birds, California, Conservation, Current Events, Environmentalism, Migration, Science, Sierra Nevadas with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 24, 2011 by Brendan McGarry

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).

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