An update on Joe the Cuckoo

In the past couple of days, I’ve seen a number of reports of people hearing their first cuckoo of spring. Following Joe’s journey has given me a new appreciation of the challenges that cuckoos face on the way to their breeding grounds in the U.K.

Joe made his expected big move west, to Ghana, in mid-March. Cuckoos often spend time in Ghana and the Ivory Coast, feasting before the big trip across the Sahara. They take advantage of the abundance of insects that are found in the area following April rains - but like so many other things, climate change is altering both the pattern of rainfall and its timing. This year, rains - and therefore insect food - were late and more sparse than in previous years (a problem not just for cuckoos, but for those of us who love chocolate).

Finally, on April 12th, Joe made his big move north, flying nearly 1,500 miles across the Sahara. This is the most nerve-wracking part of his journey, a 50-60 hour nonstop flight with no food or water available; I had my fingers and toes crossed that he’d managed to find enough food on the Ivory Coast to fuel this major flight. Well done, Joe!

For the past 10 days, Joe has been hanging out in Spain and Portugal, no doubt recovering from his Sahara crossing. Will he fly in short hops from Spain to France, or will he make one last big push and fly direct to the U.K? Watch this space!

Map of Joe’s journey - Fall migration to the Congo (2023) and Spring migration back to the UK

Bluebells

The bluebells have appeared in my garden.

On this (U.S.) side of the Atlantic, they are Mertensis virginica, Virginia Bluebells, a spring ephemeral, native to moist woodland, most commonly found on river floodplains and in bottomland.

They join the other fleeting flowers of spring: the frothy forget-me-nots, the deep blue stars of periwinkle, the china blue hyacinths, and near-purple grape hyacinths. Why are so many spring flowers blue, I wonder? Perhaps they are celebrating the fresh spring sky.

I planted the bluebells in my garden in honor of my dad.

On his (U.K.) side of the Atlantic, the native bluebell is the English bluebell, Hyacinthoides non-scripta. It too likes dark, moist woodlands, and – together with wild garlic and primroses - is considered a marker of ancient woodland, defined as land on which woodland cover has persisted since 1600. The decaying leaves of centuries have enriched the soils, such that species of invertebrates and fungi that can be found nowhere else thrive in ancient woodland.

When I was young, Dad and I used to walk to Deborah Wood to see the bluebells carpeting the ground. To me, it was a magical place, its shadows full of surprises, like the red fox we saw one day. On summer evenings, we’d hear a cuckoo call from within its damp dimness.

In the weeks before Dad died, I’d walk the farm lanes that he and I had walked so many times, and often I’d find myself in Deborah Wood, searching for the bluebells, lines from T.S. Eliot running through my head:

                  “April is the cruellest month, breeding

                  Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.”

The landscape had changed since I was a child, the hedgerows which used to border the lanes ripped out in the pursuit of near-surface coal deposits. Dad had fought the proposal for open-cast mining, using data on species diversity to show that the hedgerows were over 300 years old. But nothing was allowed to stand in the way of progress; I’m just grateful that Deborah Wood and its bluebells survived.

In lockdown in the U.K., in spring 2020, I walked each day up the stream behind my house in Weardale. The footpath passes through a narrow strip of ancient woodland, and I marked the passage of time through the successive flowering of primroses, violets, and wild garlic. Until one day, in a shady spot where spring water dripped down the rocks that marked an old quarry, I found a clump of wild bluebells, and knew that I’d found a resting place for some of Dad’s ashes.

English Bluebells in ancient woodland

Spring comes to the North Pennines

A short walk in Upper Teesdale reveals that Spring has come to the North Pennines.  Flushes of bright green along the edge of rivulets show where fresh new vegetation is growing. A dozen black grouse parade one behind another across the lower pastures, while oystercatchers prospect for nesting sites along the streambanks. Curlews drift overhead, their ringing “Coor-li! Coor-li!” an invitation to the whole world to waken from winter’s sleep and rejoice in the new season.

Much as I love the curlews, today it is the lapwings that demand attention. They seem to be everywhere, rising from the ground almost at our feet, twisting and tumbling in the air., constantly calling their folk-name: “Pee-wit!” As the birds turn, their wings flash black to white and back again to black; their name, lapwing, comes from the Old English, meaning “to leap with a flicker”.

The males are showing off their flying skills like pilots at an air show, swooping down towards the ground and then - at the very last second - seeming to catch an updraft from some small rise in the land, and lifting off again into the sky.  Groups of two or three males conduct aerial skirmishes, circling around one another in a three-dimensional tango of advance and retreat. I try to watch them while I walk, but quickly become dizzy, so I stop. I’d rather let my heart leap and tumble with the birds in this celebration of spring than have my feet cover distance on the path.

Meanwhile, there are more lapwings on the ground, many of them tilted forward, beaks to the ground, their apricot undertails exposed to the sky. Some of the birds are pulling at the grass and rubbing their breasts across the ground while keeping their wings wide open. I’ve never seen this behavior before and assume it must be something to do with mating. Later I learn that these are ardent males, displaying their nest-building prowess by constructing multiple scrapes in hopes that one appeals to a female. If the nearby birds are females, they seem unimpressed.

I am reminded of the lapwing in John Gower’s poem, Confessio Amantis, or The Lover’s Confession:

“And on his hed ther stant upriht,
A creste in tokne he was a kniht”.

Lapwing as knight: the image seems so fitting for these courtly birds, jousting in the skies for the favor of a fair lady.

Joe

I am following a cuckoo named Joe.

I should say, right up front, that I’m not literally following him, this slim grey bird who each spring undertakes a death-defying journey from tropical forests in Africa, across the Sahara, then over the Mediterranean Sea to Britain. And flies back again in fall. Instead, I’m watching a little flashing dot on a screen, a dot that represents the last known location of Joe’s electronic tag. Like pre-release convicts and political prisoners, he is equipped with a transmitter that reports where he is at all times. 

I should also say that “Joe” would not be my first choice of name for a bird as compelling – and, in some ways, as scandalous - as a cuckoo.  A bird which disguises itself as a hawk, scaring mother birds off the nest so it can steal in and deposit one egg of its own. By some extraordinary trick, cuckoos lay eggs that match the eggs already in the nest, fooling the unsuspecting foster parents into raising the foundling as their own.

I’d go with something that celebrates the bird’s bravery in migration, its cleverness, its ability to remain concealed even as its call reverberates in your ears: ““Wanderer”, perhaps, or “Joker”, or “Stealth”, or – let’s face it – “Delinquent”. But the people who paid thousands of dollars for the transmitter got the naming rights; I think my small donation paid for a fraction of a pixel on the map of Joe’s travels. And I don’t know who “Joe” was, except that most of the sponsors name their birds after family members – often dead family members, gifted a new presence in the world on the wings of a migratory bird.

Naming a bird – or any living creature – means connection, which brings both happiness and sorrow. I’m now hostage to Joe’s fate. I’m anticipating joy with every stage of Joe’s journey, visualizing the places he’ll go (and that I’ll never see), admiring how far his wings take him, cheering him on past obstacles. I will celebrate when his migration is complete, imagining him safely “home”. But I also know that one day I’ll feel sorrow, because at some point Joe’s luck will run out and that little flashing dot will wink no more.

“I hoped you haven’t named those fish”, says my friend as we gaze at the comets and shubunkins swimming happily in my garden pond. “You remember what happened last time”. The heron, she means, the heron who one day walked down my driveway as if he’d just stepped out of an Uber, strolling past my porch with a gleam in his eye. My first thought was to find my camera – A heron in my yard, what joy! – and by the time the second thought kicked in – No! No! Not my fish! – the heron was spearing Spot and Sparkles.

I would not have cried so much if they were, simply and anonymously, “the fish”, if I had not shared their lives.

In naming creatures, human or other-than-human, we mark them as individuals, with their own lives, their own stories; the bestowing of a name comes with a desire to protect.  Newspaper editors know this, of course, which is why the daily body count from Gaza is much less compelling than the story that features one family, trying to survive among the rubble. 

The blinking dot that represents Joe shows that his migration has just begun. A few days ago, he left his wintering grounds in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the second-largest rainforest on Earth. He has moved west, into the Republic of Congo, prompting me to consult an atlas, to search online for photos of his location; geography lessons at school were never so interesting. In the next week he will hopefully continue west towards the Atlantic coast, where he will gorge on insects to fuel the long flight across the Sahara.

Over the next few weeks, I will follow Joe’s journey. So many things could go wrong: insufficient fat reserves to propel his wings across the unforgiving desert; storm winds that push birds out over the Atlantic, to be lost at sea; illegal hunting in Malta.

Fortunately for Joe, he is unaware of these risks. He knows only the imperative to breed, to follow the ancient migratory pathways that will lead him to a place where generations of cuckoos have sung their welcome to summer.

I wonder where my cuckoo is. The cuckoo of my adult life, that arrives in late April to a small patch of trees by a rushing stream in northern England. The one whose bright ringing call of “Cuck-oo! Cuck-oo!” drops me through a rift in time and space, back to my childhood, when on early summer evenings we could hear the call drift down from the nearby wood. The magic wood, I called it, because you could find things there that could be found nowhere else, like the cuckoo, and thousands of bluebells, the markers of ancient woodland. One evening, lured by the song, Dad and I went to the wood, scanning every branch for a handsome grey bird with yellow eyes and feet, but we could not find it. The wood is gone now, turned to shiny new houses, and my dad is long dead, but for me they live again in every cuckoo’s call.

WaterWorld

I’ve come to Bombay Hook, the National Wildlife Refuge at the midpoint of the Delaware Bay, hundreds of times, but I’ve never seen it look like this. As we turn onto Wildlife Drive, it’s clear that Raymond Pool – normally a distant shimmer of water – is no longer a pool, with all that connotes about a small, confined body of water, but a large lake that laps at the very edge of the road. Standing amidst the prairie grasses, as if to confirm that land has been replaced by water, is a heron, hunched among the swaying stems.

No - wait – I see a flash of red: it’s not a heron, but a crane, and when I raise the binoculars, I see that yes, YES, it’s a Sandhill Crane, and in fact there are two of them, striding out now into more open water. We’ve seen them at the Refuge before, but usually they’ve been standing on grass at the back of Bear Swamp, and while I understand that in Florida they stroll across suburban lawns, my memories of them are from wet prairies and wetlands in the Upper Midwest. Today, they look quite at home in the water.

We follow the road around to the other side of Raymond Pool, hoping to see hundreds of dabbling ducks – pintails, shovelers, wigeon, green-winged teal – tails up and heads down as they feed on underwater grasses. Instead, the pool (now lake) is empty from shore to shore. Finally, we see a set of ripples that mark the plunge of a diving duck, and after a few minutes two ducks surface: buffleheads, the male dramatic in purple-black and white, the female a drab brown. Buffleheads are so buoyant that at the end of a dive they seem to pop out of the water like a cork out of a bottle of champagne, exuding cheerfulness. It’s odd, though, to see them here; normally they are across the road, in the fast-moving current of the deep tidal channel that connects to the Leipsic River and the Delaware Bay. That’s when I realize that the water in the pool is deep, much deeper than usual, too deep for the dabbling ducks to be able to reach the bottom-growing grasses. Those birds have fled for shallower water elsewhere.

On the saltwater side of the road, a heron stands huddled, his toes gripping the slippery mud, nearly in the water; it is approaching high tide. He must be waiting out the tide, dreaming of the moment when he can step carefully into the now-shallow water in pursuit of fish. Herons seem able to remotely sense water depth, never stepping into water that would cause their tail feathers to get wet. This one has a long wait ahead. “Poor heron”, I say, “he must be grumpy”. “Grumpier than usual”, my partner replies, because the heron’s prehistoric appearance and cantankerous “G-r-r-r-onk-k-k” calls suggest constant displeasure.

Continuing along the road we come to Shearness Pool, where water is nearly to the top of the embankment that separates the pool from the road. A few disconsolate mallards swim through the cattails. A wide watery vista – “Lake Shearness”, I mentally christen it – opens before us, its flatness punctuated by dozens of muskrat lodges which rise like small volcanoes above the water’s surface.

And then we see that every muskrat lodge has been claimed by avian refugees. Here, a pair of Canada Geese are sleeping on the roof of the muskrat’s reed house; there, a group of mallards is preening atop a haphazard bundle of sticks; and in the further distance a heron stands alert on a cattail platform, like a sentry on a watchtower.

As we drive on, we see more herons on post. There must be some hierarchy among them, for it seems the tallest birds are on the highest lodges. The one closest to us – perhaps a young bird – has found accommodation on a rickety pile that rises only a few inches above the water. He shuffles, stretches, scratches his beak with one long toe. Judging from the number of people at the side of the road, phones raised in his direction, he’s been there for some time. Perhaps he’s tired of being photographed, because as I raise my camera he steps down. Water closes over his tail, and while he maintains a stoic expression, he emits a startled “Gronk!”. That water was ice not long ago.

Like the herons, I am out of sorts. Seeing the Refuge in this half-drowned state, I realize that what I love most about it is the intermixing of land and water, the complex mosaic of mud, marsh and tidal channels, the way the landscape changes so dramatically between high and low tide. I imagine there’s an explanation for all this water – El Nino, perhaps, which brings wetter winters to the southeast coast. Just as there was an explanation for the parched dryness of this place two summers ago, when the parched pools shrank to mud puddles. Too dry, too wet, rarely just right: is this our future?

The Wonders of Snow

Snow!! It has snowed here twice in the past week. Given that it’s mid-January, snow is hardly news, and yet – after an abnormally warm December - there’s an element of relief in seeing the white stuff.

The little boys next door spent their midweek snow day making a snow figure, although the snow was so wet their creation was more iceman than snowman, and their ambitions outstripped their ability to push the giant ice ball around the yard; Mum did the heavy lifting.

I greet snow with the enthusiasm of a child. Snow transforms the world, coating every tree branch in sparkling stars, turning an overturned wheelbarrow into abstract sculpture. The broken-down old maple by my driveway, which spends the year sullenly shedding rotted branches, is transformed by the snow that lies lovingly along its lower limbs into a friendly giant.

When the snow falls, I feel the urge to snuggle deeply into my house, to light a fire, roast a chicken, or bake bread. On such days the world – in the form of the local wild birds – comes to me, and I spend hours on my sunporch watching the birds at the feeders. While my neighbors prepare for the storm by stocking up on milk and toilet paper, I’m at the local hardware store stocking up on bird feed.

Is there anything more joyful than the sight of a cardinal in fresh-fallen snow? I wonder if this is a learned response from all of the Christmas cards that pair red birds in snow with cheerful greetings? Or does the trick work the other way round, beginning with some primal response to the color red in the human brain, and ending with the purchase of Christmas cards? It doesn’t seem to matter what the bird is – a robin the UK, a cardinal in the US – so long as it’s red. Interestingly, in both countries folklore tells that a robin or a cardinal often appears to the recently bereaved, as a sign that the spirit of the departed is still close by.

It's not just the cardinals that come, of course. They are accompanied by the house finches, house sparrows and chickadees who regularly visit my feeders. But my garden regulars are far outnumbered by the juncos, white-throated sparrows and song sparrows who spend the winter in the scrubby patches that surround this hamlet.

I’m delighted by the juncos, their dark upper body separated from their pale lower body by a sharp line that reminds me of the Plimsoll line on a cargo ship.  I hear in my mind my grandfather explaining the Plimsoll line, named in honor of a British lawmaker who championed the cause of vessel safety.  The Plimsoll line, or waterline, marks the safe limit of loading of a ship: just a little extra weight of cargo and the Plimsoll line sinks below the water, as all too soon will the ship. The juncos seem to perform their own safety calculations; no matter how deep the snow gets, they sink in as far as their bellies, but no further.

As the snow continues to fall there is suddenly an invasion of birds, all dark wings and harsh cries. Hundreds of red-winged blackbirds, cowbirds, starlings and grackles descend on the feeders and the seed I have scattered on the ground. I’ll admit that my first instinct is to chase them away, for they bully the smaller birds and strip the feeders bare, but as the snow piles deeper I’ll make my peace with them.

Last winter they brought along an unusual visitor: a bird with a pale orange breast, which I finally identified as a first year male Baltimore Oriole. Why had this bird stayed when its family and friends had migrated south at the end of summer, and how had it survived without its usual diet of insects and fruit? I rushed out to the shed for my  oriole feeder, neglected since summer and covered in dust, but the bird ignored its flamboyant orange plastic and my offerings of oranges, cherries, grape jelly and orange-flavored suet. Perhaps the desire to spend cold winter nights in the warmth of the dark flock outweighed his desire for foods that would mark him as an outsider.

Immature male Baltimore Oriole in midwinter.

Seeing the Oriole, I realized that the snow reveals as well as it conceals. Absent the cold and the snow-covered ground, the Oriole would have been invisible to me, just part of the crowd of black birds that wheels and turns over the distant fields. And so, while others fret about digging out cars and getting to the shops, I’m content to sit in my sunporch, marveling at the birds and the snow.

2023 in Review: UK version

Obviously lots happened in 2023, but looking back over the year a few things stick in my mind as moments of peak joy - or sorrow.

Gannets at Bempton Cliffs

Gannets at Bempton Cliff. Last June I found a dead gannet on the beach at Bamburgh. It was my first sighting of a victim of avian flu, which in the months to come would rip through the seabird colonies of northern England. This year, slightly panicked by the news of last year’s mass die-off of gannets, I decided to drive to the RSPB reserve at Bempton Cliffs in Yorkshire. It was an extraordinary sight – and sound. Gannets were nesting on every possible cliffside ledge, squabbling over territory; gannets cruised along the clifftop, carrying grasses and mosses for nest repair; and gannets soared overhead, effortlessly riding the updrafts. Not for the first time, I wished I could fly. Mostly, I was just grateful that the birds were there, in abundance.

Golden Plovers in the North Pennines. Also in June, I spent time hiking in Weardale and Teesdale, where I’m slowly learning the different habitats of the waders that come up to the Dales to breed. This summer, up on the tops, high amongst the peat and the heather, I became familiar with the flute-like call of the golden plover. Exotically spangled in gold and black, standing on rocks to proclaim territory, they look almost like Christmas tree ornaments. Then, in a second, they vanish into the moorland vegetation, their mournful call the only sign of their presence.

(Re-)discovering Teesside. When I was a child, industrial Teesside – with its belching smokestacks and noxious smells – was not a place to visit, at least not if you wanted to enjoy nature. But in the past few years I’ve been drawn there in winter, to look for the curlews and godwits that haunt its muddy shores. This year, lured by reports of a vagrant Brown Booby, I was drawn to its southern edge, the South Gare, and discovered a whole other world: expansive mudflats and miles of sand dunes offer habitat to an array of birds, while residents frolic on the beaches. There’s even a tiny fishing port. I know I’ll be back in 2024!

Summer drought. I grew up with floods, so it’s hard to get used to drought. But this summer, walking along Bollihope Burn, I saw the future, in the form of a stream so dry that it was a Burn in name only. I walk there most days when I’m here, looking for the dipper and the heron – but they were nowhere to be seen. In the uplands, the wet scrapes that curlews depend on as a source of food for their chicks went dry. On winter days, when it seems the rain will never cease, I think back to those desiccated places; be careful what you wish for.

Opinion: Beyond Lines on a Map

Peat-stained streams tumbling down dark rocks. Sheep, black faces and curled horns marking them as Swaledales, huddled in the shelter of stone walls. The curlew’s “Coor-li! Coor-li!” call haunting the wet grasslands. The remains of lead mines, testament to Victorian industry. The North Pennines Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty – now rebranded as the North Pennines National Landscape - is home to all of these and more. It’s a very special place that celebrates natural beauty and cultural heritage.

I grew up with this landscape, learning how the pieces fit together: how the rocks and climate have shaped the soils, plants, wildlife, farms and mining legacies. The landscape shaped my life, too. From walks in these hills came my love of wild things, my choice of career, my need for open spaces and solitude. For me, the North Pennines are a refuge, a place where I can focus on the here and now, far from the news of war and famine, of the extinction crisis and the climate emergency.

 But these global problems will increasingly affect this place I love. The curlews whose call was the soundtrack to my childhood are now red-listed, meaning they are at risk of extinction. Hotter summers are drying up the wet patches in which they hunt for food, their sickle beaks unable to penetrate the baked soil. The arctic-alpine flora of Upper Teesdale, a relic of the last Ice Age, is increasingly under threat from warmer temperatures and changing land management. Ski runs in Weardale, struggling to recover from the Covid pandemic, desperately need snowfall that is no longer reliable.

 All of this was on my mind as I watched the news from COP-28, the recently concluded climate negotiations conference in Dubai. It will, perhaps, be best remembered for finally naming the elephant in the climate room – emissions from fossil fuels – while doing little to evict it. More interesting to me was the release, earlier in the meeting, of a Joint Statement on Climate, Nature and People, which recognized the interconnections between climate change, biodiversity loss and land degradation (for which you can read crop failure). More importantly, the Statement committed the signatories (which include the UK and US) to better alignment of climate, biodiversity and land restoration strategies and to increased investment in all of these.

 You might wonder what this has to do with the North Pennines National Landscape.

 The answer is that the Joint Statement reaffirmed commitment to an ambitious climate and nature target: protecting – and managing for nature – 30% of land and sea by 2030. Scientists tell us that 30% is the magic figure at which natural landscapes can significantly reduce climate change and biodiversity loss. In 2020, then Prime Minister Boris Johnson committed to this target, promising to protect 30% of the UK’s land by 2030 (“30 x 30”).

Adding up National Parks, National Landscapes and assorted nature sites, the Westminster government quickly declared victory, noting that 28% of the landmass in England has some kind of protected status. That’s true - but just looking at lines on a map doesn’t tell the whole story. The scientists at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) developed a set of criteria for “what counts” inside the lines for an area to count towards the 30 x 30 target. Among those criteria are that “protected areas shall have clear ecological objectives” and “be managed with nature conservation as the dominant priority”.  Independent scientists were quick to do their own accounting and reported that only 3-5% of England’s landmass met the IUCN criteria. That notably excluded National Landscapes like the North Pennines, which cover 15% of the English landscape and whose primary purpose is to conserve and enhance natural beauty - not to address the climate and nature crises.

Reversing course, the government later admitted that National Landscapes did not currently count towards 30 x 30, but committed to improving management on these lands. So, what will it take to go beyond lines on a map, and drive meaningful action for climate and nature in places like the North Pennines?

 The answer, not surprisingly, is power and money.

The government’s own “Landscapes Review”, published in 2018, spelled out the details. Power is needed, in the form of statutory authority, adding management for climate and nature as a primary purpose for National Landscapes. Legal language is also needed to ensure that public bodies whose actions affect National Landscapes – such as the Forestry Commission and water utilities – help implement these climate and nature purposes. And money is needed, to shift the focus of land management from the extraction of natural resources to their restoration, supporting a “nature-positive economy” - another government commitment.

Despite promising to provide all of this, in September 2023 the government again reversed itself, removing language in the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act that would have made managing for climate and nature a primary purpose for National Landscapes. Instead, the Act contains vague language about National Landscapes playing a role in achieving national environmental targets, to be implemented through an Outcomes Framework that is yet to be published.

This past week, the government finally published its response to the Landscapes Review, billed as an action plan “to ensure that Protected Lands [National Parks and National Landscapes] are at the heart of our 30 x 30 commitment”. And once again, the government passed on the opportunity to make the changes needed to turn this ambition into reality.

However, the management plans for many National Landscapes - including the North Pennines - are due to be updated in 2024. These are five-year plans, so if National Landscapes are to contribute to 30 x 30, climate and nature recovery must be “at the heart” of them. Environmental groups, such as the Wildlife Trusts, and local stakeholders have a role to play in advocating for the new plans to include specific climate and nature targets, as well as a commitment to monitoring progress towards those targets.

Writing about the American West, author Wallace Stegner once wrote: “This is the native home of hope”, and talked about creating “a society to match its scenery”. Our National Landscapes deserve the same.

The Birds of Heaven

 I heard the call – a soft purring – before I saw the birds.

The sound transported me back in time thirty or more years, to when I was volunteering with a captive breeding project for endangered whooping cranes. In that project, sandhill cranes served as surrogate parents to endangered whooping crane chicks, and humans – impersonating sandhill cranes – helped with the early stages of the process; the flying lessons were, of course, beyond our ability. Dressed in grey smocks and equipped with imitation crane beaks, we taught the whooping crane chicks to find food and water. And during long sessions huddled on the floor of a dark pen, dipping the puppet beak into food or water and touching it to the tiny chick beak, I learned to make the low purring sound that cranes use to tell one another that family is nearby, and the world is safe.

That contact call was what I heard last week at Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge.

I never expected to see cranes in Delaware. While there are historic records of sandhill cranes on the Atlantic coast, a combination of hunting pressure and wetland loss drove them to extinction over a hundred years ago. So, after my summer with the crane project, travelling to see cranes in the wild meant going elsewhere. To Nebraska, to witness the immense spring gathering of sandhill cranes on the Platte River. To Florida, where a resident population of sandhills is so accustomed to humans that they graze on the median of interstates and stroll down suburban streets. To Lake Hornbarga in Sweden, where common cranes learned to eat the potatoes that were once grown to produce vodka. And to Wisconsin, where once a whooping crane flew directly overhead as I stood in a corn field.

And even though there have been scattered reports of sandhill crane sightings in Delaware over the past few years, I was still amazed to see a pair of them last week, feeding in the marsh at the back of Bear Swamp Pool. Long-legged and long-necked, with elongate wing feathers arranged into a “bustle” that drooped gracefully over their tails, they were taller and more elegant than the herons and egrets who kept them company. They were feeding voraciously along the marsh edge, the red crown of their heads often hidden among the grasses, occasionally purring to one another, until the moment when they raised their heads high and turned to strut one behind the other along a small strip of mud, giving the unison call of a mated pair. With that bugling call they summoned to my mind images of the cranes I’ve seen and those I’ve only dreamed about.

 Across five continents, cranes are woven into myths and folklore: they are, as Peter Matthiessen describes them, “The Birds of Heaven”.  In Japan they are considered holy creatures and were once believed to live 1,000 years. They are in fact long-lived birds, living until 20 years old in the wild and 30 in captivity, but their fossil lineage is even more impressive. The wing bones of a crane ancestor, found along the Platte River, on the bird’s current migration route, have been dated back to 10 million years ago, making them the oldest living bird species.  According to Japanese legend, if you fold 1,000 origami cranes – one for each year of the cranes’ mythical lifespan - you will be granted a wish from the gods, eternal happiness or lifelong health. From this comes the ritual of folding 1,000 origami cranes in supplication for the health of a loved one. Elsewhere, in the Chinese tradition, cranes are believed to carry the souls of the deserving departed to heaven.   

In my mind, I can choose to regard the cranes’ appearance at Bombay Hook as part of a natural process, of species seeking out new habitats in the face of change. But my heart reads it differently: as a moment of grace, and a glimpse of heaven.

Sandhill Cranes at Bombay Hook. Photograph: Eileen McLellan

Witness

It’s as if I’d caught the woods in the midst of undressing, the treetops already bare, empty branches raised to the sky, while lower down the leaves still flame in their fall colors: scarlet for oak, gold for hickory. The loblolly pines, in their sober evergreen, seem unimpressed.

Here, at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, the pines are the reluctant stars in a slow-moving drama. As the land slopes down towards the water, I leave the hardwood trees behind, and the pines assert their full glory. For me, as a birder, walking through a pinewood is a challenge, the desire to constantly look up into the canopy in search of birds vying with the need to look down for the roots that trip the unwary. At last I hear, then see, a small mixed flock: chickadees, golden-crowned kinglets, brown-headed nuthatches, tiny birds in constant motion from pinecone to pinecone, tree to tree. The nuthatches, like the loblolly pines, are at the northern edge of their range – for now.

The glory of the pines is in their structure: tall straight trunks that erupt at the top into a mass of horizontal branches: a perfect platform for a bald eagle nest. In breeding season, Blackwater is home to the greatest concentration of bald eagles on the Atlantic Coast. It’s what this Refuge is known for, although it was created to support migratory waterfowl along the Atlantic Flyway.

I love to visit Blackwater as fall transitions into winter, after the cold fronts have swept down from Canada across the Great Lakes and Midwest, driving hundreds of thousands of geese and ducks before them. The winged travelers descend on places like Blackwater like teenagers on an illicit party. They preen and strut, gorge on food, erupt in squabbles, and make a ruckus until well after dark. Today’s trip – done in response to a possible government shutdown at the end of the week - is too early for the full spectacle.  

The attention that I would have given to the great flocks of geese goes instead to the landscape, to witnessing forests becoming marsh and marsh becoming open water. Standing at the edge of the marsh, I’m surrounded by the ghosts of pine trees. Reduced to broken snags, their bark peeling, their white skeletons revealed, these trees have succumbed to the saltwater that creeps ever inland. For this is a place where climate change past and climate change present meet. The land is slowly sinking as it recovers from the Ice Age, while the sea is slowly rising due to global warming.

As the saltwater creeps ever higher and further inland, it’s as if the land is dissolving. At the landward edge the big tracts of forests still stand, but as I walk downstream those tracts fragment, become smaller blocks surrounded by tidal creeks. As the creeks widen and become marsh, the pine forests become pine islands, close enough together at first that I can picture how they once were connected. Looking from the shoreline out to deeper water, I can see how the islands shrink and separate until, in the distance, only isolated snags remain to haunt the marsh.

While marsh replaces forest, the marshes are vanishing too, over 5,000 acres lost since the 1930s, drowned by the rising sea. With the marsh goes a whole food chain that is critical for the geese, the bald eagles and a whole host of other species.

But there’s hope. A partnership between the Fish and Wildlife Service, The Conservation Fund, and National Audubon Society has worked to improve the health of priority areas of surviving saltmarsh. Land levels have been raised using sediment dredged from the Blackwater River, and the new land surface planted with hundreds of thousands of plugs of marsh grasses.

And, in a recognition that Nature can create saltmarshes better and more cheaply than we can, Refuge managers are now working with private landowners to buy land in places that are especially vulnerable to rising water levels. In the coming decades, these farm fields and woods will slowly transform to marsh, ensuring that this vital habitat continues to exist.

In the Visitor Center at Blackwater, there is a quote from Mollie Beattie, the first woman to lead the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: “What a country chooses to save is what a country chooses to say about itself”.

What will we choose to save?

Ghost pines at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge. Photo: Eileen McLellan

Prairie Dreaming

I’ve spent a lot of time in the Midwest, in the corn and soybean fields that Midwestern farmers boast “feed the world”. My first trip was in November 2009, to Iowa, in the heart of the so-called “Corn Belt”.  The people were friendly, but the landscape was bleak. The temperature was in the mid-thirties, with rain that always seemed on the edge of turning to snow. The fields had been tilled, stripped of even remnant corn stalks; clods of dark brown soil lay exposed to the wind and rain. Coming from Maryland, where most farmers practice no-till and grow cover crops, I was astonished to see so much bare soil. The land was flat to the far horizon, with no trees and no streams; not even a roadside hawk eking out a living on field mice. Desperate to find signs of life, I drove out one morning to visit a prairie remnant.

In contrast to everything around it, Doolittle Prairie was full of color and energy. Native grasses, their stems all shades of gold and bronze, reached for the sky.  Frost-tipped spider webs sparkled with diamonds in the low sunlight. Goldfinches twittered to one another as they swayed on the seedheads of asters and goldenrod.

At the beginning of the 1800s, tallgrass prairie covered 200 million acres of the Midwest. To the early settlers, the prairie landscape seemed “so vast that it could not be subdued”. But the deep, dark soils proved highly fertile, and within 60 years most of the prairie yielded to the plow. In Iowa, less than 0.1% of native prairie survives.

Last week I was back in Iowa, and delighted to glimpse, next to my hotel, a stand of native grasses, all feathery plumes and rustling stems. Not native prairie, obviously, in the heart of Des Moines, but…something. Perhaps this was a Midwestern version of “acknowledgement to country”? Common in Australia, “acknowledgement to country” recognizes the importance of the original inhabitants of the land, the Aboriginal people and the native flora and fauna.

I was soon disappointed. The “prairie” proved to be some meagre strips of switchgrass, alternating with strips of mown turf , each decorated with a staked-down conifer. Conifers? In prairie? The combination spoke of “ease of landscape maintenance” rather than ecological design. Equally disconcerting was the planting in front of the convention center. Native grasses were laid out in a geometric grid, separated from one another by several feet of empty soil. Geometry, monoculture, hard edges, empty ground – these are the antithesis of wild prairie.

There has been something of a fashion for prairie gardens in the past decade, largely inspired by the work of Piet Oudolf. I first saw his work at The Lurie Garden in Chicago, on a summer day when the garden was a riot of colorful flowers. Later, I saw the prairie plantings on the High Line, the rewilded railway line in New York City, where the prairie concept has been fitted into a tiny space, no more than 30 feet wide. But even on this small scale, and on a January day, the plantings felt alive, grasses whispering to one another in the breeze.

The Lurie Garden, Chicago. Photograph: iStock

Chelsea Grasslands, The High Line, New York City. Photograph: iStock

Fortunately, I learned that there are landscaping companies in Iowa, that specialize in designing prairie gardens. Even more encouraging, some new housing developments around Des Moines incorporate prairie patches as part of the community. And some 20 miles east of Des Moines, prairie restoration is underway on a large scale at Neal Smith Wildlife Refuge, where over 4,000 acres of tallgrass prairie has been planted since 1990. Prairie restoration at Neal Smith was a massive effort, involving hundreds of volunteers who collected the seeds of native plants from remnant prairie patches across Iowa. Managed using the traditional, Native American techniques of prescribed burning and managed grazing, restoration success can be measured by the refuge’s ability to support healthy herds of American bison and elk – and by the delight on visitors’ faces.

Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge.

Sometimes I dream about prairies, the swaying grasses, the hawks, the bison.  I dream that someday Iowa will be more than the land of corn, that it will no longer be what a colleague called “our National Sacrifice Area” of degraded lands and polluted streams. I dream that Iowa fields will grow food for Iowans to eat. And I dream that prairies are celebrated for the stories they tell, of plants and people deep-rooted in the heartland of America.

Life and Death in the Salt Marsh

One of the things I love most about salt marshes is their smell, especially at low tide – that’s when you can really smell the mud. “Stinky” is how my natural history books describe salt marshes, comparing the smell to rotten eggs. But to me, that smell says “life” – with an undertone of death.

That’s because salt marshes are an alchemist’s chamber, where death is turned into life, and that life – dying in its turn - creates more life. You can think of salt marshes as vast recycling machines, where the stuff of life – carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur and more – is endlessly transformed, one creature becoming another. Marsh grass is eaten by snails, snails are eaten by crabs, and snails and crabs are eaten by birds. Alive, the snails, crabs and birds excrete nutrients, which fertilize the growth of marsh grass. Dead, the nutrients stored in their bodies are released back into the marsh, fertiizing it further.

Carbon, oxygen, nitrogen – those all sound familiar from high school biology classes. As humans, we are carbon-based lifeforms. We need oxygen to breathe. We need nitrogen to make protein (and it’s an essential component of the DNA and RNA that transmit our genetic codes). But sulfur – what’s that about?

Twice a day, rising tides bring fresh seawater into the marsh. Along with water and salt come many other chemical compounds, including sulfates. Sulfates are usually toxic to plants, but the commonest salt marsh plant – Spartina, a type of grass – has found a way to turn the sulfates from a problem into a benefit. Specialized sulfur-eating bacteria living inside Spartina roots can transform those sulfates into energy; the plant then uses that energy to create its own fertilizer from nitrogen in the air. In the process of producing energy from seawater, the bacteria produce hydrogen sulfide, which gives marshes that rotten egg smell. So, the process that makes salt marshes smell awful is actually the process that makes marsh grasses grow!

Toxic sulfates are not the only problem faced by marsh organisms. As Spartina grows and dies over and over again through thousands of years, it builds up thick layers of peat. Over time the peat becomes anoxic: without oxygen. Under these conditions, the normal processes of decomposition stop. While this helps preserve the peat, it also halts the cycling of nutrients from dead plant cells into marsh soup and then into the growth of new marsh grass. Fortunately, other types of sulfur-eating bacteria can take over the job of decomposing the peat and continuing the nutrient cycle.

Salt marshes are not the only places where sulfur-eating bacteria are found. They are the ultimate survivors in extreme environments, such as the hot springs in Yellowstone National Park and hydrothermal vents in the deep oceans. Scientists believe that these bacteria evolved 3.4 billion years ago, when the oceans were boiling hot and there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. They may represent the first forms of life on Earth. So next time you’re in a salt marsh, take a deep breath, and believe that life – in some form – will endure whatever we humans do to the planet.

Kings of the Sky

We have released the Monarchs! Parents sending their children off to college could not be more proud – or nervous – than we are in sending these butterflies out into the world.

In truth, though I say “we”, my partner did all the work, because I was traveling. I was an absent parent – though I watched every step, anxiously, on screen.  As a result, I am emotionally invested in a creature I have never touched, and whose fate I will not know.

The process of raising a Monarch butterfly begins with milkweed, the only plant that Monarch caterpillars will eat. For years I tried to grow milkweed in my garden, but every winter the plants succumbed to my sodden clay soil. So, as we were raising these Monarchs for an education program at our local Wildlife Refuge, we collected caterpillars from stands of milkweed there.  The caterpillars – allover striped in black, white and yellow, like a snazzy set of pajamas – came home and were installed in a mesh tent with lots of milkweed.

Munch, munch, munch. We hadn’t realized how much milkweed the caterpillars would eat. Nor had we realized how difficult it would be to find pesticide-free milkweed where we live, where the crop fields are sprayed multiple times each year and the local Council mows the roadside verges.

Eventually one of the caterpillars made its way to the top of the mesh tent, spun silk fibers to attach its tail to the top, and slowly formed itself into the shape of a J-hook. I’d always assumed that the next stage, the chrysalis, resulted from the caterpillar spinning silk around itself to form a protective cocoon. Instead, the chrysalis slowly emerged as the caterpillar turned itself inside out, bottom to top, head to tail.

Now began the watching and waiting. I knew, from reading, that inside the chrysalis the caterpillar breaks down (“completely dissolves” said one article) and transforms into a butterfly. But what exactly does this mean? Physically, I suppose, body parts break down into molecules, and those molecules rearrange themselves into a different configuration, the way a child plays with a Meccano set.

But not everything breaks down, because the adult butterfly retains in its body the essence of the milkweed on which the caterpillar fed; this milkweed makes the Monarch butterfly somewhere between unpalatable and poisonous to predators. A neat trick of evolution, from the perspective of the adult Monarch, but a puzzle to me, picturing the “black goo” that the caterpillar supposedly turns into.

What I’d really like to know is what happens to the caterpillar’s soul, or spirit, or whatever we want to call its life force. Is there a caterpillar spirit, that departs from the chrysalis allowing a new butterfly spirit to enter? Or does the spirit stay constant as the body is transformed?

After about a week, the chrysalis began to change color, from leaf green (for camouflage) to brown, an outer sign of the changes happening within. Finally, on Day 10, the chrysalis began to change color again, from brown to clear, and now we could see inside a hint of orange wings with black wing bars.

Monarch chrysalis, with the butterfly visible inside. Photo: Terry Willis

Slowly, the chrysalis began to split, revealing the adult Monarch, its wings still crumpled and its body swollen with fluid.  The emergence from the chrysalis is perhaps the most dangerous part of the process: if the wings are damaged at this stage the butterfly will not fly as it needs to. Flight is especially critical for Monarchs hatched at this time of year, because this is the generation that will fly south for thousands of miles to overwinter in Mexico.

Over the next few hours the butterfly pumped fluid from its body out into the wings, the wings extended and filled out, the body slimmed down. We had a fully-formed Monarch butterfly! The second caterpillar performed the same miracle a day later.

Now we had a quandary. I’m sure that when we started this adventure, we imagined releasing the butterflies on a sunny day in a flower-filled meadow.  On the day that the first butterfly hatched, though, Tropical Storm Ophelia began a slow march up the East Coast, bringing high winds and rain. The butterfly program at the Refuge was cancelled.

We fretted, not wanting to release the butterflies into the storm, so we decided to provide them with us for a day or two and provide them with food. First, fresh tickseed flowers: those were ignored. Next, sugar water on a sponge; also ignored. Next, overripe watermelon; ignored again. Instead of feeding, the butterflies spent all of their time fluttering against the roof of their tent.

Migratory birds kept in captivity show a phenomenon called Zugenruhe, or migratory restlessness, in which they try to set out on their migratory journeys even though they are in cages. Were our Monarchs experiencing the same phenomenon? It became clear that we needed to release the butterflies, or have them starve.

When released, each one spiraled higher and higher into the sky. Did the adult butterflies retain some vestigial memory of the Wildlife Refuge where they first lived as caterpillars? Was the spiraling a search for familiar landmarks? Or was it the exhilaration of wings feeling air for the first time?

Now they’re gone, hopefully to join the great river of Monarchs flowing south towards Mexico. I’ve read that when the butterflies arrive in Mexico in early November, on the Day of the Dead, they are celebrated for bringing with them the souls of departed family and friends. It seems a fitting celebration for a creature whose metamorphosis joins life, death and rebirth.

An Unlikely Visitor to an Unlikely Place

I should probably start by saying that I’m not what the British call a “twitcher”. That is, I don’t travel long distances just to add new species to my life list of birds seen. So how did I end up, on a hot Saturday afternoon in September, standing on a breakwater in industrial Teesside, looking for a Brown Booby?

A “Booby”, I should explain, is a large seabird, closely related to gannets (which I fell in love with on my trip to the RSPB’s Bempton Cliffs sanctuary earlier this summer). Unlike gannets, however, boobies are tropical birds, meaning that I haven’t seen one – and certainly wouldn’t expect to see one in northern England in September. The name “booby” comes from a mishearing of the Spanish “bobo”, variously translated as “clown” or “stupid”.  “Clown” because…well…watch this footage of the mating dance of the blue-footed booby. And “stupid” because the birds were easy for 18th-century Spanish sailors to catch (think “booby trap”).

Brown Booby. Photo: iStock

Brown Boobies are relatively common in tropical waters of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, meaning that the bird I was here to see most probably came from the Caribbean. Whether it stowed away on a ship, or was blown across the ocean on storm winds, it was a long way from home.

It was the location that drew me. Teesside, the remnant estuary of the River Tees and center of chemical manufacturing, seems an incredibly unlikely destination for a tropical bird with a mind to wander. Not for this bird the well-known seabird hotspots, the teeming cliffs of scenic islands. Instead, it showed up at a major seaport, an area ringed around by chemical plants on land and wind turbines offshore. I’ve visited birdwatching sites on the north shore of the Tees Estuary many times and been intrigued by the juxtaposition of nature and industry. But I’d never ventured to the south side of the estuary, despite its reputation for good birding. It always felt too far and, frankly, too industrial. Now I had reason to go.

I’ll admit that I nearly abandoned the idea as the car’s GPS took me in multiple figure-of-eight loops across the River Tees before abandoning me on the entrance road to a giant chemical facility. “Re-calculating, re-calculating”, the GPS commented, before sending me down an unpromising lane, lined with scrap tire dealers, to a railway track and the ominous sign “Private Road”.  In the distance I could see the remains of the Redcar Steelworks: security fencing, dump trucks and giant piles of rubble. I knew there was some controversy over the plans to clean up the site and transform it into the UK’s largest freeport, so security would be high.

Finally, emboldened by the sight of other cars on the road, I plunged across the tracks and around the potholes. The road itself was testimony to over a century of steelmaking, being constructed of slag from steel blast furnaces, but it was in poor condition. As I drove on, it became clear that some kind of mass exodus was underway. With my mind on the Booby, I interpreted this to mean that the bird had flown off to some other location, with birdwatchers in hot pursuit.

Imagine, then, my surprise when I rounded a corner and saw hundreds of campervans and deckchairs lining the roadside. The South Gare, as this breakwater is known, has captured sand from the River Tees on its way out to sea and so built a complex of beaches and sand dunes. Prompted by one of the hottest days of the year, the residents of south Teesside had gathered to enjoy a day at this unlikely seaside: scuba divers set off into the murky waters; kayakers and stand-up paddleboarders skimmed over the waves; children cried for ice-cream; fishermen huddled over their lines; dogs wandered through the chaos pursued by frantic owners. The exodus, then, had not been birdwatchers, but families headed home for dinner.

Beyond the brightly-colored swimsuits, tee-shirts and beach-towels, I saw a small group of birdwatchers, distinctively clad in khaki and olive, gathered around spotting scopes. Shouldering my own scope, I made my way towards them.

“Is it still here?”, I asked (there was no need to specify “it”). The response was not encouraging: “It was really close this morning, but for the past couple of hours it’s been fishing across the harbor.” One man pointed to the far shore, where I could just make out a scrum of gulls diving into the water in search of fish. Even through the scope, I had no hope of picking out the Booby at that distance.

They birders were a friendly group, happy to share their photos of the Booby, debate camera equipment, discuss rumors of another Booby being seen in Scotland, and reminisce about other rare birds they had seen. I learned that many of the group had driven long distances to see the bird, and that they were renewing acquaintances made at previous “twitches”.

Conversation was suddenly interrupted by the crackle of a radio: “Booby on red buoy number 12”. It took a while to find buoy number 12, which was a long way away and directly aligned with the sun. Several people packed up their scopes and cameras and started moving in that direction. Apparently, this was how the day had gone: in response to a reported sighting, dozens of birders would pick up their scopes and resume their pilgrimage along the South Gare to a closer viewing spot.

I decided to stay where I was, trying to pick out the places I knew on the opposite shore and idly eavesdropping on birding conversations. Another thirty minutes passed. Heat haze shimmered, flies buzzed. People who had driven hundreds of miles to reach this spot, and who had stood on the rocks all day, began to leave. The rest of us stared somewhat desultorily at gulls, until suddenly a cry went up: “It’s right there! On top of green buoy number five!”. And indeed it was, just offshore, a bird shaped like a gannet, but with all the wrong colors and a much bigger beak. For long seconds, our world contracted to the view through our scopes, an oddly shaped bird with a distinctive white belly, sitting on a green buoy. I heard “Green buoy number five” spoken into a radio, and imagined that further down the breakwater birders were once more packing up equipment and resuming their pilgrimage.

Then, just as suddenly as it had appeared, the Booby was gone, skimming over the surface of the water, back towards buoy number twelve.

I left, feeling oddly elated. Yes, I could have wished for a longer and clearer view of the bird. I could have wished for a camera good enough to take a decent photo (you can see the awful photo I took below), or for the bird to be close enough for my camera to capture a clear image. But there was something special about seeing such an exotic bird making itself at home in a place where Nature has, frankly, been ravaged.

I doubt that “visit Teesside” was on the Booby’s bucket list of things to do before it died (not that birds have bucket lists!). It ended up here because its ocean wanderings intersected with a ship, or more likely an unusual storm (of which there have been many in the Atlantic Ocean this year). But here it was, making the best of it, unfazed by the giant container ships that pass the buoys on which it rested, following the local gulls to locate fish supplies. It was adapting to its less-than-ideal circumstances. As climate changes and habitat is lost, that gives me hope.

The brown and white blob on the left side of the buoy is the Brown Booby! Photo: Eileen McLellan

Flawed Beauty

Dead Friar’s Stone, above Weardale, County Durham.

When I was last on these moors it was the end of June, and a family of curlews was running around on the path. At least, I like to think it was a family, with one chick successfully fledged. Certainly, there were three of them, one with a shorter beak than the others, and I heard what sounded like parental alarm calls as I came close. One by one they lifted off from the heather, sailing out over the valley, the ground falling away below them. Not for the first time, I wished that I could fly.

The curlew is my spirit bird, and my heart lifts when I see and hear one. But they are in decline, with the UK population falling by 55% since the 1990s. Curlews are long-lived birds, so the decline seems to arise not from poor adult survival but rather from a lack of nesting success – eggs that are destroyed before hatching, and hatched chicks killed before fledging.

Today, though, the curlews are gone to their winter quarters on the estuaries, and the only sounds come from the sheep, ewes calling anxiously to their lambs. Until there is a sudden whirring of wings, the grouse erupting from almost under my feet with its peremptory “Go-back! Go-back!” call.

Grouse are king here, although as they exist only to be shot, it’s a dubious honor.

The heather is in bloom, a mass of pinks and purples that gild distant hills with an amethyst haze. Closer up, it’s clear that the heather blooms in patches. Square blocks, maybe 10 meters on a side, are interspersed with areas of blackened stems and charred peat. This chequerboard pattern is the signature of heavily-managed grouse moor. Blocks are burned each spring to stimulate the tender new growth that grouse prefer to eat, and to create the variability in plant height which provides them with shelter. When I walked here in June, it seemed that I could still smell smoke as my feet crunched through the charcoal stems.

To my younger self, growing up in the Highlands of Scotland and the North Pennines, these landscapes of heather and grouse signified home. It seemed they must always have been there, but I’ve come to learn that they are relatively recent in the history of this land. They are now contested ground. A younger generation calls for an end to driven grouse-shooting and the transformation – “rewilding” - of the British uplands.

I can’t help but wonder what this would mean for my spirit bird.

Moorland managers like to point to the abundance of curlews – and other waders (golden plovers, redshanks, snipe and lapwings) – on grouse moors. It’s no secret that, to be economically viable, grouse moors need to produce incredibly high numbers of grouse. Along with heather burning, and medicated grit, that level of grouse production requires very high levels of predator control. Predators legally “controlled” (i.e., killed) on grouse moors include foxes, crows, and weasels. All that habitat management and predator control seems to be good for curlews: some studies suggest that breeding success is three times higher on managed grouse moors.

So, from the perspective of curlews, highly-managed grouse moors are a good thing.

From the perspective of Hen Harriers, or Red Kites, or any other raptor, they are not.

You might think that, given the abundance of grouse prey, raptor populations would flourish in association with grouse moors. However, their populations are anomalously low compared to what the habitat and prey abundance could support. The birds are simply…missing. In recent years the introduction of satellite tagging has shown that there is a clear pattern of healthy raptors “disappearing” over managed grouse moors.

From where I stand, I can look down over Stanhope Dene, where an endangered Red Kite was found in June of this year, hanging from a tree. It had been both poisoned and shot. Turning around, I can see on the far skyline where another poisoned Red Kite was found last summer. Harassment of raptors – whether through shooting, poisoning, or nest disturbance – is illegal, but common.  Enforcement is lacking and penalties are seemingly inadequate.

Would some of those missing raptors prey on curlew chicks? Almost certainly. But that wouldn’t lead me to advocate for killing raptors, even if it were legal. For our uplands to be healthy we need both waders and raptors, and I’m not willing to trade off one for another.  And I’m not sure that grouse moors, in their current form, are economically viable without that trade-off.

Even as I enjoy the sight and smell of the heather, I feel the emptiness of the skies, the birds that should be there and are not. It’s a beautiful scene, but deeply flawed, and the juxtaposition of beauty and death breaks my heart.

We Do What We Can...

Imagine a hospital without ambulances.

Imagine patients, in desperate need of treatment, unable to get help.

That’s the situation at my local wild bird hospital. The birds that arrive there are often hungry, in shock and in pain. They may be baby birds fallen from the nest, or whose parents have died. They may be injured as a result of collisions with windows, powerlines, or cars. They may be entangled in discarded fishing line. They may be sick, from botulism or avian flu. And the only way that they can get help is if a volunteer drives the bird to the hospital.

This summer, I started volunteering as a “transporter”, as the volunteer ambulance drivers for the bird hospital are known. Of course, I don’t have an ambulance, a siren or flashing lights. Just a regular car, which over the months has filled with the tools of the trade: plastic bags, towels, cardboard boxes and plastic totes. Duct tape (to assemble the boxes), and a knife (to punch air holes in the assembled boxes). Leather gloves for protection against beaks and claws, vinyl gloves and bleach for protection against disease.

By mid-August, most birds have raised one or two broods of babies and are regrowing feathers and replenishing energy stores in preparation for migration, or winter. But some of our resident birds are taking advantage of longer, warmer summers to work on a third brood, and last week I got a call for an injured baby American Robin.

The caller said that she’d found the bird that morning, on the lawn, and moved it into the shade of a tree. When baby birds first leave the nest (a process known as fledging) they often can’t fly, and sit helplessly on the ground yelling to their parents for food. The parents will continue to take care of the baby, though it’s vulnerable to predators. Fledglings (as babies at this stage are known) don’t need to go to the hospital – unless they’re injured. This one had a suspected leg fracture.

Arriving at the caller’s home, I was horrified to find the fledgling at the bottom of a flight of concrete steps leading below-ground.  It was so dark and dirty on the steps that I could hardly see the bird - but I could hear the constant cheeping of “Feed me! Feed me!”. Every now and then the bird would open its beak wide, revealing bright yellow feathers that flashed like sunshine in the gloom. And now I could also hear the frantic calls of an adult American Robin, no doubt one of the parents, alarmed at our presence so close to its baby.

“She’s been bringing him earthworms for hours”, said the caller.

The parent Robin’s calls grew increasingly distressed as I picked up the fledgling, put it in a towel-lined box, and took it to my car. It must have been awful for the bird to see its baby taken away by a seeming predator, after it had spent weeks incubating eggs and feeding nestlings.

But of course, I had no way to explain to the bird that I was trying to help. And in any case, I needed to get the baby Robin to the hospital before they closed for the day.  On a good day, the drive would be about an hour, but at 4 p.m. on a Friday afternoon I was looking at rush hour traffic that was getting worse by the minute. “Now’s when I need the siren and flashing lights”, I thought to myself.

I wondered whether - if I had a siren, flashing lights and a big sign saying “Bird Ambulance” – any of the other drivers would care enough to let me pass. And, of those who would, would they feel differently on learning it was an American Robin, a common garden bird, not a Bald Eagle or some other rare and charismatic species?

As someone concerned about climate change, I sometimes ponder the carbon footprint of these trips to the bird hospital. Yet, despite years working on the science and policy of climate change, there are days when transporting birds to the hospital feels like the most meaningful thing I do. Policy change is slow – much slower than it needs to be – and days and weeks can go by with only bad news. In contrast, holding a wild bird in my hand, taking it to care, is tangible and immediately gratifying.

When I got to the hospital, one of the staff confirmed my fears: the bird had multiple leg fractures. I hope that s/he can be treated and someday released back to the wild. I suspect a sadder ending, a release from pain in the form of euthanasia. I tell myself that either way it’s better for the bird than lying broken, in the dark, at the bottom of concrete steps.

Driving home, I remembered what one of the hospital volunteers told me one time when I said that I wished that I could do more: “We all do what we can”. The baby bird’s parents did what they could. They couldn’t fix a broken leg, but they could and did keep bringing earthworms. I can’t halt climate change or the global extinction crisis. But, bird by bird, I do what I can.

Snow in Summer

It’s early August, and I’ve gone to one of my favorite places, Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge, to do two of my favorite things: birdwatching and photography. Bombay Hook is one of the largest areas of tidal salt marsh in the mid-Atlantic region, and it’s a magnet for birds in all seasons.

At this time of year, I’d expect it to be filled with shorebirds, migrating south from their breeding grounds in the Arctic. This year, though, there has been a lot of rain, and the freshwater pools on the refuge are too deep for most of the shorebirds, and they have gone elsewhere in search of food.

I’m disappointed not to see them, but there’s a different treat in store. The marsh edges are studded with bushes bearing huge white and pink flowers of the Swamp Mallow, Hibiscus moscheutos. From a distance, the impression is of huge snowflakes decorating the tops of the marsh grasses.

I’ve seen Swamp Mallow here before, but not in such quantities, and I puzzle over the change from previous years. Perhaps it’s something to do with the Refuge’s efforts to control the invasive Common Reed, Phragmites australis, which has gradually been choking the marsh? Successful control of Phragmites requires the plant equivalent of the Apocalypse – fires, floods and pestilence – except for the replacement of pestilence by massive of doses of pesticide (specifically, an aquatic-safe herbicide). Ironic, isn’t it, that in order to protect and restore native plants like Swamp Mallow, we need to use poison?

In addition to the Swamp Mallow, the freshwater pools at Bombay Hook are also filled with large white wading birds. In the photo above we see a Great Egret, the size and shape of a heron but with blinding white feathers and a yellow beak. In the photo below we see a large group of egrets, the taller Great Egrets and smaller Snowy Egrets, with some dark Glossy Ibis mixed in.

Great egrets, snowy egrets and glossy ibis. Photo: Eileen McLellan

The egrets are another conservation success story. In the breeding season they develop gorgeous, airy plumes, long feathers which serve no practical purpose except to attract a mate. Those feathers nearly led to the extinction of the species. In the late 1800’s it became the fashion for women to decorate their hats with the birds’ long plumes (and sometimes even the entire bird, in a taxidermized state).

In 1896, two socialites from Boston began to campaign against the fashion for wearing plumes and feathers, converting their friends to the cause at tea parties, and eventually organizing the forerunner of today’s National Audubon Society. In the next 20 years the ladies and the organization they founded succeeded in passing state and later federal legislation prohibiting the slaughter and trade of migratory birds. Egret populations slowly recovered, and today we can enjoy seeing their snowy feathers in our coastal wetlands.

What choices will we need to make today, so that future generations can see this snow in summer?

Hummingbirds and hope

Late July, a blue sky, bluebird kind of a day, cool and sunny after a week of mounting heat and humidity. The day feels like a reprieve, not just from the heat but from a summer’s worth of climate misery: wildfire smoke that choked the sky and my lungs, the storms that tore huge limbs from my old maple tree. Around the world forests burn, crops fail, floods wash away homes and livelihoods. This summer feels like a turning point, a time to acknowledge that the climate change so long predicted is here. Today, though, such thoughts are swept aside as I celebrate the beauty that is here and now. 

Seemingly out of nowhere, the young hummingbirds have appeared. They’ve probably been here all along, tucked into their tiny nest, but now they have fledged and are zipping around the garden from flower to flower, exploring their new world. One has claimed the patch of Salvia right outside my window, and I watch his tiny body hovering in front of the blue-black flowers, his long bill probing deeply into their trumpets. For an hour, I focus only on the sapphire flowers, the emerald glitter of his body in the sun, his darting flight.

Behind the Salvia the wrecked limbs of the maple await their date with the chainsaw. I briefly consider replacing the wounded tree with a huge flowerbed, turning my garden into a hummingbird wonderland filled with vibrant blooms and the jewel-like birds. Then I think of the shade the tree still provides, the squirrels who make their winter nests in its branches, the red-bellied woodpecker who drills into its crevices, the hawk who uses it as a hunting post. I wonder when I’ll be ready to say goodbye to the tree, and hello to the garden that will replace it.

 Change is a constant. In a month the hummingbirds will be gone, heading south for the winter, many of them making a perilous journey across the Gulf of Mexico in the heart of hurricane season. Meanwhile, I see a house sparrow gathering straw; it seems he plans on repairing the nest in preparation for a third brood, even as the youngsters from the most recent brood still quiver their wings and beg for food in the willow shrub.

 One bird will travel across continents, the other will live its life in my garden. I delight in them both, and in the fact that I’ve created this little green oasis for them in the middle of endless corn and soybean fields. I suddenly grasp the power of creation, of taking action to make things better; this is the hope we all need for the future.