Wild With Nature

I recognized it right away, that emphatic kiBURR call from the ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) on the hill. I was in Rosebud County, Montana with my colleague and mentor Grant Hokit on a morning in early July, making some naturalist observations as we traveled across the state for our work. It was a call I had never heard in Montana before, but something in my brain made the connection to the bird that I had come to know in the dry interior of Oaxaca, Mexico the winter before: a Cassin’s kingbird (Tyrannus vociferans), a noisy flycatcher whose breeding distribution reaches its northern limit in Montana.

Connections between Montana and Oaxaca had become especially important to me in the past six months. In January, Carito Cordero and I had met in Oaxaca and fallen in love. Two thousand miles away from her doing my summer field work, the voice of the Cassin’s kingbird helped me, in some small way, to bridge the separation. I pulled out my microphone and recorded.

On the wings of a Cassin’s kingbird

Now it’s late November, and I’m back in Oaxaca with Carito. As I listen to the kingbird recording and think about how its story weaves together with ours, its call transports me back to July in Montana… 

The Cassin’s kingbird calls from the upper third of a large, lone ponderosa pine on a hill where sandstone outcrops mix with needle-and-thread grass (Stipa comata) and other native prairie plants, lightly invaded by cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum). Grant and I are at a transition zone between habitats, with prairie below us and open, dry ponderosa pine forest on the slopes above. The huge, luminous flowers of white prickly-poppy (Argemone polyanthemos) dot the lower part of the slope. The pale green wash of silver sagebrush (Artemisia cana) follows the draw below the lone pine where the Cassin’s kingbird continues calling. 

Birdsong and the heat of July

In this season when peak birdsong and nesting activity blurs into the dry heat of midsummer, all around us we hear the living, breathing vocal fingerprint of this place. The patch of sagebrush is large enough to support a Brewer’s sparrow (Spizella breweri), trilling musically in the background. From the prairie below, I can make out the occasional songs of western meadowlarks (Sturnella neglecta). A scattering of western kingbirds (Tyrannus verticalis) and a couple of lark sparrows (Chondestes grammacus) share the grassland-pine transition with the Cassin’s kingbird. An orchard oriole (Icterus spurius) flits among a patch of skunkbush sumac (Rhus trilobata) and then lands in the ponderosa pine, singing. In the distance I can pick out a few more birds of the pine forest: a western wood-pewee (Contopus sordidulus), a northern flicker (Colaptes auratus). 

Eventually, Grant and I get to see the Cassin’s kingbirds as well as hear them. There are at least two of them in the pine, and one is carrying an insect in its beak. It’s a strong indication that we’re on a breeding territory: insect-carrying suggests that this bird has nestlings or fledglings nearby.

Bittersweet September

The hot summer wears on. The Montana sky surges with thunderstorms, then bouts of wildfire smoke. My field season wraps up. In mid-September, as songbirds migrate south across Montana in a tide and stop over in the chokecherries and cottonwoods to forage, I prepare for the upcoming transition from Montana to Oaxaca. Beyond excited to be with Carito again, but also feeling the weight of saying goodbye to friends and family, to Lake Helena, to the rivers and prairies and cottonwoods of my state, I write:

Do the songbirds feel nostalgia

during the goodbyes of September?

Or is it just me, asking myself

about the inexorable turning of the seasons

among the red, withered leaves of the dogwood

and the juicy black orbs of the chokecherries

where the birds stop for a moment or two

on their way south? I ask myself if they, too

carry in their soul an impression of every place

where they have lived and where they will live. I don’t know—

just that the fresh fall air touches me this way. 

My wings are laden with memories and hopes

and I continue ahead, towards a future that I can not know.

Fall migration

On September 22, Montana birder Dalton Spencer observes four Cassin’s kingbirds in southeastern Montana’s Treasure County—the latest fall date they’ve ever been recorded in the state. In the ensuing discussion on Facebook, several birders point out that very few people have made fall bird observations in that part of Montana. Perhaps Cassin’s kingbirds regularly linger later in the fall than we currently know, they suggest. Three days later, following the southward trajectory of the kingbirds, I fly to Oaxaca.

Three weeks later, I meet the Cassin’s kingbirds again. It’s mid-October and Carito and I are near the town of Tamazulápam del Progreso in the interior of Oaxaca, among flowering cazahuate (Ipomoea sp.) trees and fields of maíz criollo bordered by walnuts and wild sunflowers. Walking among the fields as the evening wanes towards sunset, I find myself surrounded by Cassin’s kingbirds. Dozens of them are perching in the treetops, giving their kiBURR calls, fluttering downward to catch insects over the wild sunflowers. Small groups of them pass overhead, heading eastward into a light evening breeze. In all, I count 55 of them—more Cassin’s kingbirds than I’ve ever seen in my life. 

Cassin’s kingbirds from Montana to Oaxaca

Here, we’re close to the southern limit of the breeding range of this species. But the nesting season is long past now, and with such a concentration of kingbirds, I have little doubt that what I’m seeing is migration in action. Kingbirds from the northern three quarters of the breeding range are vacating the Great Plains and the northern deserts to congregate here, in central and southern Mexico. A few of them will push a bit farther south into the state of Chiapas; a handful may reach Guatemala. I wonder if some of this evening’s kingbirds spent the summer in Montana.

November in Oaxaca

Fast-forward to mid-November. Once again Carito and I are in Cassin’s kingbird habitat: the dry central valley in the outskirts of the capital city of Oaxaca de Juárez, visiting Carito’s aunts and uncle. On a mild, cloudy morning, I walk dirt roads among a profusion of wild sunflowers and scattered guamúchil trees (Pithecellobium sp.). A lesser goldfinch (Spinus psaltria) is whistling mournfully from the sunflowers, which now hold a winter’s abundance of birds. Many of them are migrants from the north, birds that I know from the Montana summer, funneled now between the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, concentrated in a wintering range that they share with many resident Oaxacan birds. Intent on foraging and avoiding predators, they show themselves in brief glimpses. Most of them call only rarely.

The habitat here is a patchwork: the guamúchil trees and sunflowers mix with fields of corn, tomatillo, and cempasúchil, fields at a much more human scale than the fully-industrialized agriculture that I’m used to in the US. I can hear a radio and the sound of hammering in the distance as carpenters add more and more houses to the patchwork—but the urban sprawl here is relatively diffuse and the houses are “house-sized,” not the many-thousand-square-foot mansions that dominate the sprawl around Montana’s cities. This is a place with an obvious human presence, but one that nevertheless provides a lot of habitat for birds, too.

A winter’s abundance of birds

Cassin’s kingbirds and western kingbirds call periodically from perches in the guamúchiles and on the power lines. They’re sharing this winter habitat with two other close relatives, the tropical kingbird (Tyrannus melancholicus), a year-round resident, and the scissor-tailed flycatcher (Tyrannus forficatus), a migrant from the southern Great Plains. In the distance, three crested caracaras (Caracara plancus) perch in a tree. A loggerhead shrike (Lanius ludovicianus) sings from another guamúchil until an American kestrel (Falco sparverius) takes flight from a power pole along the road. She dives opportunistically at the shrike, forcing it to take cover among the branches.

As birds like the Cassin’s kingbird help me draw the connections between my special places in nature in the United States and those that I’m getting to know in Oaxaca, I’m constantly checking range maps and learning new things about species I thought I knew well. The lesser goldfinches that are everywhere among the sunflowers today are year-round residents in this valley. Nevertheless, their calls transport me to the day in September when I heard these same calls in my mom’s Missoula, Montana yard, at the far-northern edge of the lesser goldfinch lands. 

Threads of connection

A Bewick’s wren (Thryomanes bewickii) begins his energetic song from another guamúchil nearby. Also a year-round resident in this valley, the Bewick’s wren is a rare visitor to Montana, where I’ve only seen one once. But the song carries me thousands of miles away to the western redcedars (Thuja plicata) and urban gardens of the Seattle, Washington neighborhood where my friends Greta and Augie live, a song I hear every time I visit them. 

A white-throated towhee (Melozone albicollis) begins calling as music swells in the background. This bird, too, is a full-time resident in this valley. Extremely common in the interior of Oaxaca, its distribution is limited to a handful of states in southern Mexico. While the Bewick’s wren and the lesser goldfinch connect me to my special places far away, the white-throated towhee reminds me to stay present here, in this unique place and moment.

More birds show themselves in glimpses of movement and snippets of song and call, and the web of connections continues to grow. A flock of lark sparrows darts among the sunflowers, flashing white tail feathers. Like the Cassin’s kingbirds, they take me back to those July ponderosa pines and white prickly-poppies of southeastern Montana, at the edge between forest and prairie.

Connecting worlds

Three grasshopper sparrows (Ammodramus savannarum) emerge from hiding among the weeds and perch alongside a curve-billed thrasher (Toxostoma curvirostre). The grasshopper sparrows bring me memories of June in Montana, when their insect-like song filled the prairie. A Lincoln’s sparrow (Melospiza lincolnii) hiding behind a sunflower head draws me a thread of connection to the willow thickets and beaver dams I know in Montana’s mountains, where the song of this now-silent bird was the heartbeat of summer.

How do they do it, these intrepid songbirds, these 20-gram specks? In September, so many of them are flying south through the night that they show up on radar. How do they connect my two worlds, so close and yet so far apart, flying over walls, over cities, past so many obstacles, returning year after year no matter who is elected president, no matter what horrible wars we start or manage to end?

I think of a poem I wrote in 2021 about bird migration, as I attended college online in the midst of the Covid pandemic and spent as many early mornings as I could outside with the birds, trying to stay grounded. I didn’t know Cassin’s kingbirds then, but as I read it now, I think of them:

Almost weightless

Darkness presses in against the windows,

repelled by the too-bright yellow glow

of the bedroom light. Thunder cracks the pre-dawn blackness

while the migration radar glares starkly from the phone,

a deep orange pulse, shifting in ten-minute snapshots

across the outline of Montana. Migration peaked

between 10:00 pm and 1:20 am, the radar intensifying

from orange to hot white. While I slept

through the soft darkness of the May night,

they were moving by the thousands, almost weightless,

sodden, tired warblers and sparrows, wings cleaving invisible mists,

dark stratus and cumulus, somehow navigating

saturated skies above black folds of hill and mountain,

alluvial fan and pungent sagebrush, and the softer blackness

of hidden thickets along the rushing stream,

tender new chokecherry leaves,

feathery golden currants in full bloom,

dripping gently in the night.

The thunder cracks again as my eyes adjust

in the too-bright yellow glow holding the night at bay

and I gear up: rough scratchy warmth of long underwear,

supple field pants to repel the rain,

rich familiar smell of the well-used plaid wool shirt,

crisply gridded datasheet clipped into the notebook

in the pocket of the battered tan fishing vest.

Burgundy raincoat rustling stiffly, stuffed

into the backpack with steaming thermos of tea.

Sunrise

Then at sunrise I stand in the saturated morning

feeling the cool molded rubber of binoculars in my hands

camera case weighing down my hip, lightning

flashing on the changing gray-green folds of hill and mountain

to the west. The deafening melodies of the meadowlarks

greet the morning all around me. Out with the notebook I scribble

reducing wonder to gridded data, but wonder remains

as the distant sandhill cranes bugle like ancient musicians

throbbing against tender green grasses. The plaintive whistles

of vesper sparrows call me onwards,

past the orderly buzzing humming insect

song that is the savannah sparrows, perching

on last year’s tan alfalfa stems, glistening

golden now. A light breeze picks up the morning sunlight

touching the brilliant green grasses. I can hear them growing.

The vesper sparrow, singing from a junk pile on the rocky hill,

calls me onward, and I find myself by the smooth roar

of the creek’s swollen, muddy torrent. The sun glints coppery

on the new leaves of the chokecherry thicket. A spotted towhee

scratches in the moist fragrance of rotting leaves

beneath. Put your face close to the soil

and you can hear the faint rustle and click

of leafhoppers and spiders against the skin of the earth.

But you can not hear the methodical chewing

as millions of caterpillars feast on coppery chokecherry leaves.

Just the staccato rapidity of the western tanager’s call

as he moves methodically through the branches,

feasting on them. Just the jarring chack of the yellowthroat

as she does the same, the splashes of tan, yellow, black

from sodden, tired warblers, gathering caterpillars.

Returning to spring

As the planet hurtles around the sun and the northern hemisphere tilts slowly, inexorably towards spring, the Cassin’s kingbirds will be there, too, flying north, arriving where the ponderosa pines grow among sandstone and needle-and-thread grass. Perhaps they, too, will think of November’s sunflowers where the lesser goldfinches call among the guamúchiles and ache for Oaxaca.