

June 5, 2025, Chouteau County, Montana. Horned larks (Eremophila alpestris) tinkle in the pre-dawn sky. The indigo night cedes to pink over the distant blue silhouette of the Bears Paw Mountains. I chew on a cold, lifeless blueberry bagel as the clock approaches the appointed hour. 4:49 a.m. Half an hour before sunrise.
You are what you eat, so the saying goes. I am a plain of wheat that stretches to the horizon, lines of grain etched by massive tractors, moist morning air heavy with the sweet metallic bite of ag chemicals. The prairie is gone. The land has been transformed into a grid of wheat, huge green squares of this year’s crop and huge brown squares of chemical fallow. Not even a thistle dares to grow there.
It’s not all one giant wheat field, of course. There are the shelterbelts where a few trees protect a farm house from the wind. Some of them are tended with obvious care, lilacs blooming, lawn mowed, shed painted, flag flying. Others are relics from another time, windows gaping, barn roof sagging—memories of a time before farming became industrial.
The wheat and the prairie

The wheat fields fascinate me: the simplicity, the straight lines, the sheer scale of it, the huge tractors and sprayers, the plastic cubes of pesticide. Prairie converted into bagel factory.
The prairie always creeps in around the edges, though. This expansive sky, big as the world, so alive with clouds and colors. The veiny dock (Rumex venosus) and verbena (Verbena bracteata) that grow along the gravel roadsides. And right now, pre-dawn, it seems more like prairie than wheat field as the horned larks broadcast their tinkly songs from all over.
Ready, set, count birds

4:49 a.m. It’s time to start counting birds. This is my seventh year doing this Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) route, one of over 4000 routes across the United States and Canada that volunteers like me survey one morning each summer. For many North American breeding birds, the BBS is our best stab at tracking how their populations are changing from year to year.
Montana birder Harriet Marble started this BBS route in 1979 and surveyed it annually for the next 37 years. Each June I think of her as I follow in her footsteps.
Everything is ready now. My notebook is out, the frequent stops sign taped to the back window of my car. As the horned larks tinkle and the prairie tries to seep in at the edges of the wheat, I set my 3-minute timer. Go!
Birds in the wheat

For three minutes, I try to write it all down: every horned lark I see or hear, every western meadowlark (Sturnella neglecta), every mourning dove (Zenaida macroura) and thick-billed longspur (Rhynchophanes mccownii), gray partridge (Perdix perdix) and long-billed curlew (Numenius americanus), northern pintail (Anas acuta) and red-winged blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus). Without moving from this point, I’m trying to count each individual bird within earshot and all of those that I can see within a quarter mile.

Three minutes beeps. I jump in my car, punch the next point into my GPS and race towards it, half a mile up the road. The survey consists of 50 points, three minutes of intensive listening and looking at each one. By 9:30 a.m., I’ll be done, a community of birds sandwiched in my notebook. Horned larks and thick-billed longspurs from the brown chemical fallow where nothing grows, a Say’s phoebe (Sayornis saya) from the shelterbelt near one of the farm houses. Northern pintails and a yellow-headed blackbird (Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus) from a small puddle in the middle of a field. Franklin’s gulls (Leucophaeus pipixcan) screaming as they fly over in small groups. Birds in the wheat.
Wheat fields and missing birds

Every year, I wonder how these birds are doing. I wonder it about the horned larks and thick-billed longspurs that sing so vigorously from the wheat fields. I find them here every year. Are they thriving, or are they dying invisibly from chemical exposure? Do horned larks get cancer like we do, or are their lives so short that it doesn’t matter? I wonder about the species that I only find in the pastures and the sagebrush, the places where the prairie isn’t totally gone. The chestnut-collared longspurs (Calcarius ornatus), Brewer’s sparrows (Spizella breweri), lark buntings (Calamospiza melanocorys)—surely there were more of them here before the wheat?

At Stop 19, a farmer drives past as I’m doing my 3-minute bird count. She waves, friendly, too polite to ask me what the heck I’m doing standing here with binoculars. Red-winged blackbirds sing from a moist depression in the field.
At Stop 36, a lark bunting helicopters down from the sky with lively abandon, landing on a fencepost at the edge of a pasture. Grasses and sagebrush. The prairie creeping in. And with it, the song of the lark bunting. Beyond him, wheat fields stretch towards the horizon. No lark buntings there.
Pesticides? Habitat loss?

Every year, the chemical contamination question haunts me, hanging heavy in the air like that sweet-metallic smell where the wheat grows. 3-minute point counts don’t give the answer. The thick-billed longspurs I write down in my notebook— Are they nesting successfully? How do farm chemicals affect them? Are these fields their happy homes, or death traps?

Regarding the loss of the prairie, the answers seem much more apparent. Plow prairie to grow wheat, and gone are the lark buntings. Gone are the Brewer’s sparrows and burrowing owls (Athene cunicularia). The horned larks remain, them and the thick-billed longspurs and that metallic smell in the air. The infinite sky remains. The farmers who welcome an out-of-place stranger with a friendly wave, trying to make it in an economy that has them growing massive fields of wheat. And once a year, me, eating blueberry bagels and wondering what these wheat fields mean for life on earth.
Lonesome Lake

The night before I camped at Lonesome Lake, where the wheat gives way to wetland, where thousands of Franklin’s gulls scream as they circle and land among coots (Fulica americana) and canvasbacks (Aythya valisineria). I watched the prairie gulls and thought of my grandmother, how I inherited her love of birds. I didn’t give it much thought when she was alive, but now a cloud of gulls or a mudflat full of shorebirds connects me to her, to how she loved the ocean and the life at its edge. And here, at the margin of the wheat, the Franklin’s gulls bring the ocean to the Great Plains summer.
My grandmother was born in 1924, when lark buntings were already losing ground to wheat fields but before huge tractors, before synthetic insecticides, before farmers had to get big or get out. During my grandmother’s lifetime, grassland birds like chestnut-collared longspurs declined precipitously. And just like I eat blueberry bagels, my grandmother ate wheat bread. Life is full of paradoxes.
Blueberry bagels and wheat fields

At one edge of the wetland, a flock of black-necked stilts (Himanthopus mexicanus) is calling sharply. The last time I heard them calling like this was in Oaxaca this winter, in the mangroves along the edge of the Pacific Ocean, not too many kilometers from Grandfather Teo’s milpa and fruit trees. There the line between farm and wild land is much softer, and the air doesn’t have that metallic smell. I take pictures of the wheat fields to show him this winter—he’ll be curious about a system of agriculture so different, so foreign, so industrial.
There I’ll eat corn tostadas from small milpas tended by hand among the forest, and perhaps a thicket tinamou (Cryturellus cinnamomeus) will sing at dusk. There’s more than one way to grow food. But for now, I subsist on blueberry bagels: I am a plain of wheat that stretches to the horizon, up to the edge of Lonesome Lake where the Franklin’s gulls wail. The prairie is gone, but it keeps creeping in at the edge.
Afterword

Chestnut-collared longspurs and thick-billed longspurs are among the steepest-declining birds in the United States, according to the 2025 State of the Birds report. Both have lost well over 50% of their populations in the last 50 years. Meanwhile, the lark bunting has declined massively across its range.
So has the Baird’s sparrow (Centronyx bairdii)—a species which Harriet Marble used to hear regularly on this BBS route, well over a dozen in peak years during the 1990s. Each year from 1998 onwards, though, Baird’s sparrows have been few or entirely absent on the route.
Many questions remain regarding how the use of insecticides and herbicides may impact birds in places like Chouteau County. However, existing research points to the ongoing loss of the prairie to intensive agriculture (rather than pesticide use in itself) as the biggest driver of prairie bird declines.
Prairie losses have affected the Lonesome Lake area, too. Harriet Marble reports that for many years farmers had fields enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays them to conserve soil and wildlife habitat by converting cropland back to grassland. Around Lonesome Lake, the program benefited many prairie birds, but the good news didn’t last. “When price of wheat increased, farmers must have left the program and then plowed up the habitat that once supported so many sparrows,” Harriet wrote me. Following the loss of the Conservation Reserve Program fields, numbers of prairie birds such as chestnut-collared longspurs and Savannah sparrows have diminished substantially. And from 2021 onwards, I have not heard a single Baird’s sparrow on this route.
Further reading
Hill, J.M., Egan, J.F., Stauffer, G.E. & Diefenbach, D.R. (2014). Habitat availability is a more plausible explanation than insecticide acute toxicity for U.S. grassland bird species declines. PLOS One 9(5): e98064. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0098064&type=printable
North American Bird Conservation Initiative. (2025). The state of the birds, United States of America, 2025. https://www.stateofthebirds.org/2025/
Rodríguez, V. & Venegas. D. (2013, 12 June). El Conteo de Aves en Reproducción (Breeding Bird Surveys) en el Norte de México. Sonoran Joint Venture. https://sonoranjv.org/es/el-conteo-de-aves-en-reproduccion-breeding-bird-surveys-en-el-norte-de-mexico/
Sater, S. (2025, 1 January). Mystery of the twilight: birds at dusk and sustainable agriculture. Wild With Nature. https://wildwithnature.com/2025/01/01/mystery-of-the-twilight/
United States Geological Survey, Eastern Ecological Science Center. (2022). BBS trends 1966-2022. https://eesc.usgs.gov/MBR/

I appreciated listening to this Shane. Thanks for your respect and dedication. Jennifer
Hi Jennifer! Great to hear from you, and I’m glad you appreciated this story. Wishing you the best and I hope to see you someday soon!
Shane