Plants Archives - Wild With Nature

A cup of water in the drought

Shane Sater — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 13:47:00 +0000

The moon slides into the clouds above Oaxaca de Juárez.

The full moon hangs in the black western sky over the thorny matorral above the city of Oaxaca de Juárez, Mexico. Buff-collared nightjars (Antrostomus ridgwayi) give their stuttering songs from the rocky ground between sleeping, rain-drenched shrubs. A fog bank covers part of the valley, glowing with the city lights below.

The moon slips slowly into the fog. The eastern sky gradually lightens. Higher on the slope, a great horned owl (Bubo virginianus) hoots authoritatively as the dawn chorus begins all around.

The morning grows hot in the dwarf oak forest above Oaxaca de Juárez.

By 10:30 am, the matorral and the stunted oak forest above is almost completely silent. A brutal late-July sun breaks through the clouds. A blue-gray gnatcatcher (Polioptila caerulea) is giving its whining mew call from the oaks, accompanied by a distant chainsaw.

A dry summer

Stunted corn in the rocky soil at the edge of the city.

Yesterday’s rain was extremely welcome: this summer’s rainy season has been abnormally dry here so far. At the edge of the city, where houses replace matorral, someone has optimistically planted a small patch of corn in the rocky soil. The corn is sparse and stunted. I’m not convinced that corn would grow well in this spot even in a wet year. But the drought definitely isn’t helping.

I try not to think about the plants in our terreno near the Pacific coast. The small, rocky course of the Río Sal flows right past it; when we’re home, I can haul buckets of water from the river to help the plants through the worst of the dry spells. But when we’re gone, all I can do is keep hoping for rain.

El Niño

Sea surface temperature anomalies: how different the temperature is from the average for this time of year. Map for July 30, 2026, courtesy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

This year’s El Niño pattern keeps intensifying. The surface waters of the eastern equatorial Pacific are hotter than they’ve ever been recorded in July. We seem to be on track for an El Niño event that will break all the records. Biologist and international bird guide Álvaro Jaramillo points out that a large region of the northern Pacific is experiencing a major heat wave, too. The unusually warm, nutrient-poor water causes a drop in phytoplankton productivity, initiating a chain reaction throughout the food web. Fish, whales, and seabirds such as albatrosses and shearwaters must move or face the prospect of starvation.

This June and July, fishers and biologists have observed a sharp rise in numbers of dead seabirds along the Ecuadorian coast—among them sooty shearwaters (Ardenna grisea), blue-footed boobies (Sula nebouxii), and waved albatrosses (Phoebastria irrorata). And the El Niño is forecast to continue strengthening in the upcoming months. In summary, writes Álvaro, “this is not good for marine life.”

Thirsty corn

A nighttime thunderstorm flashes in front of the high peak of the Cerro Zempoaltepetl.

On Oaxaca’s Pacific coast, the general expectation in El Niño years is drought—coupled with more hurricanes than normal. This year’s dry summer is matching up. I hope we’ll get lucky and avoid the hurricanes. The ocean is warmer than normal here, too, though it’s pretty mild compared to the hotspots farther south and in the northwest Pacific.

At the beginning of August, we go with our Tío Carlos to visit his home pueblo, Tamazulápam del Espíritu Santo, high in the pine forests of the Sierra Mixe. I assume that here in the mountains it’s surely rained. I’m wrong. Hooded yellowthroats (Geothlypis nelsoni) sing from milpas where the corn is tall but thirsty-looking. In the evening, a far-away thunderstorm lights up the tall peak of the Cerro Zempoaltepetl. But the rains don’t come.

Intense summer

Rebecca Solnit, writing for the Guardian, summarizes the toll a runaway climate is exacting across the earth this summer. 20,000 deaths in Europe from brutal heat waves. 600 homes burned to the ground in and near Spokane, Washington; massive fires across much of Europe and North America. According to the World Meteorological Organization, this July was the hottest on record in Africa, Asia, and North America. Much of Europe is experiencing drought.

When the rains come, they can be just as destructive. Natasha May and Jonathan Watts report that in early July, parts of Bangladesh received well over a foot of rain [over 40 cm of rain] in 24 hours. From Afghanistan to India and Bangladesh, the heavy rains have destroyed homes and even taken lives; in China, this year’s typhoons have triggered the evacuations of hundreds of thousands. And just a few days ago, the collapse of a glacier in the Himalayas caused catastrophic flooding in Nepal and Tibet, leaving hundreds of people dead.

Summer is more intense than it used to be.

Rainy season

It’s more intense where we live on Oaxaca’s coastal plain, too. As a kid in the 1990s in her grandparents’ home near Huatulco, Carito remembers how the months of rainy season brought an abundance of life-giving moisture, cooler temperatures, relief from the brutal spring heat. It would often rain nonstop for a week, at times gentle and at times heavy, but a full week of constant moisture from the sky. Once the rains first began in May or June, I understood, we could expect at least a shower pretty much every afternoon.

But this year, the rains we were all counting on haven’t come. The thunder clouds gather each afternoon over the mountains of the Sierra Sur above us, promising moisture, then move on without a single drop. In three months of “rainy season,” we’ve had maybe 5 days with a soaking rain. The abuelo Teo, who almost never complains, talks frequently about how it’s so unusually hot and dry.

Return to the coast

Pre-dawn at the terreno.

We’ve been away from home for a week and a half now. It’s time to return to Huatulco. As we drive across Oaxaca’s central valley, Carito gets word that it’s raining on the coast. I try not to get my hopes up.

The pavement is wet as we descend the curves from Pluma Hidalgo to Huatulco, but it’s already drying out. Tomorrow will reveal the answer I’m hoping for and dreading. Have the plants survived?

The last sliver of the waning moon hangs in a dark blue sky over the terreno as the stars begin to fade. A collared forest-falcon (Micrastur semitorquatus) sings in the distance. The dawn chorus picks up speed. A couple of northern barred-woodcreepers (Dendrocolaptes sanctithomae) greet the morning with their questioning phrases. A black-headed saltator (Saltator atriceps) blasts out its call, moving to the top of the guarumbo tree (Cecropia obtusifolia), so close that my ears hurt. The sky grows softer, speckled with pastel clouds.

Good news

Hills of corn shooting up through a mulch of leaves and woody debris.

The morning light gives me the best news I could have hoped for. Between the brief rain, the minimally-disturbed soil, and the mulch of leaves and branches that I’ve left in place, almost everything has survived.

The corn I planted before we left is a foot high now. The weeds have grown, too, and I work my way along with the machete, cutting back espina de clavo vines and mala mujer, adding to the mulch layer.

A banana and the green monster of the bean vines.

The peanuts are flowering, though I can see that the leafcutter ants have been munching on them. The beans I planted in March along the arroyo have grown into a sprawling green monster, climbing over the hibiscus and okra, engulfing the young lime tree, clambering up the bananas. These beans are so vigorous now that I’m pretty sure they’re safe from leafcutter ants. I chop them back with the machete, uncovering the lime tree.

The papayas, with a patch of peanuts beyond them.

The papayas I started in pots and transplanted out, watering them with a bucket and shading them with branch trimmings, are waist high. The turmeric is lush, the ginger less so. Five breadfruit seedlings I bought in March are looking healthy. The jackfruit, pitahaya, and passionfruit are inching along but surviving. There’s not much to harvest yet, but there are a few things: lemongrass, chepil greens (Crotalaria sp.), mirasol chiles, yardlong beans, okra. Not too bad after a week and a half away.

Sustaining life

A young breadfruit tree next to a clump of lemongrass, with okra and yuca growing in the background.

As climate change makes life harsher, I’m thinking a lot about what I can do, together with my local plants and animals, to respond. Here, that looks like planting a lot of different things, annuals and especially perennials, edible leaves, tubers, and seeds. I hope that lots of different plants will mean more resilience. If a drought wipes out the corn, there’s still a good chance that the papaya, nopales, and passionfruit will survive.

A spot-breasted oriole (Icterus pectoralis) feeds on nectar from the viny shrub Combretum farinosum, February 2024.

Adapting to climate change looks like keeping the soil covered and protected, chopping down weeds as compost and mulch, sharing seeds and plants with family, friends, and neighbors. Even if our crops fail, hopefully someone else’s will make it through. It looks like planting not just food but also habitat for the animals that have no escape from the wild weather. On my to-do list is more cacahuanano (Gliricidia sepium), a leguminous tree whose flowers are a popular food for orioles and parakeets in January; two species of Combretum vine, whose showy comb-like flower sprays feed pollinating insects and birds from November through March; and the fall-flowering coquito tree (Lafoensia punicifolia), which is popular with various species of hummingbirds.

A long-billed starthroat (Heliomaster longirostris) feeds at the flowers of a coquito tree, November 2024.

And sometimes, after pouring months of sweat and love and aspirations into this earth, I have no choice but to step away for a week and a half in a drought, and hope. The less help these plants need from me, the better-equipped we’ll be for the unknown of the months ahead.

Thank goodness something survived.

A cup of water in the drought

The milpa, dry but still surviving, August 20.

It’s mid August. It’s been bone dry since we returned to Huatulco. The first of the fall migrant birds are arriving. In the last few days I’ve heard the fall’s first least flycatcher (Empidonax minimus), willow flycatcher (E. traillii), Louisiana waterthrush (Parkesia motacilla), and orchard oriole (Icterus spurius).

So far, the plants are still alive. Will it be enough—the intact soil, the mulch, the diverse plantings—to make it through the drought?

I don’t know. There are reports of milpas shriveling and drying up across the region: the central valley, the Oaxacan Mixteca, the coast, Puebla, Guerrero. I spend one afternoon watering the milpa with buckets, a cupful of water for each hopeful cluster of corn and beans. I keep waiting for rain. If we don’t get moisture in the next month or two, we’ll be entering the long dry season already parched. The river is now the lowest I’ve seen it, and I fear it’s just a matter of time before it dries up completely. In the long term, I want to add more organic matter to help retain water in this sandy soil. But for now, I can just dip cupfuls of water, and hope for rain.

Growing in the dark

Dusk.

It’s dusk now at the terreno. The hour of the insect chorus. Soon, the trees will darken into silhouettes, and the trill of the Middle American screech-owl (Megascops guatemalae) will carry across the forest. It’s time for me to leave, but the sounds and happenings of this place will stay with me. What will happen next week is uncertain, but this is what’s here now. The bats that flit across the dimming sky; the fireflies Carito used to see so many of when she was a kid. The nocturnal leafcutter ants carrying away pieces of the peanut plants; the emphatic yelps of the mottled owl (Strix virgata). The dew that falls every night, a tiny bit of moisture to help us through the drought. And all of these plant allies, growing in the dark. Growing to sustain us and our neighbors, we hope, come what may with this crazy climate.

A flight of amazons: noticing nature with Richard Louv

Shane Sater — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 18:09:16 +0000

The barrio.

June 8, 2026, Santa María Huatulco, Oaxaca, Mexico. It rained hard all morning and a good part of the afternoon as the skirts of Tropical Storm Boris came inland from the Pacific. The rain has finally stopped now, but the wind has arrived, in billowing gusts that sigh through the mangoes and coconut palms of our barrio.

The barrio is a noisy place: roosters, motorcycles, all of the sounds of dogs and humanity. Here isn’t normally where I slow down to notice nature. But today, after spending all day inside reading, I’m tired and cooped up. And so, inspired to notice this place anew, I climb the steep stairs up to the balcony with my parabola and binoculars, curious, ready to pay attention to the birds and other goings-on of nature around me.

Noticing my barrio

A male great-tailed grackle (Quiscalus mexicanus) lands in the top of the mango tree across the street, then another shows up alongside him. Both hold their heads pointed skyward in a display pose that looks very uncomfortable. Are they going to sing?

The Coca-cola truck arrives and parks in front of the corner store. Motorcycles pass by. Nothing. Finally, one male gives a single piercing whistle.

The Coca-cola truck starts up again and roars past, climbing up the sloping street in front of our house. The grackle whispers a little bit.

The wind has died down and a tentative drizzle has begun again. Other grackles and a yellow-winged cacique (Cassiculus melanicterus) sing in the distance as another motorcycle growls past.

The tegoche and the grackle

Russet-naped wren.

A russet-naped wren (Campylorhynchus humilis), or tegoche, gives his rolling song from the tangle of the passionfruit vine I planted in front of the house last year. Among so many loud noises, is it just coincidence that the common birds of the barrio—the tegoche, the grackles, the yellow-winged caciques—make a lot of noise, too?

Finally, a great-tailed grackle gives me a show. Another male, or the same one, perhaps. He’s a bit closer now, in the top of another tree, a species I don’t recognize with dark green, leathery, elliptical leaves. He gives a few chuck calls, then launches into ecstatic, unmusical song, fanning his huge tail and quivering his wings at shoulder height.

I wonder about the grackles. This afternoon I’ve seen several females flying past like arrows with food in their beaks: a sure sign that there are nestlings or fledglings around. But as common as these birds are in so many of Oaxaca’s towns, I realize I don’t even know where they build their nests.

Urban ecology

Blue-gray tanager.

Later, as I ride downtown with Carito on our motorcycle, I keep thinking about urban ecology. The Río Huatulco is rain-swollen, the color of oxidized clay. Downtown, gray-breasted martins (Progne chalybea) are darting over the rooftops and lined up on the electric wires. I’ve seen them once in a while in our barrio, but very infrequently. Are they lacking good nooks and crannies for nesting there? I also think about the blue-gray tanagers (Thraupis episcopus), another highly urban bird in this region. I often find these tanagers singing from perches among the dense buildings and traffic of downtown. But I’ve never found them in our barrio, and now I wonder why.

I read up on great-tailed grackles in Birds of the World. In this sort of urban context, I learn, the females typically build their basket-like nests high in big trees. The males I watched this afternoon were doing their typical territorial displays, it turns out: a strong hint that there is at least one nest in those trees where they were perching, right across the street from our house. Territorial males defend nesting trees. Females decide where to nest, often switching trees (and mates) from one nesting attempt to the next.

Richard Louv: Noticing

The rains of Tropical Storm Boris.

It was Richard Louv who inspired me to slow down and notice the ecology of our barrio. An internationally acclaimed author who has written extensively about nature and its importance in our lives, Richard’s newest book, just-published this June, is titled Noticing: Intimate Encounters with the Natural World. As the rains of Tropical Storm Boris drummed on our tin roof this morning, I was reading Noticing. Let’s hear from Richard, who was kind enough to narrate some excerpts for me:

Deep noticing can improve our physical, mental, and spiritual health and attaches us more deeply to place and to our neighbors of all species. It can illuminate and deepen known science and lead us to ask better scientific questions. It can enrich and inform our art and music and architecture. It can build compassion and our sense of reciprocity with other kinds of life.

Some days, it’s learning about the biology of great-tailed grackles among the traffic. To pause, to listen, to notice: to remember the vitality of life, wherever we find ourselves on this beautiful, fragile, resilient planet.

Otherworlds

Night silhouettes in the pine forest of Montana.

From encountering mountain lions in his backyard to contemplating the ripples of rainwater in the hollow of an oak, it is clear that Richard is a passionate, joyful observer of nature. He invites us to slow down and notice, to cultivate a childlike curiosity, to make space in our lives for wonder:

Otherworlds exist all around us. Most might appear to be ground fog, faint singing, or fleeting shadows moving through or above the trees. These worlds emerge from under the bark, from wind and clouds, from deep beneath our feet, but cannot be seen by eyes alone. The shapes, sounds, and perceptions are created by biological life and geological forces, or they may be imagined or projected from within us.

These otherworlds—the mycelium messages whispering through forests, the dance of predators and prey, the geopolitics of ants, the electrical fields of plants and bees, the nighttime biosphere of bioluminescence, our own glittering bodies—these and other realms have always existed. So easily dismissed as superstition, the feelings of awe they produce are captured in stories and myths inspired by living, breathing creatures; wind, rain, and snow; floating seeds. And falling embers.

The corn fields of June

Morning among the corn fields.

June 12. A tropical kingbird (Tyrannus melancholicus) gives his dawn song from a lone hormiguero tree (Cordia alliodora) among fallow corn fields made vibrant green by the rains. It’s quiet here: no motorcycles, no Coca-cola trucks. Just fields being reclaimed by a green profusion of grass tussocks, vines, and the bean-like plant known locally as nescafé. An expansive sky, scudded with unsettled gray clouds. Green fading to blue where the endless ridges of the Sierra Sur rise skywards. Half an hour ago, lightning flashed in the darkness over the Pacific Ocean.

The clouds gradually soften as the morning light increases. The sun comes out. A blue-black grassquit (Volatinia jacarina) is doing his courtship display on a grassy slope and he lets me get close, so close that I can hear the flutter of his wings as he hops into the air and gives his song—an unmusical sizzle like a drop of water on a hot comal.

Amazons and bobwhites

Looking towards the mountains of the Sierra Sur.

From time to time, I hear the unmistakable screams of a flock of lilac-crowned amazons (Amazona finschi) as they pass high overhead, bound for somewhere in the Sierra. Every time I hear them, I try to find the distant flock and count them. One of the largest parrot species of Mexico’s Pacific coast, the lilac-crowned amazon is at great risk from the pet trade, habitat loss, and climate change. I’m happy to see so many of them today.

A yellow-green vireo (Vireo flavoviridis) is giving his monotonous singsong from a spreading guanacastle tree (Enterolobium cyclocarpum) where a small pineapple field transitions to overgrown forest edge. And there, beyond the vireo, is the unmistakable song of a northern bobwhite (Colinus virginianus) quail: bob-WHITE!

I walk closer, intent on the gully where the bobwhite is singing. He sounds louder now, belting out his bob-WHITE! from his hiding spot. In the past three winters that I’ve spent here, I’ve never seen nor heard a bobwhite. His song is another sign of the rainy season, this time of nesting, singing, and growth.

Vitality and loss

It’s extra-special because I’ve heard that these quail have become rare here in recent years. Local wisdom is that many have died from eating pesticide-treated corn seed, as industrial production has increasingly replaced the traditional practice of saving untreated seed and planting native corn varieties. The bobwhite sings once more, then falls quiet.

To spend time in nature is to witness, again and again, the incredible vitality of the living world. At the same time, in the midst of all the converging environmental challenges of our time, it is to experience profound loss. Let’s hear again from Richard:

An acorn woodpecker (Melanerpes formicivorus) granary in the Sierra Sur of Oaxaca.

When I moved here, I convinced myself that escape from the city was a form of transcendence. As it has turned out, I feel a greater sense of loss here than I did in the city. In the city, the loss of nature is muted by freeway noise and distraction. Here, we cannot escape it.

Every year, we see more old oak skeletons leaning, crouching, and then falling to their knees. Oak bones are scattered throughout the forest like tusks in an elephant graveyard. The life of the acorn woodpecker is linked to that of the oaks. The birds’ habitat shrinks each year. As the oak groves vanish, so will the woodpecker dynasties, regardless of how much wealth they have stored in their granary banks, gutters, or vent pipes. Can we be a transcendentalist in a world with no escape from such threats? Experiencing nature brings us closer to beauty, wonder, and creation, but that closeness makes the ultimate threat even harder—because we become more intimately aware of what we are losing.

Imagining a future

A small whitebark pine in the mountains of Montana.

Perhaps we need a new transcendentalism, a set of beliefs for this age—not an acceptance of destruction but a determination on both the global and the local scale not only to conserve what remains but also to create new natural environments.

When we consider our path to the future, we usually think of the way technology shapes what lies ahead, or we consider war, charismatic leaders, education, religion, or the comet that might come out of nowhere shattering the future. We think primarily about our own species, considering ourselves at the pinnacle of all life. We mainly wonder what will happen to us.

What would a future be like in which the welfare of all species was considered—a future in which we would recognize that we are part of nature, that all of nature is within us, and that we are part of a larger family?

In that future, we would shift from taking life to giving life. We would bring back the eastern ash, the whitebark pine, and the disappearing black oaks; we would revive the plummeting insect populations and the North American songbirds, whose numbers have fallen by a third over the past fifty years. In the meantime, our most effective antidote to ecological anxiety is noticing, cherishing, and protecting the wildness that survives within our animate circles.

A flight of amazons

Lilac-crowned amazons flying over.

I can hear another flock of lilac-crowned amazons approaching. I scan the southern sky and spot them, an irregular line of broad-winged specks, necks thrust forward, wings beating hard. There are 17 in this group.

Below them, the landscape spreads out to the horizon: from the Pacific Ocean behind them, across the lush green coastal plain, to the blue foothills of the Sierra ahead. I don’t know where they’re going or what they see, how they’ll survive this year’s El Niño of drought and hurricanes. But I can imagine, and wonder. I can be inspired by Richard Louv to seek nature wherever I am, to cultivate my curiosity, to notice deeply and imagine otherworlds.

And from these moments of wonder, I create a map of stories spread out like the landscape below the lilac-crowned amazons: stories to remember and stories to share, stories to accompany me through life on this fragile, resilient planet. Great-tailed grackles hide their nests in the mangoes of our barrio. A mountain lion screams outside Richard Louv’s house in the mountains of southern California. And this morning in an hour and a half, 235 lilac-crowned amazons cross the Huatulco sky, bound for the mountains. Maybe someday I’ll learn where they’re going.

The owl and the leafcutter ants

Shane Sater — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 20:15:44 +0000

This podcast is the second in a series. It will make more sense if you read/listen to the first one, A familiar voice a long way from home, first. Happy listening!

April 2025, western Montana, USA. Sounds of spring in the forest…

Male Williamson’s sapsucker.

A male Williamson’s sapsucker (Sphyrapicus thyroideus) taps on a shrubby juniper trunk as the evening light fades. He flies to a wood fencepost along the gravel road that climbs west into the forest, drums hesitantly.

It’s breeding season for owls. Later that same night, I’m cooking dinner over my tiny camp stove when a northern saw-whet owl (Aegolius acadicus) begins singing. I drop dinner and grab my microphone.

It’s a cool night, low 40s Fahrenheit. There’s a waxing three quarters moon to the south. I listen in silence and the tiny owl keeps singing for minutes, invisible among the dark Douglas-firs (Pseudotsuga menziesii).

Stinging nettles and jerusalem-artichokes

Bellflower greens.

Recently returned from Oaxaca, I am bringing all the inspiration the abuelo Teo has given me for local food and mixing it with my field biology work. I gather stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) greens as a red-naped sapsucker (Sphyrapicus nuchalis) drums on a cottonwood branch.

Dinner with bellflower greens.

In my mom’s yard, there are lots of weeds and other plants to eat: dandelion (Taraxacum officinale), garlic, walking onion, masses of tender, mild bellflower (Campanula spp., including C. rapunculoides) greens. Young shoot tips of hops (Humulus lupulus), the first time I’ve tried them. We dig jerusalem-artichokes (Helianthus tuberosus) with friends and I pickle them with walking onions, ginger, jalapeños, and black pepper. I buy grass-fed beef from Oxbow Cattle Company.

The Pacific wrens (Troglodytes pacificus) are singing in the forest and I find a pair of chesnut-backed chickadees (Poecile rufescens) excavating a nest cavity in a dead fir. I eat tostadas that the abuela sent me and I think of Oaxaca.

Pickled jerusalem-artichokes.

The flammulated owl

Camping with oyster mushrooms.

On our video calls, Carito shows me the garden in our house. The tomatoes I planted over the winter are bearing fruit and the passionfruit is growing. On an early May field biology trip to far northwestern Montana, I build a campfire along a two-track through a selectively logged ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) stand and cook up the oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus) that I found in the morning. A flammulated owl (Psiloscops flammeolus), recently arrived from the poorly-understood winter range in Mexico and Central America, sings briefly in the distance.

Camping food: ramen noodles with stinging nettle greens.

My dinners in the field are typically rice ramen noodles that I cook over my tiny gas stove. In this season, I often add a few handfuls of stinging nettle greens.

A marsh, an owl, and more stinging nettles

Deepening darkness over Carey Lake WMA, Carey, Idaho.

In the middle of May, I make a long road trip to the nearest Mexican consulate in Boise, Idaho to request a Mexican visa. On the way back, I listen to great horned owls (Bubo virginianus) and sandhill cranes (Antigone canadensis) at dusk from the edge of a marsh near Carey, Idaho. As the sky gets darker and the Canada geese (Branta canadensis) settle in for the night, I’m absolutely delighted to glimpse a pale white owl flying silently over the marsh. The owl plunges into the bulrushes, clearly hunting. I wait, attentive. Half a minute later it emerges from the shadows and flies north, right past me. I get a good look at its heart-shaped facial disk in the deepening darkness: an American barn owl (Tyto furcata).

A thriving stinging nettle patch in the canyon.

I camp in a dry, rocky canyon and wake up to the gentle clucking of the chukars (Alectoris chukar), a chicken-like bird of rough, arid slopes. A Bullock’s oriole (Icterus bullockii) sings at full volume from the willows. In general, though, the canyon is eerily quiet for mid-May, without the bustle of activity from songbirds passing through in their spring migration that I was expecting to find. I gather stinging nettle from a massive, healthy patch where a seep emerges from the rocks.

A Cassin’s finch feeds on immature Siberian elm samaras.

Later that day, I stop at an irrigation pond where a big flock of Cassin’s finches (Haemorhous cassinii), 70 of them, are feeding on the tender, leaf-like green fruits of the Siberian elms (Ulmus pumila). I join the Cassin’s finches and gather a bag of elm fruits too. That evening, my ramen features not just stinging nettle, but Siberian elm as well.

Ramen with stinging nettle greens and Siberian elm samaras.

Hoping, trying, and failing

An unhappy tomato plant.

Oaxaca, Mexico, April 2026. A Bell’s vireo (Vireo bellii) sings from the dense second growth of an abandoned field. Soon it will be migrating north to a breeding range that extends from northern Mexico to South Dakota and Indiana.

The themes here are much the same, but so many things are different. Growing new plants is a lot of hard, sweaty work, a lot of hoping, trying, and failing. The sesame (Sesamum indicum) doesn’t sprout. The tomatoes curl their leaves with displeasure—or maybe it’s a virus. Half of the lemongrass (Cymbopogon citratus) that I transplant from a friend’s garden dies.

One day I find a burro roaming around the arenilla and chase it off. That launches a major fencing project, harvesting bamboo rails and lashing them to trees along the boundaries. The abuelo shows me that the bejuco tronador vine, whose wild tangles I’ve spent weeks trimming, is strong and flexible when freshly cut, good for lashing.

The leafcutter ants

Defoliated bean plants.

One morning, half of the beans are completely defoliated. The perimeter fencing isn’t finished yet; first I blame the burro, then I suspect it’s deer. I know that no bamboo fence will discourage those tenacious herbivores.

Leafcutter ants at night, carrying away the bean plants.

The next morning some of the radishes and Asian broccoli are nibbled to the ground. I cut bamboo fencerails in frustrated incompetence. The day after, I notice a few green leaves placed carefully on the ground under a defoliated bean plant, chunks cut out of them in tidy curves. Now I know what is eating the beans. It’s neither a deer nor a burro: it’s the dreaded arriera, the voracious (but ecologically fascinating) leafcutter ant. I return at night with a headlamp, observing the ants as a northern potoo (Nyctibius jamaicensis) sings hoarsely from the bamboo along the river. I follow their trails through viny tangles, read about their biology, try to learn how to tolerate them or manage them without poisoning the ecosystem.

Squash flowers and mangoes

A male squash flower.

Still, in the midst of everything, most of this great diversity of plants is growing. The squash is blooming: I harvest male squash blossoms so that Carito can make squash flower quesadillas. I make eggs one morning with radish greens, Asian broccoli tops and yard long beans (Vigna unguiculata). The next day, the arriera has mowed the rest of the radishes down to the ground. The mirasol chilies are almost ripe, and the first corn I planted is waist high.

For the moment, though, most of the local food we’re eating is from plants that we didn’t tend. Coconuts from a few semi-abandoned trees along the coast. Mangos from the neighborhood and from friends. Oranges from the orchard the abuelo Teo planted, decades-old trees that he watered by hand for the first two years, carrying a bucket up the hill from the river.

Red-breasted chat by day, potoo by night

Corn, squash, and what’s left of the beans.

Meanwhile, every day brings more bad news from the US, from a democracy being ripped apart from the inside. On the computer I work with my biologist colleague Grant Hokit on a niche model for our Montana tick ecology project that has been my work for the past two years. In 2027, if all goes well, I hope to return to Montana and continue studying ticks. In the midst of everything, I think of Montana’s stinging nettles, bellflowers and oyster mushrooms, northern saw-whet owls and Pacific wrens.

Fencing with bamboo and the bejuco tronador vine.

And meanwhile, a northbound orchard oriole (Icterus spurius) sings from a coastal wetland while thousands of migrating Franklin’s gulls (Leucophaeus pipixcan) rest where the Río Copalita meets the Pacific Ocean. At the arenilla, a red-breasted chat (Granatellus venustus) sings by day, a northern potoo at night. I plant taro (Colocasia esculenta), yams (Dioscorea alata), chaya (Cnidoscolus aconitifolius), and tomatoes. And every day, the corn, squash, and bananas keep growing among the defoliated beans.

A familiar voice a long way from home

Shane Sater — Fri, 01 May 2026 19:27:15 +0000

Sunset in the pine forests of the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, Mexico.

Dusk at the end of March in the pines of Oaxaca’s Sierra Norte. An American robin (Turdus migratorius) sings to the twilight and I ache with homesickness. The mountains roll northwest in vast blue silhouettes. Montana is incomprehensibly far away. The song of the robin carries me the thousands of miles in an instant and I’m home, Missoula at the cusp of spring, the cottonwood buds swelling along the river, the pileated woodpeckers (Dryocopus pileatus) calling. I could hop on a jet, worsen the climate crisis, and be home tomorrow. But my decision is made. This year I won’t be going back.

The robin keeps singing. The Mexican whip-poor-wills (Antrostomus arizonae) join in with their burry cries. This robin is here, though its familiar voice makes me long to be there, and here it will most likely stay, at the southern tip of a vast breeding range that spans most of North America. And this year, so will I.

The arenilla

Biodiverse agriculture in the terreno of the abuelo Teo. Nopales, banana, and soursop.

I never planned to divide my life between two countries, but love intervened. And this year, as much as I miss Montana, my friends, my family, my summer field biology work and the land I know well there, there are many reasons to stay. My once-freeish United States is under attack by its president, and Carito would be at risk there. Climate change continues to intensify. All of the air travel back and forth hurts. And here, Carito and I have taken on a big project.

Near the terreno of her abuelo Teo is a patch of earth that hasn’t been cultivated in a few decades. Since I’ve lived here, I’ve gotten more and more excited about local food, all of the knowledge that exists here, all of the possibilities for growing food ecologically. The abuelo Teo in particular inspires me with the type of biodiverse agriculture he practices. And so, at some point this winter as I was talking about wanting to grow sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas) and yuca (Manihot esculenta), he told me: there’s that corner down by the river, the sandy arenilla. Clear it, plant it. Go for it.

Passionfruit and sweet potatoes

My mom and Carito with the banana plant we found within the dense vegetation of the arenilla.

And so, in these months, I’ve been going to the arenilla with a machete and a handsaw. Some days Carito has joined me, other days she’s brought me lunch. When my mom visited, she helped too. I’ve been getting to know this tangle of vines, herbs, and young trees. Opening up sunlight, a small patch of disturbance in the tropical forest. Reading, planting, and imagining. The traditional techniques of the milpa, agroforestry systems of the Pacific island nations, which plants need the moisture along the arroyo and which can survive in the drier earth above. Getting ready for May and June, the start of the rainy season: planting time.

Many plants to learn: bananas (Musa spp.), sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum), taro (Colocasia esculenta), coconut (Cocos nucifera). The fast-growing plants of the milpa: corn (Zea mays), beans (Phaseolus vulgaris), squash (Cucurbita spp.), gourds (Lagenaria siceraria), papayas (Carica papaya), chiles (Capsicum spp.), tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum). Passionfruit vines (Passiflora edulis), sweet potatoes (Ipomoeas batata), peanuts (Arachis hypogaea), yams (Dioscorea spp.), yuca (Manihot esculenta) and bamboo, hibiscus (Hibiscus sabdariffa) and lemongrass (Cymbopogon citratus). Cacao (Theobroma cacao), ginger (Zingiber officinale), turmeric (Curcuma longa). Breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis), limes (Citrus spp.), starfruit (Averrhoa carambola), black persimmon (Diospyros nigra). Chayote (Sechium edule) and luffa gourd (Luffa aegyptiaca), sesame (Sesamum indicum) and okra (Abelmoschus esculentus). And still, Montana tugs at me. Some days I feel very torn in two.

Tinamous near the orange grove

Dawn, April 1st.

But as Trump wages a senseless war in Iran, as Montana passes from a dry, dry winter into a climate-crazy spring, as the global fertilizer trade contracts abruptly and the spinning plates of industrial agriculture teeter, something about tending this land makes sense to me.

Clay-colored thrush.

April 1st, 2026. The thicket tinamous (Crypturellus cinnamomeus) sing from the forest near the orange grove as the pale eastern sky awaits the sunrise. The tinamous are close, the closest I’ve ever heard them. The trees were just silhouettes against a rosy dawn as I walked past the terreno of the abuelo Teo 20 minutes ago, but now there’s enough light to read by. Below me, the dirt track drops down toward the arenilla, and I can see the clearing along the arroyo where I’ve planted milpa and bananas. A clay-colored thrush (Turdus grayi), one of the coastal cousins of the American robin of the sierra, sings from the top of a palo mulato (Bursera simaruba). New leaves and flower buds are emerging around it. And from the orange grove I hear something else, a bird that sounds like a squeaky toy—a sulphur-bellied flycatcher (Myiodynastes luteiventris)! From its South American winter range, this flycatcher has arrived to spend the summer here in Oaxaca.

Those that migrate and those that stay

Young milpa in the moister part of the arenilla: corn, beans, and squash with papaya, okra, and banana.

It’s my first time hearing this bird. In past years, I’ve always left for Montana before it arrives. The song of the clay-colored thrush, the arrival of the sulphur-bellied flycatcher, the full-on chorus of the thicket tinamous: spring is arriving here, too, in the heat of the dry season in the Oaxacan tropical forest. Warblers and vireos are on their way north. Say hi to Montana for me when you get there, my friends. And here, this year, I’ll stay, with the thicket tinamous, the milpa, and the sulphur-bellied flycatcher.

Fall migration

Shane Sater — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 11:55:34 +0000

Moonlight on the Russian-olives.

Russian-olives (Elaeagnus angustifolia) dappled silver with September moonlight. Almost silent, tree crickets and a distant dog. I look up at the starry night and think about all the birds I can’t hear. Are they up there tonight, flying?

Migration, vast and shifting—I’ll never really comprehend it. But there are glimpses.

The fall flocks. 3600 common grackles (Quiscalus quiscula) streaming past in waves, flooding the cottonwoods, an out-of-tune orchestra belting out at full volume. Squadrons of grackles, heads bronzed in the morning light. Fifteen minutes later, they’re gone.

A juvenile cedar waxwing feeds on fall chokecherries.

The birds of summer, suddenly gone without warning. Back to the Marias River, the place of no black-billed cuckoos (Coccyzus erythropthalmus) this year. Where did the 45 northern house wrens (Troglodytes aedon) of July go? A cedar waxwing (Bombycilla cedrorum) flock trills from bare evening branches, descending to feed among orange-tinged chokecherry (Prunus virginiana) leaves. Otherwise, quiet like a deserted town. The brown thrashers (Toxostoma rufum), the mountain bluebirds (Sialia currucoides), the violet-green swallows (Tachycineta thalassina) feeding young. Gone. The bank swallow (Riparia riparia) colony silent, too late for goodbyes.

Birds in migration

Wilson’s warbler.

But wait now, quietly, intently. Watch the chokecherries, tune your eyes to the silent flit of a foraging warbler. Strain your ears for chips and seeps. The chokecherries are alive with birds from the north. White-throated sparrows (Zonotrichia albicollis) and Lincoln’s sparrows (Melospiza lincolnii), yellow-rumped warblers (Setophaga coronata) and Wilson’s warblers (Cardellina pusilla). And a different sharp call, a quick movement, a glimpse of something interesting. There it is again, gray and bright yellow in a different pattern. A mourning warbler (Geothlypis philadelphia), a bird that nests in shrubby areas in the boreal forest, the first time I’ve ever seen one.

Mourning warbler.

Sparrows and screech-owls

Eastern screech-owl habitat, pre-dawn.

Sometimes there’s nothing. Plains cottonwood (Populus deltoides) leaves flutter their final goodbyes to summer, and I wonder where the migratory flocks are.

And then there are times when a weedy riverbank comes alive with sparrows, seeps and chips among the tumble-mustards (Sisymbrium loeselii) and cockleburs (Xanthium strumarium).

A cold dawn and an eastern screech-owl (Megascops asio) whinnies from the cottonwoods.

A neglected field of brush piles and Canada thistle (Cirsium arvense) down bursts with sparrows, hundreds of them, slender chipping (Spizella passerina) and clay-colored sparrows (Spizella pallida), bulky white-throated and white-crowned (Zonotrichia leucophrys) sparrows, the metallic tink call of a swamp sparrow (Melospiza georgiana).

A Lincoln’s sparrow among the Canada thistle.

Clay-colored sparrow in fall migration.

A white-throated sparrow at the edge of a chokecherry thicket.

The curves of fall migration

Migrating birds don’t always fly south. This fall I study range maps, learn the birds of the boreal forest that nest due north of my state, but whose migrations curve east through the Great Plains. I’ve never seen them in Helena. But out here in the shelterbelts, town parks, and green ash draws on the eastern Montana plains, with luck you might find them:

Fall comes to a green ash draw in eastern Montana.

Mourning warblers, Cape May warblers (Setophaga tigrina), and purple finches (Haemorhous purpureus),

Cape May warbler.

Purple finch (a female or juvenile).

Philadelphia vireos (Vireo philadelphicus), purple martins (Progne subis), and ruby-throated hummingbirds (Archilochus colubris),

Philadelphia vireo.

specks of feathers and fast-beating hearts on a journey I’ll never really comprehend.

One morning watching these chokecherries and weeds and brush piles overflow with southbound birds

Chokecherries on a cold (and very birdy) September morning.

is all is takes for me to fall in love, again and again

with chokecherries

weed patches

cottonwood leaves fluttering goodbye

and screech-owls singing in the cold September dawn.

A young white-crowned sparrow feeds among a weedy October patch of kochia (Kochia scoparia).

Afterword

This story is really special to me—and extra special because it’s my last one before I go on hiatus for a while. I’ve shared some more details about that towards the end of the podcast.

Independent podcasting isn’t easy, which is one of the reasons I’m taking a break for a while. In the meanwhile, all of the ways that you support this show remain greatly appreciated! Spreading the word about Wild With Nature is huge, and leaving a rating on your favorite podcast platform helps too. And of course, my Patreon supporters are what’s kept me going this long. (If you’re a current supporter, don’t worry—I’m pausing your monthly charges until I start podcast production again.) If you’re not a supporter but would like to look into it, please check out https://www.patreon.com/wildwithnature. Podcasting can be lonely at times, but knowing you’re there with me makes it much less so.

The post Fall migration appeared first on Wild With Nature.

The silence before the cuckoo’s song

Shane Sater — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 16:52:59 +0000

Black-billed cuckoo habitat along Highwood Creek.

July 9, 2025, Highwood Creek, Chouteau County, Montana. I hear it as soon as I step out of the car, that resonant, knocking cucucu that I’ve been listening for all across Montana this summer. Black-billed cuckoo (Coccyzus erythropthalmus)! My hands are shaking and my heart is thumping as I start recording with my phone, just in case the cuckoo doesn’t sing for very long. I hurry to pull my parabolic recorder out of the car, turn it on, waste precious seconds debating whether to bother with the headphones. I slip one headphone on, aim the parabola, and press record. The cuckoo keeps singing.

The wild red raspberries (Rubus idaeus) are ripe along Highwood Creek and the fireweed (Chamerion angustifolium) is blooming. The cuckoo is singing from a patch of cottonwood gallery forest sandwiched between the creek, the gravel county road, and a driveway. I walk a bit closer along the road. The singing stops. A slender bird with a long tail and a very white belly sails across the driveway and disappears into a dense clump of chokecherries.

Somewhere among the forest

The forest along Highwood Creek, looking downstream.

The cuckoo sings again from the chokecherries (Prunus virginiana), cucucu, cucucu, rhythmic and soothing. A minute or two later, I hear it again farther downstream. It must have slipped out of the chokecherries without me noticing.

Then it falls silent. I wait 15 minutes. Nothing. Only the song of a black-headed grosbeak (Pheucticus melanocephalus) fills the cottonwoods. But the cuckoo is out there, somewhere, a silent shadow among the shrubs. The memory of its voice reverberates in my body: a mystery. A reminder. A call to understand. There is more going on in this changeable forest than we can possibly know.

It was music that brought Anna Kurtin to the cuckoos—music and a curiosity about secretive wildlife. After a childhood near Austin, Texas and a biology degree at the University of Texas at Austin, she began working for the National Park Service in Arizona studying bats and spotted owls. The challenge of finding these elusive animals and a childhood love of music—playing percussion, specifically—came together to draw her deeper into acoustic methods of monitoring mysterious wildlife. And in 2022 this interest brought her to the University of Montana, where a team of biologists and conservationists had already begun to coalesce around black-billed cuckoos and was seeking a graduate student.

July silence

Nighttime in the cottonwood forest.

In Montana there’s a long time in the July night when the cottonwood forest is nearly silent. Nobody sings; only the faint burbling of the water ripples the stillness. Perhaps a fledgling great horned owl (Bubo virginianus) screeches once in a while. And amid the silence, if you’re lucky, you might hear the croaking flight call of a black-billed cuckoo passing by overhead. In some parts of the breeding range, observers have heard as many as six cuckoos flying past in the night, making these calls. Why do they do this? We still don’t know. Are they venturing forth to forage, heading out to feed on caterpillars in the dark? Sometimes people also hear cuckoos singing during the night, that distinctive cucucu ringing out from the depths of the forest.

If only we could be in multiple places at once, listening night and day for the sound of a cuckoo. Perhaps then we could begin to answer some of the many mysteries about these birds. But there was a way to do this, it turned out, a device known as an autonomous recording unit (ARU). An ARU is simply a battery-powered microphone with a memory card. By placing ARUs along eastern Montana’s river valleys, Anna’s team hoped to be able to find more cuckoos.

In search of black-billed cuckoos

Black-billed cuckoo team members from Montana Audubon (Bo Crees, Amy Seaman) and the University of Montana Bird Ecology Lab (Lynette Williams) install an ARU. Photo by Peter Dudley.

In 2022 and 2023, Anna and her collaborators—Dr. Erim Gómez and the Charismatic Minifauna Lab at the University of Montana, Anna Noson and the University of Montana Bird Ecology Lab, Dr. Andy Boyce and the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, and biologists at Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks and Montana Audubon—set out ARUs in a variety of habitats along the Missouri, Musselshell, and Yellowstone Rivers. These general areas were already known from previous sightings and habitat modeling as some of the best in Montana for black-billed cuckoos. But the team wanted to gain a finer-scale understanding of where cuckoos were, where they weren’t, and why.

They programmed each ARU to record sounds for four half-hour blocks each day, two at night and two during the morning. (If they had left the units running 24/7, they would have rapidly depleted the batteries and memory cards.) They left recorders out from early to late summer to capture the black-billed cuckoo breeding period.

38,000 hours

Orchard oriole.

Two seasons of the constantly-changing music of the cottonwood forest elapsed. Yellow-breasted chats (Icteria virens) sang, and orchard orioles (Icterus spurius). Great horned owls hooted in the night. July brought an emergence of hungry baby birds, and a flood of fledgling northern house wrens (Troglodytes aedon) begged harshly. The battery-powered microphones flicked on and off, logging it all in half-hour snapshots. In all, over 38,000 hours of audio. And somewhere within those thousands and thousands of hours, perhaps, were the songs and flight calls of black-billed cuckoos.

Now came the many months of intensive computer work. Developing a machine-learning algorithm with collaborators from the Kitzes Lab at the University of Pittsburgh to sort out cuckoo sounds from everything else. Listening to countless hours of audio to test the algorithm. Compiling habitat data the team had collected in the field. Building statistical models to account for factors such as background sound, vegetation density, and time of year that might affect cuckoo detections. More models to characterize the habitats where cuckoos called and whether the same habitat factors also correlated with frequency of calling. All of the quiet, painstaking, methodical work of a Master’s project.

Finding Montana’s black-billed cuckoos

Black-billed cuckoo at Dailey Lake, Park County, Montana, June 2025. Photo by Ian van Coller.

At last, the results. Of the 41 sites where Anna and her team placed ARUs in 2022—all of them spots where cuckoos had been observed in previous years—they documented black-billed cuckoos at 12. In 2023, they expanded their sampling to 107 sites, including both known cuckoo spots from previous years and never-before-surveyed sites spread across multiple habitats within the same river valleys. That year, they found cuckoos at 20 of 107 sites.

In 2022, Anna and her team fine-tuned when to set out ARUs and when to pick them up to capture a full cuckoo breeding season. 2023 gave them this full seasonal picture—and they found that calling activity varied strongly throughout the summer. Black-billed cuckoos called relatively frequently throughout June and the first half of July, during the day and less frequently at night. But after July 18, calling activity declined precipitously. If 2023 was at all representative, it would seem that the chances of hearing a cuckoo in Montana after mid-July become very slim.

Modeling cuckoo habitat

An extensive cottonwood forest with a tall, shrubby understory along the Yellowstone River in Richland County, Montana. Andrew Guttenberg and Dalton Spencer photographed a black-billed cuckoo here in 2022.

The habitat models added more detail to previous notions of what an “ideal” black-billed cuckoo habitat might look along eastern Montana’s rivers. To find a place that might be good for cuckoos: Look for landscapes where the river’s-edge forest canopy is extensive—landscapes, perhaps, where the cottonwoods (Populus spp.), willows (Salix spp.), and green ashes (Fraxinus pennsylvanica) stretch for miles. As you walk across this landscape, look for patches hundreds of yards wide where there’s lots of variation in the canopy height of the forest, where old trees and younger ones mix.

Search for spots where there are tall shrubs like chokecherries in the understory. Stay away from places where the conifers intrude and avoid areas close to the river crowded with single-age stands of young cottonwood and willow saplings. Instead, look for patches with lots of vertical complexity: areas where younger and older trees mix, creating a more variable canopy. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll hear a cuckoo.

Return to the Marias River

Extensive cottonwood forest along the Marias River on a moonlit night in July.

July 6, 2025. In three more days I’ll get to hear the black-billed cuckoo along Highwood Creek, but I still have no clue of that. This evening I’ve returned to the Marias River where I listened for cuckoos in early June, the patch where Anna Fasoli heard them singing in 2021. Common nighthawks (Chordeiles minor) peent in the gathering darkness as I hike down to the river and pitch my tent near the cottonwoods. But then the night deepens into that July silence. No cuckoo song reaches my ears, no croaking flight call. No black-billed cuckoo wakes me from my dreams.

A brown thrasher carrying food to a fledgling.

I get up in the morning to the shrill calls of a family group of American kestrels (Falco sparverius) as the sun lights up the trees. An adult brown thrasher (Toxostoma rufum) feeds a begging juvenile, then launches into an extended bout of song. A flood of young northern house wrens begs from the forest undergrowth. The brown thrasher keeps singing for a long time—loudly—though I didn’t hear him at all last month. Will I have the same luck with a cuckoo? But as I wander around in this constantly-changing forest, neither a croak nor a cucucu reaches my ears.

When we don’t find cuckoos

Potential black-billed cuckoo habitat along the Marias River, but no sign of them here in 2025.

If I could convert myself into a sound recorder and stay here for weeks or months, would I finally hear a cuckoo? Or is this extensive cottonwood forest like most of Anna Kurtin’s 2022 sites: a place that had cuckoos in a past year, a place where the habitat seems okay, but with no cuckoos now?

Anna points out how variable these birds can be from year to year, or even within a single summer. There’s the research of Claire Johnson and Thomas Benson in Illinois, which strongly suggests that black-billed cuckoos can move widely even within a single breeding season. All of it highlights that for a species so secretive and so mobile, even answering a simple question like “where are the cuckoos?” is incredibly difficult.

Fall migration

September in the cottonwood forest. Will a migrating cuckoo give its flight call as it passes overhead?

We don’t know exactly when black-billed cuckoos leave Montana in the fall. Across the breeding range, sightings diminish markedly between August and September. Migrating at night, they join a tide of birds in motion, a nocturnal wave headed south. They pass by almost unnoticed, guided by the stars. An invisible marathon through dark skies, a lonely flight call over the sleeping earth.

Sunrise in the Sierra Sur of Oaxaca, Mexico. Black-billed cuckoos have never been seen in this area, but there are reports during migration throughout Central America just a bit farther south and east.

By the end of September they start arriving in parts of Honduras and Nicaragua, where the Middle American screech-owls (Megascops guatemalae) trill at dawn. They keep advancing southward and make it to Colombia, Ecuador, the Amazon region of Peru and Bolivia. And then they almost disappear. For the three months between December and February, all that we know about black-billed cuckoos comes from a few dozen observations. Even where they are in this season is rather a mystery—let alone what they’re doing, what their lives are like in this vast, biodiverse region. And if it’s hard to study such a secretive bird in June and July, it’s even harder in January, when the cuckoos are silent.

Black-billed cuckoos across the Americas

A black-billed cuckoo along the Missouri River downstream of Loma, Montana, June 2021. Photo by Bo Crees.

But here, too, are people who fall in love with the cuckoos and try to understand them. During the Covid pandemic, a team of researchers at SELVA, a Colombian non-profit dedicated to conservation in the Neotropics, began a study of black-billed cuckoos. The team carried out cuckoo censuses in Ecuador and identified an important region for nonbreeding cuckoos in El Oro Province, in southern Ecuador. They also fitted three cuckoos in Colombia with radio transmitters, hoping to learn more about their migratory paths using the international Motus network of radio receivers.

Although two of the cuckoos with radio transmitters disappeared without a further trace, one of them later showed up in North America, pinging Motus towers near Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. But sadly, the project’s funding did not continue. The biology of the black-billed cuckoo remains little-known in this region; but the team from SELVA is determined to find a way to continue with this research in the near future.

The more that I learn about black-billed cuckoos, the more they fascinate me. A migration in the dark; a silent and little-known life in the tropical forest; a population decline that we still don’t understand well. Waiting in the silence of the July night among Montana’s cottonwoods, almost without breathing, waiting for the voice of a cuckoo. You might hear it, but most likely you won’t. And among all of the unknowns, a network of people, from Montana and Illinois to Colombia and Ecuador, who join together to try to understand cuckoos and help them.

Afterword

Something that I find very striking about black-billed cuckoos is the degree of collaboration they seem to inspire. Many thanks to Anna Kurtin and Dr. Camila Gómez (SELVA) for their participation in this story, and to their research teams for all of their contributions to our understanding of cuckoos. To learn more about all of the ongoing research and conservation projects at SELVA and to support this important work, visit https://www.selva.org.co/. Thanks to Harriet Marble for telling me about a possible black-billed cuckoo report near the Highwood Mountains, which finally allowed me to observe one! Finally, thanks to Tim Spahr for his permission to include his black-billed cuckoo song and flight call recordings in the podcast, and to Ian van Coller, Bo Crees, and Peter Dudley for letting me include their photos (one of Bo’s photos is also featured in this page’s banner).

Birds in the wheat: industrial agriculture and declining birds

Shane Sater — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 14:55:10 +0000

Pre-dawn sky over wheat fields and the distant Bears Paw Mountains, Chouteau County, MT.

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

Wheat fields before dawn.

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

Ready to do the Breeding Bird Survey.

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

Thick-billed longspur.

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.

A chemical fallow field in a no-till wheat system. The tall stubble helps hold the soil and store up moisture, readying the field for another wheat crop. Herbicide treatments prevent weeds from growing. Otherwise, they would rob moisture from the future crop.

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

A pasture dotted with sagebrush, not plowed under to grow wheat, still provides habitat for Brewer’s sparrows, grasshopper sparrows, and chestnut-collared longspurs.

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?

Lark bunting at the edge of a pasture. One of many species absent from the wheat fields that are visible in the background.

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?

A patch of tansy mustard (Descurainia sophia) withers after herbicide treatment at the edge of a chemical fallow field.

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?

Horned lark.

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

Sunset over 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

A black-necked stilt forages at the edge of Lonesome Lake.

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

A chestnut-collared longspur on territory in native prairie habitat.

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.

Pileated woodpeckers and reciprocity

Shane Sater — Sun, 01 Jun 2025 17:11:46 +0000

This story is the third and final in a series about a pair of pileated woodpeckers (Dryocopus pileatus) along the Clark Fork River near Missoula, Montana, USA. If you haven’t heard the rest of the story, you can start with part 1… or just jump in here!

The cottonwood forest after the windstorm.

When I next return to the pileated woodpecker forest, it’s early August, a hot afternoon with evening approaching. Wildfire smoke from Saskatchewan blurs the mountains into vague gray shapes and a western wood-pewee (Contopus sordidulus) sings lazily in the distance. The forest has changed dramatically since my last visit. Two weeks ago, the fierce winds of a freak thunderstorm pummeled Missoula, knocking down trees and powerlines. Here, it looks like a hurricane has passed through. The forest is still standing, but perhaps a third of the trees are gone. The wind snapped 60-year-old cottonwoods like toothpicks. The forest floor is littered with tree trunks and the smell of drying cottonwood leaves.

A 59-year-old cottonwood, knocked down in the storm, shows its growth rings where the City of Missoula cleared it from a trail.

I pick my way over and around the debris to check on the nest tree. I fear the worst for it. Although the breeding season is over now, the woodpeckers might have reused the cavity as a winter roost—or, in rare instances, as a nest in a future year. But even if the woodpeckers never again were to visit their laboriously-excavated home, it would remain important to the forest community. Dozens of species reuse old pileated woodpecker nests to take shelter and raise their young, from western screech-owls (Megascops kennicottii) and wood ducks (Aix sponsa) to Vaux’s swifts (Chaetura vauxi) and northern flying squirrels (Glaucomys sabrinus). As I get closer, I prepare myself for bad news. Is the tree even standing still?

Destruction and regeneration

The nest tree, still standing in spite of the storm.

When I arrive, I’m relieved to see that the snag is unharmed. In fact, this section of the forest seems to have gotten off easily, with just a few toppled trees and downed branches. In contrast, a stand farther away from the river looks like a massive bulldozer ran over it, knocking over more than half of the trees.

During the hot, late summer afternoon, a very occasional kekekekeKE in the distance is my only clue that the pileated woodpeckers are still here in their wind-struck forest.

Oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus sp.) emerge from the trunk of a willow. I often find them growing on cottonwoods, too.

Standing among broken tree trunks, I think about destruction and regeneration. The loss of these trees feels tragic. But I know this isn’t the end of the story. In a few years, the downed trees will fruit with oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus sp.)—delicious sauteed in garlic—as the cottonwoods slowly transform into soil. Perhaps a hollow log will become a winter shelter for a porcupine. Will the snapped-off trunks resprout next year, like they do when the beavers cut them down? In spite of the catastrophic winds, much of the forest is still standing. And if the river is allowed to flood, a future spring will deposit fresh sediments as cottonwood silk is flying on the breeze, and a new generation of forest will emerge.

Threads of story

The cottonwood forest where the pileated woodpeckers live stays with me, even when I’m far away from it.

Soon the fall carries me south, to my partner’s home in Oaxaca. But the pileated woodpeckers stay with me; the cottonwood forest stays with me, imprinted on my heart and mind. Sometimes I let my imagination wander among the tree trunks, not knowing what I will find: a pileated woodpecker family, a song sparrow’s nest, fresh beaver activity along the river, a new story in the wordless tapestry.

A lineated woodpecker (Dryocopus lineatus)—a Oaxacan relative of the pileated woodpecker—forages on a guanacastle (Enterolobium cyclocarpum), March 2024.

As I write over the winter, I gather together threads of story—special places in nature like this cottonwood forest, the call of a Cassin’s kingbird (Tyrannus vociferans), the dogbane that grows along the river and the birds of evening in the Oaxacan tropical forest—as I try to find meaning among the contradictions of my life. To love people and places bridged by jet fuel as climate change unleashes catastrophic wildfires, droughts, and hurricanes. To integrate into this Huatulco community as the tourist boom skyrockets prices, destroys mangroves, and changes ways of life. To seek a healthy relationship with the earth and my neighbors as billionaires and large corporations threaten it all to fill their pockets.

The Story is in Our Bones

Cottonwood catkins open on a tree downed in the windstorm, April 2025.

I keep on thinking about the pileated woodpeckers as I read Osprey Oreille Lake’s book The Story is in Our Bones: How Worldviews and Climate Justice Can Remake a World in Crisis. She writes:

…[W]hen we take a deep breath and slow down to really think about it, the things that actually make our lives possible and joyous very often are not the things that require extractivism or items to purchase. Photosynthesis, the hydrologic cycle, love, friendship, walking in the beauty of nature, mutual aid, sharing stories and meals—these are all things that can be done without financial exchange. In the current dominant culture worldview, which commodifies everything and sees things only for their deemed financial worth, we become further detached from what is given freely—wildflowers and glaciers are exiled to the realm of the superfluous since there is no monetary value assigned to them. We are taught in the commodification culture to lose respect and appreciation for many nonfinancially related treasures.

A fly visits the sap welling from a beaver-cut thinleaf alder (Alnus incana) in the cottonwood forest, March 2025.

To counter this rapacious economic worldview, we can work to restore what many have called a gift economy—a system that many of our ancestors participated in, some communities still practice today, and has engaged an ever-growing network of thought leaders. One of the central principles is not to hoard wealth; rather, the gift economy framework is about understanding that the only way the entire breathing, living ecology of place and community survives and thrives is through mutual aid. By making and giving gifts and moving those gifts throughout the community, we ensure our human and nonhuman relatives are taken care of. The essence of this exchange model is about aligning our economies with the natural laws of the Earth and our neighbors.

In communities that have practiced the gift economy, valuables are not exchanged for money or for other goods but are instead given with no outward agreement that anything will be immediately returned. There is an implicit expectation that the person who received the gift will also give at some point in the future, whether back to the giver, to another person, to the land, or to the whole community, and until that happens, one remains in a state of positive debt. While debt is uncomfortable for those of us who live in a market economy, in a gift economy, debt is what binds one to the gift-giver and to the whole community, intentionally creating an atmosphere of ongoing reciprocity.

A gift economy

Osprey’s words ring true for me. I’ve experienced it so often in Oaxaca, this heartfelt generosity. An ear of maíz criollo, an invitation to share a meal. A complete stranger who invites me to visit their rancho. A glass of mezcal, an unhurried conversation, an “ésta es tu casa.” In many cases, to offer to repay these gifts with money would be an insult. And so I stay forever indebted, humbled, and grateful. I share my knowledge of birdsongs, pass on the gift of oranges from the abuelo Teo’s orchard, help out with dishes and firewood. Not to repay, because that’s not possible, but to pass the gift forward.

It’s that way with the pileated woodpeckers, too. How can I repay the gift of a wild call on the April breeze? They’ve showed me their home, trusted me with their nestling, helped me see the magic of this forest. To repay the gift would be impossible: I’m forever indebted to pileated woodpeckers. But I can try, in some small way, to reciprocate. To protect the location of their nest tree; to share the magic of their forest. To invite you, as well, to enter into a gift economy with pileated woodpeckers.

The male pileated woodpecker watches me as he excavates the nest, April 2024.

The song of the western screech-owl

Night among the cottonwood forest.

It’s a starry April evening in 2025, one of those nights when the frost falls as soon as the sun sets. In a cottonwood grove along a stream in the western Montana foothills, a western screech-owl sings his bouncing-ball song as the water rushes over billion-year-old polished stones. I wonder if he has a mate yet, or if he’s still searching. I wonder whether the pileated woodpeckers have left a nesting cavity for him in this cottonwood stand, excavated one dry beakful at a time from the heart of a dead tree.

Excavating the nest cavity, April 2024.

Each spring, the woodpeckers carve new holes, and their gifts continue for years afterwards. They provide homes where they didn’t previously exist for western screech-owls, hooded mergansers (Lophodytes cucullatus), Barrow’s goldeneyes (Bucephala islandica), and American kestrels (Falco sparverius). Ésta es tu casa. The song of the western screech-owl continues in the frosty night: a song held by snowmelt streams, old cottonwood silhouettes, and the gift of the pileated woodpeckers. And in the quiet song of the owl, I seem to hear a “thank you.”

Journey to the pileated woodpeckers: earth connection in a critical time

Shane Sater — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 14:28:22 +0000

The Arroyo Todos Santos slips past, with Santa María Huatulco and the Cerro Huatulco in the distance.

This was going to be a story about pileated woodpeckers. But then historical events intervened, and I couldn’t ignore them. We’ll get to the woodpeckers, I promise, but first we’ve got a journey ahead of us…

The hot March winds buffet the jet as we thunder skyward, shattering the quiet of the dry tropical forest below and spewing hot gases of ancient sea life. I crane my head and say a silent goodbye to the Huatulco landscape that has become a second home to me. We’ve already rocketed higher than the Cerro Huatulco; the dry course of the Arroyo Todos Santos slips by in an instant and then we’re banking towards the coast, a wide wide turn over the tierra natal of my partner and generations of her family. Goodbye for now, my loved ones, que Dios los cuide.

Santa María Huatulco is out of sight now, but I left part of my soul in the tiny garden in front of our house, and I know Carito and our family will keep it watered while I’m gone. The tomatoes are still green, but we harvested epazote this morning before we had to go to the airport, and yesterday I planted sugarcane from grandfather Teo in a crate along the street.

Saying goodbye

Low water in the Laguna El Zarzal, surrounded by mangroves.

Banking, the jet keeps banking, then levels out again, paralleling the coast. The water has dropped even more in the Laguna El Zarzal, where I watched a black-bellied plover (Pluvialis squatarola) on the mudflats in December, within the protective circle of the mangroves. We race over La Crucecita and all of the tourist hotels and sprawl of Bahías de Huatulco, the golf course at Tangolunda, the mouth of the Río Copalita where the collared plovers (Anarynchus collaris) hide in the sand.

We bank again and the landscape keeps shrinking into anonymity as we set course towards Ciudad de México and points north. By the wee hours of the morning, if all goes well, I’ll be in Missoula, Montana. I keep my eyes glued to the window and trace the Río Copalita upstream to Santiago Xanica, where the first oak forests begin and Zapoteco is still a living language, and then I’m lost for a time, without landmarks as we cross the pine forest, mountains and narrow valleys, so many mountains, of the Sierra Sur. Goodbye for now, Santa María Huatulco.

A critical time

Crossing the pine forests of the Sierra Sur.

This is no routine trip. We’re two months into the second Trump presidency in the US, and all of the reports I’ve been seeing make me fear that my country of origin is plunging into a dictatorship. Some of my Republican friends and family members interpret things differently, and still believe that Trump is fighting corruption and has everyone’s best interests at heart. I really wish I could believe that. A few days before my flight, Trump’s police arrested 261 immigrants in the US, accused them of being linked to a violent gang—no evidence, no trial—and shipped them to a hell-on-earth prison in El Salvador. When a federal judge ordered them to turn the planes around, they ignored the order. “Oopsie, too late,” posted Nayib Bukele, the dictator of El Salvador.

By the time I reach Salt Lake City and am ready to pass through US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, I have a pounding stress headache.

Finding our shared humanity

I pass through customs without incident, shielded (so far) from Trump’s terrorism by my white skin and my American passport. A security agent jokes lightheartedly with his companions about DOGE, the informal agency Trump has illegally created without congressional approval through which Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, has been dismantling federal agencies, favoring his own companies, and accessing sensitive information about taxpayers. I’m relieved to see the human side of these security agents, relating without aggression to the passengers they’re screening and making jokes in the face of it all. As Trump tries to convert my country into a fascist police state, our shared humanity—immigrants, citizens, police officers—is a vital defense.

I think of my companions on the flight from Mexico City, an older man from Michoacán who has lived many years in Oregon and his wife from Pinotepa Nacional, Oaxaca, who is visiting the US for the first time ever. It took them three years to get her immigration documents approved. Their courage in crossing the border at this time gives me strength, and I hope they make it through without problems.

The resistance

Golden currant (Ribes aureum) leaves emerge in the garden where I listened to starlings imitate a variety of native birds last spring.

I arrive in Missoula with a cautious sense of hope. This doesn’t feel like a community defeated by two months of attacks on democracy, humanity, and nature. If anything, I sense that the storm—as Trump and his ultra-rich backers show us the extremes of sick human behavior—is bringing us together. Community is resistance. Kindness to our fellow humans is resistance. Saying no to fascism is resistance. And nurturing a healthy connection with the earth is resistance.

And so — I connect anew with this Missoula earth and community that I love. I chart my steps forward, to live towards a thriving world connected to nature even as those afflicted with the sickness of greed and power would destroy it. I talk with my partner from the wintry cusp of a Montana spring and feel the tug of mangoes ripening in the hot March winds. And, as I ground my being once again in my relationship with this Missoula earth, I remember the pileated woodpecker family I got to know here last spring…

The pileated woodpeckers

The male pileated woodpecker (distinguished by his red “moustache” line) excavates in the cottonwood.

It’s mid-April along the Clark Fork River when I first see the pileated woodpeckers (Dryocopus pileatus). The cottonwoods are flowering and the red-osier dogwoods haven’t leafed out yet. An occasional mourning cloak (Nymphalis antiopa) or Milbert’s tortoiseshell (Aglais milberti) butterfly flutters through the air. The tapping of the male pileated woodpecker is barely noticeable in the cottonwood (Populus balsamifera) the pair has chosen for their nest along the river channel. I watch him for maybe 20 minutes, perching on the outside of the dead snag and tap-tap-tapping on the trunk, periodically tossing out beakfuls of wood chips.

Pulling out wood chips.

Finally I hear a kekekekeke call in the distance and he responds. A few minutes later, the same call and response again. And then comes the caller, the female. She lands on the far side of the nest tree. He flies off. She sidles over to the hole and starts the same excavation process. Tap-tap-tap, quietly. Toss toss toss, silently.

I look up the nest-building process. Three to six weeks in Oregon, reports Birds of the World. 23 days in Kentucky. Goodness!

Three weeks minimum for a pair of pileated woodpeckers to build a nest. Three weeks beating away at a stubborn dead tree, chipping a hole with a durable bill, constructing a fortress for the nestlings. Talk about dedicated parents.

The female pileated excavating (note her black “moustache” line).

Excavating a home

Excavating deeper.

Two days later, I visit the pileated woodpeckers again: a sunny morning after a brief rainstorm in the night. The female is on the outside of the nest tree as I carefully approach, working on the cavity. But I get distracted by the ducks feeding in a riffle along the river—mallards (Anas platyrhynchos), gadwalls (Mareca strepera), and two green-winged teals (Anas crecca). When I turn back, the female is gone.

Fifteen minutes later, the male flies in, following the river upstream, and begins a long labor of tapping and tossing. The hole is already deeper than the last time I watched him. Still perching on the outside of the trunk, he now has to reach deep for wood chips. Many times I can only see the tips of his tail and wings, poking subtly out of the hole.

The male continues excavating.

He is notably quiet, especially compared to the northern flickers (Colaptes auratus), which I can hear calling every few minutes from the surrounding forest. Finally, through pure luck, I’m able to capture a few of his calls.

Land of the pileated woodpeckers

The song sparrow.

Sitting here among the cottonwoods and red-osier dogwoods, the other sounds of this landscape gradually seep into my bones. A song sparrow (Melospiza melodia) gives long performances nearby, his melodic song of whistles and trills forming the backbone of the morning soundscape. One of his song perches is among the branches of a red-osier dogwood near the riverbank. Another one is higher, in the canopy of a young cottonwood. In the distance, another song sparrow answers from the far side of the river.

The cottonwood gallery forest, with ponderosa pines and red-osier dogwoods.

The deciduous forest of this floodplain is extensive, an expanse of gray cottonwood trunks towering above an understory of tall dogbane (Apocynum cannabinum), goldenrods (Solidago spp.), and invasive grasses. The cottonwoods might look drab to some eyes in this still-leafless season, but for wildlife habitat they’re incredible, providing food, cover, and nesting cavities. I can hear the signs of this bounty in the mid-April soundscape: the pileated woodpeckers aren’t the only cavity-nesters here. Several northern flickers call and drum periodically. Red-naped sapsuckers (Sphyrapicus nuchalis), recently arrived from their winter range in northern Mexico and the southwestern US, give their slowing-down tapping from dead branches, defending territories across this forest. A group of tree swallows (Tachycineta bicolor) swirls along the river, giving their liquid calls.

The voice of the pileated woodpeckers

The nest-building continues.

The male pileated woodpecker remains quiet most of the time. Once, a northern flicker lands nearby, then thinks better of it. The pileated begins calling forcefully and follows the flicker, warning him off, then returns to his nest tree. Another time, as the song sparrow choruses in the background, he calls without any inspiration that I can see, the powerful kekekekeke that lets the whole forest know a pileated woodpecker is around.

Mostly I just hear his quiet tapping, barely audible over the noisy conversation of the river.

The song of the tall dogbane: fibers at the riverbank

Shane Sater — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 07:39:40 +0000

Tall dogbane stems and seed capsules, April.

It’s an afternoon in late April along the Clark Fork River near Missoula, Montana, USA. The song of the tall dogbane (Apocynum cannabinum) isn’t obvious, like the red-winged blackbirds (Agelaius phoeniceus) that are singing in the aspen grove on the other side of the river, or the European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) that are nesting in the cavities of the cottonwoods. But the dogbane has a song, too, a song it sings with the wind. I can hear it this afternoon as last year’s dead stalks whisper and rustle in the breeze, brushing against the dry stems of its neighbor, reed canarygrass (Phalaris arundinacea).

To know the birds is to become weightless for a time, to imagine life with wings, to sing in celebration. To know the plants is something slower, quieter, but equally powerful. A connection with the plants is rooted in the earth, grounded in place. The birds tell us of migrations, invite us to think globally, to transcend borders, to recognize habitats, perhaps to forget for a time the major environmental costs of travel as we try to imitate their journeys. The plants invite us to slow down, to become rooted in our local soil, to breathe and flex with the circular motions of the seasons.

Dogbane and cultural legacy

Tall dogbane holds a cultural legacy that stretches back for countless generations on the North American continent. Indigenous people have used its durable stem fibers to make string and cord for more lifetimes than I can imagine. As a kid in central North Carolina, I learned this ancient practice of making cord by twisting the fibers of plants. There was a small patch of dogbane along the dirt track that provided access to the neighborhood sewage line. I recognized it as a fiber plant, but I didn’t know how to gather its stem fibers then. Instead, I twisted a much weaker cordage by splitting the leaves of the cattails that grew in a local marsh.

Snow peas and strawberries in the pine needle basket that I sewed with dogbane.

Years later in Montana, reading Tom Elpel’s book Foraging the Mountain West, I finally learned how to separate dogbane fibers from the stem. (Sarah Corrigan of Roots School gives a video explanation here). Visiting my mom in Missoula, Montana, I got to know a beautiful, thriving patch of it along the Clark Fork River. In the winter we gathered the dry burgundy stems. I showed my mom how to twist dogbane string and I thought of all of the generations of people who have gathered this plant and thanked it for its gifts. Taking online college classes during the covid pandemic, I twisted dogbane during my writing and anthropology classes and used it to sew bundles of ponderosa pine needles into concentric spirals. Before the pandemic ended, the dogbane and ponderosa pine had become a gathering basket.

Emergence

Last year’s dead dogbane stems under the cottonwood canopy.

And that brings me back to April 2024. As red-winged blackbirds and starlings sing their songs of spring along the Clark Fork River, last year’s dead dogbane stalks whisper to me in the breeze. Under the canopy of cottonwoods, no new growth is yet visible, just the delicate silken tufts of dogbane seeds spilling out of their capsules, suspended from last year’s stems, singing with the wind.

On the gravel bar at the edge of the river, though, the sun has heated the rocky earth. At the base of the dead stalks, new dogbane shoots are just beginning to emerge. I make a goal to pay more attention to these plants this year, to write about them. If I stop to notice them, what will they teach me?

The first new dogbane shoots begin to emerge, April.

May growth

A May rain drenches the dogbane on the gravel bar.

The next time I’m able to visit, it’s an afternoon in late May. A rain shower is pummeling the gravel bar, pattering on the quackgrass (Agropyron repens) and forming glistening beads on new dogbane leaves. The plants have grown swiftly in the last month. On these warm, sun-exposed gravels, the new red shoots are more than a foot tall. Last year’s dead stems, bleached to whitish tan, are still standing next to the young growth.

New dogbane shoots next to last year’s growth on the gravel bar.

By now the yellow warblers (Setophaga petechia) have completed their migratory journey and returned to the cottonwoods. Spotted sandpipers (Actitis macularis) call frequently at the river’s edge. For the dogbane, it’s the season of rapid skyward growth, tender sprouts springing upwards with a supply of carefully-stored underground energy. As I walk under the cottonwoods, where the microclimate is cooler and shadier, I can see that the new stalks are still far behind, only a few inches tall. Here I find the wild licorice (Glycyrrhiza lepidota), too, the young shoots just emerging and launching their own race towards the sky.

A young dogbane shoot in the cottonwood understory.

Wild licorice shoots.

The hummingbird

A red-naped sapsucker perches in a red-osier dogwood.

The rain shower ends. The birds around the dogbane become active again and resume their singing. I’m watching two red-naped sapsuckers (Sphyrapicus nuchalis) in a red-osier dogwood (Cornus sericea), gleaning aphids from the leaves, when a hummingbird suddenly appears 15 yards in front of me. She’s a female with buffy flanks, a calliope hummingbird (Selasphorus calliope), and she’s hovering at the tips of last year’s dogbane stems. What could she possibly be doing?

The calliope hummingbird.

Suddenly, I connect the dots: is she harvesting the little bits of seed fluff that remain, in the process of constructing her nest? I scramble for my camera, but I have trouble focusing it and then she’s gone. I’m left wondering if I really saw what I think I did. A few minutes later she returns and perches on a red-osier dogwood branch. I keep hoping she’ll visit the dogbane again, but instead she flies away. I’m left with a mystery.

A spider among the stems

The spider web in the dogbane.

The next time I visit, it’s mid-June. A cicada is singing from the cottonwoods above the dogbane patch. Western wood-pewees (Contopus sordidulus) whistle repetitively, and a blackish spider the size of a mustard seed waits in its multilayered web. The web is suspended from the scaffolding of one of last year’s white-bleached dogbane stems. It’s dotted with the remnants of tiny moths that the spider has trapped. A few yards away, a common whitetail dragonfly (Plathemis lydia) finds a perch on another weathered dogbane stalk.

June dogbane growth beneath the cottonwoods.

The new dogbane has grown incredibly in the last month, as have its neighbors the grasses and the wild licorice. The stems are still supple and green, the leaves full-grown but tender, their pale veins and midribs strongly contrasting. Intent on the spider, I brush past too hastily, injuring a leaf, and it beads up with milky white sap. The sap tastes very bitter, a powerful hint to would-be herbivores: I’m strong medicine! Don’t eat me!

Dogbane on the gravel bar

June dogbane on the gravel bar.

Back at the sunny gravel bar, spring field crickets (Gryllus veletis) sing among waist-high dogbane shoots. Predictably, this patch continues to be well ahead of the shady dogbane. The upper stems are branching and the flower buds are already emerging. Spotted sandpipers call from the other side of the river as I run my hands through the wild mint (Mentha arvensis) growing under the dogbane and breathe in its rich, pungent scent.

Wild mint on the gravel bar, shaded by dogbane.

I plan to visit the dogbane again in July, to spend a day or more watching the insects that come to its flowers. But the summer slips past, the fall too, and I migrate with the yellow warblers to my partner’s natal earth in Oaxaca, Mexico, the environmental costs of air travel nagging at the back of my mind. The dogbane stays behind, rooted in the river gravels. A part of me stays with it.

Slow steps towards the plants

There’s no tall dogbane here in Oaxaca; its range ends in northern Mexico, mountains and deserts away. I miss this familiar friend. Little by little, I’m finding a place here, making new acquaintances and friendships. Including with the plants. On my morning and evening walks, I take photos of those that call my attention, attempt to learn about them. People tell me the local names and I try to remember them. I learn and forget and learn again, little bits and pieces of the incredible living richness of traditional plant knowledge, uses, and relationships.

My small garden in Oaxaca.

In our house, too, the plants are helping me put down roots. There’s no space for a garden, but I’m making compost with our food scraps and fallen leaves, mixing it with dirt that washes down the street, filling pots and wooden crates with homegrown soil. I’ve planted the ginger that grandfather Teo gave us, radishes, basil, tomatoes, hierbabuena, a passionfruit vine that my friend Joel gifted me. I scooped the tomato seeds out of the fruits and fermented them before I planted them: three varieties, a commercial roma, and two small local tomates criollos. The first ones are starting to flower now. Maybe there will be tomatoes before I return to Montana in mid-March.

Little by little is okay with the plants: they’re right here, patient, waiting for us to learn. As my friends Cat Raan and Syd Morical, herbalists and founders of Wild Wanders in Missoula, Montana like to say, every slow step towards the plants is a step of healing, for us and for the earth.

Dogbane beetles

Winter dogbane pods and stems along the Clark Fork River, November 2022.

As I keep reading more about dogbane, I find an article by Mary Ann Borge, a New Jersey-based naturalist who has done the sort of patient insect-watching that I didn’t get around to in 2024. She shares photos of a variety of bees, butterflies, beetles, and flies visiting dogbane flowers. Her story also introduces me to the dogbane beetle (Chrysochus auratus), an iridescent-green herbivore that specializes on dogbanes and related plants. I make a note to keep my eyes open for dogbane beetles this summer.

Dogbane’s strong stem fibers give us cord and rope and can connect us to this plant, to the earth where it lives, to thousands of generations of indigenous traditions. For me, dogbane is woven into my life in the memories of my childhood, the fibers of my pine needle basket, the threads of this story, in my gratitude for all that this plant teaches me, all that it gives. Dogbane invites me to become rooted in my local soil.

Becoming rooted

Dogbane seeds hang in the April breeze.

My appreciation for this plant has grown with every encounter, and a whole world has begun to show itself. Dead stalks singing in the April breeze. The silk of a hummingbird nest, the scaffolding of a spider web. The perch of a dragonfly, the strong fibers that connect me to the earth. For me, dogbane has become part of the heartbeat of the cottonwood forest—and are there dogbane beetles in this Missoula patch, too?

The plants wait for us, patiently—wherever we are—inviting us to slow down, to become rooted, to breathe and shift with the round rhythms of the seasons. Their invitation is a song, soft but steady. Dogbane stalks rustling in the April breeze. Can you hear it?

Plants Archives - Wild With Nature

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