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.

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

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.

Sparrows and screech-owls

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).

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:

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

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

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

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.

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.

Los árboles del paraíso (Elaeagnus angustifolia) reflejan destellos plateados bajo la luz de la luna llena de septiembre. La quietud es casi completa, sólo los grillos de árbol y un perro distante. Miro hacia el cielo estrellado y pienso en todas las aves que no puedo escuchar. ¿Están ahí arriba esta noche, volando?

La migración de las aves, vasta y cambiante—nunca voy a realmente comprenderla. Pero encuentro vislumbres.

Las bandadas del otoño. 3600 zanates norteños (Quiscalus quiscula) me pasan volando como olas, inundando los alamillos (Populus deltoides), una orquesta desafinada tocando a todo volumen. Compañías de zanates, cabezas brillando de bronce en la luz matutina. Quince minutos después, ya se han ido.

Las aves de verano, de repente ausentes. Regreso al Río Marias, el lugar sin cuclillos pico negro (Coccyzus erythropthalmus) este año. ¿A dónde se fueron los 45 saltaparedes comunes norteños (Troglodytes aedon) de julio? Una bandada de chinitos (Bombycilla cedrorum) da trinos desde las ramas desnudas en la tardenoche, descendiendo para buscar frutos entre las hojas con matices de anaranjado del cerezo silvestre (Prunus virginiana). Aparte de ellos, está silencioso como un pueblo abandonado. Los cuicacoches castaños (Toxostoma rufum), los azulejos pálidos (Sialia currucoides), las golondrinas verdemar (Tachycineta thalassina) que alimentaban a sus crías. Todos desaparecidos. La colonia donde anidaban las golondrinas ribereñas (Riparia riparia) está vacia. Es demasiado tarde para decirles un adiós.

Las aves en la migración otoñal

Pero esperemos ya en silencio, prestando atención. Vigila los cerezos silvestres, afina tus ojos al revoloteo callado de un chipe buscando alimento. Busca los sonidos imperceptibles, las llamadas quietas sip, chip. Los cerezos están llenos de aves, aves del norte. Gorriones garganta blanca (Zonotrichia albicollis) y gorriones de Lincoln (Melospiza lincolnii), chipes rabadilla amarilla (Setophaga coronata) y chipes corona negra (Cardellina pusilla). Y una llamada intensa y diferente, un movimiento rápido, un atisbo de algo interesante. Ahí está de nuevo, gris y amarillo claro en un patrón diferente. Un chipe de pechera (Geothlypis philadelphia), un ave que anida en parches de arbustos dentro del bosque boreal, más al norte. Es la primera vez que he visto esta especie.

Gorriones y tecolotes

A veces no hay nada. Las hojas de los alamillos ondean, diciéndole un adiós final al verano. Me pregunto dónde están las bandadas migratorias.

Hay veces también cuando la maleza en la orilla del río se pone animada con tantos gorriones, y se escuchan las llamadas sip y chip entre la mostacilla (Sisymbrium loeselii) y el abrojo (Xanthium strumarium). 

Llega un alba fría y un tecolote del este (Megascops asio) relincha desde los alamillos.

Un terreno ignorado lleno de ramas caídas y plumones de cardo (Cirsium arvense) se llena de gorriones, cientos de ellos: los esbeltos gorriones cejas blancas (Spizella passerina) y gorriones pálidos (Spizella pallida), los corpulentos gorriones garganta blanca y gorriones corona blanca (Zonotrichia leucophrys), la llamada metálica ¡tin! de un gorrión pantanero (Melospiza georgiana).

Las curvas de la migración del otoño

Las aves migratorias no siempre vuelan al sur. Este otoño estudio los mapas de distribución y aprendo de las aves del bosque boreal que pasan la temporada reproductiva directamente al norte de mi estado, pero cuyas migraciones curvan hacia el este por las Grandes Llanuras. Nunca las he visto en Helena. Pero aquí por las llanuras del este de Montana, entre los cercos vivos, los parques municipales y los fresnos y arbustos de las cañadas, con suerte las vamos a encontrar:

chipes de pechera, chipes atigrados (Setophaga tigrina) y pinzones colorados (Haemorhous purpureus),

Vireos de Filadelfia (Vireo philadelphicus), golondrinas azulnegras (Progne subis) y colibríes garganta rubí (Archilochus colubris),

manchitas de plumas y corazones que laten rápidamente, haciendo un viaje que nunca voy a comprender.

Basta una sola mañana observando estos cerezos silvestres, maleza y matorral abundar con tantas aves rumbo al sur

para enamorarme, una y otra vez

de cerezos silvestres,

parches de maleza,

hojas de alamillo ondeando un adiós

y tecolotes cantando en el alba fría de septiembre.

Posdata

Para mí esta historia es muy especial—y más especial aún porque es mi última antes de tomar una pausa. Al final del podcast he compartido unos detalles sobre esta decisión.

Producir un podcast independiente no es fácil, y eso es una de las razones por las que quiero tomar una pausa. Mientras tanto, te sigo agradeciendo mucho por todas las maneras en las que apoyas este proyecto! Compartir mis podcasts es una gran ayuda, y dejarme un rating en tu plataforma favorita de podcast también me ayuda. Y desde luego, mis patrocinadores en Patreon son los que han sostenido mi trabajo hasta este momento. (Si eres uno de mis patrocinadores, no te preocupes—no se te va a cobrar tu apoyo mensual hasta que yo comience de nuevo con la producción del podcast.) Si aún no eres un patrocinador pero te interesa considerarlo, por favor chécalo en https://www.patreon.com/wildwithnature. Hacer un podcast a veces puede sentirse muy solo, pero saber que estás ahí conmigo ayuda mucho.

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Los chipes rabadilla amarilla (Setophaga coronata) están entre los chipes más comunes de Norteamérica. Se estima que hay 170 millones de ellos, aves pequeñas y elegantes, vestidas en amarillo, gris y negro. Pasaron el verano anidando a través de una vasta extensión de bosque conífero al norte del continente, cantando desde los pinos y píceas. En septiembre los vi migrando al sur, ola tras ola cruzando las tierras frías donde vivo en Montana, Estados Unidos. A finales de este mismo mes, empezaron a llegar en Oaxaca, México, donde muchos se quedarían por el invierno. En diciembre, los seguí por avión. Durante los vuelos a Oaxaca, pensando en los chipes y su migración tan inimaginable, escribí este poema.

Volando por la noche turbulenta

en un ave mecánica, dentro de un caparazón

de aluminio, plumas de vuelo que nunca se mudan

viendo los mismos pinchazos cuadriculares de luz por abajo

que los chipes vieron mientras volaron por la vasta oscuridad nocturna

hace dos meses, corazones latiendo rápidamente. Despidiéndonos, ellos y yo

del Valle de Helena, de estas curvas en particular de riachuelo y montaña

donde conozco bien a las plantas, los macollos dormidos de los zacatones,

los brotes de los cerezos silvestres en borgoña y gris, la leonada exuberancia otoñal

de las semillas de vara de oro, el movimiento reluciente y los cantos somnolientos 

de los insectos del verano.

Nuestro cohete de aluminio sigue la cordillera

apurándose hacia el sur, mientras al este un susurro rojizo del amanecer

se difumina hacia cobalto sobre el puñal del ala izquierda

y la silueta anciana de la sierra.

Pasan horas y otras cápsulas del tiempo, propulsándose

sobre montañas y mesetas desérticas, y entre el humo de la Ciudad de México

algún papamoscas atrapa insectos al lado de la pista

y flores amarillas lucen por debajo de los nopales.

Sobre el muro

La migración de los chipes es algo que me da mucho asombro y que todavía no comprendo muy bien. Aleteando por la noche, sobrevuelan un muro intrascendente, tal vez sin percibirlo, una barrera estrecha que, por alguna crueldad de la vida, parece definir demasiado a nuestra existencia humana en nuestros dos países. A las aves migratorias, supongo, les vale madres. Viven una existencia que reconoce una sola tierra, abarcando desde las montañas empinadas de Canadá, esculpidas por glaciares, hasta los mangos y guajes de Oaxaca, algunos siguiendo hacia el sur por los volcanes de Mesoamérica hasta llegar a no sé dónde. 

Por eso vine a Oaxaca. Por las conexiones, por la riqueza de intercambio que puede acontecer cuando reconocemos que somos una sola humanidad viviendo en una sola tierra, conectada por las aves, por las mariposas monarcas, por las vastas corrientes de aire y atmósfera. Y cuando tratamos de aprender las lenguas de nuestros vecinos de otro país, de intercambiar historias, pensamientos y convivencia, pues quizás el mundo se vuelve un poco más bonito.

La gentrificación y el turismo

Vine buscando ese tipo de conexión—pero no quiero pretender que todo sea de flores lindas y de chipes. Veo una cara fea del turismo, algo que se trata no del intercambio sino de la explotación, y lo mínimo que puedo hacer es no ignorarlo. Para mí como gringo, es muy fácil cruzar el muro; para mis amigos mexicanos, los trámites son mucho más complicados. Y el simple y cruel hecho de que hay una tasa de cambio entre el peso y el dólar de 16 a uno hace que mi dinero de repente vale mucho más en México. Mientras tanto, si un mexicano quiere conocer a Estados Unidos, es nadar contra la corriente económica, cambiar pesos difícilmente ganados por escasos dólares que apenas alcanzan en un país donde todo está caro.

En los últimos años, varios extranjeros han aprovechado de este gradiente de la riqueza para mudarse a México, comprar casas y vivir más o menos en lujo. Como resultado, los precios aquí en México han subido también, haciendo la vida aún más difícil para la gente local de escasos recursos. Este fenómeno de la gentrificación me preocupa. Ni mencionar los ejemplos más feos y dramáticos, como Cancún, una ciudad que no existía antes de 1970. 

Qué pasó en Cancún

Vender el paraíso tropical a extranjeros les ha traído éxito económico a algunos hoteleros y agentes inmobiliarios, pero parece no haber beneficiado mucho a las comunidades mayas locales, según el documental El tren y la península, que investiga este tema con relación al proyecto disputado del Tren Maya. Mientras tanto, el desarrollo de Cancún ha impactado fuertemente al medio ambiente y les ha dado a los más de ocho millones de turistas que visitan cada año la impresión de que tomar vacaciones de lujo es algo que merecen, ignorando el sufrimiento que están causando. A eso le digo: ¡mierda! No conozco soluciones a estos complicados problemas sistemáticos—pero sé que no puedo hablar de la conexión y el intercambio sin reconocer estos temas difíciles también.

A pesar de las penas de la gentrificación—y a pesar de que yo, como güero del norte, vengo aquí como un representante involuntario de un sistema de desigualdad que no soporto—he conocido a muchas personas increíbles aquí en Oaxaca. Personas que me han dicho que recibir al viajero con amabilidad es algo fundamental de su ser, de su código moral. Ojalá que el viajante no se olvide de reciprocar esta amabilidad—y que mis paisanos estadounidenses no se olviden de darles la bienvenida igualmente a los viajeros que visiten nuestras comunidades. El respeto recíproco es fundamental al intercambio cultural. Como dijo Benito Juárez, “el respeto al derecho ajeno es la paz.”

De Montana a Oaxaca (y de vuelta a Montana)

Esta historia es la primera en una serie que va desde las tierras frías de Montana hasta las montañas, valles y humedales de Oaxaca. La serie va a seguir los hilos de conexión con personas, aves y tierras en las dos regiones y entre ellas. Espero que estimule un intercambio entre nuestra gente, un intercambio que enriquezca nuestras vidas y nuestra conexión con nuestras tierras, que contribuya a los profundos conocimientos que podemos tener de nuestras tierras locales el marco de las aves que no conocen fronteras, que conectan nuestro continente en una sola, diversa entidad.  

Ahora vamos a regresar a los chipes. Ya hemos seguido su migración otoñal al sur con un poema. Hemos considerado el muro y nuestra humanidad conectada y complicada a los dos lados. Ahora vamos a conocer a los chipes en la ciudad de Oaxaca en el invierno. Luego, vamos a saltar dramáticamente al norte para ver la llegada de la primavera en Montana. Vamos a esperar a que los chipes lleguen en un lugar donde se me ha crecido una relación profunda con la tierra. Ésta es una historia de vislumbres efímeros, instantáneas de una increíble migración que sólo podemos tocar imaginándola. Así que volvamos a conocer a los chipes—y no olvidemos de traer nuestras imaginaciones con nosotros.

El Parque Las Canteras, Oaxaca de Juárez

Ya estamos a finales de enero. Amaneció despejado en el Parque Las Canteras, y un alboroto de golondrinas alas aserradas (Stelgidopteryx serripennis) llenó el aire sobre el estanque. El parque, una cantera abandonada en la ciudad capital de Oaxaca, es un pequeño oasis para las aves dentro de los edificios y las calles. Ahora, tres horas después del amanecer, las voces de otras aves se unen con el martilleo de los albañiles desde el barrio. Puedes escuchar los chillidos de los luisitos comunes (Myiozetetes similis), las voces graves de las palomas alas blancas (Zenaida asiatica) y tortolitas cola larga (Columbina inca), el canto hermoso del pinzón mexicano (Haemorhous mexicanus)—y por todas partes, las llamadas de los chipes. 

Chipes en la ciudad

Donde las ramas aromáticas de un gran pirul (Schinus molle) cuelgan con frutas secas y rosadas, los chipes rabadilla amarilla están forrajeando, saltando ágilmente por las hojas. Dos calandrias castañas (Icterus spurius) se están moviendo más despacio por el follaje. Un colibrí berilo (Saucerottia beryllina) pausa entre el dosel del pirul y entonces, de repente, se va zumbando. En la distancia, otra bandada de chipes rabadilla amarilla está cazando insectos, acompañada por unos chipes cabeza gris (Leiothlypis ruficapilla) y chipes corona negra (Cardellina pusilla).

Por todo el invierno, la ciudad de Oaxaca se llena de chipes migratorios. Los chipes rabadilla amarilla, chipes cabeza gris y chipes corona negra son especialmente comunes acá. Revolotean por los árboles en el Zócalo, viven dentro del ajetreo de la vida cotidiana y llaman desde cada jardín. 

Cerca del comienzo de abril, la frecuencia de las observaciones de los chipes empieza a disminuirse en la ciudad. La migración primaveral está comenzando. Al llegar a mayo, los últimos de estos chipes migratorios van a tomar vuelo, rumbo al norte. 

Al norte

La tierra que conozco bien está 3500 kilómetros al norte, en el estado de Montana, Estados Unidos, cerca de la frontera con Canadá. Es una tierra intensa y bonita, con largos inviernos de nieve y frío. Las plantas pasan la temporada fría escondidas en raíces y tubérculos, aguantando el aire y los cambios de temperatura. Y cuando la primavera venga, viene con exuberancia. 

Hay un lugar en Montana que he venido a conocer íntimamente en los últimos años. Ya vamos a llegar allá, en la primavera, cuando la nieve está desvaneciendo. Estamos al lado de un arroyo, al punto donde las montañas se encuentran con el valle. Aguas arriba, el agua pasa por bosques de pino (Pinus), ayarín (Pseudotsuga menziesii) y enebro (Juniperus), burbujeando por parches bonitos de sauces (Salix) y álamos temblones (Populus tremuloides). Se derrama por los embalses de los castores (Castor canadensis) y entonces llega aquí, al margen del valle, donde el bosque conífero se convierte en praderas secas de gramíneas e hierbas. 

Desde abril hasta mayo

Llegamos aquí al comienzo de abril, mientras que los chipes están comenzando a marcharse de Oaxaca. Nevó un poco más anoche, pero el sol está cada día más fuerte. Ya que llegamos hacia mediodía, toda la nieve nueva se ha descongelado. El paisaje está saturado con la anticipación de la primavera. De vez en cuando escuchamos los praderos del oeste (Sturnella neglecta) que han regresado desde sus tierras invernales, que abarcan desde Nayarit, México hasta Illinois, Estados Unidos. Los mirlos primavera (Turdus migratorius) están de vuelta también, forrajeando entre las gramíneas muertas del año pasado, donde los insectos y arañas se han vuelto activos después del invierno duro.

De repente, vemos a un halcón pequeño lanzarse por el cielo. Sólo lo vemos por unos segundos; desaparece rápidamente, rumbo al sur. Su vuelo espanta a una bandada de azulejos pálidos (Sialia currucoides) que estaban forrajeando escondidos entre las gramíneas. Se echan a volar, una tempestad de plumas azules aleteando sobre nosotros.

Ya saltemos a finales de mayo, cruzando casi dos meses del rápido cambio primaveral en un segundo. El paisaje se ha transformado como si fuera un mundo diferente. No hay ni un pensamiento de nieve; el invierno se ha retirado hacia las alturas de las montañas. Ya están presentes más de cincuenta especies de aves en este tramo corto del arroyo, más del doble el número de dos meses antes. Las aguas están energéticas y lodosas, rebosando sobre las orillas del arroyo, y el paisaje se ve verde con gramíneas nuevas y las hojas de los arbustos. Escuchamos los praderos del oeste por todos lados, y ya hemos encontrado sus primeros nidos, escondidos en el suelo bajo las gramíneas viejas. 

Conectados por chipes

Los chipes han regresado también. Escuchamos los chipes amarillos (Setophaga petechia), que van a quedarse aquí para anidar, desde los cerezos silvestres, o capulines del norte (Prunus virginiana), al lado del arroyo. Una inundación de chipes rabadilla amarilla—contamos 46 de ellos—atrapa insectos entre las hojas nuevas de los alisos (Alnus) y sonda los brotes donde los cerezos pronto van a florecer. Ellos y varios de los otros chipes de hoy—los chipes corona negra y los pavitos migratorios (Setophaga ruticilla)—van a seguir adelante en su migración, buscando sitios reproductivos más alto en las montañas o más al norte hacia Canadá.

Al llegar a junio, los chipes rabadilla amarilla van a haber pasado. A este tramo de arroyo le faltarán sus cantos y su actividad. Vamos a haber entrado en la cima de la temporada reproductiva, otro capítulo en la infinidad de historias de las aves migratorias que entrelazan este continente.

Pero los chipes rabadilla amarilla han dejado huellas en nuestras vidas: aquí en Montana, en la capital de Oaxaca y en cientos de lugares entre los dos y más allá. Su migración sigue siendo algo fuera de nuestra comprensión, divisada en fragmentos, el resto imaginado. Pero aun así, los chipes tocan nuestra sensibilidad. Y nos conectan, vinculando lo particular y lo global, vinculando las relaciones profundas que podemos formar con la tierra donde vivimos a la diversidad interconectada de tierras y gente que forman nuestra cordillera, nuestro continente y nuestro planeta compartido.

Un comienzo

Desde la conexión que todos podemos tener con la tierra donde vivimos, desde el muro que los chipes ignoran y la gentrificación que no puedo ignorar, desde una cantera abandonada en Oaxaca de Juárez y las tierras frías de Montana, empezamos esta serie de la conexión por la naturaleza a través de América. El mes que viene, vamos a seguir con la historia. Y mientras tanto, te invito a reflexionar sobre estos temas. Te invito a pensar en los chipes rabadilla amarilla donde vives y en cómo los hilos de conexión de estas aves se entrelazan con tu conexión particular con la tierra. Hasta el próximo mes.

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Yellow-rumped warblers are among the most common warblers in North America. There are an estimated 170 million of them, small, elegant birds clothed in yellow, gray, and black. They spent the summer nesting across the vast northern conifer forests of the continent, singing from the pines and spruces. In September I watched them migrating south, wave after wave crossing the cold lands where I live in Montana, United States. At the end of that same month, they began to arrive in Oaxaca, Mexico, where many of them would stay for the winter. In December, I followed them by airplane. During the flights to Oaxaca, thinking about the warblers and their unimaginable migration, I wrote this poem.

Hurtling through the turbulent night

in a mechanical bird, within a shell

of aluminum, flight feathers that never molt

seeing the same pinpricks of gridded light below

that the warblers saw as they flew through the vast night’s blackness

two months ago, hearts beating fast. Saying goodbye, they and I

to the Helena Valley, to these particular curves of stream and mountain

where I know the plants well, the dormant tufts of the grasses,

the burgundy-gray chokecherry buds, the tawny autumnal exuberance

of goldenrod seeds, the glittering movement and somnolent songs of summer insects.

Our aluminum rocket follows the cordillera

hurrying south, while to the east a reddish whisper of sunrise

fades to cobalt over the knife of the left wing

and the ancient silhouette of the sierra.

Hours pass, and other time capsules, propelling themselves

over mountains and desert plateaus, and among the smoke of Mexico City

some flycatcher hunts insects along the runway

and yellow flowers glow under the nopales.

Across the wall

The migration of the warblers is something that amazes me. I still don’t comprehend it very well. Flapping through the night, they fly over an insignificant wall, maybe without noticing it, a narrow barrier that, through some cruelty of life, seems to define our human existence too much in our two countries. The migratory birds, I imagine, don’t give a damn. They live an existence that recognizes a single Earth, stretching from the steep mountains of Canada, sculpted by glaciers, to the mangos and guajes of Oaxaca, some of them continuing south through the volcanoes of Mesoamerica to I don’t know where.

That’s why I came to Oaxaca. For the connections, for the richness of exchange that can happen whenever we recognize that we’re one humanity living on one Earth, connected by the birds, by the monarch butterflies, by vast currents of wind and atmosphere. And when we try to learn the languages of our neighbors from another country, to exchange stories, thoughts, and daily life, perhaps the world becomes a little bit more beautiful.

Gentrification and tourism

I came seeking that type of connection—but I don’t want to pretend that everything is a matter of warblers and beautiful flowers. I see an ugly face to tourism, something that has to do not with exchange but with exploitation, and the least I can do is not ignore it. For me as a gringo, it’s very easy to cross the wall; for my Mexican friends, the paperwork is much more complicated. And the simple, cruel fact that there’s a 16 to one exchange rate between the peso and the dollar means that my money is suddenly worth much more in Mexico. Meanwhile, if a Mexican wants to get to know the United States, they have to swim against the economic current, exchanging hard-earned pesos for scarce dollars that barely make a dent in a country where everything is expensive.

In recent years, many foreigners have taken advantage of this wealth gradient, moving to Mexico, buying houses, and living more or less in luxury. As a result, the prices here in Mexico have shot up as well, making life even more difficult for those locals who have limited resources. This phenomenon of gentrification bothers me. And that’s even without mentioning the more ugly and dramatic examples, such as Cancún, a city that didn’t exist before 1970.  

What happened in Cancún

Selling the tropical paradise to foreigners has brought some hotel owners and realtors economic success in Cancún. But it doesn’t seem to have benefited local Mayan communities very much, according to the documentary El tren y la península, which investigates this topic in relation to the contentious project of the Tren Maya, a rail development focused on increasing tourism in the area. Meanwhile, the development of Cancún has greatly impacted the environment. For the more than eight million tourists who visit every year, Cancún has given them the notion that taking luxury vacations is something they deserve, ignoring the suffering they’re causing. To this I say: bullshit! I don’t know the solutions to these complex, systemic problems—but I know that I can’t speak about connection and cultural exchange without also recognizing these difficult topics.

In spite of the pains of gentrification—and in spite of the fact that I, as a white guy from the north, come here as an involuntary representative of a system of inequality that I can’t stand—I’ve gotten to know many incredible people here in Oaxaca. People who have told me that to receive the traveler with kindness is something fundamental to their being, to their moral code. I hope that the traveler doesn’t forget to reciprocate this kindness—and that my fellow Americans don’t forget to welcome the travelers who visit our communities, as well. Mutual respect is fundamental to cultural exchange. As the famous Oaxacan, Benito Juárez, said, “peace is the respect for the rights of another.”

From Montana to Oaxaca (and back again)

This story is the first in a series that goes from the frigid landscape of Montana to the mountains, valleys, and wetlands of Oaxaca. The series will follow threads of connection with people, birds, and landscapes in these two regions and between them. I hope that it stimulates an exchange between our people, an exchange that enriches our lives and our connection with the earth. I hope that, along with the deep local knowledge of place we may already have, this series contributes a framework of the birds that don’t recognize borders, that connect our continent in a single, diverse entity.

Now, let’s return to the warblers. We’ve followed their fall migration south with a poem. We’ve considered the wall and our connected, complicated humanity on both sides of it. Now let’s get to know them in the city of Oaxaca in the winter. After that, we’ll leap dramatically north to the arrival of spring in Montana, awaiting the coming of the warblers in a place where I’ve developed a deep relationship with the land. This is a story of fleeting glimpses, snapshots of a journey that we can only touch with the imagination. So now let’s go to the warblers in Oaxaca—and bring your imagination along.

Las Canteras Park, Oaxaca

It’s the end of January. The sun rose in a clear sky in Las Canteras Park and a commotion of northern rough-winged swallows filled the air over the pond. The park, an abandoned quarry in the capital city of Oaxaca, is a small oasis for birds among all of the streets and buildings. Now, three hours after sunrise, the voices of other birds are joining the hammering of carpenters from the barrio. You can hear the shrieks of the social flycatchers, the deep voices of the white-winged doves and Inca doves, the beautiful song of the house finch—and everywhere, the calls of the warblers.

Warblers in the city

Where the aromatic branches of a large pirul (Schinus molle) hang with dry, pink fruits, the yellow-rumped warblers are foraging, leaping agilely among the leaves. Two orchard orioles are moving more slowly through the foliage. A berylline hummingbird pauses within the canopy of the pirul and then suddenly whirs into the distance. Farther away, another flock of yellow-rumped warblers is hunting insects, accompanied by a few Nashville and Wilson’s warblers.

All winter long, the city of Oaxaca is full of migratory warblers. Yellow-rumped, Nashville, and Wilson’s warblers are especially common here. They flit through the trees in the Zócalo, the square in the middle of downtown. They live among the bustle of the city, calling from every garden.

Near the start of April, the frequency of warbler observations begins to diminish in the city. Spring migration is starting. By early May, the last warblers will take flight, heading north. 

Northbound

The lands I know well are 2200 miles to the north, in the state of Montana, United States of America, near the border with Canada. It’s an intense and beautiful land, with long winters of snow and cold. The plants pass the cold weather hidden in roots and tubers, withstanding the wind and the temperature changes. And when spring comes, it comes with exuberance.

There’s a place in Montana that I’ve gotten to know intimately over the past years. Let’s travel there now, in the spring, when the snow is disappearing. We find ourselves at the edge of a stream called Sevenmile Creek at the point where the mountains meet a valley. Upstream, the waters pass through forests of pine, Douglas-fir, and juniper, burbling through beautiful patches of willows and quaking aspens. They spill through beaver dams on their way to this place, at the edge of the valley, where the conifer forest transitions to dry prairies of grasses and herbs.

From April to May

We’re arriving here at the beginning of April, just as the warblers are leaving Oaxaca. It snowed a little bit more last night, but every day the sun is stronger. Now that it’s getting close to noon, all of the fresh snow has melted. The landscape is soggy with the anticipation of spring. Once in a while we can hear the song of the western meadowlarks, back from their wintering grounds, which stretch from Nayarit, Mexico to Illinois, USA. The American robins, also recently returned, are foraging among the dead grasses of the previous year, where the insects and spiders have become active again after the harsh winter.

Suddenly, we see a small falcon shoot across the sky. We only see it for a few seconds; the falcon disappears rapidly to the south. Its flight startles a flock of mountain bluebirds that were feeding on the ground, hidden among the grasses. They leap into the air, a storm of blue feathers fluttering past us.

Now let’s jump to the end of May, crossing nearly two months of rapid springtime change in a second. The landscape has transformed dramatically, as if it were a different world. There’s no thought of snow now; winter has receded towards the mountainous heights. Now, more than fifty species of birds are present in this single short section of stream, more than double the number that we found here two months ago. The waters are energetic and muddy, spilling over the banks of the creek, and the landscape is green with new grasses and new leaves on the shrubs. The western meadowlarks are singing constantly now, all around us. We’ve already found their first nests, hidden on the ground among the grasses.

Connected by warblers

The warblers have returned, as well. We can hear the yellow warblers, which will stay to nest here, from the chokecherries along the stream. A flood of yellow-rumped warblers—we count 46 of them—are trapping insects among the new leaves of the alders and probing the flower buds of the chokecherries. They and several of the other warblers we see today—Wilson’s warblers and American redstarts—will continue in their migration, seeking breeding sites higher in the mountains or farther north towards Canada.

By the beginning of June, the yellow-rumped warblers will have passed by. This stretch of stream will feel the absence of their songs and their activity. We’ll have entered the peak of the nesting season, another chapter in the infinite stories of the migratory birds that weave this continent together.

But the yellow-rumped warblers have left traces in our lives: here in Montana, in the capital of Oaxaca, and in hundreds of places in between and beyond. Their migration remains beyond our comprehension, glimpsed in fragments, the rest imagined. But even so, the warblers touch our awareness. And they connect us, linking the particular and the global, linking the deep relationships that we can form with the earth wherever we live to the interconnected diversity of landscapes and peoples that make up our cordillera, our continent, and our shared planet.

A beginning

From the connection that we can all have with the earth wherever we live, from the wall that the warblers ignore and the gentrification that I can’t ignore, from an abandoned quarry in Oaxaca de Juárez and from the cold earth of Montana, here we start this series of connection through nature across America. America in the sense of the word as it’s used in Spanish, a single continent that includes North, South, and Central, that includes all of us. Next month, we’ll continue the story. And meanwhile, I invite you to reflect on these themes. I invite you to think about the yellow-rumped warblers where you are, to consider how the threads of connection that these birds carry interlace with your particular relationship with the earth. Until next month.

The post Crossing the wall: from Montana to Oaxaca appeared first on Wild With Nature.

Welcome to Yellow-rumped Wanderers, a special production in collaboration with Will Valentine, producer of the Will’s Birdbrain podcast. Will is an amazing birder based in Maine whose stories focus on celebrating common birds and how we can all benefit by getting to know them. This production is longer than my normal narrated podcasts: over an hour dedicated to yellow-rumped warblers and the similarities between their lives and ours. We recorded this podcast in April of 2023. Enjoy this wide-ranging conversation, which also includes a story I narrated about watching spring yellow-rumped warbler migration near Helena, Montana.

SHANE NARRATION: February 2019 was a bitter month in Helena, Montana, with arctic air masses and deep snow. I didn’t understand how the American tree sparrows managed to survive, overwintering in this small valley among the mountains. But March’s strengthening sun melted the snowy blanket and brought the return of the western meadowlarks, singing above the matted dead grasses. And when April 13th brought the first yellow-rumped warbler, it was clear that spring had arrived. 

WILL: Winter in Maine can be just as bitter as the colder months of Montana. I’m Will, joining Shane as he reminisces on a storied encounter with one of the most common birds in North America, the yellow-rumped warbler. Thank you for letting me tag on, Shane.  

SHANE: Thank you, Will. It’s so wonderful to be here with you. I’m really excited for our conversation.

WILL: And I’m excited to talk about yellow-rumped warblers because they’re one of those common birds that I did not know existed before I got into birding and birds. They’re all around us all the time, but they’re kind of just small enough that you can’t see them unless you’re really looking at them.  

SHANE: Yeah. Similar story for me. I remember the first spring that I saw a yellow-rumped warbler returning in an apple tree and it was so colorful and just like, wow, I didn’t know we had birds like that around.  

WILL: They are all around, so all over the US, United States and North America, and they’re one of those birds that migrates. So they’re in different spots throughout different times of the year, just like the tens of thousands of US citizens that are considered “snowbirds,” or people who migrate to warmer climates during the winter—like a bird. I think that’s like 99.9% of the population of Maine, or at least the older population. So like birds, people tend to enjoy traveling, whether it’s to avoid unpleasant weather or simply for a vacation. Have you done much traveling?  

SHANE: Yeah, so I did a lot of traveling when I was young, Will, my parents actually lived on opposite sides of the country. So I spent a lot of time in Idaho and a lot of time in North Carolina and some time in California as well. And that was actually before I really got into birding and in hindsight I really wish I had known my birds then because there undoubtedly would’ve been yellow-rumped warblers in all three of those places and they would’ve been doing different things in all of them. But it was definitely interesting to be in three such different places both in terms of nature and culture. And how about you, Will, have you done much traveling?  

WILL:  I have. I’ve been traveling my whole life. I have kind of a similar family situation. So my family’s spread out all over the country. I always joke I have family in Florida, California, Washington, and now I’m in Maine. So we’ve got all the corners covered. But as a child, I grew up in Tennessee, east Tennessee (go Vols!) and then I moved to Seattle, Washington. So I’ve spent most of my time in Tennessee and Washington and of course now I’m in Maine, so all places that are great to see yellow-rumped warblers.

But of course I was kind of similar to you in another vein of like I didn’t know about birds when I was doing all of this traveling when I was younger. So I was like, dang, my life list could have been triple what it was now if I knew about these things I was seeing. But yeah, now I try and travel as much as possible whether it’s just, you know, a 30-minute trip away to see a park or a longer flight or road trip.  

SHANE: Wow, that’s awesome. I love to hear those parallels in our story. That’s so fascinating. And the life list thing too—what a regret!

WILL: I know, but I mean this is the whole point of birding. It’s like you never know what you’re going to see or when you’re going to see it. And a major theme of my podcast, it’s like it’s never too late to start birding wherever you are. So whether you’re in a city or in the country, they’re all around us. Common birds are just as cool as exotic birds. 

SHANE: Totally. Yeah. And that’s something I’ve noticed in my traveling as an adult too. So like right now I’m living in Montana but I’m actually right now in Seattle, Washington visiting friends. So it’s not all that far away, but in terms of the climate and the birds, it’s so different. And guess what, there are yellow-rumped warblers here in Seattle right now. I think they’re probably just starting to come back to Montana, but they aren’t there during the winter.

And like you say with the common birds, that’s just such a fascinating thing to me is seeing how the same species of bird that I may know in one place, then I go to somewhere different and recognize it and it’s like in a completely different community and it’s doing different things and it’s so cool. It’s such a cool lens to me in terms of getting to know that community. And they’re just like us I guess, travelers.  

WILL: And yellow-rumped warblers are very well traveled. They can migrate as far as Canada to South America, Panama, 2,000 miles. So it’s interesting you mentioned how sometimes you see the same birds in different places doing different things. I guess that’s kind of like us, like when we’re traveling sometimes we do different things in different areas. So if I go to Florida, you can best bet I’m gonna be in the water swimming in the beaches. Meanwhile in Maine I’m not swimming in those beaches, they’re way too cold. So you know, it’s just kind of another way for us to empathize, I think, with birds.  

SHANE: Yeah, totally. I mean it does blow my mind all the time whenever I think about migration. I have some clue about the science, but it’s one of those things to me that it’s like reading about something versus actually understanding what that’s like. How is it that this bird that weighs a few grams can travel from where I live in Montana and it gets cold in the winter and I’m definitely not going swimming in December—just like you in Maine, Will—to Mexico or Panama across all of these mountain ranges and deserts and stuff? I mean for me that would be a super intense journey and I don’t know if I’d make it. Especially if I couldn’t buy food along the way and stop at hotels and stuff, and here’s this tiny bird making that same journey! It’s just mind blowing to me.  

WILL: Mm-hmm. And the amount of survivability that they need, right? We have to figure out, “How are we going to make such a daunting journey?” And they have all these other things: predators to worry about, the climate, finding food. So yeah, I’m super impressed too.

I think migration in general deserves so much wonder and intrigue just because it’s such a big life moment for these birds. I’m thinking of red knots that travel from, I think it’s South America up to North America and they stop in Cape Cod or something like that, somewhere, maybe New Jersey. And thousands, tens of thousands of these red knots descend and eat horseshoe crab eggs. And that is like a huge part of their migration and survivability because it’s a big refueling pit stop and if they don’t eat there they’ll just die, they can’t make it to where they’re going.  

And in recent years horseshoe crab numbers have been decreasing, eggs less and less, so now the red knots are suffering and dying. So it’s like almost these ancient rituals of birds migrating and they have all of these ingrained techniques and things that we are kind of changing as people, developing the land that they have occupied for millennia. So it’s this kind of mysterious process that birds undertake. I mean it’s just one of the reasons I love birds—they’re so mysterious. The more I study them and research them, the more in awe I am, even of these little tiny birds like warblers.  

SHANE: Yeah, totally. I love that you spoke to ritual there and just how amazing that is, those places and times of year where these birds like the red knots are stopping over and have been doing it since way before I was on this landscape, probably. That’s been something really interesting that I think is hard for me to put into words. And so you, I think, did a really good job of that.

But just as a birder, being out on a landscape through the seasons, and like this place in Montana where I’ve spent so much time on this stream restoration site… Watching the yellow-rumped warblers and the other birds. And just seeing that little snapshot of this massive wave of yellow-rumped warblers that are moving north across the continent in the spring. And both my experience of that is so particular to this particular place I’m watching… But it’s also part of this same thing that connects us all. Because you can see the same thing in Maine—maybe it’s a week or two later or maybe it’s a little bit different. But it’s this same massive wave and ritual of birds returning in the spring. And so to me that’s really special. 

SHANE NARRATION: His crisp gray head blended in with the bark of the thinleaf alder (Alnus incana) as he flitted through the branches, but his brilliant yellow throat and crown glowed like feathered sunshine. I was doing once-weekly bird surveys on the Sevenmile Creek restoration site, a narrow band of water and shrubs surrounded by expansive grassland. And from this mid-April day onwards, yellow-rumped warblers would be my constant companions here throughout the rest of spring migration.  

WILL: Moving can be daunting; traveling can be overwhelming. Through all the stress, there is one thing that never fails to bring me comfort. The sight of a familiar bird. As we’ve just mentioned, yellow-rumped warblers and other migrating birds can be found all over the US. If these birds can learn to survive and thrive in new places, maybe I can too. What are some of the reasons birds migrate? Do any of their reasons for traveling overlap with ours?  

SHANE: Yeah, so in my understanding there are two big reasons that birds migrate. One is food and then two is weather. I mean, who wants to be stuck in Montana when it’s 20 below out in the winter? Sometimes I wonder why I do. Just thinking about the food, back to what we were talking about. About that sweeping spectacle of migration in the spring… If we think about it, in Montana or Maine or across Canada, all of these really northerly latitudes that get cold in the winter, when spring finally arrives and we’re so ready for it, then all of the plants are bursting into life and with them it’s this massive flood of insects and flowers and then fruits and seeds. So it’s like this huge pulse of food that’s available in the summer there.

Whereas in the winter, it’s really tough to survive. And so for a bird like the yellow-rumped warbler, however it is that they’ve managed to figure out this amazing migration and be able to spend the winter in Seattle or in the southern US or in Mexico and then return to these northerly areas where there’s just this massive pulse of caterpillars and spiders and all of these other foods during the summer, and then to be able to evacuate when conditions are really hard again in the winter, both in terms of finding food and in terms of surviving that cold weather…

I’d be really curious to hear your thoughts on this, Will, but to me that sounds a lot like a lot of the reasons that people travel. I mean, maybe also if we can afford it, it’s about new experiences and getting to know people and cultures and other places. But a lot of it too maybe really is about necessity or opportunities in other places. And maybe the conditions where I am in terms of economics, which basically is like food and shelter, right, and basic survival? Maybe I’m not able to really make it very well where I am and there’s this opportunity in another place. So to me that seems pretty similar. 

WILL: When I think about the reasons people move their residence or just travel… I think, yes, a lot of it does have to do with just that experience. There’s a lot of positive or enjoyment aspects of moving around and traveling. But I think especially in these more modern times, recent years, we’ve seen a lot of people moving around because they simply can’t afford to live in the places that they have previously lived in.

I’ve experienced this living in Seattle, downtown Seattle. Watching my rent go up and up and up and my paycheck not going up and up and up has really forced me to reconsider where I live and where I travel, too. I think that has a huge impact on why people travel. And maybe you can kind of relate that to birds in the sense of: people are consistently removing birds’ natural habitat, whether it’s wetlands disappearing, forests being cut down, their homes are disappearing, so they have to reconsider where they’re laying their eggs.  

So just like I may be pushed out of Seattle, birds are also being pushed out of the forest and marshes and all of that. So I think that’s another point that we can relate to. Birds have multiple different living spaces as they migrate. So during the winter they may live in South America; during summer, they may live up in Canada. But yeah, I think a lot of people can’t really afford to have two homes, a summer home and a winter home.

Another thing that’s big for me at least right now is food. So you mentioned birds are traveling, migrating for food. I am not a huge fan of lobster and that’s pretty much all we have to eat in Maine—so I have to travel for food! But yeah, I just drove down to Tennessee. A large part of that trip was for the food. I really miss the sort of local specialties they have down there and had some amazing meals. So I think for people that enjoy different types of food, traveling is really good for them to experience new things.  

SHANE: Yeah, wow. I love all those parallels that you drew there. And I’ve just got to ask if you don’t mind answering this question, what are some of your foods from Tennessee that you really love?  

WILL: Excellent question. So I think the number one, hands down, is my grandmother’s breakfast. She makes some classic Tennessee foods: biscuits and gravy, grits—homemade biscuits, I have to add. I will move heaven and earth to get to that southern breakfast. Barbecue, of course; Tennessee is really great for the sauces. Love their barbecue. But yeah, we had some really good food down there, a lot of it home-cooked. I am the only Valentine representative in the state of Maine. So it was mainly a trip to visit family and to get some connection there.

Yeah, I think just having some home-cooked food is really good. I like to make my own food here so whether it’s curries… I like to make Asian foods, like Indian food, Japanese, stuff like that. Which seems to be a little harder to find here, at least in decent form. But yeah, we’ve got a lot of diners in Maine, especially where I live. I live in the country, which is good for yellow-rumped warblers, but not so good for ethnic foods. Yeah, Tennessee food. Man, now I’m hungry! 

SHANE: Yeah, me too! That sounds amazing. Thanks for sharing that. I love, too, just thinking about the yellow-rumped warblers again, how that sort of ties in. Like you’ve got these foods that are family traditions that are, it sounds like, comfort foods for you and really amazing, and then you also cook like Indian food and Japanese food and stuff.

To me that ties back in with the yellow-rumped warblers: they’re migrating, they’re finding foods in different places and the food scene for yellow-rumped warblers obviously is not quite the same as the food scene for humans, but still, a northern, boreal conifer forest versus, I haven’t been to Mexico yet so I don’t know, I’m not familiar with the habitat diversity there, but it’s like such different places that I’m sure what’s on the dinner table as far as caterpillars or fruits or whatever the yellow-rumped warblers are finding is super different. And so it’s sort of that same kind of flexibility.

I loved what you said, Will, thinking about humans and yellow-rumped warblers and the ways that we’re similar. Like in terms of housing costs going up and it being hard to find places to live. And that’s for sure been true in the last few years where I am in Montana as well, that it’s really hard to find places to rent and it’s gotten pretty expensive. And then how that ties in with birds losing habitat. And what’s that even like for a bird? Is it that same sense of desperation, like I feel when I’m worried about whether I can find a place to live and whether I can afford it or not? So there’s that aspect of shortage and loss and that grief of maybe having a home somewhere and then having to move because it’s gotten too expensive. 

And I mean, really, I’m lucky compared to a lot of people. I have a friend who lived out of her car for several months in Helena, Montana in the winter because she couldn’t find a place to live and finally she was able to. So I think there’s both that that ties us to the yellow-rumped warblers, but then there’s also the adaptability. And that in spite of those challenges, we as human beings tend to be pretty darn resilient and find solutions even when it’s really hard. I think there’s a parallel with these yellow-rumped warblers.

They’re so flexible in their foraging, in where they can live, in living in all of these different places through the seasons, also that in spite of habitat loss and stuff, they’re still around. They’re still like right in our backyards and we can still connect with them. I don’t know, I think that’s just really cool.  

WILL: Agreed. And I think that that’s an especially poignant theme for yellow-rumped warblers because they are, if not the most common warbler in the United States, one of them. Probably top three. Part of the reason they are so populous is because they are so adaptable and resilient. Some birds are fairly fragile and constricted to certain diets or certain locations. Not really the case for yellow-rumped warblers.

One of my favorite facts about them is that they can digest certain berries that other birds can’t. So their little bellies are able to digest the wax on the berries, myrtle berries or whatnot, allowing them to survive in more “winter-ous” climates, northern climates, when others can’t. So that really speaks to the resilience of the yellow-rumped warbler in particular. Again, I can relate to that. Your friend was able to make it through the winter in a car—that’s crazy! But you know, the yellow-rumped warbler has learned how to make those adaptations too. 

SHANE: Yeah, totally. I think that’s a really, really good point. And, Will, I know that when you started birding it was while you were living in Seattle, right? And with the red-winged blackbirds, which is a really cool story. And now you’re in Maine. I don’t think I’d go swimming in the sound in Seattle right now either—but it’s a bit warmer, I think, than winter in Maine. So I was just wondering: what have you seen in terms of yellow-rumped warblers in those two different places? I’m guessing you’ve seen yellow-rumped warblers in both places. 

WILL: Mm-hmm.

SHANE: How are they different in terms of where you tend to find them, what you see them doing? Do they like to hang out with certain species in one area and different species in the other? Or just anything you’ve noticed along those lines.  

WILL: When I think back to the yellow-rumped warblers that I saw in Washington, most of those were, surprisingly, in the city. Those birds had somehow clung to the bastions of nature within that concrete jungle of Seattle. So I would be on a lunch break from the aquarium where I used to work and I’d see them hopping from tree to tree along the streets and it just amazed me.

Because it’s like, how could any bird that’s not a pigeon survive in downtown Seattle? Where you’ve got concrete on this side and then Puget sound on that side? That surprised me. The other ones that I’d see were in parks, sporadically kind of. Little one-off warblers. So they always felt pretty special to me in Seattle because they seemed pretty solitary. Almost like how you’d see one red-tailed hawk at a time or like one eagle. It’s like, “oh my gosh, there’s one yellow-rumped warbler!” 

Whereas when I got to Maine, I did start seeing flocks of them. So I’m not sure what they were eating or how they were surviving in city. But here since I’m definitely in more of a rural area and I’ve been exploring more parkland or farmland, I am starting to see larger flocks of warblers. And they’re mixed flocks, too. So not just yellow-rumped warblers but all sorts of little birds like chickadees, titmice, sparrows. So they seem to coexist when I’ve experienced them here.

And for some reason I seem to find them closer to water here in Maine. So I do think that they are eating the insects that are swarming around these bodies of water. So whether it’s marshland or ponds, that’s where I have been finding them. I’d say that’s kind of my main experience with the differences there. Which seems kind of ironic because as a person, when I lived in the city, I’m surrounded by a ton of people and I see single birds. And now I live in the country where I feel like I’m alone but I’m seeing groups of birds. So it’s like we kind of traded places. 

SHANE: Wow. That’s really cool to hear. And interestingly enough, with what you were saying about seeing them right near downtown Seattle in all this concrete, kind of low numbers of them, like one or so, one or two and right up against the Sound… I also was out birding yesterday actually and I saw a couple of yellow-rumped warblers just in a neighborhood in Seattle, popping around in the deciduous trees.

But then I also went to Schmitz Park in West Seattle, which is like this amazing patch of old growth forest right in the middle of the city. And I did not see or hear any yellow-rumps there. So I mean that’s a really small sample. Take this with a huge grain of salt. But it definitely matches with what you’re saying of your experience in Seattle: that they’re kind of seeming to take advantage of these neighborhoods and developed areas and that that’s kind of where they’re finding food and stuff here.  

WILL: Yeah. And that, I think, really speaks to the soul again of my podcast, which is: common birds are amazing and they can be found anywhere. So even if you’re in downtown Seattle or wherever, a really urbanized place, maybe you’re going to see these amazing little warblers. More so even, sometimes, than people that live close to these dense forests where you’d assume that you’d see them.  

SHANE: Totally. Yeah. And that’s a theme that I really love too and try to at least allude to with my writing. This idea that, you know, when people think of nature often they think of like Yellowstone National Park or something. But to me that’s been just revolutionary and really fun, to realize that, yes, there’s amazing nature in places like that, but it’s also right outside our doorsteps. It’s also right along the freeway and in the middle of our cities and wherever we live.

And so even if it’s with house sparrows and dandelions, we can develop that connection and realize that there’s all this life that wants to thrive around us. And then we see something like the yellow-rumped warbler that crosses those barriers and it’s in all of these different habitats, from really rural, wild Maine to the middle of Seattle. And I think that’s amazing.  

WILL: When we kind of take a step back and appreciate the wildlife and the little bit of nature that we get to experience every day, we’ll find tremendous value in that life. This winter we got a ton of snow where I live. And one of my neighbors took it upon herself to shovel all of the snow into the bushes that line my house and then her house across the lake. And it basically decimated all of the plant life there that the birds loved to enjoy last summer. So I was pretty upset about that. All of the bushes are gone, destroyed.

But just the other day I was looking into the gray brown mush that is my old plant life, and I saw little bits of green popping up. And it just gave me this hope that life is going to find its way back, after the intense snowfall and the neighbor pummeling these plants. And if plants can figure out how to live through our human shenanigans, so can birds or anything else. Just something I love about nature.

SHANE: That’s so both heartbreaking about the bushes and also beautiful. Both to see those signs of life still. And then I also, I think, the connection. That you have that connection with those bushes, because you’ve seen how the birds use them. And if you weren’t looking at the birds, maybe you wouldn’t even really care that the bushes had been hurt. But even as painful as that is, I think it’s also beautiful, that you have that heartfelt connection with the place. This stream restoration site near Helena where I’ve done a lot of birding over the past six years… It’s really been this spot that has taught me so much about birds and plants and life. And seeing these waves of migration as it’s happening… Because it’s like willows and chokecherries and alders along this stream that’s surrounded by grassland.  

So the birds like the yellow-rumps, that around that area of Montana breed up in the conifers—on this stream, I just see them in the spring and fall. So if I see them there, I know that they’re migrating. And then I get to see these waves week to week. Like, oh, now there are a bunch. Now there aren’t very many. And all of these other birds shifting across the continent with them.

A couple of years after the spring that I tell the story of in our podcast here, that site actually burned in the fall. There was this fire that swept through and it wiped out most of the shrubs. It just burned them to the ground. And so it was really heartbreaking. And then the spring after that, where before we had all of these yellow-rumps and other warblers coming through, it was just a trickle. You know, a few that probably weren’t finding very much to eat there.  

And so that has been really tragic. But at the same time that was like two or three years ago. And it’s been slow, but most of those shrubs have sprouted back from the roots underground. Where the chokecherries were like head-high and would have all these fruits in the fall that would bring in the robins and cedar waxwings—now they’re like as high as my shoulder again.

So it’s still a slow process and it’ll be a few more years before they come back. But just to see that resilience and to see that this is a fire-adapted landscape and these shrubs can handle this. It’s not good in the moment for the birds that are needing them, but they can come back. So it just ties in with both the heartbreak of seeing that loss, but then also there’s a beautiful thing about having that connection and caring and realizing that nature is resilient too.  

WILL: And again, I think I’m kind of inadvertently changing the theme of this episode, to empathy and relatability to the warbler. Because I think of these sorts of landscapes that go through all sorts of trauma like fire and the birds that suffer because of it, they’re still here. Like they come back, they bounce back. So we can, too. You know, people experience all sorts of traumatic events during their life. And just like yellow-rumped warblers, you know, I think we can figure out how to make it work. Yeah, I’m really glad to hear that, that that wildlife preserve is surviving after fire.  

SHANE NARRATION: When this first male yellow-rumped arrived, the shrubs were still waking up from the long winter. The thinleaf alders (Alnus incana) were leafless still, though their long catkins had emerged a week before, sending pollen outwards on the breeze. We watched a small skein of trumpeter swans flying north, higher than the mountains. A few rough-legged hawks passed over, migrating towards an Arctic summer ahead.

A week later, we counted seven yellow-rumped warblers. It was a clear morning after a few days of drizzle. The rough-legged hawks and the other winter birds seemed to have moved on. The leaves of the spiny gooseberry (Ribes setosum) were unfurling, and the chokecherry buds had burst. The raptors were migrating in earnest, riding upwards on thermals. Perhaps there were so many today because the previous days of rain had delayed them. We watched golden eagles, sharp-shinned and Cooper’s hawks, and at least eight red-tailed hawks moving past. And at sunrise, two male short-eared owls were flying over the grassland, their flight mothlike, hunting rodents among the grasses and doing territorial wing-clap displays. 

WILL: Another thing that can be really hard for little birds are their predators. Not only do yellow-rumped warblers have to figure out where to go during the winter cold months, what to eat, all of that. They also have to survive against predators such as raptors that eat them. So they have to factor that survivability into their travel plans, so to speak. Because they’ll interact with different predators in the different parts of the world that they’re in. When we relate that back to people, what are some of the challenges that people face while traveling?  

SHANE: That’s a really good question. I should just acknowledge that my experience with travel…. As much as, you know, as a five-year-old kid, going back and forth across the country was not very fun, and there were definitely challenges to it… I also do have a lot of privilege. Like I was never as a kid having to really worry about like, am I going to eat tomorrow? Is there a home waiting for me? Or is a predator going to kill me or kidnap me or something? And I know that there are people who do travel, really facing those survival questions. So I just have to acknowledge that I can only imagine, and admire those people, and I can’t really speak to that from my personal experience. 

But I do know that for me, figuring out how to fit in in a new place… Just basic stuff like figuring out, where do I live? How do I go through my day in this place and this home that’s different? How do I make friends, where do I fit in? How do I find work? All of these sorts of basic questions about getting to know a new place. Those are definitely things that I think probably anyone has to figure out in various ways when they travel.

And I think that’s something that is very much like the warblers. That they’re having to figure out just these basic questions that might be straightforward or might not. Like, how do I find food? What’s my niche here in this new community? Because it’s not just the yellow-rumped warblers that are moving. It’s also the black-capped chickadees that maybe they see in the summer and they don’t see in the winter depending on where they’re going. Or the white-crowned sparrows that are moving alongside them into the boreal forest. 

So it’s not just that they’re moving across the landscape as this solo entity, but they’re also joining these flocks and leaving these flocks. And every place they land, the community is probably going to be different. And like you say, what’s the risk of being eaten by a predator? That’s probably going to change in different places, too. So I think it’s just a lot of figuring out. And I think that’s very much, in a broad sense, similar to us. I’m really curious, what are your thoughts on that, Will?  

WILL: Yeah, I agree with everything that you’ve said. And when I think about why people travel and then why the yellow-rumped warbler travels, I think it’s a risk-reward type of thing. So sometimes the hope for a better food source is worth that danger that lurks just around the corner. People, as I mentioned earlier, sometimes we have to move to a different place for affordability reasons, things like that.

But I think a lot of the challenge is how set in our ways we get. We are creatures of habit most of the time. People like to accumulate things. Sometimes it can be hard to figure out how to move all of this stuff. How do you move light? When I moved across the country, I had to get rid of everything that I owned that didn’t fit into a Mini Cooper. People would tell me like, oh my gosh, you’re so brave for packing up and moving. Or like, this is going to be so hard to live in a different place.  

And I was like, actually the hard part is getting rid of all my stuff, because I love my stuff. I think the kind of, I don’t want to use the word materialism, but the comfort that we find in our things… Can be a challenge when it comes to moving or traveling. So that’s a challenge that I think people create for themselves. Some people are less attached to their things than others, but a lot of us really care about those.

I am a sentimental person. So I like to keep every birthday card that I get, or every photo. I have like 30,000 pictures, you know, just random birds and stuff. But yeah, that’s kind of a self-made challenge. I think as far as outside dangers or challenges, everything that you just said. People have to face potential predators, so to speak, in the wild. Too, some people are more vulnerable than others, definitely worth mentioning. 

But I think no matter where we are, we will always be faced with the unknown, especially when traveling. So sometimes that can be a challenge or a fear factor for people. Just kind of diving into something that’s unfamiliar. So again, like I mentioned, it can be stressful traveling. Something that brings me relief is seeing the familiar birds. I think that is something that can help alleviate that challenge. It’s like when I feel overwhelmed because I don’t know where the grocery store is or how I’m going to get to car repairs or things like that… I can take a deep breath and realize like, hey, there are yellow-rumped warblers here too. You know, I think I could figure it out. Challenges everywhere but also rewards everywhere. You’ve got southern comfort food when you travel to Tennessee and things like that.

SHANE: Totally. I love what you said there and what you were talking about, about packing stuff or having to let go of stuff. Super relatable. I did that this January. I just put all of my stuff in a storage unit and now I’m sort of doing this mobile writing thing. Which is interesting and, like you say, both challenge and opportunity. It’s very interesting. And I really love what you said about the yellow-rumped warblers.

And it’s similar for me—that like when I’m going to a new place and I’m stressed out, I feel like I don’t maybe belong, I do find that it really helps me just to connect with the landscape. Just to go out and take a walk in a patch of nature and find a yellow-rumped warbler or find a dandelion. Or find a willow that might not be quite the same species of willow as where I used to live… But it’s still a similar story and it’s still there and providing homes for all of this life. There’s something really special to me about that.  

WILL: And I think, too, that’s something that we have to seek. I think back to when I didn’t really even know about birds or recognize that there are yellow-rumped warblers all over the place. I am getting this comfort from seeing the familiar birds, but I wouldn’t really know that they’re there unless I’m actively looking. We’re taking the time to slow down. Smell the roses, for lack of a better term, and just look into these trees and bushes.

So I think in this modern, fast-paced life that we live where it’s like constantly consuming this and that, and media and have 50 screens in your face at one time, it’s really important for us to take a step back. Disconnect, and just look at one thing at a time. Like look at this tree and understand that we are more connected now than we really have ever been.  

SHANE: And something that I really admire about your work, Will, is that you make it really approachable, I think. There are some people who are avid birders or who for whatever combination of circumstances sort of have found that connection with nature in their lives. And then there may be a lot of other people who maybe just haven’t been exposed to that.

And I think that the way that you talk about all of these common species that share our cities with us, share our neighborhoods with us, is really accessible. It really invites other people into this space of just wondering and being curious and finding this connection. And I really think that that’s so beautiful because this really is something that’s for all of us. That like the birds and the plants around us can connect all of us, both to them and to each other. And so I just really appreciate that about the work you do.  

WILL: Yeah. I kind of think of it as like spreading the gospel. Because I’ve got this good news of birding—and it took me 20-some odd years to even know that that word existed. So now I’m like, I’m going to make sure that as many people as I can know about birding too. If I can share this hobby with a kid or a young adult who can then get into birding and then share it with their friends, I think that’s a win. Anybody can do birding no matter where you are. And I think it’s just so rewarding.

We’ve already talked about the benefits, like in this discussion alone. Birding, I wish I could just shout it from the rooftops at all times. And that’s one of my favorite things about the podcast too. I’ll go to parties or family events, talk to people that I don’t know or I have not had a lot of contact with and inevitably the podcast will come up. And then they’ll listen to it and they’ll be like, wow, this is so fun. Like, I really like this. I’m going to look at pigeons a little differently. Even if I can spread this to like my friends and family that didn’t really know about birding—I think it’s really enriching some people’s lives, like even  strangers’ lives that I don’t know.

And I love your work too, of course, because it’s like you bring a depth to—like my podcast is, I feel like it’s very lighthearted, fun, accessible in a kind of broad way—but you really bring it down to kind of the next level, on a more scientific way of looking at how birds interact with the habitat, their landscape. Talking with ornithologists, walking with professionals, and all of that. When I listen to your show, I think I’m with you on one of your adventures. It’s really cool. So I think both of us are really providing a unique take on this hobby and I think if you really love birds, you’ll love both of these shows.  

SHANE: Thanks Will. I love that too. Just seeing how, I think it’s like binoculars, right? If you look out of binoculars with one eye closed, it’s a very flat perspective. And so I can see that a little bit in our conversation, right? Because we’re kind of coming at yellow-rumped warblers from these two different angles. And then by mixing those together, we’re finding all of these things that I couldn’t come up with on my own. And this is so fun. So I love that.

I also love what you said about sharing this with your family and friends and that reaction of like, wow, I see pigeons in a new way now. And I’ve gotten that reaction. I have some family members who I think for a while were kind of like, Shane’s pretty weird, I don’t know why he is so into plants and birds and all this stuff, I just don’t get it. And then I started doing this blog and they started supporting it and reading it on a regular basis. And since they’ve told me like, now we’re looking at insects differently. Now we notice all of these plants that we didn’t notice before. And they have all these questions for me and stuff. And it’s really fun to see that, to see that we are making those connections and inviting more people in. I really love that.  

WILL: Me too. And that’s why all of my main episodes have a guest. Because I know that everybody has their own perspective on birds and birding and I want share the different perspectives because it adds depth to the world of birds. I even go out of my way to chat with people on my show that aren’t birders. I want to learn from a museum studies specialist on how birds affect their life or their job. Or an indie musician—what’s their connection to birds? So yeah, it’s one of those things where I always say like, if you walk outside you’re birding. But it’s more like, if you’re living and breathing, you’re birding.

SHANE NARRATION: By April 27th, the Hood’s phlox (Phlox hoodii) was in full bloom on the hillsides and the chokecherries were beginning to leaf out. This time we found 11 yellow-rumped warblers along the stream. Most of them were still the male Audubon’s warblers that we had been seeing since mid-April—the western subspecies of yellow-rumped—with their bright yellow throats. But we also found one myrtle warbler, the eastern subspecies, with its bright white throat. By now, the white-crowned sparrows were also starting to move through, bound for the boreal forest.

WILL: The yellow-rumped warbler includes four subspecies: the eastern myrtle warbler, Audubon’s warbler, the northwest Mexican black-fronted warbler, and the Guatemalan Goldman’s warbler. Sometimes we settle in different places but keep our roots where we’re from. So think different families spread out, like both of our families. You may look a little different from your cousins on the other coast, your fashion contrast, your voice sound a little different with varying accents. But you’re still family. What are yellow-rumped warblers’ flocking habits? And what’s the value of having connections not only near but far from us as well?  

SHANE: Yeah, so I really love this question and I’m just thinking of what you were talking about earlier, Will, about predators. And an experience that I’ve had on this restoration site in Montana is… It’s pretty often during spring migration, let’s say like April, probably by April and May, that we’ll have these Accipiters, so these bird-hunting hawks like the sharp-shinned hawks and Cooper’s hawks that are migrating over. And sometimes along this stream they will stop over and hunt in these shrubs.

So these hawks are like, you know, to a songbird, they’re murderers, right? They hunt mostly songbirds. So these songbirds are super-wary and they normally know when these hawks are around way before I do. Normally the birds tell me. And so the robins will start doing this really high pitched seeee call that I can’t imitate at all—it’s way too high pitched for me. And then the chickadees will sound really agitated, lots of dee dee dee dee dee calls. 

And so whenever I start to hear those things, I drop everything and I’m scanning the sky and looking, where’s the raptor? And sometimes there’ll be like a tiny speck up there and, oh, it’s a sharp-shinned hawk on a thermal or it’s a merlin, one of these little falcons that hunts birds, flying over. Or sometimes I won’t see anything. And so I think if I were a songbird I would’ve used up my nine lives by now, right? I’m so much less aware than these birds are. And so I think that really ties in with this flocking stuff. That it’s not just the yellow-rumped warblers. So during spring migration in Montana, I do see flocks. Sometimes I’ll see like these big flocks of yellow-rumped warblers. But I also see this communication between species. 

The way that, if one of the robins starts doing that seeee call, then the yellow-rumped warblers dive for cover. And I know as well, like I think you mentioned this earlier, Will, that you will see them with the chickadees and titmice and stuff where you are in Maine. And that’s for sure something that I was reading about in the scientific literature as well. Especially during the fall and into the winter, the yellow-rumped warblers will join these mixed species flocks with chickadees and nuthatches and titmice. Which is just a super cool thing to see. 

Again, they’re kind of trading communication back and forth with these other species. They’re probably also hunting food in somewhat different ways. So they’re kind of working together to cover the area and find food-rich spots maybe and not competing so much with each other. But also just that communication thing. And so I think that speaks to both the flocking and also the connections—wherever they are. I mean, I don’t know what it’s like for the yellow-rumped warblers that are spending the winter in Mexico. But I would suspect that they’re probably also tuning in to this network of other songbirds. I don’t know if they’re foraging with them, but they’re probably, if nothing else, at least paying attention to when those other birds are seeing predators and stuff. And finding sort of where they fit in in this community.  

WILL: So I have to ask, you mentioned the songbirds can kind of tell you when other sorts of birds are present like predators. What is your opinion on “pishing”?  

SHANE: So I’ll just talk briefly about that in case people haven’t heard of that before. So “pishing” is sort of doing like this psHH psHH psHH psHH psHH that will often draw songbirds in and they’ll pop up out of the bushes where they were hiding to investigate. And so there are definitely birders who will use this technique. Like if there’s a sparrow or something that is just hiding in the bushes and they want to see it. I’m a little bit cautious about pishing. There are a lot of times when I’m out birding where I just won’t do pishing at all. So there’s pishing and then another thing some birders will do that is maybe even more controversial is that they’ll do playback, where they’ll play the song of a species on a speaker to try to draw it in.  

I had an experience with a birder in Montana several years ago where I had heard a bird that I was pretty sure about, but it was kind of an unusual bird—we don’t get golden-crowned kinglets in that area very much and I’d heard one. And so they ended up playing actually this predator call of a northern pygmy-owl to see if it would bring the birds in.

And what happened is there were all of these dark-eyed juncos and other songbirds around, they did kind of move in a bit closer. And then this merlin falcon zoomed over. It did not catch a bird, but it almost did. And so to me that was a good lesson of like, okay, I really personally—I mean other people have different opinions—but personally I don’t like to do playback unless it’s a specific situation where there’s a well-thought-out reason for it.  

I have participated in some owl surveys at night before where it’s like trying to gather information on breeding populations of owls for scientific research. Then there is a structured protocol for doing playback in a way that there’s still some risk to birds, but trying to minimize it. So I’m of the same mindset a little bit with pishing, that I tend to avoid doing it. There’s some times, maybe especially like outside of the breeding season, maybe it’s not as risky for the birds because they aren’t under as much stress and where I might consider doing it once in a while in a particular situation. But that’s kind of my inclination on it.  

WILL: Yeah, I agree first of all. But the first time I actually learned about that was on an Audubon walk in Seattle of all places. So I met up with this group and the leader of that walk kept doing it. I guess they were looking for a Lincoln’s Sparrow or something like that. So somebody asked like, why do you keep going psHH psHH psHHpsHH? And she explained how that sound imitates like, the warning call or distress call of songbirds.

And it encourages other small birds to come to the defense of the distressed bird. And as they were explaining that, I kind of felt icky. Because to me it was like, if I’m in a theater and I am screaming fire and there’s no fire just because I want to see somebody in the front row get up and run… That seems wrong to me.  

So I won’t do it. I just don’t like it. I think if you are a scientist or a researcher, ornithologist, what not, and you have a reason to use playback or pishing for your research, I think you’re a professional, you know what you’re doing. But just for the sake of my own pleasure or my satisfaction checking something off a list, I don’t think it’s worth distressing the birds.

One of the most exciting things about birding to me is the unpredictable nature of these animals. You never know where you’re going to see a bird or what you’re going to see. So why try to manufacture an experience? If you know something’s there, you can wait for it, or you don’t see it. I don’t personally think using playback or warning calls of little birds is an appropriate way to honor them in their natural habitat. If I keep screaming fire in a theater, eventually the people coming to see the show aren’t going to keep coming to see the show, you know? And then there’s no show for anybody.  

SHANE: Yeah. I’m really glad you brought that up, Will, and I very much agree with you. It made me think of two other things that… Well, they’re related, they’re slightly tangents, so I’ll keep them brief. One is just that I’ve noticed, especially during spring and fall migration, that sometimes if there is one of those birds that really is not choosing to let me see it and is just hiding down in the shrubs or something… Sometimes if I just stop and maybe I sit down and I just hang out there for 15 minutes or so, sometimes that bird comes out. Sometimes it never does. And it’s just like, okay, I respect that, that this bird does not want to let me see it. But often there will be like 15 other birds that will come out of the shrubs.  

And because I’m not being such an intrusive presence on the landscape, I’m just being there quietly, they’ll come closer to me. And I can watch them foraging and interacting with each other. And I think those have been some of my most special moments in birding. When I find a place that’s where there are a lot of birds, like near water and shrubs during migration. And then I just stop and sit there for a while and that can be really amazing. So I wanted to mention that.

And then the other thing is just with your analogy about screaming fire in the theater, to me, that’s another thing that’s really cool about birding is that, yes, on one hand we could be sort of maybe not-so-ethical birders and be screaming fire at the theater, right? And then that’s maybe jeopardizing the lives of these birds. And so that’s not really something I want to be doing. But on the other hand, when we’re out and getting to know these birds and stuff, we’re noticing like, oh, this park over here, there’s so many birds using it. And maybe we’re noticing something like, oh, here’s this patch of grassland where meadowlarks and Savannah sparrows nest. 

And then, you know, maybe there’s someone who is letting their dog run off leash. And they’re not being bad-intentioned at all about it, maybe they just don’t know that there are meadowlarks nesting there. And so to me, that’s a natural outcome of birding is that, as we notice what these birds are needing to go about their lives, we can be advocates and we can be making adjustments and maybe being part of a project to plant a new patch of cottonwoods and willows for the birds. Or helping educate people who maybe aren’t thinking about letting their dog run through a really sensitive patch of habitat. And so in that way we can be not just appreciating the birds and benefiting from them, but also giving back. And to me that’s something that’s really special.  

WILL: As you mentioned the off-leash dog, I felt a small fire migrate from the theater to my heart because that’s my hugest pet peeve: off-leash dogs, especially in sensitive wildlife areas. I will straight up tell people that they can’t do that. Something I joke about with my girlfriend every now and then is I want to like set up shop, like become a volunteer with Audubon or something like that and have a little table at the entrance to a park that is no dogs, like a sensitive wildlife area, and hand off fines and stuff to people with their off leash dogs that just, aaAAAAH!

And the beaches too. Oh my gosh. Don’t even get me started on like the endangered piping plovers that we have in Maine. And watching people and their off leash dogs run along their nesting habitats. Anyway, I want to move the conversation from these negatives to more positives.  

SHANE NARRATION: The next week, May 5th, was incredible. It was clear that spring migration was actively happening, right in front of our eyes. From the 11 yellow-rumped warblers of the week before, we now counted 37 along the stream, flycatching and foraging in the shrubs. Most of them were still yellow-throated Audubon’s males, but this week we counted five of the white-throated myrtle warblers. On this day, occasional snow showers descended towards us from the Continental Divide. The spiny gooseberry was beginning to flower. We saw the first western kingbird of the spring and watched the yellow-rumped warblers foraging over the small wetlands of the restoration site, darting out from the alders to catch insects in midair. The riparian shrubs were loaded with migrant songbirds. Besides the 37 yellow-rumps, we counted 16 white-crowned sparrows and 15 Lincoln’s sparrows.

Migration seemed to lull over the next few weeks. We saw just a handful of yellow-rumped warblers. Meanwhile, the chokecherries and thinleaf alders continued to leaf out. Every week, a few more spring migrants and summer breeders trickled in. We saw our first yellow warblers, gray catbirds, lazuli buntings, American redstarts, and clay-colored sparrows of the year.

And then came May 28th. Our last survey had been just four days before, and then we had counted only four yellow-rumped warblers. From the peak of 37 in early May, the yellow-rumps had gradually dwindled. But now, among the new leaves emerging on the willows, and a few foraging least flycatchers, we counted 46 yellow-rumps. It was a flood of migrating warblers—primarily the yellow-rumps. Along with them, we saw a handful of Wilson’s warblers and American redstarts, plus 26 common yellowthroats. Yellow warblers, the only warbler species that commonly stays to nest on this site, were spaced out along the stream, singing their exuberant sweetsweetlittlemoreSWEET song.

WILL: And I love yellow-rumped warblers. So before we wrap up our chat, I wanted to make sure everybody knows exactly what we are looking at. So just a brief description of them. Yellow-rumped warblers are small songbirds with one iconic feature throughout all of their subspecies and such. And that is their yellow rump—or “butter butt,” as they are known in the birder world. So that’s kind of the defining trait of yellow-rumped warblers. They’ve also got yellow closer to their shoulder area, so their wings where their wings meet their body. And the different subspecies have different color variations. They’re all kind of the same basic brown or gray with lighter streaks across their back. But they’ve also got a little bit of yellow on their head too. So look out for those little warblers. 

I think I was surprised at first when I realized the diversity of those plumages. It’s something that I have actually talked about on my red-tailed hawk discussion, how those birds have various different morphologies and different plumage patterns and such. But yeah, yellow-rumped warblers are identifiable by their yellow rumps, so I like to call them butter butts. Yeah, can’t go wrong with yellow-rumped warblers. And too, like we’ve discussed, they perfectly embody that spirit of freedom and travel that most birds represent.

But I find so much value in their familiarity. So wherever I go, I know I’m probably going to be in the company of a yellow-rumped warbler, which makes me feel a little more at home. Traveling opens up the opportunity to meet new people, to try new foods as we’ve discussed. And to find great new places to establish families. And these are all the benefits that yellow-rumped warblers enjoy too. So Shane, what are some of your favorite things about traveling or yellow-rumped warblers?  

SHANE: Oh my gosh, Will, where to start? I think as far as traveling, it’s really special to me both getting to know new people and people who may see the world in different ways than I do. I mean that’s true of all of us, right? Like we all have different experiences, but I think especially through different languages, growing up in different places, coming from different cultures… It’s really special to get to know the diversity of human experience that way. And at the same time how we’re all human. Another thing that I really appreciate about traveling—and I think both of these tie right in with the yellow-rumped warblers—is getting to know new landscapes. And just connecting with the plants, connecting with the climate, getting to know what’s this new place?

And it seems to me like anytime I do that as well, I also learn so much about the other places I’ve lived just by comparison and realizing like, oh, here in Seattle, we have Douglas-firs and stinging nettles. Well, we also have both of those like in Helena, Montana. But the stinging nettles here are already a foot high and they’re just barely coming up in Helena, Montana because it was snowing two days ago there. So just to see those differences and similarities and to appreciate the diversity of both culture and people and human experience and landscapes is really cool. 

And then yellow-rumped warblers—there are a lot of things that I love about them. I think to me… living in inland northern climates for the last eight or ten years—to me they really speak about spring. When I hear yellow-rumped warblers singing and I see them flitting around in the trees in the willows or the apple trees or whatever in the spring, I know spring is well on its way. 

And they were one of the first birds whose song I learned. I had started birding by ear this one winter in Idaho. And so I knew like the chickadees and nuthatches and juncos—all of these winter birds I knew really well. And so sometime in April, I heard this new song that I didn’t recognize and it was a yellow-rumped warbler in my dad’s apple tree. And that was like one of the first birds that I learned by ear where I realized that I didn’t recognize it.

And then I tracked it down in the field and figured out, oh my gosh, it’s a yellow-rumped warbler and it was really special. So I think just that connection with spring. Also just seeing that migration in action. Like you mentioned, Will, they’re one of the most abundant warblers in North America. So just about anywhere, we’re bound to see them at some time of year as they’re moving through on this massive northward and southward migration and I think that’s really special. 

How about you? What do you like about traveling and yellow-rumped warblers?  

WILL: I think for me, so like how you mentioned yellow-rumped warblers for you were kind of a sign of spring. For me, they’re kind of a reminder of the value of little birds. So when I first started birding, I was all about the big birds. So like I wanted to see eagles and cormorants and these cool birds. But it wasn’t really until I had a coworker at the aquarium who was like the biggest cheerleader for warblers ever that I stopped to really pay attention to them.

I’d tell her about my adventures birding and what I saw and all that and I never really mentioned little things because I didn’t really care about them. And she’s like, well what about the warblers? Did you see any warblers? So I started looking for them and of course yellow-rumps were one of the first ones that I learned how to identify.  

So yeah, they remind me that even the little guys are worth your time and attention. But something that was a bit challenging for me at first was learning how to identify all the warblers because there are so many different versions. And we’ve talked about four subspecies alone in the yellow-rumped warbler. So something that helped me identify them was drawing them. I really like to draw, and art in general. So I thought maybe these two hobbies can mingle to support both.

So I was like, this is my task. I’m going to draw all of the 26 most common warblers in the state of Maine or in the Northeast. So I did, and it took weeks, but eventually I had drawn, labeled, and colored all these warblers. And just that methodical task of looking at all of these different details that the birds have and the male-female differentiations and all of that… Really helped me to learn the warblers and appreciate them.  

So now it’s like, yep, that’s a Wilson’s warbler, that’s a palm warbler, black-and-white, all this… It’s so cool that they’re all around us. And these little tiny birds have such big differences in personalities and all of that. So yeah, that’s something I like about warblers. Traveling, again, everything you’ve said and what we talked about. I appreciate the new experiences that can be had traveling and not just that, but the way that traveling can help me appreciate home and the little quiet moments that I have. So whether it’s seeing green poke up from my dead bushes. Or in the trees across from my window…

It’s nice to know I can travel down south in Tennessee and see this lush green landscape when it’s still dead and brown here and know spring is on the way, it’s going to get to me. So it, you know, it’s just kind of everything overlaps and connects and I like that. Also of course just meeting new people and experiencing new things and cultures. Yeah, I think that’s something else that I really love about birds. It’s like they are the most well-traveled creatures on the planet, so we can learn from them.  

SHANE: I love what you just said there. And I think for me as well with the yellow-rumped warblers, it’s very similar. Both kind of teach me how the world is so vast and amazing and more than I can ever really comprehend or understand fully and I’m just a little piece of that. And that’s a pretty special thing. But also the warblers in particular teach me how connected it is. Like I think when I was growing up and hopping on an airliner and going from Idaho to North Carolina and back… I would always get a window seat and would look out and try to understand the landscape and stuff. But I think it was kind of really disconnected in a way too.

And so just to see the migration of the yellow-rumped warblers reminds me how connected we all are. Whether I’ve been to these areas in Guatemala and Mexico where some of the yellow-rumped warblers are wintering or not. That people who live there are seeing these same birds that I’m seeing. Even though we don’t know each other yet, that connects us. I think it’s a really special thing.  

WILL: Always have a hint of familiarity. Well, Shane, I really appreciate you letting me join you on your journey in Helena and experiencing this snapshot of your experience with yellow-rumped warblers. So thank you so much for chatting with me.  

SHANE: Thank you so much to you, Will. I really have just loved our conversation and it’s so fun to hear about your experience and passion for these birds where you’ve seen them in Seattle and in Maine. I’m just really happy to have this chance to get to know you a bit more. This has been super fun. Thank you.  

WILL: And maybe just like yellow-rumped warblers experience passing by… One day, maybe we will cross paths as well.  

SHANE: I hope so.

Thanks for reading! It was truly a pleasure collaborating with Will Valentine on this special joint podcast production. In addition to the time we each spent preparing for this conversation, Will also did the bulk of the sound editing for this episode. Independent podcasting is a lot of work, and we both rely on listener support to keep going—whether it’s your words of encouragement, sharing our shows with your friends, or a financial contribution. You can find more of Will’s work by searching for Will’s Birdbrain wherever you find your podcasts. Visit patreon.com/willsbirdbrain to support him. And to join the community that supports my work, visit my Donate page. Many thanks.

The Sevenmile Creek restoration site near Helena, Montana, which I mention in this podcast, is a restoration project managed by Prickly Pear Land Trust. For those of you listening from Helena, note that the site is not yet open to the public as the habitat regrows following intensive habitat restoration efforts. Visit pricklypearlt.org for more information.

Until next time, get outside! And while you’re out there, wherever you are, keep your eyes and ears open for yellow-rumped warblers.

The post Yellow-rumped Wanderers: a special feature about yellow-rumped warblers appeared first on Wild With Nature.

When you compare the birds of a manicured lawn with those that inhabit a grove of chokecherries, the difference is stark. The lawn might support a few starlings and robins. Perhaps, late in spring migration, a handful of desperate Swainson’s thrushes might stop by. The chokecherries, on the other hand, support an intricate community of life, from two-tailed swallowtail butterflies to dozens of species of songbirds. When the fruits ripen in late summer to a deep, juicy black, they attract cedar waxwings, Townsend’s solitaires, western tanagers, American robins, and house finches. Meanwhile, throughout the growing season, the foliage supports a diversity of insects – and the birds that eat them. Flitting among the leaves, you can find Wilson’s warblers, ruby-crowned kinglets, yellow-rumped warblers, and warbling vireos. 

When we consider the diversity of life around us, it’s easy to see a lot of bad news these days. We’ve lost 2.9 billion breeding birds in North America over the last 50 years. Scientists have reported steep declines of once-common insects. But by making a few simple decisions about what we plant in our gardens, we can be part of reversing these trends. In our yards, parks, and neighborhoods, we can provide homes for the birds, bees, and caterpillars. But doing this isn’t just about avoiding extinctions – it’s also a lot of fun.

This article is focused on plants for bird-friendly gardens in the western half of Montana, USA. If you live elsewhere, the specific plants will be different, but the general recommendations will be the same.

Getting started: habitat for birds

Every species of bird is unique in its life story. The habitats it uses, the foods it eats, where it nests, whether it migrates – all of this varies. Nevertheless, all birds need food, shelter, water, and safety from predators. Plants provide excellent food and shelter – especially particular species of plants that are native to the local landscape. But before we get into the specifics of these plants, let’s consider water and predators. 

Some birds, such as American kestrels, can get most or all of the moisture they need from their food. Otherwise, birds need to drink water. Including a source of water in your garden, such as a regularly cleaned bird bath or a backyard wetland, can attract birds to drink or bathe.

Watch out for predators

What about predators in our yards? Outdoor cats are incredibly deadly for neighborhood songbirds. In the United States alone, cats kill well over a billion birds a year. This number is so large that it’s almost unimaginable. But there are a lot of outdoor cats in the United States: around 50 million pets, in addition to as many as 100 million feral cats. Managing outdoor cats, especially feral ones, can be a contentious topic. But keeping your own cats indoors is a relatively easy step to take. By doing so, you’ll help ensure that your bird-friendly garden doesn’t become a death trap for songbirds.

Windows may not be predators, but they’re another deadly neighborhood hazard for songbirds. In the United States, they’re estimated to kill over 350 million birds a year. An article by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology gives an overview of this issue and discusses several solutions. Of these, Acopian Bird Savers are probably one of the most elegant. This is an unobtrusive, low-tech design that consists of vertical rows of cords, spaced four inches apart, that hang from the outside of the window. You can make your own out of parachute cord or bamboo, or you can order them online.

Including different habitat features

Broadly speaking, all birds are associated with one or more of three general habitats: forest, prairie, or wetland. What habitats make up the larger landscape surrounding you? The answer to this question will shape the possibilities for your bird-friendly garden.

Is your home in the middle of a Douglas-fir forest, or is it in a valley-bottom subdivision? Clark’s nutcrackers probably won’t visit your garden unless you have patches of conifers close to you. Similarly, you probably won’t attract marsh wrens or Wilson’s snipes to your yard unless you live very close to a wetland. Meanwhile, many prairie birds need relatively large patches of grasses and herbs. So unless this describes the area around your house, you probably won’t have grasshopper sparrows or western meadowlarks in your yard. Many birds of thickets and forest edges, on the other hand, will readily use yards during migration or the breeding season. And, of course, there are a variety of birds that use more than one of these habitats.

In general, in order to make your yard more inviting for birds, it’s worth considering components of all three habitats: forest, prairie, and wetland. A small water feature probably won’t attract Wilson’s snipes – but, once again, a bit of water in the yard will allow birds to drink and bathe. A prairie patch the size of a front yard is unlikely to bring in grasshopper sparrows, but it will offer important seeds and insects for thicket-edge birds such as chipping sparrows. And patches of native shrubs or trees, such as chokecherries, provide food and cover for a wide diversity of migrating and nesting songbirds.

Why native plants?

You’ve probably noticed that I keep mentioning native plants for birds. Why does this matter? you might be wondering. Perhaps you’ve noticed that robins and Bohemian waxwings often eat the fruits of Russian-olive (Elaeagnus angustifolia), a frequently-planted invasive that escapes from cultivation to compete with the cottonwoods and willows along our waterways. Or you might have noticed a house finch or pileated woodpecker pecking at an apple, another non-native fruit. 

Yes, there are non-native plants that certain birds will use. But, all things considered, native plants are far superior for our birds. Why? It comes down to food – and, specifically, insects. Doug Tallamy, a researcher who has spent decades studying birds and insects, writes that 96% of North American land birds rely heavily on insects during the breeding season. Soft, juicy caterpillars are especially important. And whereas native plants have coevolved with native insects, non-native plants are comparative deserts for insect diversity.

A non-native plant like Russian-olive may still provide fruits that feed a few species. But in comparison with a chokecherry or another native plant, it’s much less useful for most of our birds. If you want to attract an abundance of birds to your yard, then native plants are the way to go.

Okay, which plants should I plant for the birds? you’re probably asking. Here are some recommendations for western Montana, organized by the foods they provide.

Native plants for insects

What sorts of native plants provide our birds with the most insects? In order to give region-specific recommendations, Doug Tallamy and Kimberley Shropshire teamed up with the National Wildlife Federation to create an interactive website, searchable by zip code. For each zip code, this tool predicts the number of caterpillar species that different native plants will support. And in North America, it turns out, wherever you are, just a handful of native plants support most of the caterpillars.

Around Helena, Montana, willows are at the top of the list. These shrubs host up to 309 species of caterpillars – juicy protein packets to feed our nesting birds. Many of our native willows grow in wetlands, but Scouler’s willow (Salix scouleriana) and sandbar willow (Salix exigua) are common species that often grow in somewhat drier areas.

Cottonwoods and aspens are also high on the list, hosting up to 245 butterflies and moths. Among the cottonwoods are black cottonwood (Populus balsamifera) and plains cottonwood (Populus deltoides) – but keep in mind that these trees are notorious for dropping branches. Meanwhile, quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) forms thickets from underground rhizomes. For these reasons, cottonwoods and aspens are best-suited for larger yards. 

Chokecherry (Prunus virginiana) and American plum (Prunus americana) are thicket-forming shrubs that are excellent for bird habitat. (They support up to 227 species of caterpillars – and check out this article for an exploration of other miniature insects that live on chokecherries.) However, if you live in an area with a high risk of bear conflicts, keep in mind that chokecherries and plums can attract bears when the fruits get ripe in the fall.

Birches, alders, and pines

Our native birches host 211 species of caterpillars. Water birch (Betula occidentalis) is a small tree that often grows along streams; paper birch (Betula papyrifera) gets much larger. And birches do more than just provide lots of insects. Their trunks (like those of cottonwoods and aspens) also make popular homes for cavity-nesting birds like black-capped chickadees and house wrens. (If you don’t want to wait for your trees to grow, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology also provides thorough instructions for nest box construction.) The related thinleaf alder (Alnus incana) is a large shrub or small tree that hosts 196 species of butterflies and moths.

Among the conifers, pines (Pinus spp.) are important for caterpillars, supporting up to 188 species. Around Helena, ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) and limber pine (Pinus flexilis) are good options. However, keep in mind that they grow to be rather large trees. Also, depending on your surroundings, you might not want to plant them near your house due to fire risk.

Goldenrods, strawberries, and more

What about herbaceous plants? For caterpillars, goldenrod is at the top of the list, hosting 65 species. Common goldenrods in Montana include giant goldenrod (Solidago gigantea), Canada goldenrod (Solidago canadensis), and Missouri goldenrod (Solidago missouriensis). These plants are commonly blamed for late-summer allergies, but this is a myth: the culprits are typically ragweeds (Ambrosia spp.), which bloom around the same time.

Other herbs that support substantial numbers of butterflies and moths are native strawberries and sunflowers. Wild strawberries (Fragaria virginiana and Fragaria vesca) are low-growing; they may not compete well with taller, more vigorous plants. Sunflowers, on the other hand, are both tall and vigorous. In Montana, common sunflower (Helianthus annuus) is an abundant annual that often grows along roadsides. We also have two common perennial species, Nuttall’s sunflower (Helianthus nuttallii) and Maximilian sunflower (Helianthus maximiliani). 

Lupines and sagebrushes are also worthy of mention, supporting up to 40 and 35 species of caterpillars, respectively. Silvery lupine (Lupinus argenteus) and silky lupine (Lupinus sericeus) are a couple of Montana’s common lupines. Sagebrushes are very diverse in Montana and include shrubs such as big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) and silver sagebrush (Artemisia cana) as well as herbs such as fringed sage (Artemisia frigida) and white sagebrush (Artemisia ludoviciana). 

Native plants for fruits

I’ve already mentioned chokecherry for the diversity of insects that it hosts. In addition to the insects, this shrub is also a phenomenal fall fruit resource for cedar waxwings, American robins, and many other birds. And besides chokecherry, there’s a wide selection of other native fruits that attract birds, from July onwards through the winter. Many of these plants also host a notable diversity of caterpillars (though they support fewer species of caterpillars than the shrubs and trees I’ve already mentioned).

Red-osier dogwood (Cornus sericea) offers clusters of small white fruits from mid-summer through fall. Gray catbirds and white-crowned sparrows are among the birds that feed on them. This medium-sized shrub also has brilliant red fall foliage.

The native currants – such as golden currant (Ribes aureum) and bristly gooseberry (Ribes setosum) – are some of the earliest fruits to ripen in the summer. They provide a tasty snack for birds and people alike. Serviceberry (Amelanchier alnifolia) is another popular summer fruit for cedar waxwings, western tanagers, and thrushes. 

Elderberry, snowberry, and more

Blue elderberry (Sambucus cerulea) ripens in the fall, as does western mountain-ash (Sorbus scopulina). The snowberries – common snowberry (Symphoricarpos albus) and western snowberry (Symphoricarpos occidentalis) – also ripen in the fall, but their fruits stick around through the winter. So do the wild roses, such as Woods’ rose (Rosa woodsii) and Nootka rose (Rosa nutkana). Silver buffaloberry (Shepherdia argentea) is a great fall fruit that sometimes remains through mid-winter. Note that this is a large, thorny bush, though, and separate male and female plants are needed for pollination.

Rocky Mountain juniper (Juniperus scopulorum) is a tall shrub that provides winter “berries” (actually fleshy cones) for Bohemian waxwings, Townsend’s solitaires, and American robins. Keep in mind that juniper, like silver buffaloberry, has separate male and female plants, so you’ll need both in your general area for pollination to occur. Juniper is also highly flammable – so it’s probably not a good idea to plant it in areas with high fire risk. Montana also has two lower-growing juniper species that provide options for smaller spaces: horizontal juniper (Juniperus horizontalis) and common juniper (Juniperus communis).

Native plants for seeds

Many birds – such as American goldfinches, American tree sparrows, and pine siskins – commonly feed on seeds. In the case of sparrows, it’s often hard to see exactly what they’re eating, since they feed on the ground. Nevertheless, a few seed-bearing plants are especially noteworthy for the birds they attract. Montana’s native sunflowers – the annual common sunflower and the perennial Nuttall’s and Maximilian sunflowers – reliably attract goldfinches and pine siskins when their seeds ripen in the fall. Our pines, such as ponderosa and limber pine, feed nomadic groups of conifer-seed specialists such as red crossbills and Clark’s nutcrackers. Thinleaf alder, water birch, and paper birch provide winter seeds that often attract common redpolls and pine siskins. And many other native plants, from asters to grasses, also produce seeds that various finches and sparrows may use.

Native plants for nectar

What about hummingbirds? These tiny, beloved hoverers often catch tiny insects – so providing habitat for insects is important to them, too. In addition, they’re well-known for their nectar-feeding habits. A variety of native plants with long, tubular flowers are popular hummingbird plants. These include orange honeysuckle (Lonicera ciliosa), yellow columbine (Aquilegia flavescens), scarlet gilia (Ipomopsis aggregata), beebalm (Monarda fistulosa), and the penstemons. Among western Montana’s common penstemons are Alberta beardtongue (Penstemon albertinus), fuzzy-tongue penstemon (Penstemon eriantherus), and small-flower beardtongue (Penstemon procerus). In addition, some of the plants I’ve already mentioned for insects or fruits – such as golden currant – are popular nectar sources for hummingbirds.

Obtaining plants

Where can you find these plants? Some local nurseries, such as GardenWerks in Helena, carry a limited selection of native plants. In addition, I was able to find three retail nurseries in western and central Montana that offer a wide selection of natives: 

• Blake Nursery, Big Timber, MT: https://www.blakenursery.com/
• Center for Native Plants, Whitefish, MT: https://centerfornativeplants.com/
• Pipilo Native Plants, Charlo, MT: https://www.pipilonatives.com/

(A fourth nursery, Southwest Montana Native Landscapes, has unfortunately closed, though it still shows up on a Google search.)

To find out more, I contacted these nurseries and asked them which plants they stock, of those I list in this article. Find their responses here.

In addition to these retail nurseries, there are a few other commercial sources of native plants in western Montana. For larger projects, the Montana Conservation Seedling Nursery and Great Bear Native Plants accept wholesale orders. And if you want to start your own plants, Native Ideals sells locally grown seeds for a variety of Montana species.

Note that certain nurseries that don’t specialize in native plants may “stretch” the concept of “native” to include species that aren’t from Montana. For example, Penstemon strictus is sometimes sold as a native plant, but it grows in the wild in the southern Rocky Mountains and doesn’t reach Montana. When in doubt, look a plant up on the Montana Natural Heritage Program’s Montana Field Guide to learn about its status in the state, or check out the Biota of North America Program’s county-level range maps. These maps are organized by genus and show the distribution, by county, of all wild and naturalized plants in the United States.

The bird-friendly garden

Is this a comprehensive list of all of the plants that are important for bird-friendly gardening in Montana? No! I’ve neglected to mention native maples (Acer spp.), raspberries (Rubus spp.), hawthorns (Crataegus spp.), and many others.

When it comes to growing habitat for birds, there are always more plants you can add. But even if you do nothing more than add a patch of chokecherries and a handful of goldenrods to your yard, where previously there was just lawn, you’ll have made a good start. As the chokecherries leaf out in the spring, wait for the yellow-rumped warblers to appear, hunting insects. When the fruits ripen in the fall, look for the flocks of cedar waxwings and robins. And if you have the space in your yard to include all of the plants I’ve mentioned here, along with a water source… in a few years, your yard will be a paradise for birds.

This story was produced with support from the Gold Country Master Gardener Association.

Further reading

Acopian Bird Savers: prevent birds from flying into windows. Retrieved from https://www.birdsavers.com/

American Bird Conservancy. (2013, January 29). Outdoor cats: single greatest source of human-caused mortality for birds and mammals, says new study. Retrieved from https://abcbirds.org/news/outdoor-cats-single-greatest-source-of-human-caused-mortality-for-birds-and-mammals-says-new-study/

Biota of North America Program. (2014). BONAP’s North American Plant Atlas (NAPA). Retrieved from http://bonap.net/NAPA/Genus/Traditional/County

Center for Native Plants. (n.d.) Our most bird friendly species. Retrieved from https://centerfornativeplants.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/cnp_plantselection_birds-1.pdf

Cornell Lab of Ornithology. (2016, December 5). FAQ: Outdoor cats and their effects on birds. Retrieved from https://www.allaboutbirds.org/news/faq-outdoor-cats-and-their-effects-on-birds/

Cornell Lab of Ornithology. (2023). All about birdhouses. Retrieved from https://nestwatch.org/learn/all-about-birdhouses/

Cornell Lab of Ornithology. (2023, February 24). Why birds hit windows – and how you can help prevent it. Retrieved from https://www.allaboutbirds.org/news/why-birds-hit-windows-and-how-you-can-help-prevent-it/

Friends of the Mississippi River. (2022). Goldenrod or ragweed: which causes allergies and which benefits pollinators? Retrieved from https://fmr.org/updates/conservation/goldenrod-or-ragweed-which-causes-allergies-and-which-benefits-pollinators

Loss, S.R., Will, T., Loss, S.S., & Marra, P.P. (2014). Bird-building collisions in the United States: estimates of annual mortality and species vulnerability. The Condor 116(1):8-23. Retrieved from https://bioone.org/journals/the-condor/volume-116/issue-1/CONDOR-13-090.1/Birdbuilding-collisions-in-the-United-States–Estimates-of-annual/10.1650/CONDOR-13-090.1.full

Montana Natural Heritage Program. (n.d.). Montana Field Guide. Montana State Library. Retrieved from https://fieldguide.mt.gov/default.aspx

Narango, D.L., Tallamy, D.W., & Shropshire, K.J. (2020). Few keystone plant genera support the majority of Lepidoptera species. Nature Communications 11:5751. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345818119_Few_keystone_plant_genera_support_the_majority_of_Lepidoptera_species

National Wildlife Federation. (2023). Native plants (by zip code). Retrieved from https://www.nwf.org/NativePlantFinder/Plants

Rosenberg, K.V., Dokter, A.M., Blancher, P.J., Sauer, J.R., Smith, A.C., Smith, P.A., … Marra, P.P. (2019). Decline of the North American avifauna. Science 366:120-124. Retrieved from https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/DECLINE-OF-NORTH-AMERICAN-AVIFAUNA-SCIENCE-2019.pdf

Sánchez-Bayo, F. & Wyckhuys, K.A.G. (2019). Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: a review of its drivers. Biological Conservation 232: 8-27. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006320718313636

Smallwood, J.A. & Bird, D.M. (2020). American kestrel (Falco sparverius), version 1.0. In Birds of the World (A.F. Poole & F.B. Gill, editors). Ithaca, NY: Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Retrieved from https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/species/amekes/cur/introduction

Tallamy, D.W. (2019). Nature’s best hope: a new approach to conservation that starts in your yard. Portland, OR: Timber Press.

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October 4, 2022

“This place is like a gadwall factory,” says Mark Mariano. Today I’ve joined Mark, a Butte-based ecologist who works for Rampart Solutions and who recently co-founded the nonprofit Montana Wetlands and Waterfowl, to survey ducks on Lake Helena. Here, just a few miles from the Montana capital, impressive numbers of waterfowl stop during fall migration on this shallow lake and the extensive marshes that surround it. And since 2020, Mark has been coming out here once a week, doing fall surveys to track the migrating ducks.

Mark’s work here is connected to a robust collaboration of biologists and industry, centered around Butte’s large, toxic Berkeley Pit and a very successful effort to prevent waterfowl mortality there. Mark’s fall surveys at Lake Helena are part of a regional bird monitoring effort. The goal: keep the Berkeley Pit team well-informed on fall waterfowl migration. Knowing what birds they can expect in the area, the team is well-prepared to scare ducks away from the hazardous waters of the Berkeley Pit. 

Mark has been doing weekly surveys of the fall duck migration on Lake Helena for two years now. All of these surveys have given him a wealth of local knowledge about Helena’s waterfowl and their seasonal movements. So today, I get to learn from Mark about our local ducks. What does Lake Helena mean for our waterfowl?

Gadwalls on Lake Helena

Mark continues telling me about the gadwalls as he scans the western bay with his spotting scope. The gadwalls – subtle charcoal, black and tan ducks that somewhat resemble mallards – show up on Lake Helena in the spring. They mate and the females lay their eggs, scraping out a well-hidden bowl in dense vegetation near water. Soon after, the males leave, forming bachelor groups that spend the summer elsewhere. By August, the young have fledged, and several hundred of them join the flocks on the lake.

By now, the drakes have returned to Lake Helena, too. We can expect to have gadwalls here for the rest of the fall, until the lake freezes. 

Coots and their associates

American coots are the most abundant waterfowl today. Just on this west end, we count 1900 of them, a large raft of stormy blue birds. A few gadwalls and American wigeons are mixed in with the raft. Coots, with their striking white bills, look similar to ducks. But they’re actually a type of rail (family Rallidae), not a duck. Like many dabbling ducks, coots feed heavily on aquatic vegetation. 

“They’re really important for the other ducks because they dive,” Mark tells me. Wigeons and gadwalls are both dabbling ducks. Unable to dive for food, these ducks tip bottoms-up to feed on plants in the shallows. But Mark tells me that it’s very common to see wigeons and gadwalls mixing with flocks of coots. There, they wait for the deep-diving coots to resurface with plant matter, then try to steal the food from them.

Two weeks ago, Mark counted an astounding 17,000 American coots on the lake. This sort of change in a few weeks – from 17,000 to just a few thousand – makes it clear that the coots are moving right now. They stop to feed on Lake Helena, then continue south. 

Lake Helena by boat

Now Mark has finished counting the waterfowl on this western bay. It’s time to start the second phase of the survey. We’ll launch the boat and make a circle around the entire lake, doing a comprehensive count of all the ducks we haven’t been able to see from the shore. 

As soon as we launch, we begin making a clockwise circle around the lake. “Counting from the boat is so much more effective and easy,” Mark tells me. By covering the whole lake and checking the marshes on the sides, he is able to get a much more complete picture of the waterfowl here than a birder who only scopes from one edge. 

Initially, Mark was doing spring surveys here, too. And his spring observations from the boat turned up something interesting. He learned that some very large flocks of snow geese stage on the inaccessible ponds along the south margin of the lake. It’s like “a mini Freezout Lake,” he told me – referring to the famous Montana lake where hundreds of thousands of snow geese stop in the spring. And because these ponds on the south side of Lake Helena are nearly impossible to access without a boat, local birders were largely unaware of this “mini Freezout” until Mark started his surveys.

Pipits, harriers, and diving ducks

Today, we find no snow geese. We can expect them to start passing over in late October or early November, when wintry weather begins to hit their major migratory staging areas in Alberta. The southeast side of Lake Helena is quiet today. From the flaming yellow sandbar willows (Salix exigua) along the shore, we can hear the occasional chip of a yellow-rumped warbler. Small flocks of American pipits flush from the lake’s edge with their electric sip-it calls. The water burbles smoothly under the bow of the boat.

Several northern harriers are circling over the marshes to the south of us. We spot a large raft of ducks out in the middle of the lake. They’re clustered along the line where the morning’s smooth water is giving way to a wind-driven chop. Mark has his eye glued to the spotting scope. He steers the boat with the trolling motor to pan the scope across the ducks. It’s largely diving ducks out there in the middle: redheads, ring-necked ducks, and ruddy ducks. 

I spot a bald eagle sweeping languidly west over the lake. Mark hurries his duck-counting as the predator approaches. And then, as we had been expecting, the ducks leap into flight. Flock after flock move west in unison, impelled by the repulsive force of the eagle’s flight. The bald eagle continues onwards. The ducks settle in their new positions. But now we can see many more redheads than before.

Lake Helena and its marshes

“They’re just showing up out of nowhere – they keep flying in,” Mark exclaims.

The redhead flocks started to show up here two weeks ago, when Lake Helena was bursting its seams with coots. With all of the redheads, Mark says he’s surprised not to see any canvasbacks today – these large diving ducks often mix with the redheads here. Perhaps the season is a bit early yet for canvasbacks, though.

We check the ponds on the south side of the lake, which are surrounded by extensive, beautiful marshes of cattails and bulrushes. 

“More gadwalls – surprise!” says Mark. Here we also see our first mallards of the day. Small groups of them lift off from this protected water, streaming obliquely past us.

South of us, in the distance, we can see a massive cloud of gulls wheeling. It’s a swarm of far-off specks over the valley, barely visible without binoculars. Presumably, they’re finding a hatch of insects or spiders to feed on. On the lake itself, over a hundred Franklin’s gulls are active. They bob on the surface and then take off, flying east over us in disorganized strings.

Completing the circle

We’ve passed the western bay now, where we counted the coots and dabbling ducks from the shore this morning. Our circle around the lake is coming to an end. There are some small groups of Canada geese in the pasture along the north shore. We scan them carefully, searching for anything different. For the past several weeks, Mark saw an unusually early snow goose with these Canadas, a surprise bird well in advance of the main snow goose migration. But today we see only Canadas: the snow goose seems to have moved on. 

Mark pilots us back towards the boat launch. Another Lake Helena duck survey is in the books. Today we’ve dipped our toes into the fall river of waterfowl migration. It’s more than a river, really: it’s a continent-wide tide, inexorably southbound, as millions of ducks and coots evacuate the wetlands of the north in the face of the approaching winter. Lake Helena is one piece in this vast puzzle. And because Mark visits Lake Helena every week throughout the fall migration, today’s survey has the context of the whole seasonal story.

Problems with carp

Lake Helena isn’t perfect for duck habitat. Massive common carp (Cyprinus carpio) spend the summer here in large numbers, churning up mud as they root for food on the shallow lake bottom. Mark tells me that their feeding prevents submergent plants from growing, reducing the food available for ducks and coots. The carp also contribute indirectly to algal blooms. By removing aquatic plants, carp prevent these plants from absorbing the influx of nutrients the lake receives from the Helena Valley. Instead of aquatic plants, mats of algae grow in response to the nutrient surplus.

Mark knows of a solution for Lake Helena’s carp issues. Lake Helena is very shallow. During the winter, the carp return to the deep waters of Hauser Lake to overwinter. Mark tells me that a size-limiting gate in the dam at the Causeway, between Lake Helena and Hauser Lake, would allow other fish to move back and forth but would exclude most of the massive carp from Lake Helena. This strategy has been deployed successfully on southern Manitoba’s Delta Marsh. There, carp exclusion has improved water quality and boosted cover of aquatic plants. 

So for Lake Helena’s carp problem, it seems that an answer is within sight. All that remains is all the work it would take to bring this idea from concept to reality. But in the meanwhile, carp notwithstanding, Lake Helena and its surrounding marshes are one of the Helena Valley’s treasures. 

Helena, the valley of the ducks

“Helena is very ducky,” Mark tells me. And indeed, between Lake Helena and the Helena Regulating Reservoir, birders have recorded a whopping 33 species of ducks, geese and swans in the Helena Valley. Why all this diversity? 

It’s because of Lake Helena and places like it. Because of these ponds, open waters, and marshes, we can watch tens of thousands of coots stopping here in the fall. We can see the gadwalls and American wigeons trying to steal their food. In the spring, we can look for the flocks of snow geese as this place becomes a “mini Freezout Lake.” 

I hope that there will always be wetlands like this in the Helena Valley. And if we can exclude the carp, how many more ducks could we support here?

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October 5, 2022

An orange-crowned warbler and two drab gray yellow-rumped warblers are hunting insects in a chokecherry this morning as its leaves drop softly, one by one, swirling to the moist ground in orange pirouettes. Helena, Montana’s Nature Park is busy with birds this morning, even though in general fall songbird migration is beginning to dwindle. Robins are everywhere, calling energetically as they land in the European mountain-ashes (Sorbus aucuparia) and feed on the bitter orange fruits. A few spotted towhees mew from the chokecherry thickets. A downy woodpecker whinnies occasionally. A large mule deer buck, unafraid here in the safety of the city limits, is thrashing an aspen with his polished antlers.

A slender, medium-sized bird bobs past us on rhythmic wingbeats. A northern flicker, we wonder? No – it’s a Clark’s nutcracker, sleek and gray with narrow white patches in its dark wings. I’m surprised to see this nutcracker – a bird closely associated with our pine forests – in the deciduous habitat of this park. A Clark’s nutcracker in the “wrong” habitat: I love stories like these. Unusual sightings like this remind me to expect the unexpected. Clark’s nutcrackers are birds of pine forests, yes – but like all birds, they move from one patch to the next. Finding a nutcracker at Nature Park is like finding me at Walmart. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. 

“So much stuff will just pass through here for a split second,” comments Sarah Kamis, my birding buddy this morning. She tells me about a time several years ago when she spotted a red crossbill – another seed-feeding specialist of the conifer forest – here in Nature Park. 

Birding in the heart of Helena

For Sarah and many other local birders, Nature Park is a special place for birds. These folks have gotten to know this place well over the course of the seasons – and they’ve turned up some amazing stories. Over the years, they’ve documented 18 species of warblers at Nature Park. This is a phenomenal diversity for anywhere in the Helena area – and particularly notable here, in the heart of the city. 

Today, we seem to be at the tail end of the fall white-crowned sparrow migration. Just a couple of chubby, brown-capped immatures are still hiding in the bushes. It’s another reflection of how dynamic migration is: a week and a half ago, Sarah and I found dozens of white-crowned sparrows here, feeding on seeds along the paved trail that runs through the park. Except for the white-crowned sparrows, that day was rather quiet, a lull between waves of southbound songbirds.

An impromptu gathering

September 24, 2022

But even when the birds are quiet, Nature Park is also a great place for impromptu community birding events. And so it was that, on that quiet morning, Sarah and I ran across our birding friends Sharon Dewart-Hansen and Bob Martinka. The slow morning of birding became a morning of storytelling. 

The conversation immediately turned to the impressive diversity of birds that birders have found here over the years. It all started in 2019, when Sarah spotted a rare black-throated gray warbler here, flitting through the bushes with some chickadees. Black-throated gray warblers typically spend the summers south of us, in dry oak and juniper patches in the Great Basin. But in August 2019, the out-of-place bird stayed around for over two weeks. Many local birders got to see it. And from then on, Nature Park was “on the map” for Helena birders.

Since then, Helena’s birders have gotten to know this park very well. When Sarah found the black-throated gray warbler, the bird list for Nature Park stood at just 85 species. Three years later, with all of the attention from local birders, the list is up to a whopping 147 species. It’s an incredible diversity – especially considering that Nature Park is in the middle of the city, and it lacks the extensive wetland habitats that would otherwise attract many more species of ducks and marsh birds.

Changes through the seasons

This morning, Bob had arrived at the park earlier than the rest of us, so he gave us his morning bird report and then took his leave. Bob’s observations confirmed our hunch – it was a slow day for fall migrants. He had seen a handful of Wilson’s warblers, Lincoln’s sparrows, and ruby-crowned kinglets. And, of course, there were the white-crowned sparrows. But otherwise, most of the migrant songbirds seemed to be elsewhere this morning.

As Sarah, Sharon, and I continued onwards through the quiet morning, they showed me a knothole in an aspen where a house wren had nested several years ago. Now the house wrens no longer nest here – they only stop at Nature Park during spring and fall migration. Why? Sharon wondered if increased numbers of pedestrians in the park have deterred the wrens from nesting.

Here at the end of September, the chokecherry bushes were already bare of fruits. Sharon told us that a horde of robins had come through the park several weeks before and devoured them all. Meanwhile, she pointed out, the magpies had returned to the park. For some reason, the magpies were nearly absent over the summer. But now they were back, perhaps taking advantage of the seeds that people feed the chipmunks.

Warblers, aphids, and crayfish

We passed by the spot along the creek where, in September 2020, Sharon and several other birders spotted two other rare birds: a chestnut-sided warbler and a black-and-white warbler. It’s a thicket of chokecherries and other shrubs along a gully: a patch of shrubs just like many others around Helena. But Sharon’s story reminded us that among these patches of shrubs, there’s often more than meets the eye.

Farther along, we stopped at an overlook where we could see the understory vegetation along the stream, a mixture of dock (Rumex sp.) and burdock (Arctium sp.). In past years, Sharon told us, there was more dock and less burdock here. She would often see various warblers among the glossy leaves, feeding on aphids. More recently, this patch has become much quieter. The dock population has shrunk, the burdock has increased, and the aphids have apparently disappeared. And so, it seems, have the birds.

We continued to where the creek, strewn with bits of trash and debris from the spring floods, crosses under the trail in a culvert. Might there be crayfish in the pool below the culvert?, Sarah wondered. We walked down the hill and checked the boulders around the pool. No crayfish here, it seemed. There are crayfish at the K-Mart Ponds (another local hotspot for birding), though, my companions told me. Sarah has seen them hiding in the water control structure at the outlet, and Sharon has watched red-necked grebes eating them.

Walking through Nature Park

Nature Park is a special place for birds. Every cottonwood, every aspen, and every chokecherry holds stories. Some days, during the height of migration, this place can be spectacular for birds. But even on quieter days, there’s always something to see, something to learn, and innumerable stories to remember. 

So this fall, I invite you to take a walk through Nature Park. Notice the seasons changing, and keep your eyes and ears open for the birds. And if you show up early in the morning, there’s a good chance you’ll find a friendly local birder with a wealth of stories about this place. I’ll see you there.

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September 6, 2022

The sun is high and the afternoon is hot by the time I make it over to Spokane Bay. A lone turkey vulture teeters as it glides along the ridge, riding the wind that flows across the grasses with a distant sigh. Since last week, smoke has blown in from fires in Idaho, a dirty white haze that fills the sky. The smoke hides the distant mountains and blurs the dry, tan hills across the lake. Around me, the rocky slopes hold Spokane Bay in a bowl, cut off from the outside world by the grip of the haze.

I let my kayak drift slowly into the bay, through the mats of green algae where the carp hide and the damselflies hover. Eventually I reach the shady shallows where the crack willows (Salix fragilis) hang over the water. Just like last week, dozens of yellow-rumped warblers are spending the afternoon here, chipping energetically from the canopy. But today, floating on the water, I have a better view of them. 

Yellow-rumps and mallards

The yellow-rumps are darting forth over the water, catching flying insects. Four or five warblers will fly out at the same time, as if they’re choreographing the hunting. It doesn’t always work, though. Several times I watch a warbler try for a large white moth. But this moth is a survivor. Each time, just as the warbler is closing in, it casually changes course, leaving the unfortunate bird snapping up a beakful of air.

The yellow-rumps are hunting along the willow branches, too, looking for caterpillars and other foliage-dwellers in an intense stop-and-start. The noisy clicking of the Great Basin cracklers floats in from the steep, dry slopes above us. 

In many ways, the bird community today seems similar to what I saw here last week. An American white pelican glides in and lands on the water with a heavy splash. The mallards are feeding at the water’s surface, darting this way and that at the outer edge of the mat of algae. Every few seconds, a quack emanates from the group of foraging ducks. 

But a hint of fall migration is evident in the turkey vultures that glide over the ridge every so often. As they fly south, they search out updrafts and thermals to save them from flapping. The wind across this ridge is providing just such an updraft. And today’s yellow-rumped warblers are probably different individuals than the ones I saw here last week. They’re spending every moment of this afternoon fattening up on insects, 12-gram athletes getting ready for another night’s marathon. Though yellow-rumps don’t migrate as far as many of our songbirds, by the winter a continent’s-worth of them will be concentrated in the southern United States and Mexico.

Algae: bad and good

Slowly, I paddle back out of the shade of the willows, paralleling the shore. Remember how the ducks last week were swimming in the open channels between the algae? I haven’t been as smart as them today, and now I realize why it matters. The algal mat is thick and heavy here. Within a few feet, my kayak is pushing a mattress-sized carpet of algae ahead of it. It’s hard to make any progress.

But the algae isn’t just a trap. It’s also an interesting microhabitat at the interface between water and sky. Besides the hundreds and hundreds of damselflies that are hovering over it, there are also tens of thousands of minute flies crawling on this bright green mat. Are the flies what the mallards are feeding on?

Eventually, I make it through the mats of algae and beach my kayak. Near the water’s edge, two banded garden spiders (Argiope trifasciata) have set up their webs. One web has four damselflies in it. It seems that this spider may be benefitting from the algal mat.

Marsh elder and a merlin

I wander along the creek upstream of the bay, passing more crack willows and a cattail marsh. A young white-tailed deer, its coat still spotted, stares back at me from among the snowberry. 

I come across a rank patch of tall plants, covered with arrays of seeds. This is marsh elder (Iva xanthifolia), an impressively large annual that typically grows in wet areas. Its seed crop has not gone unnoticed: as I walk past, a dozen American goldfinches leap into the air and fly away.

As I look up from the marsh elder, a mourning dove flies past with a faint whistle of wings. Then, seconds later, it flies back past – a merlin is in hot pursuit! The small, maneuverable falcon is flapping hard, intent on the possibility of lunch. But the mourning dove has too much of a head start. Soon, the merlin peels off and continues out of sight past the willows.

I stop to sit and reflect in the shade of the willows along the creek. In spite of the smoke today, it’s peaceful here. A black-capped chickadee flock is calling from the canopy. In the twigs of a golden currant overhanging the stream, a common yellowthroat is foraging silently.

Early migration

The drastic changes that fall migration will soon bring aren’t yet very evident here. A few common loons have shown up farther out on Hauser Lake, where a large flock of gulls are now staging. Here at Spokane Bay, last week’s yellow warblers are nowhere to be seen. These warblers are relatively early migrants; they may be gone for the year now. They’ll spend the winter in Mexico, central America, or as far south as Colombia. And a few green-winged teals have joined the mallards on the bay – though maybe they were already here last week and I overlooked them.

A hot afternoon isn’t the best time for spotting bird diversity: an early-morning foray would be better for checking up on fall migration. But even in the midst of this hazy afternoon, I’ve made new connections with this place. I’ve gotten to spend time with the yellow-rumped warblers in the willows, fattening up on insects between marathons of nighttime migration. I’ve learned about the possible hazards and opportunities that the mat of algae on the bay poses. And I’ve learned to watch for goldfinches in the marsh elder.

Even in the smoke and the heat, we can go outside and get to know the world around us. It’s still beautiful, still alive. On an afternoon like this, there’s nothing I’d rather do than be here, where the steep orange rocks meet the water, getting to know the life this landscape supports. 

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