Not too many weeks ago, in early fall, members of National Audubon Society and, along the way, birders alert to bird-related news received a set of sober new projections, adding up to heartache, through the Audubon Report, a huge new study sponsored by National Audubon on the best-case plight of many resident and migrant birds within North America as climate change proceeds. The study, extrapolating from a variety of statistics dealing with historic bird occurrence influenced by climate variables such as rainfall and temperature range, driven by trends drawn from climate modeling, looked at 588 species of birds, finding that 314 are due to be endangered or threatened by 2080. Habitats are expected to shift northward while they shrink at the same time, at a pace that's likely to leave a lot of bird species unable to cope in time to go on furthering their kind in some place where they're adapted to hide, forage and nest. While the commonest, most widespread bird species are generalists in terms of diet and habitat, our especially sought-after, hard-to-find species are specialists dependent on one or just a few types of plant community that are probably doomed to vanish, scorched or dried out of existence in the type of summers we can expect in a hotter world, where not built over or farmed into something those birds would not recognize.
To the extent that governing bodies around the world treat all wild habitat as dispensable or as commodities I've been eager over the years for evidence that human-only aggrandizement is ultimately mass suicide, the mindset of a renegade in the domain of business, public health and diplomacy all at the same time. Because climate change is propelled most of all by no-end-in-sight human population explosion, I wonder sometimes which hard-pressed fellow-creatures might end up multiplying because of catastrophes, or human population crashes we couldn't help but bring on ourselves. One example was cited in Audubon magazine some years ago, about an increase in European brown bears, red deer and wolves roaming the depopulated countryside following from the Bosnian War.
Storms intensified by the heat we've been trapping in the atmosphere may, along the way, lead to arrivals of unexpected grace. In Duluth the morning before I left for New York there was a rare visitor from the U.S./Canadian Pacific coastal highlands, a golden-crowned sparrow, oftenest found in spruce groves, willow and alder scrub similar to what's in our central region. After lots of pacing around the end of the city block where the sparrow had been seen I was finally able to view it courtesy of fellow birders who stood on the sidewalk and located it on the ground below a different feeder in some other neighbor's yard. For me this made my fourth life species of 2014. Compared to prior years and whole seasons of my life, 2014 did feel like a poor year for lifers (new-found species of bird,) whether they were hardest-to-find natives or accidental newcomers. The diversity of birds like warblers and ducks in breeding season, and the numbers of them moreover, are less than they were in the heartland when I was young; over the same stretch the human population has more than doubled since 1960 when I was born.
Today as I walked out in punishing bright breezes, layered as I was with all the due and necessary kinds of shirts and coat, I saw no birds and heard almost none, but that is the way of the boreal forest in a typical cold snap. At length I did hear one of my favorites from this kind of habitat: pine grosbeak, high in distant trees. Anthropomorphic though it is, my hearing of that soft song brings a sense of instant kinship between humans and finches of the conifer zone, across all our generations and ethnicities; it is the sound of exuberant yet controlled, moderated, mellifluous conversation, dimmed by wide surroundings, the core of the message we've come a long ways, where were you, where were you?
Near where I heard the pine grosbeak, I took these pictures of an abandoned sort of camp with outdoor tavern, whacked together out of milled lumber by a former landowner for weekend partying, vaguely if at all accounted for in reminiscenses among neighbors. In some of the remotest, least hospitable places people have left behind such pitiful shells of structures connected with commerce, warfare, food gathering, worship, or recreation.
I had never walked the drastically other habitat of Brooklyn or Queens, and only a little of Manhattan before, and in the chill of this Thanksgiving weekend found myself spellbound in Brooklyn where my daughter Lea lives and walks all her errands for lack of a car. In New York every foot of space seems built on or paved over, yet at certain points in its 250 years or so someone has remembered to install hedges or leave room for sprouting trees. Hardy shade trees cling, die and are replaced in the narrow ground along the boulevards. There are so many warm-blooded beings, most prominently people, living on top of each other, traveling over each others' heads or below street and floor level in New York that it looks to be its own ecosystem, a prototype for how best to fit teeming masses of ourselves into a restricted area. The subway tunnels exhibit the mostly underground society of rats. Parks like Prospect Park in Brooklyn in late autumn host hermit thrushes, yellow-bellied sapsuckers and, in breeding season, a whole suite of insect-eating songbirds. Elsewhere, rooftop gardens are gaining popularity for people's food and respite, not to mention being relief stations for birds, butterflies or bats; there are bound to be record keepers on this topic. Monk parakeets, escaped from pet bird cages, have multiplied and gained citizenship in at least two of five boroughs via colonial nesting. Coyotes and feral cats are legendary hunters.
We walked, walked and walked, leaping sometimes to keep abreast of each other in the midst of other walking clusters of folks. Walking and feathered flight are the way of most creatures in New York and this is a mercy; there's more to see, hear and sense this way, even for all the automated roar. Once when I lived in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metroplex and felt an over-long tension borne of commuting amid the high speed traffic jams set loose on those freeways, I dreamed at night of I-35W bare of any cars or trucks. Something had happened but the dream of course held no explanations. I walked in the right lane mostly alone, with leafy branches pawing my hair and ears as I passed under them; no one and nothing else had come swiping through to rip away those low limbs. In some of the countless back streets of New York a little bit of this thicket-like atmosphere strangely gets a hold of a pedestrian in a state of daytime awareness.
So the jungle of stone and steel, vinyl and alloys and glass sits on a lap of traditional ground, the experience of which is enriched by the libraries and museums, their curators who ask and attempt to answer the questions of what was--what was a prairie, what was a vernal pond, what mulberries were native to the American wild, etc. I like to think of country and city people equally preserving patches of what the landscape once hosted, because it functioned so well, so broadly and with a greater diversity of living creatures than we might have ever imagined or documented. The remaining wilds deserve to be kept, sacrosanct, till something can be done to even out the numbers of people with the numbers of all else that we're out-competing unto our own impoverishment and confinement. Brooklyn, NY offered me a way to see quaintness and charm in the stacked-up, heel-to-toe juxtaposition of ourselves with at least some variety of trees and their animal tenants whose nearness has graced our home, all put together.
Somebody, wherever else, will still be recording in words, song and image whatever has made that place the way it is traditionally remembered. I myself want to give New York and world-class cities like it credit for their natural diversity, but continue to bear witness to the northern phenomena of peat bogs and rapid rivers, cliffs and the grasslands that shifted ever northward into tundra, because those are still here, and I'm here ever so gradually figuring out how best I can travel, build community and live in the best sort of balance with every living being, plant or animal, for whom I ever harbored a sentiment or several....
Haunted bogscape, newly-begun mixed media work as of October 2014
See the video below for a demo of an Australian firm, Enginer's plug-in hybrid conversion kit used in a generation 1 Toyota Prius. Credit for finding this goes to Bill Hane of Blue Moon Auto in St. Paul, MN, good for answers and interpretation, at: snowdog51@comcast.net.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
