Last week-end's quarry was a pair of vermilion flycatchers over in Becker County, in Minnesota's northwestern quadrant, and would lure me across five counties including a stretch of the Chippewa National Forest. Deer season opener was that same day, marked by an unusual number of trucks and a few modest cars at trailheads along the highway, nose to nose as if aware and conferring. For me it had been since early May that I last listed a new bird, the ruff observable at long range across a lot of warm bottomland overlooking Minnesota River mudflats beneath the thunders of the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport.
A sweeping National Audubon bird study released in 2014 concluded, based upon projections of temperature, rainfall, vegetative changes and other alterations in climate that by 2080 over half, or 314 out of 588 species of North American birds will lose more than fifty percent of their customary range. Out of those 314 threatened species 126 are classified as climate-endangered, and projected to lose more than fifty percent of their accustomed range as early as 2050. Abstraction from these trends serves as a reminder that powerful, prevailing conditions (climates) do, even in a lifetime, blur and blend into one another, and that a force on earth so manifold and multitudinous as people do increase a generic all-of-a-type habitat/climate regime characterized, among other things, by a growing variety of plant species in common. Then what happens when the people-force that's taken over all the landscape divides, inevitably, into sub-sectors of clashing priorities? Civil war, or rioting may break out. In the face of such tensions, conserving pieces of habitat slips to a low priority or the effort gets wiped out. How well do we cherish the wild birds, more or less of which are archetypes, treasured emblems or voices of a distinct but vanishing type of habitat, in our minds? in our actions?
Maybe one-hundred to three-hundred of our continent's bird species seem as irrevocably slated for extinction as each one of us is in a tinier time frame--each species, comparable with each life. My attitude during this road trip rode on a stream of joy, as my aging Toyota hybrid pierced a course through the lake country, slowing through farm towns that seemed to belong to other times beset with somewhat other threats than today's. Yet however vaguely a twinge of mortification presents itself at the prospect of these losses--if the Vermilion flycatcher is not on the list of 314 climate-threatened birds because it hails from a hot latitude far to our south, our loon and Bohemian waxwing, our great grey owl and sundry favorite northern-breeding birds are. A few devotees to these creatures, to pristine lands and seas with their character facing peril will keep standing up out of a welter of angry sorrow and saying: this kind still has a chance! or this place still looks how I remember it, so let's work to keep it that way. Right now we're taking a breather in a kind of temporary contentment at how, in due time and in the comradeship of recognizing an increasingly desolate future, thousands of us got our president to rule against the latest mother of all transcontinental pipelines, the Keystone XL.
Restoration of degraded places might increasingly be taken on as a local mission; I can't forget the story of Hanna Mounce, featured in the early-autumn 2015 issue of Audubon magazine. She coordinates the Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project and works with a crew replanting seedlings of trees typifying the lost dry, upland forest that once supported Hawaii's rarest bird, of which only a few hundred diminishing individuals remain. A forest restored for one species holds the promise of saving any number of others. In more desolate times ahead, if all together we agree that a community's birth rates as well as death rates are best held in check to ensure abundant living for our foreseeable future, the recreation of habitat full of complementary trees, shrubs and soft-bodied plants may well become a therapy, a discipline, and a vocation, the horticulture and silviculture for collective survival.
Restored, protected tallgrass prairie, Becker County, Minnesota
I celebrated a distant old friend's 55th birthday and the rejection of the Keystone pipeline by observing the nearly-adult vermilion flycatcher perching on a metal pasture fence, in late morning sun and 55 degrees F. Though he wasn't close to my position looking through a window, the flycatcher was spectacularly lit, red as candy red-hots as he blurted back from nabbing insect prey midair to his perch on barbed wire; viewing conditions could not have been sharper. The few people present traded lively conversation, amid the thrill of thin, early bonds formed when folks otherwise unlikely otherwise to meet find themselves of a common mind-set. Then came time for me to hurtle back eastward, out of prairie country into what remains of wooded acreages and lakes known for ice-fishing and cracking, dry cold in most of the winters in memory.
Life appears fair to the extent that it offers such a variety of emotional sustenance, and one category has to do with getting back to visit what means most to us in our weariness and numbness, often what never changes but presents itself as a constant, or a continuum. The vermilion flycatcher and other surviving species of birds are that, are in bird books and illustrations going way back through our generations, and though these birds are in that way a constant, some of them offset the impending era of extinctions by showing up where and when least expected, like an advertisement for some other trend that we could cooperatively set in motion.
