I scheduled a Zoom program about my two visits to Cuba for this Thursday; I’m postponing it until Thursday, July 30, 2026 at 7:00 pm CDT. Here is the Zoom link.

I’m very sorry about this, but at the last minute, the Duluth City Council decided they don’t care how many thousand people signed the petition to allow Duluthians to vote on whether to develop our treasured park at the closed Lester River Golf Course—they do not want the issue on the ballot. (I wrote about the issue here.)

My dear friend Michael Bernstein, who organized the petition to call for a special election, happens to be an attorney; he sued the city when they decided not to call the legally required special election or to even bother to count the signatures on the petitions. The hearing was today, and Bernie just sent this to me:

Today, in court, the city told the judge that the number of signatures we gathered doesn't matter. Their position is that a state zoning law "preempts" our petitions — that Duluthians aren't allowed to vote on this, period. No court has ever ruled that way in a case like ours. The judge decided to wait and rule after the council acts or fails to act.

So it comes down to Thursday. Thursday, July 23. 6:00 pm. City Hall, 411 W. First St., third floor.

There are two resolutions on the agenda. One puts both measures on the November ballot — the city's own resolution says it would cost little or nothing. The other says your 8,000 signatures are legally meaningless.

Wouldn't people filling up that whole third floor in city hall say everything that needs to be said? Can you help me?

Bernie continues:

We're not asking anyone to agree with us about what should happen out there. People want different things. A park. Affordable housing for middle- and low-income people. Trails. But from everything I've heard, none of that is what's being cooked up. The mayor has insisted from the start that any plan for Lester include golf — his words, this past April: "year-round outdoor activities including, but not exclusive to, golf," alongside "business, retail and housing." A luxury golf resort developer has tried three times in fourteen years to buy that property. And honestly? Even if it's not him — even if it's any of the two or three luxury developers we've got in this town — tell me what gets built out there that's good for most of the people who live here. That's the whole point. We need a seat at the table when it comes to this land. The petitions are that seat. And the city is trying to pull the chair out from under us before we can sit down.

So I simply have to attend this meeting. I’m very sorry to delay the Zoom program—I know some people have been planning to attend since I announced it—but this is important.

During all 40 years I’ve produced “For the Birds,” my programs have combined fun and interesting stuff about birds with solid, thoroughly researched information about what we can do to help those birds we love. That means that I’ve taken controversial stands on issues that affect birds from the very start. When I’ve made errors in fact or judgment, I’ve done my level best to make the corrections as quickly as possible.

When the University of Minnesota owned the former KUMD, they never censored “For the Birds.” I’d hear about it when listeners complained, but I also knew that the station got a lot of donations specifically because of my work, and knew they aired every program I produced. When I went down to the Gulf to document how horrible the BP oil spill really was, KUMD did not fund my trip—money is tight for public broadcasting—but did give me a press pass, and in addition to the programs I produced about it, Lisa Johnson interviewed me several times and no one at the station ever intimated in any way that they wanted me to tone down my coverage.

But WDSE “The North 103.3,” the public media station that bought KUMD and now airs “For the Birds,” did NOT air the program I did about the Duluth petition. Someone high up in the station, without ever communicating to me any guidelines about topics they consider appropriate or inappropriate, not only pulled that one about this important local issue, but also at least two of the programs I did about a major national issue, lead in hunting ammo and fishing tackle (“Get the Lead Out”). I suspect they’ll not be airing at least one of the two programs I just produced about our extreme heat and dire air quality. [UPDATE: TODAY THEY AIRED BOTH OF THOSE CLIMATE SEGMENTS, THE MORE CONTROVERSIAL ONE FIRST! AIRING TWO PROGRAMS IS UNPRECEDENTED.]

That new station, “The North 103.3,” has been airing “For the Birds” every Tuesday through Friday. I knew all along that they play reruns when I don’t have a new program, but didn’t know until recently that they don’t play specific new programs if one of the powers-that-be disapproves of it. Again, no one at the station has ever been up front with me about what they want and don’t want me to talk about. Since they bought KUMD, they’ve used and received donations from listeners for my work; I get no compensation, but that has always been a perfectly satisfactory arrangement when I thought they understood that advocacy is at the very root of the term for the birds. Many long-time radio listeners count on me to speak up when birds are in trouble, and deserve to know when I’m being silenced.

On July 13 and 14, the official Duluth temperature reached 95º and 97º. On those two days, our north-facing, shaded patio reached 97º and 98º, and our south-facing front porch reached an astonishing 101º F. Our heat pump is malfunctioning, but the company has cancelled a couple of appointments already to get it repaired.

As we’ve learned in recent years, extreme heat goes hand in hand with wildfires, and this week, Duluth’s air quality was the worst I’ve ever experienced. My daughter got a screen grab when the EPA’s website was showing our Air Quality Index (AQI) at a devastating 1134! Their highest level of danger, the maroon “Hazardous” level, only goes from 301–500. We were more than double that!

For three days, from morning till night it stayed so dark that it looked as if a major storm was looming even when, meteorologically, the skies were clear. Russ and I went out to lunch on Thursday at a restaurant on London Road and could not see the lake at all. On those smoke-darkened days, our solar panels produce very little electricity.

We have two air filters in our house, both running at full strength, but even when I’d been indoors for hours my eyes were still burning, I could feel a slight burning sensation when I took a deep breath, and I could detect a faint smell of smoke. On Wednesday during some of the worst of it, my daughter saw her oncologist and I went to the dentist—in both those indoor settings we could still smell smoke. My dental hygienist told me the entire staff had been complaining of headaches. Sensible people outdoors were wearing masks.

I’m growing 6 tomato plants in pots and have to water them several times each day. The whole time I was outside, my eyes and lungs burned.

Just opening the door for the second or two it took me to get in and out, our air filters showed a spike in particulates in the house.

When the risk reaches 201 on the Air Quality Index, the purple level, the EPA website says “The risk of health effects is increased for everyone.” When it reaches the highest, maroon, level, between 301 and 500, the site says, “Health warning of emergency conditions: everyone is more likely to be affected.”

The warning issued on the hazardous days was this:

Everyone needs to cut back on outdoor activities…People with heart or lung disease, older adults, children and teens: Avoid physical activities outdoors. Everyone else: Avoid strenuous outdoor activities or keep physical activities short. Consider moving physical activities indoors or rescheduling them.

Those are sensible guidelines for humans—the ones who have options, at least—but what are animals to do? Before the heat and smoke hit, I’d been watching some delightful baby House Wrens.

Their parents are every bit as attentive and nurturing as the finest human parents, but those poor House Wrens can’t call their babies indoors when the AQI reaches unhealthy or hazardous levels.

At rest, a Northern House Wren’s heart rate was measured as 455 beats per minute, rising to 701 while incubating eggs—for obvious reasons, no one has measured the heart rate when the birds are active. Like all small birds, their respiration rate is also extremely fast. It’s impossible to assess what the heat and horrible air quality are doing to them. I’m still hearing an adult male singing but haven’t heard the tiny chips of the babies all week. I’m hoping they survived the worst of this, but there is no way to know.

I haven’t seen a hummingbird in weeks even though some of my bee balm is in full bloom. My pair of adult catbirds were coming to my just-now ripening juneberries as well as my feeders several times a day, but I haven’t seen them once since Tuesday. Where could they possibly have gone when this disaster is so widespread? Did they share the fate of those canaries in the coal mine whose deaths warned miners that the air was dangerous? There is simply no way to know.

I’m not sure which of my emotions is stronger right now—fear or fury. I’m terrified for my daughter on chemo, my little grandson, and all the other people whose health is already fragile, here in Duluth where we’re over 80 miles from the nearest fires, for all the people even closer, and all the people hundreds of miles away who are also breathing in this hazardous, smoky air. Imagine the damage to wildlife—the nestling birds and mammals too little to escape! Some of the adults and older young near the periphery of the many fires certainly survived, but 77,000 acres of burned area is a lot of valuable habitat for a lot of creatures, not even counting what the smoke is doing, both in the vicinity of the fires and spreading so widely from the actual burn.

As terrified as I am of what all this is doing right now and bodes for the future, I’m also furious. On Wednesday, the Duluth News-Tribune ran a front page headline:

Climate change drives heat wave.

High temperatures throughout Northland more likely to occur due to climate change.

Like DUH! I learned in college, more than half a century ago, that this was coming, but over the 45 years we’ve lived in Duluth, this exact newspaper has always treated climate change as controversial, presenting “both sides” when only one side had actual facts. Scientists at Exxon learned about the certainty of climate change if we kept burning fossil fuels long ago, and even as energy corporations, the Koch brothers, and so many other rich and powerful people suppressed the information as well as they could for decades, they used it to benefit their own bottom line, grooming politicians, oligarchs, and the club of powerful and wealthy insiders to ridicule climate change as a hoax.

Ronald Reagan, the affable and Hollywood-handsome spokesman for General Electric, caught the eyes, and funding, of corporate America, which was enough to elevate him to governor of California and then president of the United States. And as soon as he reached office, he famously tore down the solar panels Jimmy Carter had installed on the White House and turned the thermostat up again, telling the country that there would be no sweaters worn in his White House. And the same forces that elevated Reagan destroyed the political career of Nobel Prize winner Al Gore and more recently, even as things grew increasingly and more obviously dangerous, smeared Greta Thunberg.

Right this very minute, my tax dollars and yours are being used by the Trump administration to pay energy companies billions of dollars in “refunds” to cancel offshore wind turbine projects and abandon their federal leases, and this president still refers to climate change as a hoax, scam, and con job. As the rest of the world grows more and more independent of the fossil fuels that have put so much carbon into our atmosphere and put us all in such dire jeopardy, the United States is moving backward.

I may be filled with fear and fury, but while I was out in my yard a few minutes ago, a female monarch butterfly alighted in my swamp milkweed and allowed me to watch her for at least 3 minutes as she drank from newly opening blossoms. Her delicate tongue, as fine as gossamer, probed each tiny flower individually.

When she flew off, I went upstairs to my office where many of my African violets and Streptocarpus plants are in full bloom.

My pair of cardinals, the male recognizable because he’s missing a bunch of feathers on the left side of his nape and head, is still coming to my window feeders.

Chickadees are also visiting the feeder, and baby Hairy and Downy Woodpeckers and Northern Flickers are still chasing their parents everywhere.

There is so much loveliness in this world despite the horrors. Even the ashy dust coating my normally shiny box elder leaves is giving them a soft, silvery sheen. I can’t quite capture this with my camera, but they’re genuinely lovely in an eerie, haunting way.

Ever since that one cluster of bee balm started flowering, I’ve been finding monarch eggs and caterpillars in the nearby milkweed.

Monarchs lay their eggs exclusively on milkweed, but the adults need nectar even when milkweed isn’t blooming, so I suspect the bee balm is what attracted them to my garden in the first place.

Now that the milkweed is also blossoming, I may start seeing even more eggs and caterpillars—at this very moment, at least two eggs are close to hatching.

Not one of my tiny caterpillars has survived to pupate so far, or even to get bigger than about an inch long. I didn’t understand why they were disappearing until I found one of my House Wren parents probing through the milkweed. Toxins in milkweed make monarch caterpillars increasingly toxic as they grow, but these were apparently still too small to be a problem for the birds. I’m hoping my House Wrens will raise at least one more brood this summer, but hoping just as fervently that they’ll look further afield for baby food.

I feel sad but sort of philosophical about those tiny caterpillars—in the natural world, everything is food for something else. But in that natural world, few species eat their own kind, and usually only when their survival is in jeopardy. It’s the billionaires—ostensibly human beings too—who think nothing of harming and outright killing the rest of us and destroying the earth we all need in the name of their quarterly profits.

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In August 1979, my sister-in-law Jeanie and I took a road trip out West. We did a lot of camping in national parks, and WHOA! In the Big Horn Mountains, a LIFER alighted on my hand!! That was back when it was both legal and part of the culture of tent camping in national parks to share a bit of your food with the little critters who showed up at your campsite. I’d luckily set my Golden Guide on the picnic table, allowing me to page through it with one hand while figuring out that the bird on my other hand was my lifer Gray Jay! And the first sentence in the Golden Guide species account noted that it was “very tame.” Jeanie got several photos of that splendid lifer on my hand for me.

As I learned first hand literally, this bird is exceptionally approachable—indeed, we don’t even need to know one is there before it approaches us. When I’ve taken birders up the Sax-Zim Bog or some lovely spots north of Two Harbors, I’ve often brought peanuts along so they could have the same amazing pleasure I did, holding in their hand this brand-new lifer.

Fortunately, the Golden Guide showed both the soft white-and-gray adult plumage and the charcoal-gray juvenile plumage, so I never thought the new birds I was feeding in the Big Horn Mountains belonged to two different species. When I got home, I discovered that my Peterson guide showed only the adult plumage.

I’ve seen young Canada Jays in that plumage several times since, but never photographed them, so while I was planning this episode, I asked my friend Erik Bruhnke if I could borrow one of his for my blog post. He of course obliged.

Then, this past weekend, when I was birding in the Bog with my friend Paula, two parents and a young bird came pretty close, even though we hadn’t brought along any peanuts. My photos aren’t the best, but I was delighted!

My old Peterson guide and my even older Audubon Land Bird Guide called the bird a Canada Jay—the name such early ornithologists as Swainson and Audubon called it in the 1830s and 40s, and what the American Ornithologists’ Union called it in the first edition of their Checklist in 1886.

I thought the name change to Gray Jay in 1957 was to make this species’ name consistent with the other American jays named for colors (Blue, Green, and Brown Jays). But nope. In 1886, the Canada Jays in coniferous forests of the Pacific Northwest were believed to belong to a separate species, called the “Oregon Jay.” When that population was lumped as a subspecies into the wider ranging species in 1957, they changed the name to Gray Jay to reflect that both populations were included. Had they kept the species name “Canada Jay,” the subspecies’ name would be the Oregon Canada Jay.

The name change was carefully explained by Canadian ornithologist Dan Strickland in 2017 in an article, “How the Canada Jay lost its name and why it matters,” in Ontario Birds. Perhaps anticipating that the name was eventually going to change back to Canada Jay, John K. Terres, author of my single favorite bird reference of all, the 1980 Audubon Society Encyclopedia of North American Birds, used both names in the title for the species entry.

Most people in the US and Canada don’t care in the least what the American Ornithological Society calls any bird “officially.” The Cree name for the Canada Jay, Wisakedjak, entered English as “Whisker Jack” as early as 1740, and the funnier offshoot, Whiskey Jack, quickly became entrenched as its name for many. Wikipedia’s entry for the species quotes Niigaanwewidam Sinclair, an associate professor and acting head of the department of native studies at the University of Manitoba, in a post published by Canadian Geographic magazine. “To my people, the Anishinaabe, she is Gwiingwiishi…a great, wise teacher, and there is an old story that tells of her abilities to give gifts… Her lesson? That it is only in our bravery, resilience and commitments to one another that we can find growth.” I like that a lot.

Changing the name from Canada to Gray Jay was hard for Canadians to accept for another reason—the American Ornithologists’ Union used the American spelling (Gray) rather than the Canadian spelling (Grey). That must rankle, because the species has been reported in fewer than half of our country’s states but in every one of Canada’s provinces and territories. Fortunately, in May 2018, the American Ornithological Society changed the name back officially to Canada Jay.

Somehow, I’ve always had a little question mark in my head when I’ve said or written the bird’s name. Even though my favorite field guide called it the Gray Jay, two-thirds of my original bird books did not. As I learned about the controversy, despite liking the consistency of naming jays for their colors, I felt sympathetic to Canadians because this bird embodies such fundamentally Canadian values—it’s intelligent, friendly and open even with strangers, perfectly adapted to Canadian seasons, serious and assertive but quiet, dresses in unostentatious feathers—you just know if this bird was taught to speak, it would pronounce the word “aboot.”

So I’m very happy about the name change even as, eight years after the official name change, I keep calling it a “Gray Jay” or hesitating before I call it anything. What’s in a name? That which we call a Canada Jay by any other name is just as sweet.

I just started a “Buy me a coffee” thing for people who want to support my work but don’t want a paid subscription. I am absolutely committed to providing all my content for free to anyone who wants to read it, but every little bit of support does help me pay for my website, Zoom account, and all the other expenses involved in producing this! You can give a one-time tip for as little as $1 if you click on the button.)

Since I started producing “For the Birds” in 1986, I’ve always called any month with a blue moon “National Blue Jay Awareness Month.” Decades ago, I made a big deal about it whenever there was a blue moon, producing lots of programs about Blue Jays. Some provided solid information but many had sillier elements, often related to my fictitious Jim Baker and his fictitious company, “Baker’s Blue Jay Barn.” For example, in one “ad,” the “California Ravens” sang “Bohemian Rhapsojay.” (It was me doing the singing to my daughter’s piano accompaniment.)

My friend John Keenan, who voices my Jim Baker character, found a Blue Jay nesting in his yard back in the late 80s and snapped a photo. My friend Darlene Peterson made a drawing of it, and in 1988, KUMD sent supporters a t-shirt with the design as a premium—my kids and I are wearing ours in the top photo. One of the shirts held up well enough that my grandson Walter was wearing it 35 years later!

May 2026 qualified as National Blue Jay Awareness Month because there were two full moons, but between all the preparations and travel involved in giving talks at birding events in Ohio and Wisconsin, and then my daughter’s stem-cell harvest at the Mayo, celebrating Blue Jays entirely slipped my mind. In June and now July, I seem to be making up for lost time by focusing on my “Top Ten” favorite birds—the Blue Jay has, for half a century, always held the #1 or #2 position. I’m especially fond of Blue Jays because they are so deeply embedded in my family life going all the way back to when my children were little.

When my not-quite-one-year-old daughter Katie still had a one-word vocabulary, “mama,” and was just starting to pull herself up to stand, she gravitated to the picture window in our living room—that windowsill was exactly the right height for her to grab onto. Meanwhile, a pair of Blue Jays had figured out that I was feeding peanuts to a few tame squirrels on the front porch, right outside that picture window. The squirrels usually ate the peanuts right away but sometimes buried them. As soon as a squirrel hid a peanut somewhere and ran off, one of the Blue Jays would drop down, dig out the peanut, and fly away with it.

When I first noticed the jays, I started leaving peanuts on the flat railing for them. At first they wouldn’t fly to the porch until I went inside, but one day, the braver one of the pair flew in and grabbed the peanut while I was still on the porch—I’d just stepped back from the railing. By the time the more timid jay started coming in while I was still on the porch, the braver one was taking the peanuts right out of my hand. The second jay never felt comfortable with that. It did start coming in while I was on the porch if I was far enough away from the railing, but if I made any unexpected movement, it hightailed it back to the safety of the maple tree. One time I sneezed right as it alighted on the porch railing and it flew off, not returning for several days.

My little Katie loved watching these big colorful birds at close range, so when I asked her if she wanted to see the Blue Jays, she’d crawl straight to the living room window saying “Boo Jay!”

When Russ and I needed a second car for my speaking and book-signing gigs, we got a personalized license plate memorializing that. We had to pay $100 for it, but only that one time, so 32 years later, my license plate still reads BOOJAY. For decades, Minnesota didn’t let you personalize their critical habitat license plate, but now that they do, our license plate pays tribute to both Black-capped Chickadees and Blue Jays. Imagine being able to honor my top two birds on the same license plate!

I never had much of a relationship with either of my parents as an adult, but I made up for it in the in-law department. When Russ’s parents retired to Port Wing, Wisconsin, in 1980, they immediately set up a feeding station. Blue Jays are here year-round, their numbers augmented enormously during spring and fall migration. When a Blue Jay flies to a feeder, other birds instantly scatter, probably for the same reason that beginning birders at Hawk Ridge sometimes mistake Blue Jays for Sharp-shinned Hawks—in silhouette, both species have rounded wings and a long tail. And Blue Jays sometimes yell out a warning as if a predator was about; when the birds at the feeder scatter, in come the jays. But they’re not bullies—once they settle down to eat, the jays are as peaceable as most other birds. You can tell they have their aggression turned down when their crests are down.

My father-in-law and I ragged each other endlessly about Blue Jays, me calling them “Nature’s Perfect Birds” and him saying how much he hated them. For his birthday in August 1987, I started “For the Birds” talking about how wonderful Blue Jays are but said if I even whispered their name, it would ruin his birthday, so I’d talk about Bald Eagles instead—he got a big kick out of that. That Christmas, Russ and I made a poster with a large picture of a Blue Jay with a red circle/slash, saying “Port Wing Blue Jay Haters. Ellwood Erickson, President,” which he loved so much he immediately hung it in a place of honor in the hallway.

Blue Jays figured even more prominently in Erickson family life after I started rehabbing. The most memorable experiences happened the summer some Cloquet people brought me four very young nestlings after the branch with their nest crashed to the ground in a thunderstorm—a fifth had died in the crash. My kids helped me care for them from the start, and when they fledged and we started letting them spend the day outside, the little birds would fly up to the kids as much as me to be fed.

Our kids’ friends spent a lot of time at our house—we ran a pretty laid-back, friendly household, and you never knew what you would find when you came in, though all the kids in the neighborhood knew to be careful opening the door and looking for any birds underfoot. The little jays enjoyed the hustle and bustle.

That was the summer we were putting an addition on the house. During the time the construction workers were excavating the foundation, the little guys could have gotten in a lot of trouble, so I kept them indoors. One morning I had to run some errands so left the four little fledglings in the back room we were using as a playroom. When I returned and opened the door, the four little Blue Jays were sitting shoulder to shoulder on the windowsill, watching the excavator shovel moving back and forth, digging and dumping, digging and dumping. All four little heads moved in perfect synchrony, back and forth, back and forth, just like the stereotype of people watching a tennis match. The construction workers were charmed.

Our golden retriever Bunter followed me everywhere, and once during that construction chaos, I was so intent on getting out the door of the playroom without the fledglings following me that I accidentally closed the door on Bunter, too. I love telling little kids about this, reminding them that golden retrievers are hunting dogs. Bird hunting dogs. And it was a bloody sight when I returned. Two of the little jays were huddled in a feathery mass, sound asleep. The one I called Jake was sitting on Bunter’s back, hacking into the poor dog like a woodpecker, a bit of blood dripping from the tip of his beak. And the one I called Sneakers was sitting on Bunter’s snout, leaning over, probing Bunter’s nostrils with the tip of her beak. Bunter stood there, tail down, head bowed, looking cosmically guilty as if examining her conscience, trying to think what mortal sin she’d committed that had consigned her to this hell. It never in a million years would have occurred to her to blame the real guilty party—me. Bunter didn’t hold it against the birds, either. When she saw a hungry little Blue Jay, she’d run and get me, as anxious as Lassie if Timmy fell down the well.

Every afternoon, we’d gather in the living room for story time, which was nap time for the jays. Three of them always snuggled together when resting—they usually stayed in a tight group when outside, too.

The fourth always stuck to the humans. When we didn’t feel like having paper towels on our laps, that one would snuggle up to our shoes, so we called her Sneakers.

I always wondered if she hadn’t looked at our house, safe from rain, wind, and predators, compared it to the nest that had crashed in the storm, and shifted her loyalty.

Outdoors, the little birds were wonderful to watch—when one preened, one or two others watched every little movement. When one sampled a new insect or berry, the others would pay attention. Blue Jays don’t only learn by experience—they apparently also learn by the experiences of others.

Little by little, they grew more independent and came less often for feedings. Soon after they started staying outside at night, they stopped coming around altogether. Several months later, the one I’d called Jake showed up at our window feeder one morning and tapped, so I let him in the house. He flew instantly to the spot where I’d always kept a dish of food items for the babies, so I put some food there for him. He also got a drink out of Bunter’s water bowl.

After pigging out, Jake flew to the high shelf in the living room where the babies had often napped, tucked his beak in his back feathers, and fell sound asleep. And slept and slept! I don’t remember exactly how long he was conked out, but it was at least a couple of hours. I was scared that he was sick, but suddenly he woke up, flew back to his food dish and ate a bit more, got another drink, and was ready to face the world again. He flew to the dining room windowsill and waited; when I cranked it open, off he flew, never to return.

I’ve often wondered what led Jake to come home just that one time. He was obviously thriving out there—his feathers were gorgeous, and when he alighted on my hand, his weight seemed perfect. To survive in the natural world, Blue Jays must be ever vigilant, especially in a neighborhood with nesting Merlins and several cats. (That was before Duluth enacted a cat-leash ordinance.) Jake had obviously dealt successfully with the dangers so far—maybe he just needed a little break. Whatever the reason, I was thrilled to see him again, as were my kids.

Baby birds of every species have high mortality—that’s why pairs of Blue Jays virtually always produce 4 or 5 eggs each year while their population stays stable. It’s as scary sending a baby bird off on its own as it is watching your 16-year-old drive off with their brand-new drivers license. I think my children were a little more understanding of Russ and me when we were over-protective because they knew what it was like to want to give a sweet dependent creature its freedom even as you want to protect it from everything bad that could possibly happen.

I’ve birded in Cuba twice, in October 2016 and February 2025, and I presented a program to the Minnesota River Valley Audubon Club last month about the splendid birds there and my experiences. Now, as a thank you to my Substack subscribers (free or paid—my paying subscribers really do make much of my work possible, but all my Substack and podcast content is available for free), I’ll be providing pretty much the same program via Zoom on July 23 at 7 pm CDT. (That’s CENTRAL Daylight Time—I’m in Minnesota.) The link to the Zoom “meeting room” for the program is here. My Zoom account doesn’t allow more than 100 participants, but I’ve never gotten close to the limit yet.

Twelve score and ten years ago this Fourth of July, a group of immigrants whose parents, grandparents, or they themselves had come to America from England officially adopted the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration said, “all men are created equal” and are endowed by their Creator with the inalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

The first time in my life that I heard the word ironic was in seventh grade Catholic school history class, in the context of those very words: our teacher said it was ironic that the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence and many of the men who signed it led lives of luxury thanks to the enforced slavery of human beings who had been endowed by that exact same Creator with those exact same inalienable rights.

Every single day during the eight years I attended Catholic school, and on many of the days I attended public high school, we recited the Pledge of Allegiance, which ends with the lovely words, “with liberty and justice for all. As Pope Leo said on the eve of this milestone Independence Day, “As every American knows, the path to building a society that would embody those high ideals of liberty and justice for all was not always easy and, in many respects, is still a work in progress.”

Our Founding Fathers guaranteed those rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and that nebulous concept of liberty and justice for all in the form of the Bill of Rights. The First Amendment was the one I was most keenly aware of. Of course, even as a small child, I knew there was no such thing as free speech in school, church, or at home, not if you didn’t want to get into big trouble. But I figured out when we were preparing for the Sacrament of Penance before our First Communion that there were sins of commission and sins of omission. Stealing from and hurting people were sins of commission—you did something bad. You didn’t have to do anything at all to commit a sin of omission—skipping Mass on a Sunday or Holy Day of Obligation was a mortal sin that would land you in the exact same hell as murderers and thieves, at least if you didn’t get to Confession in time.

The sin I obsessed about—the mortal sin blackening my soul before I even started first grade and the very first sin I confessed when we received our First Penance in second grade—was both a sin of omission and an issue of free speech. I’ve written before about the time my father spewed a horrifyingly hateful racial epithet at a kind stranger in a grocery store. (You can read that story here.) I was mortified as the poor man fled with his little daughter—ashamed of my father, but somehow even more ashamed of myself for not doing anything to stop him or to help them. I don’t remember when I learned the word complicit, but that experience gave me a visceral understanding of its meaning. After my first Confession, I vowed never, ever to stay silent when I could speak out about someone being injured. Ida B. Wells wrote, “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”

In fifth grade, my class listened repeatedly to the original Broadway soundtrack of The Sound of Music. The song “No Way to Stop It” became my favorite after Mr. Borkowski explained that the Captain, unlike his fiancée Elsa and his friend Max, refused to go along with, or quietly submit to, Nazi occupation of his beloved country. In that original version of the musical, the Captain ends his relationship with Elsa not because he was in love with Maria but specifically because of Elsa’s complicity with evildoers.

Even though it directly affected my family, I didn’t learn about priests abusing children until I was an adult. That was obviously disturbing; what felt even uglier was that the Catholic Church protected those abusive priests and pressured victims and their families to be silent even as those priests continued their abuse in parish after parish.1 So I left the very institution that had taught me that complicity is a sin. Again, the word ironic comes to mind.

When he was a college freshman2, Russ hung up a poster in his dorm room reading, “To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.” That resonated deeply with me, calling complicit silence not simply cowardice but an outright sin. I’ve spent pretty much my entire adult life speaking out against things that hurt children, birds, and the environment we all need. It’s why I’ve spent the past 40 years producing, as a volunteer, my radio program, and why I’ve deeply appreciated the radio stations that have given me this wonderful forum to speak out.

My own willingness to speak up obviously does not obligate anyone to agree with me—that First Amendment protecting our rights to freedom of speech and religion suggests an even more profound freedom—the freedom to think. Exercising free speech should come with the responsibility of fairness; that’s why when listeners or readers notice an error or disagree with something I’ve said or written, I’ve always taken them seriously and tried to present their arguments fairly. In matters of fact, when I learn that I’m wrong about something, I tell my listeners and readers as quickly as possible. When it’s an issue of opinion or judgment, I try to explain, as fairly as I can, our differing viewpoints even as I may reiterate my own reasoning or point out factual errors in their arguments.

I’m under no obligation other than my own sense of fairness and honesty to air the opinions of people who disagree with me, and the media is under no obligation to air my opinions in the first place. When the only feedback I get from someone is derisive or trollish with no reasoned argument that I can discern, I do my best to ignore it, but it’s irresponsible for community and public radio stations to ignore feedback from their listeners, whether they’re regular listeners, people chancing on a program while driving through town, or powerful individual or corporate donors and sponsors or political figures.

Recently, at least one radio station did not air my program about selling a treasured Duluth park 3 nor segments of my four-part series about hunters and anglers using lead ammo and tackle. These particular programs were quite specifically advocating for birds—bluebirds, owls, and other Duluth species in the first case, and all manner of species, especially but not only eagles, condors, and loons, in the second.

I’m lucky that any stations air any of my radio segments, and I do understand the pressures on public media, both subtle and overt, especially in this political climate. But our right to free speech comes with an obligation to exercise it to protect others, and my agenda is to advocate for birds. I know I don’t have a right to speak out on the radio, but regular listeners should have the right to know when and why I’ve been censored.

A Brief History of Lead

When I started producing “For the Birds” in 1986, there were no restrictions whatsoever on lead in ammunition and tackle for hunting and fishing, even though lead had been known for a long time to be a dangerous neurotoxin. Lead can be smelted from galena—its widely distributed ore—in an ordinary wood fire, so people in ancient cultures were quick to discover many uses for it in tools, cookware, and even such things as kohl, an eye cosmetic we now realize is toxic. Ancient Egyptians applied kohl around their eyes to reduce the glare of the desert sun and to repel flies who, unlike the ostensibly most intelligent species on the planet, were smart enough to avoid contact with it.

Both the chemical symbol for lead, Pb, and the word plumbing are derived from the Latin plumbeum, because lead was used to make early Roman water pipes. It’s cheap, malleable and easy to work with, durable, and doesn’t rust. Virtually all plumbing in American cities and towns, from water mains to the pipes inside houses, was made with lead well into the twentieth century.

My house was built around 1910 or so. The inside pipes had been upgraded before we moved here in 1981, but after we’d been here a few years, Russ suddenly realized that the line from the city’s water main to our house was lead.

At the time, I was pregnant with Tommy, Katie was a toddler, and Joey was little, so we immediately pressured the city to replace it, mostly at our expense. It probably didn’t cause any harm, but why risk it? It wasn’t until the horrifying situation in Flint, Michigan, that municipalities started getting serious about lead water mains and pipes. Duluth is still in the process of replacing the old system, little by little.

It’s not as if people in the mid-1900s were unaware of the danger of lead pipes—Australia banned lead service lines carrying water to households in 1930. But despite the known dangers, new service lines could legally be made of lead in the U.S. until a provision of the Clean Water Act finally banned it in 1987. Before that, some localities actually mandated the use of lead in service lines, primarily due to lobbying by lead manufacturers and plumbing unions. Small wonder that several nuns at my Catholic school called money “filthy lucre.”

As bad as lead plumbing was, even more dangerous for ancient Romans was pewter tableware. Polished pewter was almost as beautiful as silver but much cheaper, so it was very popular with the middle class in Rome, and lead was a standard component. Wine is acidic, readily leaching lead from pewter goblets or jugs. Vintage pewter is usually about 15 percent lead but can be as much as 40 percent, and it wasn’t until the 1970s that the U.S. started phasing out the use of lead in pewter, so it’s dangerous to serve food or drink in pewter unless you are certain it was made after 1974.

Even worse than pewter tableware was leaden cookware. Ancient Romans boiled down grapes to make a sweetener called sapa, inadvertently concentrating lead acetate in their food and wine. Lead is especially dangerous for babies, children, and pregnant women, and we’ve known for a long time that exposure to it contributes to cognitive decline, infertility, and erratic behavior in people of all ages; many historians consider lead toxicity to be one of several contributing factors leading to the fall of the Roman Empire. I can’t help but wonder if lead toxicity is a contributing factor in the cognitive decline and erratic behavior of many Americans. In researching this, I read comments by antique collectors who insist they eat and drink from old pewter all the time and have never felt ill effects. Few of us notice a very gradual cognitive decline, temporary or permanent, due to aging, dehydration, illness, drug use, brain worms, or the slow bioaccumulation of lead, even when it starts impairing our judgement about serious matters.

Lead was used in paints in residential housing in the U.S. until 1978. The purpose was primarily to speed up drying times, increase durability, and improve resistance to moisture and weathering. Also, some lead compounds such as white lead served as a premium pigment, providing brilliant color, high opacity, and a smooth finish. The dry weight of indoor paints was at least 10 percent lead, and outdoor paints as much as 50 percent.

In the 1950s, my little brother often swallowed paint chips from our dining room windowsill. My mother thought it was no problem because the windowsill was clean. That poor child was functionally illiterate and suffered cognitive problems his whole life, but there were many compounding factors—he was premature, weighing less than 4 pounds when he was born in 1955; despite already being developmentally delayed, he was shunted off to first grade when he was three months shy of 6 years old, long before he was ready; and he was introduced to drugs at a young age (quite likely by a parish priest)—but those leaden paint chips certainly didn’t help.

As it ages, lead paint doesn’t only chip and crack—it also “chalks,” releasing toxic dust, so anyone exposed to the air around old paint is likely to be breathing in some lead. Houses built after 1978 are extremely unlikely to have any lead paint, but a great many houses built before then still have exposed lead paint in areas that aren’t often redecorated, such as closets, attics, and basements. In most very old houses like mine, virtually all the old lead paint was painted over and/or wallpapered multiple times, so all the lead has been trapped, at least until remodeling or sanding, when it can be released into the air.

Gasoline used to be leaded; as it combusted, the lead was released into the air, most eventually working its way into surface water, soil, and groundwater. One of my vivid childhood memories was how quickly fresh snow along roadsides turned black and crusty due to the lead and other particulates in car exhaust. Lots of moneyed interests, including Standard Oil, General Motors, and the Ethyl Corporation (a lead-additive manufacturer), fought against regulating leaded fuel, but with the national focus on pollution after the first Earth Day, there was enough political pressure for Congress to start requiring catalytic converters on cars to meet new emissions standards. Leaded gasoline permanently damages catalytic converters, so all cars built after 1975 were required to have a smaller filler neck to the gas tank, which accommodates only the narrower lead-free gas pump nozzles.

Leaded gasoline was entirely banned for on-road vehicles in 1996, though it is still available for some highly restricted uses, and lead is still a component of car batteries, x-ray shielding, many electronics, solder, and plenty of other things. Without strenuous regulations and enforcement, it readily leaches into ground and surface water at landfills.

How Lead in Ammunition Harms Humans

Imagine spewing thousands of tons of mercury, cyanide, or other known toxins into the environment every year in the name of sport. In the United States alone, an estimated 80,000 tons of toxic lead are deposited annually at shooting ranges alone. This concentrated lead slowly but surely seeps into lakes, rivers, streams, and groundwater. Lead contamination from one California shooting range made its way to a nearby stream, leading to a documented decline in fish populations. We can guess how lead contamination affects humans near shooting ranges, but it’s extremely difficult to track, there is political opposition to studying it, and very few problems with regard to the health of individuals or populations can be attributed to any single cause. For example, my older brother routinely followed the DDT truck as a kid and then was exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam. A few years after he came home from the war, he developed weird subcutaneous lumps all over his body that remained for life, and he developed cancer in his 50s, but the VA did not help him, insisting Agent Orange was not the one cause of his problems. In our system, if one harmful entity can prove a second harmful entity may also be to blame, neither is held responsible. In a world filled with pesticides and other toxins, habitat degradation and loss, and all kinds of issues that harm wildlife, it’s easy for people to deflect blame for any problem on all manner of things.

The government makes some recommendations for shooting range operators with regard to adding lime or other alkaline materials to the soil to reduce acidity, providing erosion control, and occasionally sifting the soil and recycling lead particles, but these are all strictly voluntary. Without regulations and enforcement, tens of thousands more tons of lead will keep raining down on shooting ranges every year.

In the 1980s, when I talked about hunters using non-toxic ammunition, I got ridiculed because, “like DUH, Laura, the whole point of ammo is to be lethal!” Few of them considered how vulnerable humans are to ingesting lead directly from game meat. It’s hard to find and cut out all the lead shot in a duck, quail, dove, or other small animal. A tiny amount may leach into the meat as it cooks, and some pellets may end up in someone’s mouth. Older children and adults usually spit them out, but younger children—the ones most vulnerable to the worst, most long-lasting effects of lead poisoning—are more likely to swallow them. Pellets work their way through our digestive system and out, but the acidic juices in our stomach dissolve some of it, sending it into the bloodstream.

Small animals taken with shotguns aren’t nearly as big an issue for human health as the larger animals that are usually hunted with bullets. On impact, bullets and some buckshot fragment into smaller pieces; when shot from a high-powered rifle, bullets explode in a “lead snowstorm”—the X-ray pattern formed when a bullet shatters into hundreds of tiny, dust-like metal fragments, many scattering several inches from the primary wound channel. This effect is most commonly produced by high-velocity hunting ammunition or unjacketed lead rounds striking tissue or bone. Now that we know this, many food shelves no longer accept game from hunters. The children of many deer hunters get no such protection.

The Minnesota and Wisconsin DNRs, and probably many others, have worked hard to educate hunters about how dangerous lead is for people eating game meat, but a great many hunters ignore these warnings. It can be hard to give up the rifle or shotgun handed down from a beloved father or grandpa for one that can handle non-lead ammo, or to accept that a family tradition going back many generations has a dark side. Right now, our country is so divided, with so much anger and suspicion towards anyone with different opinions about a variety of issues, that many people sincerely believe that anything environmentalists say must be wrong. To this day, against their own self-interest as well as the health of their families and friends, many hunters and hunting organizations as well as the NRA fight vigorously against restrictions on lead ammo.

How Lead in Ammunition and Tackle Harms Wildlife

Eliminating lead from ammunition is clearly in the best interest of humans, but it is even more vital for wildlife, including the game species hunters claim to do such a great job of conserving. The vast bulk of the lead shot used for hunting each year in the United States doesn’t touch the target—even in successful hits, there’s always some literal scattershot that falls to the land or water below. Many upland game birds, including doves, pheasants, turkeys, quail, and prairie chickens, as well as non-game songbirds, pick up grit, including lead pellets, from the soil, to help their gizzards grind up food. Bottom-feeding and predatory fish such as largemouth bass, trout, and carp, as well as waterfowl, do the same thing, picking up and swallowing tiny stones, lead pellets, and grit in the muck at the bottom of lakes, rivers, and streams. And any fish who swallow lead tackle but get away are also subject to lead toxicity. In all these cases, the lead bioaccumulates in their bodies.

Experts learned in the 1950s that about two million waterfowl were dying every year from lead poisoning due to picking up spent shot, yet the NRA and many hunters fought vigorously against prohibiting lead shot, even specifically for waterfowl hunting. Fortunately, at least some duck hunters understood that protecting ducks from lead was essential if they wanted to maintain sustainable numbers for the survival of their sport. This changed the political calculus, so starting in 1987, a federal ban on lead for waterfowl hunting was phased in, and by 1991, all waterfowl hunting nationwide was finally limited to non-lead shot. Despite this, lead shot continues to rain down on many wetlands because in most places, hunters are still allowed to use it for hunting upland game, even when the small mammals and so-called “upland” birds are in a wetland.

The harm to fish, birds, and mammals swallowing lead pellets and sinkers outright is only a fraction of the problem. Predators and scavengers eating them also ingest lead. Fortunately for people who eat game fish, lead tends to settle in fish bones, scales, and internal organs rather than the meat; it’s the animals who swallow fish whole, such as loons and herons, and those who eat big chunks of the fish, such as Bald Eagles and Osprey, who ingest significant quantities of lead from contaminated fish.

Bald and Golden Eagles and ravens scavenge on deer and other large game that were hit by gunshot but eluded the hunter before dying, and on the gut piles of those that didn’t get away. Every year, the Raptor Center, REGI, and other rehab facilities nationwide treat distressing numbers of Bald Eagles, the number spiking during deer hunting season, and most of the eagles admitted suffer from severe lead poisoning. In a ground-breaking study conducted between 2010 and 2018 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Geological Survey and published in 2022, researchers collected blood samples from over 600 live Bald and Golden Eagles, and liver, femur, and feather samples from almost 600 dead Bald and Golden Eagles, over all four seasons in 38 states representing all four flyways; almost 50 percent of the eagles they sampled showed evidence of repeated exposure to lead.

In 1986, the year I started producing “For the Birds,” every California Condor in existence was brought into captivity, and every single one of them was suffering from very high blood levels of lead. Conservationists started reintroducing condors back to the wild in 1992, working tirelessly to keep them from ingesting lead again, partnering with farmers and ranchers to place safe carcasses in condor gathering and feeding areas. But in California, in addition to game hunting, there’s a robust “varmint hunting” tradition, too. California hunters can legally shoot such “varmints” as coyotes, ground squirrels, and jackrabbits without limit and without collecting the carcasses, which condors were finding and eating.

Moving Forward, and Now Backward

In 2007, while he was governor of California, Arnold Schwartzenegger signed into law a regulation prohibiting lead ammo in the 8 counties (out of 58) where California Condors were most common, but the poor birds cross county lines all the time, so their lead problems continued. In 2013, Governor Jerry Brown signed a law that phased out lead ammo for all hunting everywhere in the state. As of July 1, 2019, all firearm hunting with lead ammunition is prohibited in California. The NRA absolutely opposes this law, brazenly claiming despite an abundance of data that “Traditional ammunition does not and has not negatively impacted wildlife populations in North America and is far more effective and affordable for American hunters.”

Starting in 2009, the Obama administration started working on a rule prohibiting the use of lead ammo and fishing tackle on all 573 national wildlife refuges. It took until January 17, 2017 for the rule to take effect, and then, less than two months later, on March 2, 2017, the Trump administration rescinded it.

In 2023, the Biden administration finalized a rule mandating the use of non-lead ammunition for hunting on just 8 of the nation’s national wildlife refuges. This rule was to take effect on September 1, 2026, but now the Trump administration is reversing it, with the full support of the NRA, a great many hunters, and even Ducks Unlimited, an organization revered by many for its focus on conservation. The organization claims that it’s too complicated and unfair to have different rules at different refuges even as they say a nationwide rule can’t be justified because we need scientific studies to prove the harm on such a wide scale, apparently ignoring that ground-breaking study that showed that almost half of a large sample of eagles, from 38 states representing all four flyways, were carrying unacceptable loads of lead.

Ignoring research for political gain is one thing—now a new proposal by the Trump administration will prevent a lot of important research from happening in the first place. They want to add political appointees to every committee that approves government research and grants. This will ensure that politics and big money interests will always trump scientific truth, whether the environment or human health is at stake.

I know a few hunters who have switched to non-toxic ammo to protect themselves and their families yet insist that using or not using lead should be a personal decision, not a dictate from “the nanny state.” They say it’s emotional, not rational, to consider the suffering that eagles and other victims of lead poisoning endure, even as their own arguments defending lead ammo and tackle are emotional, revolving around nostalgia, tradition, “owning the liberals,” and fears of the “nanny state.”

Hunters and anglers who oppose restrictions on lead ammo and tackle are exactly like those who opposed hunting licenses, bag limits, open and closed seasons, and the other restrictions that have, since the time of Theodore Roosevelt, ensured that the game species hunters and anglers enjoy can thrive long into the future. As long as any hunters or anglers claim a right to spew toxic lead into our environment, they’ve squandered the right to call themselves conservationists.

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If you’d asked me at any point between 1975, when I started birding, and, say, late 2004 what my two favorite birds were, I’d have instantly answered Black-capped Chickadees and Blue Jays. For several of those years, Blue Jays were Number One. What put them on top for me, even above my beloved chickadees?

When I was four or five years old, my Grandpa gave me the “Little Golden Activity Book,” Bird Stamps. I of course wanted to see every one of the 18 birds in it, but the only ones I’d seen in real life were the Robin, Cardinal, and House Sparrow. Of the remaining 15, I was most obsessed with the Blue Jay. It was the first one on the cover, had a jaunty crest, and was beautifully patterned with black, white, and a few different shades of blue. Mystifyingly, the first sentence about it said that it “can be easily seen and heard.” I sure wasn’t seeing or hearing any!

Then when I was six or seven, my family went to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, for a week-long vacation, and one morning, voilà! There was a Blue Jay in all its splendor, even prettier than the book showed! I was thrilled. For many years, I was certain that Lake Geneva must be True Wilderness—Blue Jays lived there!

This belief was reinforced by the fact that I never saw another Blue Jay during my childhood. I didn’t see another until March 23, 1975, when one showed up in Lansing, Michigan, in a stand of trees and then at a backyard feeder not far from our apartment. It was #14 on my life list.

It’s funny how utterly oblivious we can be to our surroundings—after I started birding, the first time we went to Russ’s parents’ house, just a few blocks from the house where I grew up, there were Blue Jays right there! They obviously had to have been in my part of the neighborhood, too, and the same with chickadees, but I never once noticed them growing up. Russ’s parents lived in the neighborhood for just a few years more before they retired up to Port Wing, Wisconsin, but yep—Blue Jays, chickadees, and lots of other birds I’d never noticed as a kid had been there all along! But I digress.

Now that Blue Jays were suddenly part of my everyday life, I grew increasingly fond of them, but, as is often the case with me, it took an intimate acquaintance with one individual Blue Jay to permanently embed the species in my heart.

In 1979, I was birding with my friend Ken Wood in a Madison park when we came upon a newly fledged Blue Jay quite literally playing on the playground slide. He’d hop up to the bottom and then flutter as hard as he could to work his way up the smooth, slippery slope. He never got even halfway up before gravity took over; he’d make a quick about-face and flap his little wings as hard as he could, sliding down to the bottom; he’d stay aloft for a second or two before dropping to the dirt below. Then he’d start up the slide all over again. It was both charming and hilarious. We came close so Ken could take a few photos before we left.

At home, I started feeling uneasy. Ken and I had both seen adult Blue Jays flying over carrying food—they clearly had a nest nearby. And this little fledgling was very conspicuous, but the adults never squawked at us or took any other defensive actions even when Ken was photographing the little one at close range.

So Russ and I went back to the park just in time to discover the tiny bird in the mouth of a golden retriever. Fortunately, this must have been a well-trained hunting dog because it held the little bird gently, and when I reached out to take it, the dog handed it right over! There were one or two drops of blood and a good supply of dog saliva on the little guy, but otherwise he seemed fine.

Meanwhile, those two adult jays flew over a few times, completely ignoring the situation, and the baby still didn’t make a sound. I wondered if his parents had abandoned him because he was so quiet. Most parent birds find and recognize their chicks in part by voice. One that didn’t make a peep when playing in a playground, or especially when trapped in the mouth of a dog, may have seemed defective from an adult Blue Jay’s perspective. But I’ll never know.

The moment that little bird’s eyes met mine, an electric spark surged through me. As captivating as baby Blue Jays are to my eyes, it turns out they’re even better at capturing my heart.

Riding home, the adorable little bird snuggled into my hands and looked at me with bright, trusting eyes. I was scared to death of screwing up, so the first thing I did when I got home was call a dear friend of mine, Malcolm McDonald, who worked at the National Wildlife Health Laboratory in Madison. I knew he’d raised a baby magpie many years before, and he turned out to be a treasure trove of valuable information about diet and care. He told me that taking care of a protected species was illegal, but the laws weren’t very well enforced back then (unlike nowadays!), and that he’d use his many connections with the DNR and USF&WS if anyone questioned me.

The little Blue Jay never made a sound during the first three or four weeks I had him. I thought he must be deaf, so I named him Ludwig. (This is why I’ve always used male pronouns referring to him.)

I was a teacher, and still had two or three weeks of school before summer vacation. The first week, I brought Ludwig with me every day, carrying him in a shoebox on the bus. Noel Johnson, my wonderful bus driver, peeked in the shoe box every morning to say hi to the little bird, and several other passengers took an interest in him, too.

At first, I fed him every 15 minutes during daylight hours whether I was home, on the bus, or in the middle of a lesson. My fourth, fifth, and sixth graders were as charmed as I, meaning sixty more people were invested in Ludwig’s survival and well-being.

When Ludwig got more rambunctious and started flying, I had to leave him at home. Fortunately, by then he could feed himself.

On the last day of school, Ludwig proved beyond a doubt that, unlike Beethoven, he could hear perfectly well. I brought my desk stuff home, including my trusty orange bell from Russ’s and my Parker Brothers “Pit” game. During the school year I rang the bell whenever I wanted the kids to settle down.

When I set it on the dining room table, Ludwig looked curiously at it, so I pressed the button. It rang out loud and clear! Lugwig instantly cocked his head and then pushed the button with his beak, but his breast was touching the metal dome, dampening the sound. When he stepped back, I rang the bell again. His crest popped up and he hopped up to press the button again, but again the sound was dull. I showed him how it worked a few more times, but then Russ and I went to another room to watch TV.

Maybe 20 minutes or a half hour later, we heard a clear “Ding!” A few seconds later, we heard another “Ding!” and then a “Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding!” I went running in to see Ludwig hitting the button over and over as he hovered, wings beating furiously, above it, which was the only way the little guy could hit the push button without touching the dome. He seemed very pleased with himself.

Now that he’d achieved his goal, he was ready to move on. I kept the bell on the table that summer, and he rang it once or twice more, but in the same way that my grandson Walter has outgrown his Fisher-Price little people toys, Ludwig outgrew that bell.

There are no evolutionary advantages whatsoever conferred on a bird for mastering bell ringing, but curiosity, keen observational skills, figuring out cause and effect, and tenaciousness are excellent qualities for an opportunistic omnivore, be it a Blue Jay or a human being. The longer and more closely I observed Ludwig, the more I grew to understand that Blue Jays exemplify the very best of what an intelligent, sociable species can be.

Ludwig thrived. But being raised by a human instead of within a Blue Jay family meant his education was different from that of a normal Blue Jay. The first time he took a bath in the kitchen sink, he soaked himself so thoroughly that each flight feather became a sodden, stringy, heavy mess. He hopped up to the edge of the sink with no problem, but when he tried to fly across the room to the table, he dropped to the floor like a rock. I picked him up on my finger and he stayed put while preening to dry off. Even with me patting him with paper towels, it took half an hour to restore his feathers to flying condition.

I learned that there was no way I’d qualify for state and federal permits to keep Ludwig permanently, so as soon as he started to take short flights, I started taking him outdoors to help him learn some of the skills he’d need to become independent. I was terrified the first time I set him in the branches of a bush—what if he flew off and I never saw him again? How would he survive? I realized that parent birds easily keep track of their fledglings and can reach them even in the highest trees, but I was a mere human. Fortunately, fledglings also keep track of their parents; the first week or so, Ludwig never strayed far from me.

For the first few days, when I couldn’t stay out with him, he’d happily come inside with me. As he got more independent, especially after he discovered mulberries in the back of the yard and delectable fruits further afield in the neighborhood, he’d spend minutes, and then hours, on his own.

A family of Blue Jays lived somewhere near us, and whenever Ludwig found himself on their territory, the adults would chase him off, sometimes following him a ways. He quickly discovered that they were afraid of me. Now when I was outside, he’d occasionally taunt them, getting them to chase him into our yard; he’d alight on my head and turn to face them as if saying, “My mom’s bigger than your mom!” As their own babies grew more independent, the adults grew tolerant of Ludwig.

In the evening or when rain was imminent, I’d call for him from the yard. Once I noticed my neighbor staring at me, making me feel like Samantha on the show “Bewitched,” when she’d call, “Mother! Mother!” into the bushes with Gladys Kravitz staring at her. Calling “Ludwig! Ludwig!” seemed even more bizarre.

Sometimes I couldn’t wait for him and went inside. When he was ready to come in, he’d look through our basement apartment windows until he saw us; then he’d peck at the glass to catch our attention.

By this time, he also was also starting, at long last, to make Blue Jay vocalizations. Now when he wanted my attention, he’d make a squawk that sounded like “Ma! Ma!” which I of course found both hilarious and endearing.

Late one afternoon, a huge storm blew in while Ludwig was outside. As ominously dark clouds built up, I searched for him and called, but he didn’t come. This was the kind of rainstorm that starts out with a huge cloudburst, so I gave up and went inside. Every lightning bolt and blast of thunder made me more anxious.

When the rain finally stopped, I ran out and called for Ludwig. I couldn’t find him in my own yard or nearby, so I hopped on my bike and started riding through the neighborhood, calling his name. Finally, a few blocks away, I found him sitting on a telephone line directly above a bus stop, feathers so plastered against his body that he didn’t look anything like a Blue Jay—just a gray, sodden mass squawking “Ma! Ma!” A dozen or so people were waiting for the bus as I pulled my bike to a stop. That was back when I still clung to a shred of a sense of dignity, and I felt my face grow hot as I called, “C’mon down, Ludwig!” He dropped like a rock, fortunately onto the slim strip of grass between the sidewalk and the curb. He hopped up to me yelling, “Ma! Ma!” as the people stared and laughed.

Thanks to this spunky little Blue Jay, what was left of my sense of dignity was fading away. That internal radar system so desperately focused on any sign of disapproval or ridicule makes it hard for many people to follow their own lights; we can get so wrapped up in self-consciousness that we forget that absurdities are part of everybody’s life. We need to outgrow that to become our genuine selves which, intriguingly, means to become more like Blue Jays. That was one of the important lessons I took from those magical days with Ludwig.

One morning when pouring out my Rice Krispies, out of the box came a little “prize”—a bright red rubber-band-powered propeller. I wound it up and the propeller glided off through the dining room. For a few seconds, Ludwig was spellbound as it floated through the air; suddenly he took off and grabbed it in midair. I called, and he brought it to me.

That’s how we learned to play a fun game of fetch. It was even more fun in the backyard without walls or ceiling to get in the way. Over and over I’d shoot it up and he’d race after it and bring it back. One time it landed on our apartment building’s roof. He flew up to retrieve it, but the moment he landed on the hot roof tiles, he keeled over on his side. His crest went up, one wing and his tail spread out, his beak opened, and he froze. I thought he was having a seizure.

I called but he didn’t move. In a panic, I rushed to the basement where our landlord kept a ladder, lugged it out, and climbed up to the roof, not even thinking about how scared I am of heights as I rushed toward him. But as my hand reached out to grasp him, he shook his head, stood up, grabbed the propeller, and flew onto my shoulder as if nothing had happened.

I called Malcolm about that, and he laughed, explaining about how birds sunbathe, especially on hot, sunny days. This innate behavior raises the temperature of a bird’s skin and feathers, probably helping to banish some parasites. I’d read about that in my ornithology text books, but was still shocked to see it in real life. I really thought Ludwig was dying.

Ludwig kept his collection of toys—some shiny buttons, a rubber band, that Rice Krispies propeller, and an old ring—in a ceramic cup. Now and then he’d take out his treasures one by one, arranging them in a line, and then put them all back into the cup. Once in a while, he’d fly off with one and hide it somewhere. Once he wedged a button in the crevice between the dining room window frame and the sash, and we had to work the button out with a knife before we could open the window.

One day I gave Ludwig a few sunflower seeds. He tucked them away with his other toys, not realizing they were food. A day or two later, I bit one open and ate the seed in front of him, then cracked open another and gave him the seed. He was thrilled! Years later, when we gave our toddler Joey his first Starburst candy, he especially loved the colorful wrapper, calling it “present candy.” That reminded me of how Ludwig loved sunflower seeds as much for the packaging as for the seed within.

Ludwig was very curious about insects, and became adept at catching flies. He put a couple in his cup until he figured out that they were edible--then he just swallowed them as he caught them.

But the instant he first grabbed an ant in his beak, his crest popped up and he spit it out, violently shaking his head with what looked like revulsion, apparently reacting to the formic acid taste. But within half a minute or so, he picked up the ant again, ran his tongue back and forth on it, spit it out again, and cocked his head. Then he grabbed the ant, leaned over to one side and spread the opposite wing, and rubbed the ant on the feathers. The taste of the ant seemed to release this behavior. By the time he switched sides, the ant body was pretty mangled. He didn’t eat it—he just left it on the table for me to clean up.

Of course, I immediately called Malcolm, wondering if this was the “anting” behavior I’d read about in ornithology. Yep. Malcolm said that this was “active anting,” and that Blue Jays also engage in “passive anting,” sitting on an ant hill in the same position they do when sunning, allowing the ants to crawl all over their skin and feathers. Either way, some of the formic acid coating the ants’ bodies ends up on the Blue Jay’s feathers and skin, probably acting as an insect repellent.

By summer’s end, Ludwig was spending most nights outside somewhere—I’d see him just once or twice a day and he no longer wanted to come indoors. The last day I saw him was the last day of summer vacation. Through that fall and winter, whenever I saw a Blue Jay, I wondered if it could be Ludwig.

The next year, when Russ and I were in Chicago during spring vacation, a warm breeze floated into Madison. Our next-door neighbor was out sunning herself when she spotted a Blue Jay alight on each of our apartment windows, peeking in and tapping on the glass. He landed on her lawn chair and studied her a bit, and then tried our windows once more, and finally flew off.

I felt so sad when she told me I’d missed him, but so joyful to learn that he’d survived the winter. Ludwig had a whole rich life ahead of him. Five decades later, I still feel a quiet joy knowing that even as he was leading his life as a proper Blue Jay should, he’d kept in his mind a little memory of me.

(I just started a “Buy me a coffee” thing for people who want to support my work but not with a Substack subscription. I am committed to providing all my content for free to anyone who wants to read it, but every little bit of support does help! You can give a one-time tip for as little as $1 if you click on the button above. It will be deeply appreciated.)

When available, Luke has been airing original programs on Tuesdays through Fridays, and pulling oldies from my huge archive when I haven’t produced a new one. On the program’s 40th anniversary, he also aired:

* Community Connection: 40 Years of For the Birds

Every Friday, Luke airs a cool program he calls “Back Tracks,” in which he “invites a special guest to answer three deeply personal music questions—revealing the songs that define their memories, inspirations, and moments that matter most.” He interviewed me for Back Tracks this past November:

*Back Tracks: Three Music Questions with Laura Erickson

It wasn’t until I was looking for these two links that I discovered that, in 2022, one of my favorite people, Tom Kasper, who owns Birchview Greenhouse and Farm, had talked on-air with Luke about my book, 100 Plants to Feed the Birds!

*Tips for Hardy Gardeners: A Book for the Backyard.

Trying to rank beloved people or birds on any Top Ten list falls somewhere between “prohibitively difficult” and “impossible.” Choosing favorites among birds feels akin to choosing favorites among my children—my connection to each is unique and special.

That said, the Black-capped Chickadee easily earned its place as my number one favorite bird because it’s the one that genuinely feels like part of my immediate family. The chickadee wasn’t just the first bird I ever saw when I started birding—to figure out what species it was, I had to spend quite a few minutes searching through my field guide, and the little bird was so cosmically obliging, not just staying within view but sticking close to me, posing from every angle, sometimes even making eye contact, as I figured out who it was. How could I not be smitten?

That entire first spring, chickadees didn’t just show up virtually every time I went out—they also seemed to bring friends for me to add to my life list, especially warblers.

I wasn’t at all surprised to learn that many small neotropical migrants associate with chickadees as they pass through strange areas—I’d seen firsthand that this was true.

When we moved to Duluth, chickadees were the first birds to visit my feeder and then to feed out of my hand.

One with a deformed bill and foot befriended me. He was obviously looking for literal handouts, but the confiding way he trusted me, looking in my window for me, alighting on my hand, and usually sitting right there so he could use my fingers to help him wedge the mealworm into position so he could manage to eat it warmed my heart.

The elongated upper bill broke off in the spring, and normal pecking action made the bill good as new. His deformed foot (he was missing the three front three toes on his right foot) still made him identifiable, and his frequent singing near my window confirmed that he was a male. He didn’t attract a mate that year but did the next, and they successfully raised young. I’ll never forget my joy and pride watching him feeding his babies and then watching the last ones fledge.

I worked at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology from 2010–2012, right when several scientists there were working on fascinating chickadee research projects. That’s when I got to watch them get banded.

I could check out their private parts…

…see inside their nests…

…and see exactly how such a friendly, confiding little bird is no wimp. Chickadees may willingly alight on our hands, but it’s strictly on their terms—they have a nasty bite when held against their will.

In 2021, when we were hunkered down at home during the pandemic, a pair of chickadees nested at eye-level in our dead cherry tree, giving me all kinds of opportunities to watch them excavate the cavity…

…build the nest within (well, I couldn’t peek inside a natural cavity!)…

…bring in the food for hungry babies…

…and carry out the fecal sacs.

They even let me make a video of the last one fledging.

And when the babies got skilled at flying, the parents frequently brought them to our yard while I was out there, giving me wonderful insights into chickadee family life.

Parent chickadees give almost all the food they find to those hungry mouths until by July or early August, when the young are finally independent, the parents are exhausted and bedraggled.

But with natural food everywhere, they quickly replace all those worn-out, year-old feathers with fresh new ones.

The backyard chickadees coming constantly to the feeder in my home office window caught my baby grandson’s eye, too. One of the very first words he learned was “dee dee.” Then, after he learned that his other grandmother was called “Nana,” he himself came up with the name “Dee Dee Nana” for me—the name he still calls me.

Those two old saws—“familiarity breeds contempt” and “absence makes the heart grow fonder”—don’t work for me. I guess a person who is still happy with the spouse she married in 1972 would of course have a special love for the bird who sticks with her every day the whole year round, personally engages with her, and genuinely seems to like her.

So in the same way that I have a special love for my husband, children, and grandchild, I have a special love for the Black-capped Chickadee, the bird who is and always will be Number One on my life list and in my heart.

I love birding in my own backyard, especially during spring migration. Seeing and, sometimes even more thrillingly, hearing new arrivals is magical.

Up here, migration is ever so slow in March, picks up in April, and swells to a magnificent crescendo in May. When I’m home every day, I don’t miss a thing and can keep up with my feeders and birdbaths, keeping everyone healthy and happy.

But tragically, as far as backyard birding goes, May is the month when a lot of birding festivals and other cool events take place. Last year, I was gone the first third of the month because I received an amazing invitation to go on a tour of Guyana. Wonderful as my own backyard is, how could I possibly say no to that?!

Every single day from May 2–May 9, I saw birds not merely new for the year but new for my life—a minimum of 5 lifers each day, 20 or more on a few days, and an amazing 31 on May 7!

I got home on May 9 and spent the rest of the month right here on Peabody Street, seeing plenty of birds migrating through my backyard.

This year, I left on May 5^th and spent every day through the 17^th away from home, attending the Biggest Week in American Birding festival in Oak Harbor, Ohio, where I connected with beloved birds…

…treasured old friends…

…and brand new friends.

From the Biggest Week, I drove to Madison for the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology’s annual meeting, making stops to visit the Indiana Dunes and to spend an evening with my dear high school English teacher, Jane Lucas.

I got home late on the 17th, and the very next morning Russ and I drove to Rochester. Katie was getting a stem cell harvest at the Mayo, and we helped with Walter while she was getting tests and preliminary stuff; we brought him back to Duluth on the 21st.

So I missed a lot of this year’s spring migration. For the first time in years, I didn’t see a single Harris’s or Clay-colored Sparrow, Veery, or Gray-cheeked Thrush in my yard, and I missed some amazing birds in Duluth while I was gone, like a Painted Bunting who was around for several days, last seen just before we made it home from Rochester.

I missed a lot of exceptionally cold weather, but came home to plenty more. (It was pretty cold in Ohio, Indiana, and Chicago as well.) And even when temperatures started reaching the 80s and 90s in much of the state, it stayed much cooler in my Lakeside neighborhood, making migration late enough that many birds should have been coming through after I was home paying attention. I felt sad about how few birds there were.

Oddly enough, even as local reports included vagrant Summer Tanagers and extremely rare Western Tanagers—I got to see one of those at the end of April!—there were very few reports of the tanager that belongs here—the Scarlet Tanager. The only abundant migrant in my yard the last week of May was the Cape May Warbler—my oriole feeders were inundated with them.

This happens regularly during cold Mays, but usually when I’m getting lots of Cape Mays, I’m also getting Scarlet Tanagers. But the only Scarlet Tanager I’ve seen so far this year was in Madison, Wisconsin.

It wasn’t just being gone so long that made me miss so many birds up here. Based on a lot of other birders’ info, this desperately cold May made migration pretty dismal throughout the area. We did have some cool rarities show up here and there, but there simply were not many of the birds that should have been passing through in big numbers.

Distressingly, my own yard has been thick with starlings, who are having a banner year—bazillions of fledglings are begging everywhere. I also have way too many pigeons. When I’m working at my desk, I wave my arms to shoo starlings and pigeons away, but if I go downstairs for even a short time, they clean out the feeder, so I leave it empty if I’m not there to watch, and don’t put much in there when I am around.

One Red-headed Woodpecker visited for a few days. I was happy to see it but was glad it didn’t stick around. Last summer a pair excavated a nest hole a few blocks away on Peabody Street, produced eggs, and had been incubating them for a few days when starlings took over. If I was devastated, imagine how those poor woodpeckers felt.

At least one pair each of Northern Flickers and both Hairy and Downy Woodpeckers are nesting in or close to my yard, and the unbanded male Pileated Woodpecker and his unbanded mate must also have a nest somewhere not too far away—one or both show up at least once a day.

Oddly enough, on June 1, I still had a couple of Cape May Warblers, and even as I was starting to write this on June 2, a few Tennessee Warblers were still visiting my oriole feeder, though they spent almost all their time in blooming fruit trees where tiny insects abound; that’s where I also spotted an extremely late Yellow-rumped Warbler. One gorgeous male Baltimore Oriole was here through the 2nd, singing persistently. Like the warblers, he didn’t come to the feeders much after natural food was everywhere. I watched for a female but didn’t see one after Memorial Day weekend. Orioles haven’t nested in my neck of the woods since the 80s, so I wasn’t surprised when the male disappeared on the 3rd.

It was 43º outside when I woke up on June 2 and the afternoon temp barely made it to 59º. Most days recently it’s been dry and windy—not at all a warm welcome for insectivorous migrants; insect activity and rates of insect reproduction speed up in warmer temperatures with higher rainfall. This also means that conditions are bad for many of our nesting birds during the narrow window of time each year that neotropical migrants can reproduce.

I’m of course enjoying my catbirds, hummingbirds, chickadees, and Blue Jays, but the lackluster migration left my heart heavy with a sense of foreboding. Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul. I’m clinging to that.

Chipmunks may not have feathers, but I can’t feel too sad watching one stuff his cheeks. (This one is Bizzy, my spunky little male Eastern Chipmunk.)

I used to find Thomas Wolfe’s words “you can’t go home again” comforting. My childhood home was violent and scary—I’d never want to go back there. But I’ve thoroughly enjoyed returning to other former homes.

Last year when Russ and I returned to Michigan State University so I could see a Black-capped Chickadee where I’d seen my first precisely 50 years before, we checked out all the apartments where we’d lived. It was also fun to retrace my steps at Baker Woodlot.

I’d loved our time in East Lansing and felt nostalgic, but I had no pangs of homesickness at all. It was during our time there that we got married, graduated from college, and I started birding, so it’s not like this wasn’t a lovely, important, and memorable period of our lives, but I think that, like high school, East Lansing always felt like a temporary wayside on the path to where our real lives would begin, never quite home.

Then, two weeks ago, I attended the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology’s annual convention. This year it was in Madison, and I felt wave after wave of homesickness. The meeting was held in a hotel just a few doors down from Russ’s and my old apartment building.

We both loved that apartment, and the building looks almost exactly the same as it did when we left it 45 years ago, but I felt nostalgic, not homesick. As far as dwellings go, Peabody Street has been home for me from the moment we carried our first boxes in, a Bald Eagle flying overhead, Evening Grosbeaks calling from the box elders, and chickadees showing up within moments of Russ setting up our first bird feeder. Peabody Street is where we brought our three newborn babies home to, and even where my daughter and son-in-law brought their newborn baby home to during the pandemic.

No, our old Madison apartment didn’t feel like home, but that building was less than a mile from the first place on this planet that I fell truly, madly, deeply in love with: Picnic Point, or what is now called the Lakeshore Nature Preserve. That’s where I felt all those waves of homesickness.

I discovered Picnic Point the first week we lived in Madison and it was love at first sight. The park was on the shoreline of Lake Mendota, with wonderful marshes, mature woods, dense tangles, and other rich habitats all in a single lovely park.

I visited Picnic Point hundreds of times in the five years we were there, including every single schoolday morning from the beginning of March through the end of the school year except during thunderstorms. I’d get up at 4, put on my birding clothes, and grab my backpack with a change of clothes (I was among the half of all teachers back then required to wear skirts or dresses to school) and any graded papers and other work I’d brought home, and would bird from before sunrise until it was time to head to the bus stop.

When birding was good, sometimes I had to run a mile or more to make it on time. Noel1, my bus driver, would wait if he spotted me running, so only once did I miss the bus—a Golden-winged Warbler was singing away in some dense vegetation and I simply had to see it. I ran like mad after I finally got a good look but was still over a block from the bus stop, not in easy view, when the bus went by; I had to run the mile and a half to get to work. A school bus passed me, some of my students taking bets on whether I’d make it in time. The losers learned never to bet against Mrs. E.

On this three-day stay in Madison, I visited Picnic Point four times, feeling a soul-deep contentment every moment I was there. Warbling Vireos, American Robins, Gray Catbirds, and Baltimore Orioles seemed just as abundant as ever, along with a few Red-headed Woodpeckers and Wood Ducks.

No place stays the same over years, much less decades, and many things about Picnic Point are very different from what I remember. Back then I saw Cliff Swallows only as migrants—now they’re nesting somewhere about because I saw them collecting mud.

Canada Geese were once strictly migrants visiting Picnic Point only briefly in spring and fall—now they’re nesting all over the place. Wild Turkeys wander in the woods. And no longer is the marsh across University Bay Drive teeming with Black Terns—the nesting colony that I so loved and took for granted disappeared long ago.

But hokey smoke—now Sandhill Cranes are everywhere—in the marshes and ballfields, flying overhead, and even strolling across busy parking lot entrances.

During my five years in Madison, I’d amassed a list of exactly 200 species of birds at Picnic Point, but Sandhill Cranes were not among them. Now they were inescapable!

My son often tells me about the adorable baby Sandhill Cranes near his home in Florida—cranes are so exceptionally tame there that it’s easy to see whole families on manicured lawns.

Up here, they keep to wilder places, the grasses and shrubs almost always obscuring views of the little colts.

In Madison, the cranes have grown every bit as comfortable with people as those Orlando ones! It was especially thrilling to see a family with two colts at close range when I was leading a family birding trip with my dear friend Alicia Craig.

I miss the old Picnic Point sign, but I was very happy to notice on one of the new signs that the park now opens at 4 am.

Back when I lived there, the park didn’t open till 7. I hate breaking legitimate rules, but what choice did I have?

One spring morning, while I was thrilling at some Hooded Mergansers hours before the park “opened,” I heard footsteps approaching. Even as I was turning around, I blurted out, “Look through my scope!—Hooded Mergansers displaying!” And then I realized the guy was a policeman, there to kick me out. But he politely obliged, and the moment his eyes focused, he got excited—he’d hunted Hooded Mergansers before but had never seen them displaying. He didn’t say a word about my being there when the park was closed—instead, he started strolling by regularly, always asking what I’d been seeing.

That kind of friendliness is the same as always. One guy walking past saw my big camera and asked how many pictures I’d taken that day. I checked—371 so far. We got to talking about birds, and he asked what the giant ones walking around were. He had a rich Caribbean accent and the jolliest laugh I’ve ever heard. Fittingly, his name was Jude—he really could take a sad song and make it better.

A bit later, I ran into a graduate student named Martin whose Picnic Point list had surpassed mine—he was at 214! I miss Picnic Point profoundly, but was so happy knowing that my beloved park is in good hands.

Change may be the only constant, but at Picnic Point, the song remains the same.

Little by little, the pace ever accelerating, corporations and the billionaire class of America have been taking over more and more of the national treasures that belong to all of us. They’ve always run roughshod over natural resources, dumping their industrial wastes into the soil, water, and air that belong to every one of us as they evade, until they can dismantle, regulations and laws passed by huge margins of Congress to protect our air, water, and wildlife. Now, as these greedy, genuinely evil forces have taken control over all three branches of government, even as they’re eviscerating what’s left of environmental protection, they’re trying to buy our treasured public lands for their further enrichment. This is happening at the national, state, county, and local levels—so much that it’s impossible for anyone to keep track of it all, much less effectively fight everything everywhere all at once.

Duluth has a housing shortage right now, but not for the wealthy. Russ and I bought our house—what many people called a “starter home”—in 1981, right after Russ got his Ph.D. and was starting his job here when we were expecting our first baby. His parents generously loaned us $5,000 to cover the down payment—15 percent of the house’s price—while we used up our own meager savings to cover moving expenses, re-wiring and fixing up the house, and buying a crib and other essentials. It took us a little more than a decade to pay his parents back.

A great many of our friends bought their houses the same way back then. None of us were saddled with student loans—college costs were much lower. (I am not making this up: a full year’s tuition and fees at the University of Illinois, allowing us to take the maximum number of credits, cost $270 when I was there. A student could cover that and all their dorm costs for the academic year with a summer job paying minimum wage!)

There is no way Russ and I could afford to pay 15 percent of a “starter home’s” price to help our kids today. A modest 80-year-old 2-bedroom, 1-bath house down our block just sold for almost $300,000! Wages have not kept up at all, and a lot of people in their 40s are still struggling to pay off their student loans—how can they possibly afford that?

So who is buying up these “starter homes”? In too many cases now, billionaires and private equity latch onto as much as they can, profiteering off the rent those poor young people are forced to pay. Meanwhile, developers, like one in Duluth, are buying up some of the most beautiful public lands to sell for much larger profits than they’d get by building affordable housing.

Right now, one of those developers is doing his best to latch onto one of the most beautiful parks in Duluth, what was the Lester River Golf Course.

The developer wants to provide a nine-hole private golf course and build the kind of housing people who belong to private golf clubs want—not the kind underemployed young people need—even as the City Council gives lip service to “affordable housing.”

The land formerly used as the Lester River Golf Course has been protected parkland since 1955 thanks to a city law that requires 8 of 9 council votes before designated parks can be sold. Golf was clearly not the best use of this park—there weren’t enough golfers to justify the city’s expenses, and we still have a municipal golf course at Enger Tower. The Grand View Golf Links in West Duluth is also open to the general public, plus there are three more public golf courses not far from city limits. There are also already two private golf courses in Duluth.

But in a lame-duck session this past December 8, the Duluth City Council voted 8–1 to convey the vast majority—230 acres—of this beautiful park to the Duluth Economic Development Authority (DEDA) for $1. The underhanded way they quietly pushed forward a developer’s dream is disturbing on every level. At public expense, they’d hired the consulting firm Bolton & Menk to survey Duluthians about land use but, almost certainly realizing that people in Duluth treasure our public land, they made their underhanded vote before getting any results. The consultants found that an average of 74 percent of Duluthians surveyed were opposed to either commercial development or housing (including genuinely affordable housing—the city has many other locations where that could be provided) on that site, with twice as many of the remaining votes neutral as favoring development. Those results were quietly posted on the city’s land-use study website but have not been discussed publicly by anyone at the city. Now, if the property remains at DEDA, a mere five city councilors will get to decide the fate of this beautiful piece of parkland, the best place in town for finding bluebirds, land that is supposed to belong to each and every Duluthian.

A group of Duluth residents has been trying to change that. Our Park, Our Vote is a citizen-led campaign that has spent the last several months gathering signatures on two petitions which, together, would put to voters the question of whether to restore parkland protection to the entire 267.5-acre former Lester Park Golf Course. Under the city charter, valid signatures from 3,664 registered Duluth voters would force the question onto the ballot. The deadline is June 1. The website shows well over 3,000 signatures, which is almost enough, but each signature and address will be scrutinized to ensure they precisely match the city’s voter rolls; many are expected to be crossed off due to simple mistakes. My treasured birding buddy, lawyer Michael Bernstein, is leading this effort, and all the pertinent information is online at ourparkourvote.org.

If you’re registered to vote in Duluth, please head to Amity Coffee, Duluth Gear Exchange, Stitchcraft, Studio Café, Tortoise & Hare, or the Zenith Bookstore to sign the two petitions—all those addresses are available on the website. Please go today, and please tell your Duluth friends. We have only until this weekend to get all the signatures we need.

If you’re not a registered Duluth voter, you can’t help with this, but you can and should be paying attention to your own local land-use issues. Too many city and county governments are selling out to developers, Big Data, and other projects in the interest of the Epstein class, not their own constituents. We must put a stop to the wealthiest people taking what rightfully belongs to all of us. Our children’s and grandchildren’s quality of life depends on it.

Have you ever watched babies in strollers or backpacks at a shopping mall? Everything is new and draws their gaze—they haven’t figured out what to ignore yet. Without filters, they stare out bewildered, transfixed, their eyes wide with wonder.

Just like one of those babies, when I started birding, my eyes were bewildered and transfixed, scrutinizing every single branch and twig on every single tree. Little by little, I learned that I saw birds more quickly if I focused on movement and sound. That made my birding much more efficient, but it also meant that I missed cool things that really do require scrutinizing every branch.

It was during those heady first days before I developed those filters that I spotted my first whip-poor-will during an ornithology class field trip through an East Lansing woodlot. My professor was amazed when I pointed it out—just a bump on a log or, in this case, a thick horizontal branch, its exquisitely camouflaged plumage blending in perfectly with the bark.

I was thrilled—a LIFER!—and my professor said I was the only one he knew who’d seen a whip-poor-will before ever hearing one. Whip-poor-will calls are loud and piercing--almost impossible to not notice if you’re spending evening or pre-dawn morning hours anywhere near one in spring and early summer, but I was a city girl who’d never slept in the woods before I started birding. During daytime, whip-poor-wills are extremely secretive, hardly moving a muscle and keeping their eyes mostly closed.

People love or hate the whip-poor-will’s constant calls, which can go on and on for hours, especially after a long winter when many of us can finally keep our bedroom windows open. In the 1980s and early 90s, I loved hearing them at Camp du Nord up by the Boundary Waters, and my Uncle Elliott used to tell me about the ones he listened to in Galena, Illinois—like me, he enjoyed their persistent calling. But when I talked to humor writer Dave Barry about birds a couple decades ago, he mentioned that a whip-poor-will called all night outside his tent at Camp Sharparoon where he was a camp counselor, and said it made him wish he had a bazooka.

A New England legend says the whip-poor-will can sense a soul departing and capture it as it flees. Another American folk belief is that hearing a whip-poor-will singing is an omen of death. One of James Thurber’s darkest short stories, titled “The Whip-poor-will,” is about a whip-poor-will’s persistent calls driving a man to commit a triple murder and suicide. The sexism and, worse, the casual racism in that story are as ugly as the plot.

Me, I love Whip-poor-wills. The vast majority of my encounters have been strictly by ear, but one night in May 1983, back in the days when you had to see a bird to count it on your Minnesota life list, when I was pregnant with my daughter and was bedridden for a few weeks, I heard one in the yard next door. Russ set up a reclining lawn chair in the back yard and helped me into it so I could add it to my state, county, and backyard lists. I’ve also seen a couple flutter here and there at Camp Du Nord. But just hearing them without seeing them has been satisfying, too. I recorded this Eastern Whip-poor-will while teaching a Road Scholar (formerly Elderhostel) class in Wisconsin—we never did see it, but listening to my recording fills me with joy.

The one I spotted fifty years ago remains, to this day, the only roosting whip-poor-will I’ve ever picked out on my own, and up until this very month, on May 7, was the only one I’d ever seen in daytime. But when I was at Magee Marsh in Oak Harbor, Ohio, taking part in an amazing birding festival called The Biggest Week in American Birding, some people located TWO roosting whip-poor-wills along the boardwalk, and I got to not just see but photograph both, one close enough to give me some especially nice photos. I was thrilled!

Eastern Whip-poor-wills eat nothing but flying insects, which they catch on the wing from about a half hour after sunset until it grows too dark to see the insects against the night sky. They start foraging again at first light, quitting for the day about 40 minutes before sunrise. On nights when the moon is bright, they may feed all night.

Whip-poor-wills lay their eggs in phase with the lunar cycle, the chicks hatching on average 10 days before a full moon. As the chicks grow increasingly voracious, the hours of moonlight are increasing, so the parents can maximize the number of insects they catch per night right when the growing chicks need it most. As with many other insectivores, whip-poor-will numbers are declining as moth, butterfly, mayfly, and other flying-insect populations plummet.

Before 2010, America’s two disjunct whip-poor-will populations were believed to belong to a single species, but the southwestern one has a softer call and enough difference in its DNA that it was split off as the Mexican Whip-poor-will. The whip-poor-wills found in Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the rest of the eastern states belong to the species now called the Eastern Whip-poor-will. I’ve been lucky enough to have heard the southwestern species in Arizona a few times, and its calls really are softer and less piercing—I doubt it has inspired much by way of folklore or stories about driving people insane. But something about our good old Eastern Whip-poor-will, even when one is keeping me awake nights, will always fill my heart with pleasure and happiness.

Part 1: Secrets are natural, and not all of them are bad.

My house on Peabody Street was originally a one-story bungalow, but during the Depression, a large family living here put in dormers and built three small bedrooms in the attic. We dated the construction by the old newspapers used for much of the insulation up there.

There was a fourth, incredibly tiny room at the stair landing, its plywood door only 18 or 20 inches wide and barely 5 feet high. We originally used it as a storage space for our Christmas decorations, but before us, some kids apparently used it as a clubhouse. While rooting around in there in the early 1980s, we found a crevice between the baseboard and beaverboard wall with a piece of folded up, yellowed notebook paper reading:

Pledge

I hereby promise
not to tell anybody
about our secret club.
If any body should
tell they will get
the supreme penalty.

Three children signed with their initials. Russ and I got a big kick out of this and kept the note on our family bulletin board for years. Keeping secrets must be a fundamental human impulse—my very first memory involves a big secret that I felt honor-bound to keep.

My grandmother died of breast cancer in 1953 when I was not yet two years old, but I’ve had a lifelong vivid memory of the big secret between us. I remember climbing up the steep concrete front porch steps by myself even though I was rather small for my age. When my Grandpa opened the door, he and my parents would talk in hushed voices as I ran through the entryway and living room, around a corner, and into the bedroom where my Grandma was lying very still in bed. I’d stand at the bedside trying not to disturb her, but the moment she opened her eyes and saw me, her face would break out into a huge, soul-nurturing smile.

I was forbidden to climb into the bed—everyone was afraid I’d hurt her—but she told me she needed me to climb up and lift her arms to help her hug me. Her radical bilateral mastectomy left her arms limp and heavy, but I remember her hands were gentle, warm, and loving. She told me we had to keep this a secret or they wouldn’t let me into her room anymore thinking I might hurt her, so I never breathed a word about this to anyone. Even after she died, it never occurred to me to divulge the secret until long after I was an adult.

After she died, my dad and aunts put every photo of her away—they said the reminders would make my Grandpa too sad—so I can’t remember seeing any pictures of her when I was growing up. But one day when I was in my early 40s, a letter arrived from Connecticut from a name I didn’t recognize. When I opened it, something fell to the floor—a photograph—and the moment I saw it, I started crying uncontrollably.

I instantly recognized my Grandma’s face and her warm, loving smile. The letter was from one of my dad’s cousins who’d kept in touch with my aunts, so she knew that her beloved Aunt Laura had a granddaughter named Laura who’d written a book about birds. When she came across For the Birds in a bookshop, she saw a resemblance in the back cover photo of me, tracked down my address, and sent me that photo—still one of my most beloved possessions.

When I next saw my aunts, I told them about the letter, my recognizing Grandma’s face and smile, and about our secret. They said this was all impossible—I was just a baby when she died. They were floored when I told them exactly what room in the house she’d been in and how the bed was situated.

That secret between me and my grandma feels sacred to me, which is probably why I never used to feel concerned about secrets in other contexts. Many birds keep secrets or at least are secretive in many of their habits—their lives and the survival of their nests and young depend on it. Most of us keep birthday and holiday present secrets, adults keep some secrets from their children, and families keep secrets from outsiders. Some of these secrets are a simple matter of privacy, but some are much more insidious.

Part 2: Democracy dies in darkness

Data centers are well known to cause horrible problems for the people who live very close to them because of the noise and heat they produce, but the ripples of genuine harm go well beyond that. Their enormous water and energy consumption cause pollution, water shortages, and higher water and energy costs for people in the cities, counties, and states where they are located. Plus their outsized carbon footprints are a major contributor to climate change.

Yet in my own neck of the woods, in Hermantown, Minnesota, right outside Duluth, where Google plans to build an enormous data center, the city councilors and other people involved in rezoning the land for the project all signed NDAs so for a long time as the process proceeded, no one outside their inner circle had a clue that Google was even involved—even as the city held public hearings! Apparently these elected officials cherish their feeling of belonging to a small circle of power brokers more than their belonging to the community that elected them, despite the fact that this community will be facing all the damages that data centers always cause, with Google reaping all the benefits.

A few years ago, Duluth closed a vast, 27-hole public golf course on my side of town—property that is zoned as public parkland. Most people (except many dog walkers) don’t yet realize that without the golf course there, we now have free access to a beautiful area that had mostly been limited to golfers before this. This public park has stunning views, many beautiful graveled paths, valuable habitat, and a huge bird migration. And those migrant birds don’t just pass overhead--a great many of them use this valuable open space to feed and rest. And beyond migration, this land provides plenty of nesting habitat as well. And that Lester Park open land is a wonderful place to find wintering owls such as Great Grays and Long-ears. But now a developer wants to use the land for upscale housing and a pricey private golf course.

Maybe it’s because I grew up in Chicago which, well over a century ago, set aside a huge swath of city land as forest preserves and protected almost its entire lakeshore as public land that I see squandering public land here in Duluth as a mortal sin. Not only would we be losing some of the most scenic property in the city—we’d be increasing pesticide runoff into the Lester River and Lake Superior, sacrificing valuable bird habitat, putting in yet more huge bird-killing windows right along our migration pathway, and for what?

Our secretive mayor and the secretive developer with a sketchy record aren’t quite saying, and the inner circle of power brokers, from our City Council to the Chamber of Commerce, have a horrible track record of protecting and promoting developers who don’t live up to their promises. The City has been very secretive about this project and are blatantly ignoring the results of a poll their own consultants made that showed that public sentiment was strongly opposed to developing this land.

It used to be that I’d pick one important issue and monomaniacally throw my heart and soul into it. I spent two years while my children were little fighting construction of a 300-foot guyed, lighted tower proposed on Moose Mountain precisely along our migration flyway. We won—the corporation finally put in a 99-foot structure cemented in the ground, just below the height at which the FAA requires the lights that lure nocturnal migrants to their deaths.

I worked for much longer to get the City to adopt a cat leash ordinance—they finally passed it in 1999 not because of anything I said about the huge numbers of birds killed by domestic cats but because the county health department testified to the danger toxoplasmosis poses, especially for small children and the elderly. Those cats that eat or toy with birds are the ones most likely to release the disease organisms in their droppings, and outdoor cats selectively choose soft garden beds and children’s sandboxes for depositing their feces.

Although my side won both battles, the wider wars regarding both those issues are going badly. Now when opposition to a tower construction project includes concerns about bird mortality, communications-tower developers hire a particular ornithologist they know will testify that bird deaths at towers are “insignificant.” Even though it’s well established that communications towers kill 7 million birds every year, the tower project on Moose Mountain remains the only one in the country that was modified specifically because of the danger lighted, guyed towers pose to migrating birds.

And huge, well-funded projects to neuter feral cats and release them continue even as we’ve seen that they do not reduce the number of feral cats out there killing birds. These feral cats expose humans, pets, and wildlife to both toxoplasmosis and rabies.

It takes so much time and energy to fight these local battles while meanwhile, even more scary state and federal issues loom. We individual citizens, each one of us supposedly an equal participant in our democracy, can’t help but feel hopeless and helpless facing the lies, secrets, and power of those making the decisions that hurt all of us. And whether looking at little local matters or the vast issues affecting everyone in the country and the world, this mess we face today is so big and so deep and so tall, it seems there really is no way to fix it, no way at all—especially without a Seussian Cat in the Hat to magically put things right. But “We the People” managed to win independence from the powerful British Empire and to win a Civil War waged to end the horrifying outrage of slavery. Margaret Mead wrote, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

I started producing “For the Birds” forty years ago because something deep inside me needed to make sure people understood how wonderful and valuable the birds in our world are. Because I do the program entirely as an unpaid volunteer, money and political arm-pulling don’t influence what I say even as billionaires, corporations, and the government are now insidiously influencing most of the news organizations we trust and censoring popular television programs. As the Washington Post once seemed to believe, democracy really does die in darkness. Sunlight is the best disinfectant against these forces of darkness.

FOR DULUTHIANS: I’m going to post more specifically about the public land issue in Duluth’s Lester Park, but meanwhile, a group of Duluth residents formed Our Park, Our Vote, a citizen-led campaign that has spent the last several months gathering signatures on two petitions which, together, would put to voters the question of whether to give parkland protection to the entire 267.5-acre former Lester Park Golf Course. Under the city charter, valid signatures from 3,664 registered Duluth voters would force the question onto the ballot. The deadline is June 1. They’re at about 3,000, which seems pretty close to the number of signatures needed, but petitions like this are of course always carefully vetted; some people have a new address not on their voter registration yet or sign a name that doesn’t precisely match the way they wrote it on their voter registration. So they’re shooting for 7,200 signatures with little more than two weeks to go.

My good friend and birding buddy Michael Bernstein is leading this effort. One volunteer in Lakeside recently had 23 people open their doors in a single evening. All 23 signed. Obviously, if a person is one of the 9% who were in favor of this development, they can vote for it—the vote simply gives us citizens a say about land that belongs to us.

If you’re registered to vote in Duluth (any precinct as long as it’s in Duluth, Minnesota), please sign. You can sign at Stitch Craft, Amity Coffee (they don’t have a website, so that’s their Facebook link), Duluth Gear Exchange, Tortoise & Hare, and Zenith Bookstore — or find the current list at ourparkourvote.org. If you go to Duluth Gear Exchange, you can also pick up a yard sign that says “Let Duluthians Decide Lester.” I of course have one in my yard.

If I had to choose one college course that changed my life, it would be a no-brainer. In the term before I graduated with my degree in elementary education at Michigan State, I took an environmental education class for teachers taught by Robert Hinkle in the Fisheries and Wildlife Department, a class that opened up the natural world to me. We learned a little plant and animal identification, but more importantly, we learned to appreciate those plants and animals and their natural rhythms and how everything had a place in one or more ecosystems and in our lives. That was the class that inspired me to go to grad school to take all the “ologies”—ornithology, mammalogy, herpetology, and ecology, along with the other environmental education classes and seminars Bob taught. I’d had so many questions about nature as a child, and now saw the way to get answers, preparing me to deal with those kinds of questions from my students.

What I most remember from Bob’s classes was his reading aloud from Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax, and other inspirational works. After he left Michigan State, he spent much of his career as chief naturalist at Cleveland Metro Parks and often wrote his own lovely, evocative essays about nature.

Now Bob is retired, but last week he shared a new essay with some friends. I yearned to hear it in Bob’s own voice, so he graciously recorded it for me. Here it is:

We Wait...

They come. If we could hear, hear beyond the traffic and the noise of civilization, if we could hear beyond the waves of a thousand beaches and whispers of wind through April’s greening branches, we could hear them. Softly, they start. Here and there, far to the south, they move. First one decides, then a dozen, then hundreds of thousands, and they come.

The humans do not notice. Trapped in an artificial world, trapped in bubbles of automobiles, buses, offices and factories, trapped in front of glowing computer screens and absorbed in the light of smart phones, we grow less smart with every generation. We fall into a fantasy world of our own making, where we are fed a constant stream of drivel and taught what to prize and what to fear. Each year the humans notice less, and they need us more.

And yet they still come, unheralded, feeling the tug of lengthening days and starlit nights. Southerly winds bear them northward, mile by mile, night after night, feeling the mysterious ancestral urging that forces them across rainforest, ocean, forests, fields, villages and cities. Below the humans sleep, unaware that overhead hundreds of millions of creatures pour tirelessly northward in a vast living stream, night after starlit night.

We wait. We step out onto darkened porches and listen, listen upward not out. Straining to hear, coffee in hand, we wait. Patience is a virtue and we must be virtuous. They will come. We want to be the first to hear, first to feel the quickening in our hearts when we know that the vast movement has begun to arrive. We want to feel the reassurance that they still live, they still move, and that once again they grace us with their being. Our daily life calls, reminding us that we have responsibilities after the long night. We must sleep, rest, and do our lives again tomorrow. We listen a little while longer anyway, that we might hear. Sometimes we do.

Ahead, the weekend beckons. Time to slip once again into the vast living aerial stream, time to renew old acquaintances at all the special places where the vast living sky-stream dips to earth each morning. The April air is warm, and the morning skies blue. Sun streams through the newly emerging leaves, revealing newly arrived travelers feeding, calling, and resting, all preparing for the next night’s sky journey. Some are home, however, and we welcome them as old friends returning once again, gracing our lives with their color and song. As April days lengthen, they are joined by a steady stream of others, some the same, many others different as the vast living stream pours northward each evening. And the best lies just ahead. April slips gracefully into May, and the vast waves northward still increase as the uncounted millions make their way northward, and home. By month’s end, they have arrived in the places where vast generations of their ancestors called home.

And we arrive. Watchers meet watched. For a few moments, feathered wonders touch our lives briefly, intertwine, then move on. The event is truly come as you are. Watchers share freely among all who come to see. Not much is needed - eyes and ears are all, one or the other or both. Binoculars are helpful. Some bring cameras, but without large lenses and large measures of luck, cameras can be left behind. A field guide is useful, but most watchers share willingly, and good sightings can be lost while searching the pages for unknowns. In the end, all that is important is being there, seeing the wonder and catching the spirit. All this is waiting for you, free. You invest only your time and the rewards are great. You have become part of a vast living river moving northward. Come out and watch and listen this weekend. Refind your part of the natural world that still stirs your soul.

When I was a little girl, The Mickey Mouse Club was my favorite television show. Every day of the week had a theme—Monday was “Fun with Music,” Tuesday was “Guest Star Day,” every Thursday the Mouseketeers went to the circus, and Friday was the Talent Roundup. Wednesday was unpredictable so they called it “Anything Can Happen Day.” As much as I have always loved predictability and knowing what people, places, and things I can count on, I also love unexpected delights, so I loved “Anything Can Happen Day” most of all.

Even as the annual patterns of bird movements and behavior are as predictable as sunrise and sunset or those Mickey Mouse Club days of the week, and even as I can happily rely on my backyard chickadees, Blue Jays, and Pileated Woodpeckers just about every day, I especially love birding’s Anything Can Happen Days, sparkling with unexpected delights.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that since I got home from Colorado last week. Going through thousands of photos kept all the unexpected delights of the trip vivid. Starting the trip our first day with a White-tailed Ptarmigan at Loveland Pass was not unexpected, but the bird flying in less than 15 feet away from me sure was!

Our last day, we ended the trip with a Sprague’s Pipit—a bird I’ve seen only twice before, in 1991 and during my Big Year in 2013, both in Texas, and both at a great distance. The only photo I had was a horrible shot of one in flight.

This time around, the species was so unexpected that it wasn’t listed on our checklist. Erik Bruhnke stopped our van when he spotted it in the grass next to the road and I just happened to be in a perfect position to get photos out the window. It wasn’t surprising that the glass was clean—Erik is extremely and consistently conscientious about washing the windows—but my photos turned out much better than through-the-glass pictures usually do. Yep—anything can happen!

In the middle of the trip, we came upon two extraordinarily cooperative Dusky Grouse. I’d never before gotten a photo of this secretive bird, and the best we were hoping for was a distant look, maybe. Another unexpected delight!

Then I got home, and on April 17, both a Cinnamon Teal and a Eurasian Wigeon turned up in Duluth—two species I’ve never seen in the county. The teal was reported just once—a fly-by—but the wigeon has been seen by a lot of birders at Chambers Grove Park and then at Slag Point, both in West Duluth. Oddly but aptly enough during an Anything Can Happen Day, I’d already seen both species in Colorado on April 8 at the Walden Reservoir. The teal wasn’t unexpected there but the Eurasian Wigeon sure was—like the Sprague’s Pipit, it wasn’t on our checklist of expected birds for the trip.

I’ve been behind in all sorts of things ever since my return, so I didn’t try to find either of them. But when Jim Lind found a Brambling in his Two Harbors backyard on April 19, I simply had to chase that one!

It was too close to dark for me to head there when Jim first saw it, but the next morning, as soon as I could, I drove up. The bird had been seen three times before I got there, the last a few minutes before I arrived. I stuck around for over an hour until I had to head home to babysit, but no luck. It was seen again about 11 am, and so I headed back after Walter went home, but that 11 o’clock sighting was the last.

Dipping on a good bird is hardly delightful, but the possibility—even likelihood—that a good bird won’t stay long is an important element of what makes it so joyful when one does. I did get to see a Brambling once—in East Grand Forks in 1989 with a couple of birding friends. We tried psyching ourselves on the long drive so we’d not be too disappointed if we missed it. That made us even more elated when we did get to see it.

Standing in the cold for two or three hours hoping against hope I’d see Jim Lind’s Brambling had plenty of rewards—connecting with other hopeful birders, getting lovely looks at a nearby sapsucker…

… Brown Creeper…

… Yellow-rumped Warbler…

… a flock of swans…

… and then pelicans winging by.

It’s this run-of-the-mill birding, seeing what is supposed to be around right then, that gives us something to count on whether we see rarities or not. Rachel Carson wrote, “There is something infinitely healing in [the] repeated refrains of nature, the assurance that night after night, dawn comes, and spring after winter.”

My day-to-day, predictable joys provide a soul-deep contentment that isn’t diminished on the days when I do miss an unexpected delight. And minor disappointments make the unexpected delights I do get to experience—a sudden White-tailed Ptarmigan flying right up to me, a close-up Dusky Grouse, a Sprague’s Pipit right outside my window—sparkle like a dazzling sunrise.

Had we only seen that ptarmigan, grouse, or Sprague’s Pipit at a huge distance, I’d still have been utterly delighted. Instead, they gave me unique, unasked-for moments of grace and the assurance that yes, nature is soothingly rhythmic and predictable, but like those Mickey Mouse Club Wednesdays, unexpected delights may pop up at anytime. Anything can happen.

Every December, a little before New Year’s Day, the American Birding Association names a brand-new Bird of the Year, and their 2026 choice was the Horned Lark. Talk about perfect timing! The Horned Lark happens to be the most abundant bird we saw on my Colorado trip, with over 500 individuals tallied over the 10-day birding tour. Our group found them virtually everywhere, from the rocky heights of Loveland Pass down to the windswept Pawnee National Grasslands and agricultural areas of eastern Colorado and western Kansas.

The Horned Lark was #23 on my life list—I found my first in the field behind the Natural Resources Building at Michigan State on May 8, 1975. I was only aware of one, but this was the height of their breeding season, so there was almost certainly another one nearby. The bird I identified helpfully had his or her “horns”—tiny pointed feathers on the sides of the head—fully erect, and even more helpfully stuck around long enough for me to page through the field guide to ensure that no other birds were a better match.

As a rank beginner, I needed to see every one of a bird’s field marks to add it to my life list, and Horned Larks usually keep those tiny feathers down flat against the head. Both my Golden and Peterson guides mentioned the black tail that makes recognizing them in flight rather easy, but my eyes were not yet quick enough to take in details like that when birds were in flight. Fortunately, this one stayed down to earth.

I almost certainly saw other Horned Larks that year, but I didn’t recognize them. Indeed, I didn’t recognize another Horned Lark in the wild until we moved to Madison, Wisconsin, the following year, and it took a couple more years to get good at recognizing them in flight. I spent a lot of time birding with friends in the agricultural and restored prairie areas of Columbia County—prime habitat for Horned Larks—and was getting faster at taking in important details.

But I did see and grow intimately acquainted with two Horned Larks while we were still at Michigan State, just not in the wild.

One of my professors in the Fisheries and Wildlife Department handed me a box with a nest and two nestling Horned Larks found on one of the intramural ball fields on campus. A groundskeeper tried moving the nest to a safer place, but the parents ignored it. My professor said that if I didn’t take them, he’d have to euthanize them. In retrospect, that would have been far more merciful—I had no wildlife rehabilitation skills and no understanding of baby bird diets, so I failed miserably, leaving me with both very tender feelings about and a lot of guilt toward Horned Larks.

Well-meaning people with the best of intentions can cause a great deal of suffering without even realizing it when they try to raise baby birds without the right skills and understanding of that species’ natural history. Even after I had the skills and became a licensed wildlife rehabber, I never again handled a Horned Lark, baby or adult, so have never had an opportunity to make any kind of amends.

As soon as the ABA announced that the Horned Lark was their 2026 Bird of the Year, I felt obligated to finally write something about this lovely grassland bird, but up until the Colorado trip, I hadn’t seen any this year. I knew I’d see them in Colorado, and sure enough, on our very first morning, after breakfast, loading up the vans, and a long drive up the mountains, we found our first at Loveland Pass.

The van thermometer read 8º F, the wind was howling, and the snow was blowing—daunting conditions even for this northern Minnesotan. I knew we’d see plenty more Horned Larks on this tour, and I was supposed to be focusing on our “target” bird here, a White-tailed Ptarmigan. Our group gathered in a line behind the White River National Forest sign by the parking lot, hoping against hope for a miracle.

The only other time I’ve ever been to Loveland Pass was during my Big Year in 2013, when I came along on one of the “Minnesota Birding Week” trips led by Kim Eckert. That time around, an avalanche put the kibosh on getting there the first day, and the pass stayed closed the entire time we were in Colorado until our very last morning; we made a detour en route to the airport. We didn’t have a lot of time and ptarmigan plumage in winter is exactly the color of snow, but someone managed to pick out tiny black eyes and beak in the distance, and voilà!

We watched for a few minutes before we realized there were actually two birds in view. The photos I got were the only pictures I’d ever taken of this stunning bird.

Now, on the first morning of this 2026 trip, we stood in the frigid wind for a few minutes.

Even as the whole point of this stop was to search for ptarmigans, those Horned Larks were tantalizingly close. I had to try to get a photo! So I moved 10 feet or so beyond our group, out of the shelter of the sign, widening my stance and bending my knees slightly to brace myself against the powerful wind. The larks kept fluttering up, but every time, they alighted out of view behind rocks—I never did get a photo. But suddenly, out of the white came a ghostly form who alighted barely 15 feet (according to my camera EXIF info) from where I was standing—no Horned Lark, but a Horned Lark miracle!

This stunning male ptarmigan showed off his brilliant red “eyebrow” mark to perfection.

I took a bazillion photos of him while he stayed on the rock for over a minute. Right before he started to walk, I just happened to start shooting a video which caught every second as he walked directly toward me and then on past, giving everyone nice closeup looks. (The wind is LOUD. Turn the sound down before you play!!)

My excitement and the blasting wind made it hard to hold my camera steady, so the video is herky-jerky, but I got a lot of decent screen-captures from it.

He called just before flying off, and I got a noisy but useful 6-second sound recording.

When Russ and I were in Alaska, I got to see some very close Willow and Rock Ptarmigans, but this experience was so unexpected and amazing that the memory will stay with me for life, and all because of those wonderful Horned Larks. They clearly don’t hold a grudge.

One of my favorite movies of all time is The Wizard of Oz, even though every time I see it, one element disappoints me to my core. The opening scenes, set in Kansas, were filmed in black and white and then the film was colored in a sepia-tone process, giving us a dramatic visual sense of Dorothy’s drab existence at the start of the story. After her house, with her and Toto in it, is carried off in the tornado, she opens the door to the Emerald City and the magical land of Oz, suddenly in dazzling Technicolor. What a creative and meaningful transition!

But after all her wondrous experiences and adventures are over and Dorothy grows homesick, suddenly recognizing the beauty of Kansas, I wanted her return home to be filmed in realistic color. The first time I watched the movie as an adult, after I’d become a birder, I was heartsick to think that the way the movie was filmed, the happy little bluebirds Dorothy sang about would still be in sepia tones, not vivid blues, for the rest of her life.

I was thinking about The Wizard of Oz when I came home to Duluth after spending a week and a half in Colorado. The very word Colorado comes from Spanish, meaning “colored red” for the reddish sandstone and soils of the state and the reddish silt in the Colorado River. And like Dorothy’s adventures in Oz, this was probably the most intense adventure of my life—a 9-day, 2,000-mile journey encircling Colorado, always getting up extremely early each morning, and never staying in the same motel two nights in a row.

Most of our group went owling one night and found a Boreal Owl, but for the first time in my life, I stayed behind because I was just too exhausted. The point of the trip was to search for various gallinaceous birds on what Victor Emanuel Nature Tours calls the Colorado Grouse tour—we ended with eleven species! I didn’t expect to see any lifers on this trip, but at this point in my dotage, I’m more interested in savoring wonderful birds regardless of whether I’ve ever seen them before.

We had a lot of excellent luck, and most of the birds we saw were in stunning living color. Not quite Technicolor—the gorgeous male White-tailed Ptarmigan who flew about 12 feet from me at Loveland Pass on our first outing did show off his brilliant red eyebrow, but the fierce wind and blizzard conditions made the rest of him a white-on-white sort of thing.

The next day’s Gunnison Sage-Grouse were far, far off—the only blinds to observe the leks of this critically endangered species are far off to protect the birds from any possible disturbance.

The rapidly disappearing Lesser Prairie-Chicken has pretty much vanished from Colorado now, which is why our final day’s outing took place in Dorothy’s Kansas. Dense morning fog muted these splendid birds’ colors, so they weren’t quite sepia, but hardly vivid.

As the species who devours 9 billion chickens in America every year, we humans should be able to appreciate that gallinaceous birds must have muted plumage to protect themselves from predation. The brilliant psychedelic colors of male prairie-chickens and Sharp-tailed Grouse are limited to special air sacs that they can deflate and hide under feathers when not displaying at a lek.

Dusky Grouse have brilliant crimson air sacs, but keep them mostly hidden even when they are displaying. It’s not easy being tasty.

Even if our views of brilliant color were limited, I did get the best looks I’ve ever had at Greater Sage-Grouse…

…Dusky Grouse…

…and Greater Prairie-Chickens…

… to say nothing of that amazing ptarmigan.

I also had my best looks in decades at Gambel’s Quails…

… Clark’s Nutcrackers…

…and one surprisingly cooperative Sprague’s Pipit.

And on top of all that, I was shocked and delighted to get a lifer—a Chukar!

This introduced species is a popular game bird in the Middle East and was introduced a few times here and there in the United States before it became established in dry, rocky habitats of the West in the 1830s. Because it’s not native, it’s also legally bred in captivity for game farms and for training hunting dogs. In 2021 and 2022, a group of escapees found their way to my neighborhood, and I got quite a few good photos, even though these Chukars were not countable on my life list.

Perhaps the combination of Chukars not being native American birds and my already having lots of pictures of them was why, when I looked through the list of birds we might see before the trip, I didn’t think of the Chukar as a potential lifer. But our superb guides, Erik Bruhnke and Kevin Burke, took us to a very dry, rocky spot called Coal Canyon, and WHOA! eBird noted that it was a lifer!

All in all, even though much of this splendid trip couldn’t be said to be in Technicolor like the Emerald City, it was in living color, and as filled with joy and adventure as Dorothy’s time in Oz.

But unlike Dorothy, I did not return home to a dull sepia world. Robins and cardinals were singing away, their vivid colors somehow less thrilling than the brilliance of their songs. My beloved BB the banded Pileated Woodpecker hasn’t been hanging out in my part of the neighborhood all year—since late autumn, an unbanded male seems to have displaced him. Now an unbanded female seems to have paired with this new male, and the two of them showed up within minutes of my arriving home Sunday.

And miracle of miracles, my beloved Dizzy, the adorable and extremely friendly chipmunk who is at least two years old now, is back and just as adorable and friendly as ever.

No, as much as I love having colorful adventures away from home, my world when I return is not dull sepia. My heart aches for poor Dorothy Gale, who even when she had finally started appreciating that there is no place like home, could not see it, or the rainbow those happy little bluebirds were flying over, in color.

You don’t have to be a birder or to love backyard critters to see the whole world in living color, but maybe it helps.

In December 1978, Russ and I took a road trip to southeastern Texas. Starting on January 2, he had a meeting in Aransas, so we decided to make it into a birding and tent-camping trip up until then. Starting December 24, we followed I-35 from where it starts in Duluth to where it ends in Laredo. While we were still on the interstate, about 30 miles north of Laredo, I spotted out the window my lifer Harris’s Hawk, #283 on my life list. It’s a spectacular bird, with rich rusty thigh feathers and large rusty shoulders, a white-tipped tail, and white undertail coverts, all of which made it easy to identify at 55 mph—the national speed limit back then. I saw Harris’s Hawks several more times on that trip and other trips to south Texas, and have also seen them in Arizona and New Mexico here in the United States, and in Mexico and Costa Rica .

Of all the birds of prey, Harris’s Hawks are notable for their extraordinarily sociable natures. They hunt cooperatively—I’ve watched that myself a few times in nature, and also saw it on an episode of Wild Kratts, my grandson Walter’s current favorite TV show. That sociable nature is so innate that when Harris’s Hawks are raised by humans or taken into captivity, they bond easily. Many people believe that legends and rituals regarding the Thunderbird or Sacred Bird of several Native American societies are derived from the people’s interactions with Harris’s Hawk. The charming Kratt Brothers are clearly delighted with all their animal encounters, but seemed especially delighted handling a Harris’s Hawk, probably because Harris’s Hawks that are accustomed to handling are so personally engaging.

I’ve been thinking about Harris’s Hawks a lot recently, because so much attention has suddenly been focused on the wonderful, Oscar-winning movie, Hamnet. I read the book several years ago, and remembered that Agnes, the main female protagonist, had a falcon in the story. The book made it clear it was a Eurasian Kestrel.

But in the movie, even as they used the term “falcon” at least once, the bird portraying the kestrel was a Harris’s Hawk. I of course noticed this—how can a birder possibly look at any recognizable bird and not know what it is?

Movie producers are seldom birders, and fact-checking about bird issues in TV and movie production is woefully inadequate. Even Russ noticed when Special Agent Alden Parker, on NCIS, showed a photo of a male Ruby-throated Hummingbird but called it a “she.” Since the word “it” works perfectly fine as a pronoun for birds, and because Parker is ostensibly an active birder, his specifying that this one was a female was simply unacceptable. And it drives me nuts when a soundtrack includes species of birds that could not possibly be heard where a scene is supposed to be taking place. NCIS actually does a very good job with that.

But in the case of Hamnet, I instantly understood why they made the choice to use a hawk, not a falcon, and a Harris’s Hawk at that—a species not only in an entirely different taxonomic order but also impossible to be found anywhere near England during the time of Shakespeare.

Falconers have trained plenty of birds of prey for use in public performances and in movies and TV. But raptors are not like dogs—in just about all cases, well-trained raptors respond to just one handler. A falcon might do some cool flight maneuvers to communicate that Timmy fell down the well, but no way would it then rush to the rescued boy and give him a slurpy kiss.

Performing on a movie set is stressful for just about all birds of prey; a falcon could deal with this if the hander it was bonded to was the only human it had to deal with. The Humane Society monitors animal use in movies now, and I’m sure they watch out for how comfortable birds of prey are with their handlers. So there were strong ornithological reasons NOT to use the species mentioned in both the book and movie.

But why a Harris’s Hawk, which isn’t simply in the wrong taxonomic order but also a species that never could have been found in Shakespeare’s England? Because of their intrinsic and unique social natures, Harris’s Hawks that have bonded with one person can fairly easily adapt to being handled by others—an important point when a bird must convincingly interact in a gentle, benign way with an actor rather than its handler. So although it was momentarily disconcerting for me to see Agnes holding a Harris’s Hawk rather than a Eurasian Kestrel, I quickly understood that this was a good thing for the well-being of both the bird and actress Jessie Buckley, which was far, far more important than strict taxonomic and biogeographical accuracy. The behaviors and quirks that make each species unique are also important ornithological elements that must factor in when selecting a bird of prey for a movie scene.

But naturally, ever since the movie came out, some pedantic birders have been ridiculing the use of a New World hawk where an Old World falcon was called for. The bird was an important figure in the book and the movie, but how could anyone be sidetracked for more than a moment by an issue so relatively insignificant in the face Hamnet’s emotional power and intensity? It was as perfect a movie adaptation of a book as I’ve ever seen, Harris’s Hawk and all.