The little bird who could

(Dark-eyed junco nest on the right front tire of my Elantra)

This is my favorite time of year, primarily because migrant birds are returning, and breeding has begun.  Dark-eyed Juncos are now in the woods all around my house, males are singing, and their hormones are raging.  I parked our Elantra in the driveway yesterday and, this morning, a junco was building its nest on top of the right front tire.  The nest is comprised of long strands of dried grass.  I felt badly about it, but I can't let that car sit there for the next month while the bird finishes its nesting cycle.  So I drove to town, which obviously destroyed the starter nest (I have to actually say that the nest was destroyed, for the economists who might be reading this blog).

 

When I returned home I parked the car in the same place.  Within two hours, the bird was busy building a nest in the exact location on the tire again.  I promptly removed the material, hoping that this junco gets the message: you will not be successful building your nest on a car's wheel.

Usually any bird's nest that is disturbed early in the cycle, like this one was, is enough to cause the bird to change locations immediately.  Once the female is incubating, she will rarely abandon a nest unless it is completely destroyed.  So I was surprised that this bird, probably the female, tried to build in the same place, given that the first attempt was obliterated.

A few years ago, we had a pair of juncos build a nest on a ledge in our garage.  We normally keep the garage doors closed, so we kept trapping the birds inside.  I gave up, left the doors open, and they fledged several young.

Notice also, that the Korean Hyundai was parked next to the American Jeep.  The junco chose the Korean car over the American.  Could juncos be used by the American automotive industry to decide what the public will choose to buy in the future?  Could they be used to help us decide who the next Super Bowl winner will be?  Or American Idol?  Food for thought.

In the end, I wish her well.  May your babies grow and thrive----------elsewhere.

Birds in June

(Robin's nest in a Syringa.  Why are the eggs of the American robin blue?)

I spent an hour this morning appraising the avian situation in my forest.  Male singing has changed over the past month in an interesting way.  Species that were quite vocal earlier in May are now fairly quiet, but others are singing constantly.  Dark-eyed juncos, chipping sparrows, song sparrows, black-capped chickadees, wood thrushes, all the woodpeckers, white-breasted nuthatches, eastern phoebes, American robins, gray catbirds, and blue-headed vireos are relatively inconspicuous now.  I assume that the frequency of bird song is correlated to the stage of the nesting cycle.  Males sing to keep other males at arm’s length and to attract females.  When the male or female (usually the female) is incubating eggs or tending nestlings, males tend to be quieter.  I am sure this is to avoid attracting predators to their territory, where the nest is located.

But other species are quite vocal.  Ovenbirds, red-eyed vireos, great-crested flycatchers, eastern wood pewees, and veerys are still waking me up early in the morning.  Because they returned from migration later than the group of silent species, some of whom are year-round residents, these late arrivals may be further behind in their nesting chronology.  If they are mated, then they must be at an earlier stage of the nesting cycle.

Some of this can be documented.  The phoebe nest hatched five nestlings about three weeks ago, and they are now working on their second brood of the season.  By the way, I covered this bird in a blog several weeks ago.  It turns out that this pair nested on a window ledge on the back of my house rather than on the light fixture on the front.  The chickadees that I described last week are now incubating eggs.  And I found a nest yesterday of an American robin in a Syringa shrub next to the house with four eggs.

But let’s review songbird nesting chronology a bit.  Males establish territories, sing, and, if fortunate, acquire a mate.  One or both adults build a nest, which is distinctive to that species (i.e., mud, moss, grass stems, twigs).  Bird nests are truly marvels of the animal world.  How birds actually build these structures amazes me constantly.  During this stage, they copulate, which is done by the male hovering in flight above the female; their cloacas touch, sperm is transferred, and voila. When the nest is complete, the female will start laying eggs.  Egg-laying occurs early in the morning, and the female lays only one egg per day.  Even the famous while leghorn chicken, which has been bred to do nothing but produce and lay eggs, can only lay one egg per day.

Clutch size varies from about 3-6 in temperate species, but the number is relatively fixed within a species.  One of the parents, usually the female, then begins incubating the clutch after the next-to-last, or penultimate, egg is laid.  Eggs do not begin developing until the heat from the female’s body is applied during incubation.  The last egg laid, which occurs one day after incubation starts, will hatch about 24 hours after the rest of the clutch; this “runt” of the litter is often the one not to survive because it is always one day smaller than its siblings.  Incubation takes about 10-14 days, depending on species, and then the real work begins.

One or both parents must then find food, and I mean a lot of food, to feed the hungry nestlings.  These morsels usually consist of insects or other invertebrates, which are high in protein.  Nestlings fledge from the nest after 10-12 days.  For large birds like hawks, incubation and the nestling period are about three times as long as for small songbirds.  If you have never found a nest of a small bird and followed it, you should do so.  The rate at which nestlings grow is truly astounding.  You can see the difference in size and feather development every 24 hours.  But here is a puzzle.  Those nestlings have to defecate several times per day, and yet you will see no feces in the nest.  Where is it?

Will you cause the adults to abandon the nest if you find it and check on it up close once or twice a day?  It depends.  If the adults are only at the nest-building stage, they may abandon that effort and relocate because they “think” a predator has found the nest.  Why continue if something is going to eat your eggs?  But once they have reached incubation stage, they will usually not abandon the nest.  Too much time and energy have now gone into that nest to just walk away.  So find an active nest, observe it until the babies fledge, and report to us here.  There are worse family activities in which you could be involved.

Once the young have fledged, many males will begin singing all over again in the hopes of attracting a new female who wants to nest.  And on it goes, throughout the ages—the stuff of which poems are made.

Does touching a bird's nest cause the female to abandon it?

(Male Bobolink.  The male usually helps at the nest, but the female does most of the work.)

Did you grow up with your mother telling you not to touch that robin's nest because the mother would not come back and the babies would die?  Most of us did.  This has to be one of the most frequently uttered adages in all of nature lore.  The fact is, this is mostly myth.

During the 1980s, Eric Bollinger and I studied Bobolinks in upstate New York.  Bobolinks are a polygynous (i.e., males commonly have more than one female mate) species in the blackbird family.  The males have an incredibly long, bubbly song and their appearance is described as having  a tuxedo on backwards.  They are about the size of a sparrow.  Bobolinks build their grassy nest on the ground.  The female lays one egg per day until she has completed a clutch of five, begins incubating with the laying of the penultimate egg (next to last), incubates the eggs for 10-12 days, and then feeds her nestlings for another 10-12 days until they fledge.  Males usually help feed nestlings, but they are not as attentive as females.

Eric and I and our technicians located hundreds of Bobolink nests in those years, which are built on the ground in hayfields and meadows.  Once we located a nest, we placed a bamboo stick in the ground about a meter away from the nest with some colored plastic flagging on the top of the stick so we could relocate the nest at will.  Once found, we checked the contents of the nest every day to determine its progress and success.  When the nestlings were about 7 days old, we removed each one from the nest, collected a blood sample, measured it, placed an aluminum band on one leg, and returned it to the nest.  In some years, we removed the eggs and measured them before returning them to the nest.  In other words, we disturbed the nests a great deal during their three-week life, although we were careful not to trample the concealing vegetation around the nest any more than absolutely necessary.

Nearly 1,000 nests endured this harassment, and Eric and I learned a great deal about the behavior of  females because of it.  If we found a nest while the female was constructing it, she usually abandoned the nest.  If we found the nest when she had laid only 1-2 eggs, she often abandoned the nest.  Once the female had laid her full clutch of eggs and began incubating, she almost never abandoned, and if the nest contained nestlings, she would absolutely never abandon her brood.  The same seems to be true of most other birds as well.

Think of it this way: the more the female had invested in time and energy in the whole operation, the less likely she was to give it up.  Remember also, most birds have only a limited seasonal window during which they can successfully complete the nesting cycle.  In the case of Bobolinks, it takes a total of about 30 days from initiation of nest-building to fledging of their young.  In addition, they continue to feed their fledglings after they leave the nest for some period of time.  Bobolinks do not return from South America until early May and they start moving south again in August.  If they had to start over with the nesting cycle part-way through, they would barely have enough time to get those babies to a size and age where they could endure a long migration at the end of the summer.

Realize that the patterns I have described above probably apply to most songbirds in North America.  They may not apply equally well to tropical birds, which live in an area with many predators, and which always seemed to me to be extremely wary of predation threats.  Those species might abandon their nests more readily than temperate species.

So when your mother or grandmother tells you not to touch that nest because the female will not come back to it, you can say: "Well Mom, it goes like this".  There is a danger of attracting predators to a nest that you have disturbed, and where you have presumably left your scent.  Raccoons are very good at following these clues.  But as far as the female of the nest is concerned, she has invested too much for too long to walk (well, or fly) away easily.

The short, but eventful, avian calendar

(Daffodils at DrTom's.  It goes so fast; winter will be here before we know it.)

I tend to think of the year in bird seasons. April and May are the best months of the year for me because most of the species in this part of the world breed and nest during those months. June and July is fledgling time, when adults are busy feeding their still somewhat-dependent offspring, and the rest of the year is boring. It is just that by comparison, after May, it all goes downhill for me, and I begin looking forward to the following April. This is a terrible way to live, really.

As year-round residents, we have chickadees, nuthatches, cardinals, titmice, brown creepers, crows, blue jays, and woodpeckers, and some other species. Several of these are common at bird feeders stocked with sunflower seeds tended by homeowners. But now those species have become more conspicuous—they are singing and calling, prospecting for nest sites, and even building nests. The extremely high-pitched song of the brown creeper is common in my woods now. (This song is so high-pitched that some humans can not hear it). Chickadees are calling throughout the day, and I saw a pair checking out a small cavity in a dead red maple yesterday. Woodpeckers are tapping, barred owls are calling (although they do that all year), and crows certainly have an active nest by now.

Red maple and aspen are flowering now, but leaves are forming on some species. This will increase rapidly over the next couple of weeks. And, of course, this is the season for daffodils, tulips, and forsythia to bloom. Juneberry just finished flowering.  Dogwood and lilac will follow shortly.

So the locals have come alive, but we now have new members in the community, who left us last fall to go to warmer, more productive climes. For the most part, the birds that have now returned by mid-April are the so-called “short-distance migrants” that wintered in southern U.S. Song sparrows, American robins, brown-headed cowbirds, dark-eyed juncos, and accipiter hawks, are back and acting sexy. Eastern phoebes and broad-winged hawks, who have returned, came from a bit further. Phoebes can winter as far south as Mexico and broad-winged hawks can winter even further away. From the Cornell Lab of Ornithology website: “A recent study attached satellite transmitters to the backs of four Broad-winged Hawks and followed them as they migrated south in the fall. The hawks migrated an average of 7,000 km (4,350 mi) to northern South America, and traveled an average of 111 km (69 mi) each day. Once at the wintering grounds, the hawks did not move around much, staying on average within 2.6 square km (1 square mi).” And there are ruby-crowned kinglets, which just arrived at my place, but they are passing through to breed in coniferous forests farther to the north.

April is the beginning of the bird year for me. Everyone is now vocalizing, looking for their mates from last year, and locating nest sites. May will be even better, when the long-distance migrants return. The action is picking up, but I want every day to slow down. Based on my bird-oriented annual calendar, “winter” is only three months away.

The phoebe and the porch light

 (An Eastern Phoebe with an insect.  Is it the same bird nesting on my porch light year after year?)

Each year in late March, Eastern Phoebes (Sayornis phoebe) return to my property from having spent the winter as far south as Mexico.  Today, they returned.  I can always tell, because the male sings incessantly when he returns, and his favorite song perch seems to be at the corner of our house next to our bedroom.  The singing starts just before it is light, so spring phoebes and DrTom are on the same schedule, fortunately.  I love early morning.

Bird migration has always fascinated me.  I have been more interested in why birds migrate, than in how they do it.  The answers to the how question are truly astounding, and there are many good summaries of this.  Much of the early pioneering work on this topic was done at Cornell University by Bill Keeton, who used homing pigeons as his model.  And the Germans Kramer, Sauer, and Wiltschko are important.  Depending on the species, they might use visual landmarks like rivers during the day, or they use the sun’s location, or they navigate at night by orienting to the stars, or they use the earth’s magnetic field.  Bobolinks (Dolichonyx oryzivorus), for example, contain small deposits of an iron compound called magnetite in their skulls.  This is presumably used to detect the weak forces of the earth’s magnetic field to help them migrate between North and South America.

Eric Bollinger and I published a number of papers in the 1980s on Bobolinks and the behavior known as breeding site fidelity, or breeding site faithfulness.  This is the tendency of individuals to return to the exact location where they bred the year before.  It turns out that this is a common phenomenon in migratory songbirds: adults often return to the exact location where they bred the year before, but their babies rarely return to the place where they were born.  In Bobolinks and most songbirds where this has been studied, adults tend to return to the site where they bred the year before if they were successful in producing babies at that location.  If the nestlings had been eaten by a snake or a skunk, for example, or the nest was destroyed by farming equipment, then those adults tend not to return to the same location the following year.  It appears there is a simple Darwinian algorithm operating in those pea-sized brains: if I was successful in producing offspring, return; if I was unsuccessful, do not return.

So, every year since 1980 we have had a pair of Eastern Phoebes near our home.  But the observation is more remarkable than that.  Phoebes originally nested on ledges beneath an overhang, probably rocky cliffs.  Houses, however, are a great substitute, because of the overhanging eaves and the existence of some kind of platform beneath that overhead protection—like a window ledge.  At our home, phoebes almost always use the light fixture next to the front door.  (They also use a window ledge on the back of the house.) This is convenient for me, because every morning during the breeding season, I step outside, reach my hand up and into the nest, count the number of eggs or nestlings by feel, and then resume drinking my Cafe Britt coffee (which, by the way, you can buy on this site).  Although I have never formally studied phoebes, this would make for pretty easy field work.  The bottom line is that nearly every year, the nest over our light fixture successfully fledges 4-5 young.

Now, I have never banded the phoebes at my house, and this is unfortunate.  I am missing a lot of the biological story, because I do not know if these are the same individuals that return to my property each year.  But for 28 years, phoebes have nested on this light fixture and yet these birds probably live only a few years—they can not be the same individuals during all of that time.  This means that new birds sometimes settle near my house, start looking for a suitable nest site, see the light fixture under that overhang, and a “CFL light bulb” goes off in their little head.  (Research has proven that light bulbs in bird heads are fluorescent and not incandescent).  Each succeeding generation of phoebes spots that nest location and simply can not resist it, in spite of the fact that every time we enter or leave the front door, the attending adult is flushed off the nest.

As you can see, my original interest in site fidelity has blended with a fascination for this incredible innate focus by the bird on a suitable resource, in this case a nest site.  I am sure that exactly the same consistency and skill go into locating and capturing food—phoebes mainly eat flying insects like moths.  Many thousands of years of natural selection have honed these abilities into a razor-sharp performance, which ensures their survival and successful reproduction.  For me, spring has not really started until I hear that simple, yet distinctive song of the phoebe.  My coffee is ready, so all I need now is this year’s nest.

Cats: our feline friends, or are they?

(Cat eating a bird it has just killed.)

About a decade ago I had a student in my Conservation Biology class named Scott Boomer. We were discussing the problem of non-native organisms that week, and Scott told me he had kept some interesting records on the behavior of three cats that he and his wife had at that time. The cats (one male, two females, and all neutered) had access to food and water in Scott’s apartment around the clock. The three natural predators had the habit of capturing prey outside and bringing it back to Scott, often dropping it at his feet or putting it in their bathtub. Scott is a biologist and he was able to identify all the prey items returned to his apartment over a 2-year period.

The list included:

Mammals: 5 deer mice, 2 woodland jumping mice, 5 Eastern chipmunks, 4 meadow voles, 1 gray squirrel, 6 star-nosed moles, 4 short-tailed shrews, 1 cinereus shrew, 2 little brown bats, 1 Eastern cottontail

Amphibians: 2 green frogs

Reptiles: 1 Eastern painted turtle, 3 Eastern garter snakes

Birds: 3 common yellowthroats, 2 black-capped chickadees, 1 house wren

Total: 43 animals

Now, there are about 90 million cats in the U.S., according to the 2005-2006 National Pet Owners Survey. A certain percentage of those cats never go outside. But anyway you run the numbers, the collective mortality on native wildlife by U.S. cats must total millions of individuals of dozens of species. In some places in the world, feral cats, those that have gone completely wild, are responsible for the demise of rare species of birds. The Stephens Island wren (a flightless species) in New Zealand went extinct in the late 1800’s due to the island’s cats, or so that story goes. The wedge-tailed shearwater in Hawaii is also impacted by cats. Conservation biologists actively control cats (as well as non-native rats, mongoose, etc.) in such places today, especially on oceanic islands.

We hear a lot these days about our “ecological footprint”, or the impact that a human has on the earth’s natural resources and ecosystems. I doubt that our pet ownership is included in these calculations. Remember that I tend to think in terms of quantity and quality of habitat for biodiversity. I usually think of our “habitat footprint” as defined by the boundaries of our house and the lawn surrounding it. But the effect of that living space penetrates further depending on the chemicals we use on the property, how far away we or our children trounce on the environment, and the influence of our pets, of which cats are probably the worst offenders. There are zones of concentric circles beginning with the epicenter of the house itself, which include areas of decreasing influence on the fauna and flora that is there now, as one moves respectively outward. Cats probably have an effect in each of those zones, but they may represent the only threat in the outermost circle, which is perhaps several hundred meters from the edge of the house.

In fact, last year someone built a new house about 100 meters from the edge of my woodlot. For the past few months, I have had two cats roaming my property that I am sure live at that house. I have not had cats on my property in 20 years. And so it goes. We increase our collective ecological footprint, we chip away at the quantity and quality of wildlife habitat and, in my opinion, the quality of life is diminished just a little bit more---again.

In these few paragraphs I wanted to increase your awareness of an idea that perhaps you have not thought much about--- how that lovable pet cat of yours is possibly reducing the biological diversity in your neighborhood. I do not intend to explore a detailed solution to this problem, although attaching a simple bell to your outdoor cat would probably reduce its kill rate. You might be thinking that cats kill organisms that people do not like very much anyway, so what the heck. But I can assure you that every one of those species killed by Scott’s cats represents a unique and interesting biological story. Remember that not so long ago, nearly everyone thought it was fine to shoot, trap, or poison wolves, mountain lions, and eagles.

Gulliver, the red-eyed vireo

(Red-eyed vireo)

One morning in June a few years ago, I went out onto the deck to have my morning coffee. I heard a loud begging squawk of a bird, which was quite persistent and lasted all morning.  Finally, my young son and I went into the yard to investigate.  Bingo!  There on the ground was a young nestling bird, which I determined was a red-eyed vireo (Vireo olivaceus).  About 25 feet above the location of the baby vireo, I could see a nest on a limb of a red maple tree; obviously, the bird had fallen from the nest, which was too high for me to reach.  I always hate these decisions, but the choice was clear: either try to raise the baby by hand-feeding it, or let it die.  Lazy DrTom probably would have let nature take its course, but my empathetic 12-year old son would have none of that.  He was such a cry-baby.

We put the bird in an old bird cage that we had from our daughter's zebra finch days, and then the work began.  The bird was hungry even now, so we started the laborious process of collecting crickets and other insects from the yard, and feeding them to the open mouth of this insectivorous species.  Nestling birds can eat a tremendous amount.  How adult birds can locate and collect enough insects to feed 4-5 ravenous babies has always amazed me.  They eat so much and grow so fast that you can literally see the increase in their body size within a 24-hour period.

The vireo, which we named Gulliver, begged and ate, and we hunted and searched.  This was really getting old. Insects were getting more difficult to find for some reason, even when I used a sweep net.  So I did what most red-blooded Americans do to solve their problems--I went shopping.  I bought mealworms at the local pet store.  This solution was a little expensive, but mealworms are a nice, plump juicy meal, and Gulliver loved them.  So far, so good.  We even took Gulliver on a little trip with us to Hershey Park.  When we got to the park on a really hot afternoon, we left Gulliver in his cage in the car while we reconnoitered a bit.  We returned to the car only about 20 minutes later to find the bird lying on the bottom of the cage, with bird guano all over the car seats.  The poor thing had gone apoplectic before passing out from the heat.  Of course, our son was hysterical (cry baby), so we rushed to our motel room, and hustled the patient into the air-conditioned room.  After applying drops of water to his bill for several minutes, Gulliver lapped up the life-saving liquid and made a remarkable recovery.  Whew!

We returned home that day and decided that it was time for Gulliver to try his wings.  He was now about 12 days old, the time at which he would normally fledge from his nest anyway, so I banded the bird with an aluminum leg band, and set him free.  We didn't know what to expect.  Would he zoom off, never to be seen again, or what.  Quite the contrary.  Because we were his sole source for a well-balanced meal, he was not about to leave the cafeteria.  He stayed very close to the house for several weeks, mostly on the deck railing.  Whenever any of us went outside or came home from work, he immediately flew to us, landed on our shoulder, and begged incessantly.  As the summer continued, he spent more and more time in the forest next to our yard, but I could call him to the deck to feed him.  He was adult size by now and eating quite a bit, so I decided to adopt an economy of scale and order a box of 2,000 crickets from Rainbow Mealworms of California.  On the very day the crickets arrived, Gulliver apparently moved into migration mode and was gone.  Red-eyed vireos spend the winter in South America, so I figured his ancient instincts had kicked in or he had been picked off by a predator during the night, leaving us with beaucoup crickets and no mouth in which to insert them.

Throughout that winter we often discussed our experience with Gulliver, this interesting little bird that had befriended us.  Had he made it to Argentina?  Did he even know that he was a red-eyed vireo?  Had his instincts developed normally so that he could function as he should?  Our answer came the following spring.  I was standing on the deck one May morning, when a red-eyed vireo landed on the railing for only 1-2 seconds, and then returned to the woods.  Vireos are common in our woodlot, but they never land on our deck.  In addition, I saw the unmistakable glint of a shiny metal band on one leg of the bird.  Gulliver had survived his first migration and returned to the location of his birth.

We never saw Gulliver again after that brief encounter that May morning.  It was almost as if he was signaling to us that he had made it, and to say thanks, and now I'm an adult, and I'm nearby.  I usually hate that anthropomorphic stuff (i.e., making it sound like animals have human emotions), but even DrTom is allowed to slip once in a while.

Sense of place

(Today's post is not humorous, so set the dial in your brain accordingly.  It is a little deeper, and more heartfelt than usual.  But it is a Sunday (the 1st or 7th day of the week?), so I assume you might have a bit more time than normal for reading and thinking.  So top-off that coffee mug, put your feet up, and let the cat get comfortable on your lap.  Oh, and no crying.)

I love my property. I mean, I really, really love it. It is not that it is a particularly beautiful place, because it is not---typical 50-year old second-growth forest in upstate New York. My maple, ash, and aspen woodland is certainly not as dramatic as the Sonoran Desert in March, or as majestic as the Grand Canyon, or as awe-inspiring as the savannas of western Kenya. I have been to many truly wonderful places during the past few years, but after I am there for only a few days, wherever it is, I long for my 12 acres near Ithaca.

Where does that longing come from? I am not absolutely sure, but that feeling contains emotional, psychological, and biological elements. After all, I have lived on this land for 29 years now, and it holds many memories for me. My children grew up here. I can look at the yard in front of the house to this day and remember playing catch with my sons there 20 years ago. I can still see in my mind the other accoutrements of my children's activities: the old tree fort, the skateboard ramps, the rabbit hutches. I can hear their youthful voices. I can smile at the memory of all those undergraduates who I duped into moving my firewood from one place to another over the years. I remember my mother emerging ghostlike from a dense fog as she returned from escorting our kids to the bus stop down our long driveway, during one of her visits. So the place holds memories of events, and objects, and people who are now gone. Imagine how strong this suite of emotions must be for people who still give birth to their babies and bury their loved ones on their land. I assume the concept of “sacred land” must originate from this.

But the longing for my land consists of more than old memories. There is a relevant vitality about it as well, which renews me every single day. I have an evening ritual (at least during good weather), which I have described many times. With a glass of single-malt scotch and a good cigar in one hand, and a folding chair in the other, I go to some predetermined spot in my woods to sit for an hour or so. Well, I don’t just sit there—I use the scotch and cigar for their intended purposes. But mostly I watch and listen to what is going on around me and conclude that it doesn’t get any better than this.  My wife understands this about me, and she indulges me this evening ritual, even though she has much she wants to share from the day’s activities.

May and June are my favorite months, because the forest is alive, especially with singing, territorial songbirds. The migrants have returned from Central or South America. The resident species are rejuvenated with new hormone levels that make them interesting again. The vireos, tanagers, warblers, and chickadees are mine; they are not legally mine, but in every other sense of the word they belong to me and to my land. They live here, build nests here, raise their babies here, and eat insects or fruits that grow here. I love this place so much in the spring that I have all but vowed not to do any traveling during that time of year so as not to miss a single day.

I have learned much about myself and about the human connection to the land from my time on this hill. I have learned that the most enjoyable moments I spend all year are when I am sitting among those organisms near my home. Once you have the land, those moments are absolutely free. It costs you nothing, and it can be more fulfilling than anything I can think of to do in town.

I have learned that it is not the same for me to sit in a publicly-owned forest, even though it may be more beautiful to the unbiased eye—it is not mine. That sense of pride I have when sitting in my forest is not there. I am not allowed to cut trees for firewood, to manipulate the habitat to encourage the residence of certain species of vertebrates, or to build a bonfire for social gatherings on the public’s land. I am strictly a visitor and, as valuable as that experience is to most, it is not enough for me.

And most of all, I have learned how powerful the connection of humans to their land can be. By extrapolation, I can only capture a hint of the powerful emotions of all those peoples across the globe who are in conflict over “their” land, who are moved around by distant governments, by neighboring enemies, by degraded resources, by market forces, or by global climate change. Most of the time my professional and personal goal is stated as “conserving the earth’s biodiversity”. But in a very real way, my goal in conservation is to allow the unadulterated "sense of place" to flourish in a manner consistent with the antiquity of human cultures and races, and with all other species.