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.

Part 1: Searching for my niche in the Duluth birding community

On May 12, 2026, “For the Birds” will be 40 years old. When I first walked into the college radio station at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, with my trusty Peterson bird records and three scripts in early May 1986, I didn’t know if anyone there would be remotely interested in a program about birds, and I had no clue what I was doing—I was simply frustrated that I’d not yet found a niche in the Duluth birding community the way I’d so easily fit in in East Lansing, while I was a rank beginner, and in Madison, where I became much more skilled.

I’d never ever been on the radio before, and my only experience doing anything for public consumption had happened several years before, while we were living in Madison. The afternoon paper, the Capital Times, published an article about warblers filled with factual errors, and the very next week, Peter Fox, the city editor at the morning paper, the Wisconsin State Journal, just happened to call me at the school where I was teaching to tell me that the paper was starting a brand new “Leisuretime” section, and he wanted to list the beginner birding walks I was leading for Madison Audubon on his events calendar. I said sure but hoped that if he published any articles about warblers in the new section, they’d be more accurate than the one in the Cap Times. He said, “Well, why don’t you write one for us?”

That felt like a put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is challenge so I agreed, but WHOA! it was daunting. My only college degree was in elementary education, and I’d never written anything for publication before. I confided to my birding buddy and closest friend, Ken Wood, how embarrassing and scary this was, but he seemed certain that I’d do just fine. He told me to think of newspaper readers as smart sixth graders who’d never had a chance to learn anything about birds. My job was simply to make the subject accessible and interesting for them, never assuming they knew basic stuff while never talking down to them.

Peter Fox wanted photos to accompany the article, so he sent a photographer on one of my birding walks at the arboretum. These walks were on weekdays and I had to be at school by 8:30, so the group met at at 6, an ungodly hour for the photographer. He’d been mostly planning to take people shots and I don’t think he brought a telephoto lens, but this being May in a Madison hotspot, warblers abounded, and he got some nice photos. He didn’t want his gorgeous Blackburnian Warbler photo “wasted” on an inside page, so he lobbied for and got that one on the front page.

The article was very well received (I later found the paper won an award for it!), so Peter asked me to write more, and I did. When we moved to Duluth in 1981, I sent some clippings to the Duluth News-Tribune, but the managing editor there, Larry Fortner, told me the paper already had the “finest outdoor writer in North America.” Russ and I both enjoyed Sam Cook’s articles, but he wrote mostly about hunting and fishing, not about birding and nongame birds. I wrote back that the Wisconsin State Journal also had an outdoor writer who covered those kinds of activities, but Larry was just not interested. Journalists and media professionals back then, and probably still today, have little training in nature studies, and few understand how hungry people are for reliable information about backyard and local wildlife.

I knew it was pure luck that I got the newspaper assignments in Madison, so I wasn’t too disappointed to have lost that creative outlet. But what was frustrating at a soul-deep level was how I simply could not fit into Duluth’s birding community of the 1980s. Things have changed dramatically as the “old guard” retired and, especially, after Frank Nicoletti moved here, but that was in the future. I got involved in Duluth Audubon from the very start—within a year, I was elected president and was editing the monthly newsletter. But those jobs don’t require any birding skills. The local birding community was specifically focused on Hawk Ridge, and the people serving as raptor counter, bander, and naturalist back in the eighties formed a closed, insular circle. It was so different from Lansing and Madison!

In all three cities I’d lived in, we had some genuinely great, very experienced birders, mostly but not all men. I never minded deferring to them, and just about all of them took me seriously. In Madison, I did Big Days every May with the top birders, who considered me among their numbers. In Duluth, even when the big guns were actively searching for a fourth for a Big Day team (four is the ideal number), they refused to let me join—one team leader bluntly explained that women did not belong on Big Day teams. I started my own team, which we called the Reeves after a lovely European shorebird that occasionally turns up in America—it’s the only bird with a different species name for males and females. (The males are called Ruffs.). But two of my team regulars were from the Twin Cities, not Duluth, and only one was as acquisitive as I was, so we focused more on quality than quantity.

My Madison Audubon birding walks for beginners had been very well attended and popular. Here the Duluth Audubon board of directors would not allow me to lead any field trips using the Duluth Audubon name because one of those top local birders was already doing a very popular and worthwhile spring and fall bird class for Community Education, leading trips to the best hotspots in the area. I signed up for it several times—it was great! But in Madison, we had lots of people leading different kinds of field trips, figuring the more opportunities we provided, the more people we’d be including. People in Duluth had to pay to sign up for Community Ed classes while mine would be free and more informal—a good way for people who weren’t sure about birding to try it out without any commitment.

I was plenty busy and happy at home—my three children were born between 1981 and 1985—and Duluth Audubon kept me busy, too, but I’d never felt so excluded from the most active birding community before. I was also missing teaching—I needed, deep in my bones, to be sharing stuff about birds. I had no clue how I was ever going to find my niche here. I was ready for a big change.

Part 2: Radio?!

When we first moved to Duluth, I listened to KUMD and National Public Radio a lot, but I never could have imagined me writing and producing a radio program. One of my favorite things on NPR was when John Ciardi talked about the etymology of words and expressions on “Morning Edition.” He didn’t sound anything like a radio person—the kind of news reader who maintains the same detached, professional tone whether reporting on a devastating tragedy or delivering a funny fluff piece. Ciardi was deeply knowledgeable and passionate about etymology, and it came across in his segments.

In early 1986, I wrote to him asking about a poem I couldn’t get out of my mind—I only remembered the last lines, and was pretty sure he hadn’t written it, but for some reason I associated it with him and badly wanted to find the entire poem. He responded with a lovely letter explaining that Love Poem, by John Frederick Nims, was one of the ones he’d included in his book, How Does a Poem Mean? That was why I associated the poem with him—we’d read that book in high school English. I was thrilled to hear from him.

Then on March 31, the day after Easter, on “Morning Edition,” I heard the horrifying news that John Ciardi had died of a heart attack on Easter Sunday.

This was cataclysmic. Suddenly there was a huge vacuum on the airwaves—someone had to quick get on the radio talking about something they were deeply knowledgeable and passionate about. On the strength of that, I sat down and wrote three scripts—about Duluth’s spring weather, orioles, and grackles. I decided to call the segments “For the Birds,” in part to beat anyone to the punch who wanted to dismiss my work, and in part because being for the birds suggests advocacy. My close friend Karen Keenan knew Bob De Armond at KUMD, so she asked Bob to set up an appointment for me to meet Stephanie Hemphill, the station’s news director.

Stephanie liked what I’d written, led me into the studio to record those three scripts on the spot, and showed me how to mix in the bird sounds at the beginning and end. I’d figured those three scripts were just a sample, but she saw no reason to change anything. Since I’d written three, she decided to start airing “For the Birds” every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And that was that.

Other than Stephanie teaching me how to do my own recording and production work at the KUMD studio, I got virtually no feedback. I was painfully self-conscious. It’s funny to listen to those first programs now—I talked much too fast and my voice was higher-pitched from nervousness.

I muddled through week after week, focusing on Duluth’s spectacular spring and fall migrations, backyard bird feeding, interesting birds, and any other topics that seemed interesting and timely. I did the program as an unpaid volunteer, but money was never my measure of the value of anything worthwhile. I didn’t know how to promote the program, but somehow Minnesota’s KAXE and Wisconsin’s WOJB and WXPR heard about it and started airing the program the next year. That meant a little more work for me--I had to dub the copies and get them in the mail—but KUMD covered the cost of the tapes and postage.

At some point someone told Dale Connelly of Minnesota Public Radio’s “The Morning Show” about “For the Birds” and I sent him a few recordings and transcripts. He was interested, but an MPR producer said no way—I sounded too much like a teacher (which of course I was—”For the Birds” was nothing if not authentic) and she said nobody wanted to hear about birds once a week anyway. I’ve never been all that ambitious and just about always took no for an answer pretty easily. Anyway, I was happy just the way things were.

And that is how “For the Birds” got its start four decades ago.

Part 3: Getting silly.

Six months after I started producing “For the Birds”, as my almost-three-year-old daughter Katie’s December 10 birthday approached, I wanted to do a special program just for her. We watched Sesame Street together every day, and she was especially fond of Big Bird, so I decided to do a program about him. The humor was pretty over the top but it was a lot of fun to write and put together, and several listeners called the station to say how much they enjoyed it.

If my goal was to promote the love, understanding, and protection of birds, I knew that injecting humor was a good way to achieve that. A few months later, I did my very first April Fool’s Day 1987 program, about how the “Cornell Lavatory of Orthinology” had cracked the code of all bird language. Two of my favorite KUMD volunteers, Tim Winker and Dan Procter, voiced a crow from Chicago and one from Duluth, and I introduced my fictitious underwriter—Jim Baker from Baker’s Blue Jay Barn. My friend John Keenan (Karen’t husband) provided the voice of Jim Baker. Many people thought I’d gotten my inspiration from “A Prairie Home Companion,” but Saturday afternoons and evenings were for our children, so I’d never listened to it. Any inspiration I got to make a fake commercial would have come from “Saturday Night Live”.

For April Fool’s Day 1988, I did a parody of Duluth’s famous John Beargrease Sled Dog Race—my version was the John Chickenfat Sled Bird Race, in which the teams were made up of homing pigeons pulling their sleds through the sky from Grand Marais to Hawk Ridge—that year, my fictitious Jim Baker was fielding a team of Blue Jays. This program marked the radio debut of my son Joe, who was six at the time, and of my neighbor Mary Tonkin, who portrayed Jaimie Honker, “top sled-bird racer in North American, straight from the Alaskan Ichickenrod.” (In real life, Mary Tonkin was my kids’ emergency auxiliary backup grandma.) That was also when I created Earth Angel Bird Emporium, “Helping you to attract upscale, trendy birds to your home.”) Earth Angel was voiced by Karen Keenan—the friend who got me that appointment at KUMD in the first place.

April Fool’s Day fell on a weekend for the next two years and I was getting stir crazy for an opportunity to get silly again. Fortunately, there were two full moons in December 1990, and I got the idea to name any month with a blue moon “National Blue Jay Awareness Month.” I did a few silly programs that month, including one in which I compared Blue Jay intelligence with that of a little kid, using my five-year-old son Tommy as the kid. Cell phones were a new technology, so Jim Baker had an ad for Baker’s Blue Jay cellular phones (Here ‘s the link to that program).

My mother-in-law always listened to the local radio station that was in the “Music of Your Life” network playing old standards, so I of course had to do a parody of that for April Fool’s Day in 1991: “The Music of Your Blue Jays.” This time, I brought my whole family into the act in an ad for American Blue Jay Insurance, and introduced my own personal vocal “group,” the California Ravens, singing the parody song “Dancing Cheek to Beak” and a madrigal for Baker’s Blue Jay Blend. (It was fun singing harmony with my own voice in the studio, late at night so no one would hear!) It became something of a tradition: whenever April Fool’s Day fell on a day Duluth’s 103.3 FM station was airing “For the Birds,” I’ve tried to produce some sort of silly program.

I was lucky in my choice of best friends when we moved here—Karen and John Keenan lived just a couple of houses away from us when our firstborn Joey and their daughter Britta were babies. It’s been enormous fun to write scripts knowing exactly how they would read their parts. John has done such an amazing job with my Jim Baker character that a surprising number of listeners over the years told me they thought Baker’s Blue Jay Barn, and Jim Baker, were real. I used Karen and John in my 1992 parody of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Erich Segal’s Love Story, my own “A Farewell to Love Stories.”

After I saw the 1995 movie The Bridges of Madison County, I read the book, which was so over the top that I simply had to parody it. The main male character actually says, “I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went out to sea,” which gave me the idea to make the character a Peregrine Falcon; John Keenan did his voice and Karen played poor Francesca Pigeon, consumed by her love. (The Pigeons of Madison County.)

The funnest one I ever wrote was a parody of the movie Where the Boys Are. Karen and I played two birdwatching college girls heading up to Grand Marais over spring vacation to be “Where the Boids Are,” with Russ and John playing two hitchhikers we pick up en route. We had to keep doing retakes because we were laughing so hard as we recorded the lines, like Karen’s “I love that spotting scope of yours. It’s sooooo long.”

For April Fool’s Day in 1992, I did a program about the Winter Bird Olympics, ending with a news headline about Lorena Bobwhite. In 2006, after I saw the video ostensibly showing an Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Arkansas, I had to produce an April Fools Day program about the rediscovery of a small population of Dodoes in the Duluth Harbor.

My daughter Katherine is a wonderful pianist, so I enlisted her help to provide accompaniment for the California Ravens singing such tunes as “Bohemian Rhapsojay” and “Turn Around.” I needed more of a sixties band sound to do a parody of “Last Kiss” (“Where Oh Where Can My Blue Jays Be?”) so I actually paid three UMD students, Darin Bergsven, Nate Perbix, and John Sommerfeld, out of my own pocket to come to the studio for that one.

For April Fool’s Day 2005, I reported on a major breakthrough in our understanding of bird intelligence, with an ad for Baker’s Blue Jay window feeders with Jayagra suction cups.

Duluth’s Mayor Don Ness did a cameo when I did my Chickadee Ghost Pirates Terrorizing Duluth story on April 1, 2010.

You could easily tell which TV shows I was watching in 2014, when I parodied Breaking Bad, and in 2015, when I wrote the true story of Don Draper and How Mad Men will end (if it sticks to the truth).

The pandemic inspired my April Fool’s 2020 program about how Blue Jays are helping humans with social distancing.

Jim Baker got into high tech, developing Bluolingo: The first Blue Jay translation app for April 1, 2022

He announced a new podcast featuring not human guests but Blue Jays for April Fool’s Day 2023, and announced a new product for travelers, CLOACA, for April Fool’s Day 2024.

Last year I provided updates from Earth Angel and Jim Baker, for April Fool’s Day 2025

On April 15, 1987, I did a program about the birds of baseball.

In December 1999, my son Joe and his best friends Ian Smith and Ramiro Figueroa, high school seniors at the time, voiced this silly program: How Earth Angel Bird Identification Binoculars saved Christmas.

December 2000 had a blue moon, meaning it was National Blue Jay Awareness Month. I ran an ad for Jim Baker’s Blue Jay Instant Vocalization Decoder Ring. (That one ended with the California Ravens singing “Bohemian Rhapsojay.” Jim Baker also announced a bunch of other products, such as Oil of Ojay, Jaybelline Eye Cosmetics, Jim Baker’s Blue Jay Board Games, and Baker’s Blue Jay Video Games. He also made a new, improved Baker’s Blue Jay Blend: Not just for Blue Jays anymore.

The crazy election in 2000 inspired this California Ravens song: “Blue Jays Are Here to Stay.”

For one month, I think in 1999, I launched an hour-long program, “Wake Robin.” Each program featured an interview with someone interesting, including John Fitzpatrick, Director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology; Greg Budney, curator of the Lab’s Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds; and Pulitzer-Prize winning humor writer Dave Barry (I am not making that up!). We played some music, had silly pre-recorded ads, and lots of fun stuff about birds.

KUMD let me air it live at 6 am on Saturdays for the month, but I couldn’t get anyone at the station interested in helping with production. Tim Winker, “the VOICE of the North Woods” and one of KUMD’s most creative volunteers, helped me each week, running the board, making sure everything went okay, and adding a voice to make the program more interesting, but without sponsors, I couldn’t pay him or anyone else (much less myself), and it took about 60 hours each week for me to get the pre-recorded segments written and produced. So the program only lasted for that brief “trial period.” The following was one of the segments on that program. Tim Winker introduced the piece, Karen Keenan played Earth Angel, Russ Erickson played Lars, and Stephanie Hemphill played Juliet Montague in these Testimonials about Earth Angel Bird Identification Binoculars.

(Listen to the radio version of Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.)

Early spring is the time to start paying attention for early migrants. One early arrival in forests, parks, and old neighborhoods with large trees is the Brown Creeper, the only member of the family Certhiidae in the Americas. This attractive, small and slender bird is cryptically colored to match tree bark. It has a delicate, relatively long bill, curved downward to pick out tiny insects from crevices in the tree bark, and long, stiff, tail feathers that curve downward at the other end to brace it against tree trunks. Its hind toe bears a long, strong claw providing an additional brace to help the bird hitch its way up tree trunks.

The Brown Creeper’s lovely, high-pitched sounds are beyond my hearing now unless the creeper is very close and I crank up my hearing aids to eleven. Losing the Brown Creeper calls and songs is one of the bitter tragedies of old age, but it’s well offset by the joy of still being alive and able to see these wonderful birds.

I saw my first Brown Creeper on December 16, 1975, at the Morton Arboretum outside Chicago. A month later, on January 30, 1976, I added it to my Michigan list at Baker Woodlot on the Michigan State University campus, and by February, according to my field notes, I was recognizing the tiny mites by sound. It isn’t uncommon for them to overwinter in Lansing, Michigan, or Madison, Wisconsin. Rarely, one may even overwinter in Duluth or the Sax-Zim Bog.

I usually find my first up here in late March or early April. On some days in mid-April as their migration peaks, I may see half a dozen or more in my own backyard.

Brown Creepers live up to their name, creeping up tree trunks, often in an upward spiral, until they encounter too many branches, when they flutter down to a low spot on another trunk and creep up that one. If they continue up a limb, they gravitate to the underside.

Arthur Cleveland Bent put together a wonderful series of books about the life histories of North American birds, and gave Winsor Merritt Tyler the honor of writing the Brown Creeper entry. He opened it with this superb description:

The brown creeper, as he hitches along the bole of a tree, looks like a fragment of detached bark that is defying the law of gravitation by moving upward over the trunk, and as he flies off to another tree he resembles a little dry leaf blown about by the wind. As he climbs up the tree, he is feeding, picking up tiny bits of food that he finds half-hidden in the crevices of bark along his path. In his search, he does not work like the woodpeckers, those skilled mechanics whose work requires the use of carpenter’s tools, the drill and chisel. The creeper’s success depends on painstaking scrutiny, thoroughness, and almost, it seems, consciousness. Edmund Selous (1901), speaking of the European tree-creeper, a bird close to ours in habit, uses the exact word to show us the creeper at work. “His head,” he says, “which is as the sentient handle to a very delicate instrument, is moved with such science, such dentistry, that one feels and appreciates each turn of it.

Creepers seem as earnest and focused as they are sentient, and as introverted as songbirds could be. Occasionally during migration, I spot two or more in my backyard or the same swath of woodland, and they often associate with chickadee flocks, but they hang out on the periphery, never in the thick of things, and when the flock moves on, a creeper may linger a while. It’s only where they’re nesting that we’re likely to see two near each other; even then, except when doing their charming courtship flights or at the nest itself, they stay focused on their own work, like a couple who are deeply in love but have different work places.

Even the most introverted among us fall in love, creepers included. I’ve only seen a courtship flight a handful of times in my life. Winsor Marrett Tyler describes it beautifully and accurately:

Once in a while we see a bird launch out from a tree and at top speed twine around it close to the bark, then dart away and twist around another tree, or weave in and out among the surrounding trees and branches. He has thrown off his staid creeper habits and has become for the time a care-free aerial sprite, giving himself up, it seems, to an orgy of speed, wild dashes, and twists and turns in the air. But after a round or two, back on the bark again, he resumes his conventional routine and becomes once more a brown creeper.

Bird observers in the early 1800s claimed the Brown Creeper nests in cavities, but in 1879, Thomas Brewer wrote that the normal nest, as with the European creeper, is built between a tree trunk and a flap of partially detached bark. Sure enough, the next spring, William Brewster used that tip to search trees near Lake Umbagog in Maine and discovered quite a number of nests.

On May 1, 1976, Russ and I went on a Michigan Audubon trip that included a nice long stop at Hartwick Pines State Park, where my mentor Joan Brigham found a Brown Creeper nest at eye level. It was the loveliest thing, exquisitely concealed on the truck of a huge white pine, the hammock-shaped nest woven of bits of bark, fuzzy material such as spider silk and Usnea lichen wedged where a large piece of bark was jutting out. I recall one or two tiny eggs, white speckled with rust. I’ve never since seen a Brown Creeper nest at eye level, so I’ve never seen a nestling, and creepers are so quiet and cautious that I’ve never seen a fledgling, either. Winsor Merritt Tyler wrote of one brood:

The young birds left the Concord nest early on June 4 (possibly June 3). At 8 am, two were clinging, 30 feet from the ground, to the trunk of a living white pine tree which stood not far from the nest. One or two more were on another pine trunk. The little birds were extremely difficult to find by reason of their small size, their distance from the ground, their inconspicuous color and especially because each took a station in the dark shadow immediately below a horizontal limb. Here they remained motionless for many minutes. Later, two young birds, one following the other, moved upward by feeble hitches and perched or squatted close to the trunk in the right angle formed by the limb. In hitching over the bark, they moved almost straight upward and whenever I saw them as a silhouette against the sky, and could thus determine the point, they did not use their tail for support. The shortness of the young Creeper’s tails gave to their bodies a rounded, unbird-like outline and, with their short, stubby bills of wide gape and their squatting position on the upright bark they suggested tree-toads in no small degree. Like most young birds after they leave the nest, the fledgling Creepers were more noisy than they’d been the day before. They announced their whereabouts to their parents with a note not previously heard—a high sibilant call, “tssssi” or sometimes clearly divided into two syllables thus: “ts-tssi” The voice was very slightly tremulous and, although the pitch and delivery of the notes were decidedly Creeper-like, they suggested to Mr. Faxon and me a flock of Cedarbirds.

It’s during spring and fall that most of us get to enjoy creepers in our backyards, but they’re usually so quiet that we must pay attention to notice them in the first place. I usually see them at Park Point or in lovely old forests, but there’s something special about the ones passing through my own backyard.

One Particular Brown Creeper

It takes much more than a bird’s subdued loveliness and shy ways to make me fall in love, but I fell truly madly deeply in love with one particular Brown Creeper in 1978, when I was a teacher at St. James School in Madison, Wisconsin. One spring morning when I arrived at school, our janitor brought me the little bird, who had apparently collided with a window. It had a sprained wing, so it remained in my classroom for several days.

I’ll never forget holding that tiny mite for the first time—its forward-facing eyes, an adaptation to give it binocular close-range vision as it looks into the tiny crevices in tree bark, looked directly into my own eyes. Many stunned birds seem unusually tame, but this one was alert—simply very calm. During the following days, as it grew stronger and started flying, it never once acted fearful. That word Winsor Merritt Tyler used to describe them, sentient, seemed true and apt.

We kept the window shades in my classroom pulled so it wouldn’t crash again. I got permission from the office to send two students to buy some mealworms at a nearby pet shop, and we set up several fairly large tree limbs here and there in the classroom where the little bird could perch and hitch its way up. But in this peculiar habitat, it didn’t limit itself to those woody substrates—many times it alighted on a student’s or my ankle and hitched its way up a knee sock, trouser, or pantyhose-covered leg.

After several days, when it was easily flying from one limb, human or arboreal, to another without getting grounded, it was time to release it, so we took a class hike to a nearby wooded park with the creeper in a shoebox.

When we reached a good spot in the midst of lots of large trees, I opened the box, half expecting that the moment it saw the woods, it would take off. But no—it let me pick it up out of the box and hold it momentarily as it looked all around, studying its surroundings with interest. I handed it to one of my students who held her arm out and opened her fingers. The little bird kept studying the trees and each of us gathered around even as the little girl held her hand wide open. After at least 30 seconds, and possibly as long as a minute, it flew to the base of the nearest tree, just four or five feet away. We watched it hitch its way up, taking its time, opening its bill a few times to snap up microscopic insects. Then it moved to another, equally close tree and did the same. We watched it climb that tree, and another, and another, in no hurry to get away from us.

We weren’t in any hurry to get away from it, either. But little by little it worked its way deeper into the woods, and finally we lost sight of it. I whispered, “Live long and prosper,” and we trudged back to school.

Not one of us cried, at least not obviously. How could we not feel sad to say farewell to our pleasant little friend even as we were genuinely thrilled that we had saved its life and returned it to its natural home? For homework, I told the kids to write down the definition of the word ambivalent. I bet they still remember what it means.

Laura, thank you for raising these environmental cost questions, as they are genuinely important and not transparent. I wanted to offer one clarification on Merlin, because I think it actually reflects well on Cornell’s design choices.

Merlin’s Sound ID runs entirely on your phone — no data center connection required during active use. Cornell’s own documentation states that “Sound ID runs on your device, without requiring a network connection,” and their FAQ confirms that recordings are not transmitted automatically. The download you do upfront during initial installation is what makes local inference possible. And again, I don’t think there are data available about what it took to train their model initially, but besides battery life on your phone, whether you run it for 60 seconds or 60 minutes, I don’t think there is a significant difference in water/energy use.

Your larger points — that we lack transparent accounting of these costs across the industry (and how “apps” can distract while in the field) — absolutely stands.

I’ve corrected the post itself, but wanted to make certain that all my subscribers knew that using Merlin in the field does NOT involve AI.

[This post was edited on March 24, 2026 to reflect information that Peter Repetti added in an important comment. Thank you, Peter!]

When I was in college, I took a bunch of the “ologies”—ecology, mammalogy, herpetology, entomology and aquatic entomology, as well as two ornithology classes. Botany, too. I also took a few courses taught by my wonderful friend and hero, Bob Hinkle, focused on training us to be good all-around naturalists. Through all of this, I took many exams testing my identification skills. I did well on all of them and aced most.

But that was half a century ago. Since then, I’ve focused almost entirely on birds, and a lot of information about other forms of wildlife—info that I thought was securely locked into my brain—leaked out, never to return. When Deb Burns, my editor at Storey Publishers, asked me to write 100 Plants to Feed the Birds, my instant response was straight out of Star Trek: “Dammit, Jim, I’m a birdwatcher, not a horticulturist.”

If I’d had to rely on my memory to write that book, it would have been a disaster. Fortunately, I have access to the Internet and a whole library of my own reference books and materials, so I could find plenty of information about the native plants birds depend on for shelter, nesting material and substrate, seeds, fruits and, perhaps most importantly, native insects. Researching and writing that book made me appear very well informed, especially after the book was given the 2023 American Horticultural Society Book Award, which made me very proud.

But now when I lead bird walks, people think I can name all the plants we come across. They of course only ask about plants they don’t know, which raises the probability even higher that I won’t know them either. Fortunately, there’s someone in every group who, when any question about plant or animal identification comes up, whips out their cell phone, snaps a picture, and identifies it via iNaturalist, Google Lens, or another app. This whole process arouses enough interest to distract the whole group, ending my public display of ignorance.

Sometimes I take nice photos of butterflies, moths, dragonflies, or other insects, various plants, and other non-avian forms of wildlife. When I get home, I can look them up in Sparky Stensaas’s wonderful North Woods Naturalist Series of books if they’re from around here. If not, I use those apps.

Unfortunately, every single use of those apps, in the field or back at home, involves AI. I consider identifying plants and animals a wonderful use, helpful to so many people new to nature as well as those of us who’ve spent a lifetime studying and celebrating it, but in terms of energy and water consumption at huge data centers, it’s no different from other uses of AI, and no easier to find out exactly how much consumption is involved. Ironically, the water usage, carbon footprint, and pollution generated at data centers harm the very wildlife these apps are helping us identify.

It took me a while to get good at using eBird, but now I use it whenever I go birding. I generate my own checklist when I’m leading a bird walk or going out on my own, but when I’m on a guided birding tour, I prefer to let the guide generate and share the list—then I use “My eBird” to remove from my own checklist species I didn’t personally see, add species I may have seen on my own or the guide forgot to enter, and occasionally add media. eBird has an enormous database, but none of it involves AI, and using eBird in the field doesn’t involve data centers at all (as long as we downloaded the right regional “pack” ahead of time) right up until the moment we submit, share, or download a checklist. Then our data is added to all the other data on the eBird servers, i.e. “the cloud.”

Many uses of technology are incredibly valuable, and eBird is a prime example. Sure, it’s fun and useful for birders, but its value extends far, far beyond the hobby of listing, providing a huge, accurate body of information critical for bird conservation. Even more important, because birds are such incredibly useful indicators of environmental health, eBird’s value extends to other forms of wildlife and to whole habitats and ecosystems; the more gigantic eBird’s database grows, the more valuable it becomes. And again, using eBird does not involve AI. Nevertheless, we must assess with clear eyes the environmental costs of any huge database accessed by over a million active eBird users before we can possibly determine ways of minimizing its environmental costs.

Google Lens and iNaturalist, both AI intensive, may be helpful for people trying to identify plants and animals, but I’d argue that when it comes specifically to birds, Merlin is a much better choice. [Here’s where I started editing, because Peter Repetti pointed out that Merlin apparently does NOT use AI] 1 I am also virtually certain that Merlin’s database is more accurate than Google Lens or iNaturalist. And Merlin generates data used by eBird, so it has positive value beyond accurate identifications.

What Merlin is most used for by most people now is real-time identification of bird sounds. In 2025, 11.6 million active users took advantage of Merlin’s Sound ID feature alone! I’ve caught it in a few mistakes, but if it were being graded, its accuracy would earn it a strong A.

I use Merlin a lot when I’m birding because my ears can no longer hear high frequencies. When I’m hoping to see a particular bird with a high-pitched song, such as a LeConte’s Sparrow or Golden-winged Warbler, Merlin tells me whether one is singing anywhere near.

Merlin can’t tell me where a bird is, so if I want to see or photograph it after Merlin confirms its presence, I put on my special binaural headphones, plug them into my iPhone, and turn on my Hear Birds Again app. (I wrote a lot about getting and using the app and headphones on this blog post.)

Hear Birds Again does not use the cloud or AI—it’s simply programmed to lower the frequency of high-pitched sounds coming in through tiny microphones in the headset, and makes them come through the ear pieces at a frequency I can hear. The mics are close to both ears so I can get the direction of the singing bird just as I can when I’m hearing anything without technological aids.

I don’t like wearing the headphones or using the app the whole time I’m birding—it drains my phone battery and somehow, because those high-frequency sounds are altered, my brain keeps trying to convert them to their real pitches, which tires me out. And if I don’t recognize an altered bird sound I’m hearing with “Hear Birds Again,” I have to turn the app off to use Merlin.

[Again, see footnote or Peter Repetti’s comment below suggesting that Merlin does NOT use AI.]

I can’t begin to guess how many people have told me how delighted they are when Merlin tells them about cool birds in their own backyard, or at their cabin, or when they’re traveling and don’t recognize all the new bird sounds they’re hearing. This is genuinely wonderful, and I sincerely celebrate Merlin’s popularity and how accessible it’s made birding. I also love that people can look up plants and non-avian animals with iNaturalist and Google Lens. But wouldn’t it be better for us and the natural world we love so much if we knew and could minimize these programs’ environmental costs?

A few years ago, I contributed to a Kickstarter campaign to support a project called Terra Listens that was trying to develop a small, affordable listening station for people to set up in our yards that could listen 24-7, identifying all the birds vocalizing within hearing range. Terra devices now also pick up wildlife radio tags. It took a lot of time for the small Terra team to develop and start building the units, but I got mine in 2024 and immediately set it up. Suddenly I could be working hard at my desk, glance over at my phone, and see that Trumpeter Swans were flying overhead at that very moment, or my first Brown Thrasher of the season was singing somewhere near. If I was traveling, all I had to do was turn on the app on my phone and I could see exactly what birds had been in my yard, or even listen to them live!

But this winter it hit me that Terra Listens is analyzing the sounds of cars, kids, dogs, our heat pump, my neighbors’ wind chimes, people talking, and everything else it can detect every moment of every day. I can’t imagine how energy intensive must it be to run Terra 24-7. I couldn’t justify it, so I turned my device off and brought it in for the duration. I may turn it back on during migration, especially if I find out some more specifics about just how valuable detections of wildlife radio tags are, but I just can’t see running it all the time anymore—not as more and more secretive billionaires and corporations are building more and more data centers, using more and more electricity and water and damaging more and more habitat to keep AI projects, good and bad, mushrooming.

AI, like every single thing any human has ever made, has costs and benefits. There are genuine, sometimes massive real-world benefits of some AI processes. But unless we reckon squarely with the environmental costs of this mushrooming technology, we cannot begin to work out ways of minimizing those costs and mitigating the damage. Attention must be paid.

Russ and I do our level best to minimize our consumption of natural resources. It’s easy to see exactly how much gas we use in my Kia Niro hybrid, how much electricity and water we use in our house, and how much electricity our solar panels produce. But the energy that we use via big data centers is impossible to see on our own energy bills or any other way, even as Big Data mushrooms into a larger and larger portion of virtually everyone’s energy consumption. With the exception of DVDs, CDs, vinyl, and other hard copies, every video, movie, or program we watch on our computer, phone, or tablet and every bit of music and radio we listen to via streaming comes to us through big data centers. Every time we use the internet for anything, or many of those “smart” home appliances, we’re using Big Data. The so-called cloud where we back up data and save files, and where every one of my photos on Flickr resides, is hardly up in the sky—a tech “cloud” is just a pretty word for a data center.

It’s endlessly frustrating to me that there is no way to know how much energy and water I’m using now. I resent that so many apps I use are raising prices because they’re adding AI bells and whistles that I don’t want to use. And it drives me nuts that more and more social media users, including well-meaning people and organizations who support a clean environment, are now using very energy-costly AI-generated images and avatars—they’re suddenly inescapable.

I’m constantly pleading with people to stop using generative AI to create images for uses in which real photographs would work just as well, and to turn off AI on their search engines when possible. But meanwhile, whenever I upload a blog post to Substack or a radio/podcast recording to my website, I’m putting them on a big data server, and every time someone reads or listens to my work, they’re using big data energy, too. Data centers are ginormous users of electrical power and water—two things we simply can’t afford to squander.

Yet, ironically for someone who hates how energy-intensive it is, I use big data almost every day, both when I’m outside birding and when I’m home again, processing my photos.

In 2010, when the extraordinary bird photographer Shawn Carey and I joined forces (well, we shared the cost of a small airplane and a boat) to document the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, he suggested that I start using Adobe Lightroom to tag, organize, and process my photos.

Lightroom was a game changer for me, and I’ve been using it ever since. This was back when you bought software rather than renting it, when Lightroom cost less to purchase outright than the monthly rental fee is now. (I use another Adobe product, Audition, to produce my radio show/podcast and to edit my natural recordings. I used to use Cool Edit, a shareware program that was easy for a non-tech person like me to learn, but Syntrillium sold it to Adobe in 2003. Now Lightroom and Audition are elements of Adobe’s “Creative Cloud.” None of my sound editing involves the cloud until I upload recordings.)

I’m a birder, not a photographer. I want my camera to work like binoculars only with a memory. No way do I want to fool with camera settings when I’m looking at birds, so I point and shoot in almost every situation. The only setting I ever mess with in the field is exposure—I overexpose when a bird is backlit…

… and underexpose in dark situations.

With my DSLR cameras, I used to have to guess about the exposure. Now that I have a mirrorless camera, I can see for myself whether I need to tweak it.

Except for exposure, I let my camera choose the best aperture, shutter speed, and ISO within the minimums and maximums I keep pretty constant.

Photographing the birds in the first place doesn’t involve any data centers. I upload them to my computer using “Lightroom Classic,” which doesn’t involve storing anything on the cloud. And unlike Photoshop, Lightroom doesn’t have many AI processes, but one recent addition, “Denoise,” has become part of my photo-editing routine.

To photograph birds, it’s normally best to use the fastest shutter speed and smallest aperture possible. Unfortunately, that forces the camera to use a high ISO setting, making pictures appear noticeably grainy, a problem exacerbated the more you zoom in. Some of my pictures that were otherwise fine were too grainy be used except as documentation. That’s why I now use Denoise.

Because I have to crop pictures of distant birds so much, some otherwise useful photos are too small for PowerPoint presentations, my blog, or printing. If I need one for those purposes, I can use another AI process called “Upscale” from an app I bought from Topaz Labs. I hardly ever use it—I don’t usually mind small photos, and this only works well when the photo is very sharp and clear…

…or when the subject is an important one for me, and I’ll be using that photo for a lot of purposes.

These two AI processes involve fairly straightforward machine learning, meaning their energy consumption and the water essential for cooling the data centers aren’t nearly as intensive as generative AI—getting AI to create written or illustrated work or do a complicated search. But unless we start pressuring the companies to reveal exactly how much energy and water each process uses, how can we make responsible choices about whether and how often we use even relatively lower-use processes?

Right now, tech companies are as secretive about their data centers and energy usage as Donald Trump is about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein—in both cases, the purpose is to hide information from Americans who have a right to know. At this very moment, Google wants to build a huge data center in Hermantown, Minnesota, right outside Duluth, but they kept their company’s identity secret for many months and forced the Hermantown elected city officials to sign NDAs about the project, even though those officials would be voting on a project that would affect virtually every person in the area.

Democracy dies in darkness. It’s impossible for us to make wise choices that will affect our own well-being and the world we’re leaving our children and grandchildren unless we have transparency. Tech companies should be required to reveal how much energy and water each of their products uses, and we consumers should be given clear and easy “opt-outs” for the AI elements of every app and search engine we use, and we shouldn’t have to pay for things we don’t use.

I’m not holding my breath about any of this changing. The many ways Project 2025 has already been implemented prove that the billionaires driving our government absolutely hate transparency. In his first term, Donald Trump eviscerated the popular Energy Star program which requires manufacturers to place a sticker on every new appliance showing exactly how much energy it uses so shoppers can make easy comparisons. Since 1992, Energy Star has saved an estimated 5 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity, more than $500 billion in energy costs, and prevented 4 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions. That savings for us and the environment was money insatiable billionaires wanted, and they’re the ones in the driver’s seat right now. There’s no way they’ll allow the politicians they own to expand the Energy Star program so we can see, and maybe even figure out how to conserve, the energy we’re using at their remote data centers.

Tomorrow I’ll discuss a very ironic way that a lot of us, including me, are squandering energy at big data centers, not while we’re sitting at our computers, but while we’re outdoors enjoying nature.

Birds may not have a clue about the sports we humans play, but we name plenty of teams after them, perhaps yearning for their speed, agility, fast reflexes, and superior vision and hearing. Oddly enough, I never cheer for the three major league baseball teams named for birds despite the fact that Blue Jays are among my Top Three favorite birds and I love cardinals and orioles, too.

No, I’ve been a Cubs fan for as long as I can remember, thanks to my Grandpa. I’d snuggle against him when the game was on Channel 9 in Chicago. We’d both get excited whenever Ernie Banks came up to the plate, and would hug when Jack Brickhouse yelled “Hey, hey, hey!” whenever Mr. Cub (or any other Cub) hit one out of the park.

On November 2, 2016, when Kris Bryant caught the last hit and tossed it to Anthony Rizzo to end the 10^th inning of the seventh game of the World Series, it was 11:47 p.m. EST, or 10:47 Central Time. I’m usually asleep by then, but no way could I have slept that night! There was lots of postgame coverage, and I couldn’t bring myself to turn the TV off until 1 am.

I took my little dog Pip out as always right before bed, but hokey smoke! When I stepped out the door, what to my wondering ears should I hear but a Boreal Owl, calling away right in my own backyard!

I’ve seen Boreal Owls before on Peabody Street, but the night the Cubs won the World Series remains the only time I’ve ever heard one calling here! I even got a quick glimpse of the little thing actively hunting in the back of my yard. Clearly, Nature itself was celebrating.

Oddly enough, the only other time I was with my dog Pip when I’ve come upon a Boreal Owl was on February 24, 2018. The bird had been reported multiple times that week in the Sax-Zim Bog near Highway 7 and Stone Lake Road. After hitting all my other favorite stops in the bog, I made this my last stop. Success! (Unfortunately, the little guy didn’t cooperate for photos.) When I got back in the car, I switched on the radio right when they were reporting that the US men’s curling team had just won the gold at the Winter Olympics in South Korea!

I’m not a curling fan in the way that I’m a Cubs fan, but curling is a Duluth specialty—quite a few of our friends play, and that entire victorious Olympic team hailed from in and near Duluth. And this was a first ever for a US curling team winning Olympic gold—apparently some sort of synergistic sports magic happens whenever my little dog and a Boreal Owl come together.

I was so thrilled by that Boreal Owl connection that I went to the Duluth Entertainment and Convention Center when the city celebrated the curling team. The ballroom was packed!

I like going to the DECC—when they renovated, they actually put a quote of mine about chickadees on permanent display.

And seeing the curling team was wonderful. I brought home an autographed photo of them.

Now I’m even more into curling because my son-in-law joined the Duluth Curling Club a few years ago. He and Walter watched every single one of Korey Dropkin and Cory Thiessen’s mixed doubles games during this year’s Winter Olympics, and I watched most of them. I didn’t hear of any reports of Boreal Owls all winter, so I guess a gold was out of reach, but how thrilling when the Cory/Koreys won the silver!

I knew the city would celebrate them at the DECC, but we’re avoiding large crowds as much as possible right now because of my daughter’s chemo. Fortunately, Michael got a message from the Curling Club that people in the club would greet the Cory/Koreys at the airport. That was certain to be way less crowded.

The two of them were exhausted—the women’s final was on Sunday morning in Cortina, then they took a long bus ride to Verona for the closing ceremonies and immediately got on another bus to get to the airport in Venice for their flight home, arriving here about 7:45 Monday night. Despite exhaustion and jetlag, they were friendly and patient with every one of the family, friends, and strangers (like us!) who showed up.

Both the Cory/Korey’s were so exceptionally nice that when we were headed home, Walter mentioned that he wanted a play date with them.

I get shy and self-conscious at these kinds of things, but I did muster the courage to ask Korey Dropkin if I could hold his silver medal in my hand.

It’s pure silver, 80 millimeters in diameter—just about exactly the length of a Ruby-throated Hummingbird from tip of bill to tip of tail. But boy is it heavy— 500 grams, or 1.1 pound.

That’s as heavy as 125 hummingbirds, 35–40 Black-capped Chickadees, 5 or 6 Blue Jays, or 2 Pileated Woodpeckers. Imagine that!

Of course, regulation-sized curling stones dwarf that. They weigh 38–44 pounds, which is about as much as a pair of Trumpeter Swans, North America’s heaviest birds; the smallest females weigh about 17 pounds and the heaviest males 28 pounds.

I’ve never held a curling stone; wielding a baseball is much more manageable for me. And for my 70^th birthday, Russ gave me a baseball that had been autographed by Ernie Banks.

It weighs 4.9 ounces—just about exactly the average weight of a Boreal Owl! And that brings us pretty much full circle.

Automatic Electric, the huge phone and switchboard manufacturer a few blocks from my childhood home, gave our town an enormous tax base, meaning the public school teachers in Northlake were among the best qualified and highest paid public-school teachers in Illinois, and there was funding for school programs that people would have a hard time imagining nowadays.1

At the time, every Illinois public school was required to provide physical education. Like most high schools, West Leyden had an excellent swimming pool, gymnastics equipment, track and field courses, and tennis and basketball courts, but there was also enough money to provide surprising extras. One was that senior girls had a unit of golf in gym class. All expenses, including the use of good golf clubs throughout the 6-week class and a field trip to a real golf course at the end of the unit, were paid by the school district.

Back then, I didn’t know anyone who golfed, and our TV was black and white, so if I happened to turn the TV on when a golf game was on, I’d not have noticed that the golf course was just as emerald green as Automatic Electric’s spacious lawn. But the first time I noticed a golf course as my family drove past, those same eyes that had thought Automatic Electric’s lawn was the prettiest natural space I’d ever seen were even more wowed by the golf course—so much sprawling, bright green dotted with a pond or two, lovely shade trees, and aesthetically shaped sandy-colored bunkers contrasting with even more vivid greens, each marked with a brightly colored triangular flag. What could be prettier than that?

I had no clue that golf courses were maintained with huge applications of fertilizers and pesticides, but I probably would not have cared—after all, I’d grown up with the DDT truck; FLIT guns; and a neurotoxin, hexachlorophene, in our Ipana toothpaste and teenage acne products. Kids in my class sometimes shot spit balls up into the asbestos ceiling in our class; when they got caught, they had to pry them out, along with flakes of asbestos, using a knife. I didn’t learn of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring until high school, didn’t read it until college, and didn’t really grok it until, first, birding opened my eyes to how each bird species has its own special needs and fits into its own natural communities, and second, when my maternal protectiveness kicked in with my first pregnancy, putting me on red alert to a host of dangers to all the tiny beings I loved.

I didn’t enjoy anything about golf, and our PE grade wasn’t averaged in for our class rank, so I wasn’t the least bit troubled by how utterly inept at golf I was. Most of the unit was taught on school grounds, and the one field trip to a real golf course was to occur the very week our science club was planning an 8-day camping trip to the Smoky Mountains, so I got out of it.

The teachers sponsoring our science club were focused on the physical sciences, so most of our activities involved geology, mapping, astronomy, and chemistry. We didn’t focus at all on wildlife.

It’s ironic that on these field trips I was as close to genuine wilderness as I’d ever been in my life but still thought a golf course or the oversized lawn of a local factory was the more beautiful “natural” setting.

Six years after our Smoky Mountains trip, when I was reading my brand-new Golden Guide, I figured out from the maps that there must have been a LOT of birds singing where I was in the spring of 1969. Russ and I returned to the national park in 1980, retracing our steps to several of the places we’d been, and I saw a lot of cool birds that I must have passed right by, oblivious. Ruffed Grouse. Tufted Titmice. Carolina Chickadees. Carolina Wrens. Kentucky and Hooded Warblers.

There are, of course, some birds on golf courses—indeed, one major birding destination for listers is the exclusive Biltmore Hotel’s golf course in Coral Gables, Florida.

The hotel building is a haven for several hard-to-find non-native but countable parrots.

The Biltmore golf course itself is home to a small flock of exotic but “countable” Egyptian Geese and Florida’s ubiquitous Muscovy Ducks. But native birds there are few and far between.

A few golf courses are surprisingly important for native species because otherwise the land they’re on would most likely have been developed for housing. The Princeville Makai and the Kahuku golf courses on Oʻahu are home for a few oceanic birds, including Laysan Albatrosses, who nest there every year.

But these oceanic birds don’t eat anywhere near the golf course. They find all the food for themselves and their chicks at sea, so contaminants aren’t as big an issue for them as they are for birds who need their nesting habitat to provide food as well as a simple substrate.

TV producers stick bird songs into the background soundtrack of golf tournaments to give viewers the subliminal sense that every golf course is the lovely natural setting my childhood imagination believed it to be, but TV viewers seldom notice that the sounds are often of species that would never ever be in the geographical location of the golf course, much less in that kind of habitat with crowds and cameras all about.

In 2024, there were about 16,000 golf courses in the United States and fewer than 14,000 McDonald’s restaurants, and the footprint on the landscape of even one golf course is bigger than that of all the fast food franchises put together in that town or city. The average 9-hole golf course covers 50–60 acres—significantly bigger than Automatic Electric’s sprawling 35-acre plant and property—and an 18-hole golf course covers an average 115 acres, some exceeding 200 acres. The standard heavy pesticide and fertilizer applications contaminate the water features on the courses themselves, seep into groundwater that may supply houses and farms miles away, and run off to surrounding lakes, rivers, and streams essential for golfers, non-golfers, and wildlife alike.

Every single thing we humans do to provide for both our needs and pleasures exerts an environmental cost, and millions of decent human beings love playing golf. But those golf courses could not be considered multi-use—the Biltmore does allow birders to walk on some marked and paved pathways, and there’s a surrounding pathway circling the Kahuku golf course that even bikers can use, but non-golfers are strictly kept off every inch of playing area. Golfers protect their pristine courses much more diligently than our society is willing to protect wilderness. And that simple truth breaks my heart.

1

Regarding those exceptional high school programs: our town was genuinely blue-collar. Russ’s and my families were typical—my dad and Russ’s mom finished high school, but my mother dropped out when she was 16, and Russ’s dad only attended school through sixth grade. Only one or two of our friends’ parents had gone to college, none of my relatives had, and to be honest, when I started high school, I had no clue what college even was. But somehow we were given opportunities that many kids of much more upscale suburbs didn’t get, at least not paid for by their school districts:

1. Every year we had at least one major field trip for English class—entirely free for us. Just one example: in 1968, when we were juniors, my beloved English teacher Jane Lucas took us to the Goodman Theater in downtown Chicago to see an exceptional performance of Othello that had me sobbing.

   

   I was too clueless to recognize any of the names in the program, but I kept it as a memento of a glorious experience. A full nine years later, in 1977, Russ and I went to see some science fiction movie he was excited about. I got into it a bit but got distracted very time Darth Vader spoke. His voice stirred some vague recollection that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Then, right at the climax, it hit me and I blurted out “It’s Othello!” Russ shushed me, but we stayed through the credits and saw that the role was played by David Prowse. The moment we got back to our apartment, I pulled out my old program tucked in my yearbook to prove that David Prowse played Othello, but no—some guy named James Earl Jones had played him.

   

   I took so much pride in being able to recognize voices—human and avian—that I was bummed out. Months later, Parade did a feature story about James Earl Jones, saying he’d done the voice of Darth Vader but hadn’t wanted a credit—David Prowse was the guy in the suit. Vindication! And when the original Star Wars was re-released in theaters just before The Empire Strikes Back came out, they added the credit for the actor who, for me, has always been the real Darth Vader.

   On other English class field trips, we saw other plays and at least two movies: Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
   

2. If we wanted to learn a musical instrument, the school district not only provided lessons in beginning band or orchestra class—it also provided the instruments for our own personal use so we could practice at home. For free!
   

3. All the transportation to just about all extra-curricular club events was paid by the district. The school board didn’t particularly like our science club field trips, both because they involved co-ed camping and because there was a potential for accidents hundreds of miles from home, so this was the one thing we had to pay out-of-pocket for. My parents were not willing to foot the bill, but I could usually scrounge up enough babysitting money, and the one time I did not have enough before a trip, one of our teachers advanced me the rest until I could pay him back.

   

4. I wasn’t into sports, but for the kids who were, all the equipment and transportation to events was paid for by the school.
   

5. Besides the golf unit in girls’ gym class, we also had a six-week unit on fencing.

   

   I loved it so much that I took a semester of fencing at the University of Illinois, and for a while (until I started birding—one must prioritize!) I was on the women’s fencing team at Michigan State. At the time, there was no such thing as Big Ten women’s fencing, but the men’s coach—the amazing Charles Schmitter—thought that was criminal. He received absolutely no compensation to coach us but put out notices to see if any women were interested, got the men’s team to share their equipment and help us along, and set up informal matches when the men’s team was playing where a similar unofficial women’s team was being developed.
   I still have the fencing equipment Russ bought me back in the early 90s. Again, my interest was entirely sparked during that fencing unit at West Leyden High School.