Opportunism

 Opportunism and bird migration

Pondicherry National Wildlife Refuge, New Hampshire

Migration for this autumn season brought a few nice surprises to our area. In late August and early September, we enjoyed the usual warbler show in our driveway, where a line of Balsam Firs provide a suitable place to forage. We had Cape-May Warblers, Bay-breasted Warblers (a few with some bay still on the flanks), American Redstarts, many Black-throated Green Warblers, one snazzy Wilson’s Warbler, Black-and-white Warblers, Tennessee Warblers, Nashville Warblers, Common Yellowthroats, Northern Parula, Magnolia Warblers, Blackburnian Warblers, Chestnut-sided Warblers, Yellow-rumped Warblers, Red-eyed Vireo, Blue-headed Vireos, and a few Scarlet Tanagers. Not bad.

Wilson's Warbler, Danville, Vermont. Peeking out from the interior of the vegetation.

Black-throated Green Warbler in its fall plumage. Newport, Vermont

Each migration season brings a reminder that birds have been such a successful life form due in part to a facility for opportunism. Migrating birds need stopover points with abundant food to fuel the long journey. They will be found in the kind of undisturbed habitat patches that you read about in field guides. But in addition, they are found in transient patches that just happen to arise on the route. The birds don’t seem to care whether the food (insects and caterpillars, for warblers and vireos) is provided by mature forests or by gardens and back yards. Shorebirds, herons, and egrets are drawn to healthy wetlands, but man-made wet areas will do, at least for a few hours or days of the journey. To be sure, all forms of wildlife seize on opportunities to feed, but the special mobility conferred upon birds gives them an extraordinary ability to find the smallest bit of far-flung habitat.

The local community of birders in my area has helped me to find a few of these patches. A cornfield beside the Passumpsic River in Saint Johnsbury has drawn in dabbling ducks in spring and fall, when either rain or snowmelt fills it up to a suitable level. Fruit trees around our grocery store parking lot sometimes bring in Bohemian Waxwings in the winter. Shorebirds will make use of flooded farm fields, too. I have spent time tracking down Upland Sandpipers and Buff-breasted Sandpipers in Delaware ag fields (especially sod farms), and I’ve seen Greater and Lesser Yellowlegs and Killdeer in fields close to home.

Birders are no less opportunistic than the birds. If the birds happen to be there, why not stop and look at them? Even when the scenery is – ahem -- not winning any awards, shall we say.  In New Mexico, west Texas, and Arizona, sewage treatment plants become an accidental food source to shorebirds, dabbling ducks, and herons. The Tucson sewage plant is famed among birders: I went there once for a Least Grebe, a rarity from south of the border. (It is comically named "Sweetwater wetlands.") We once ventured to the sewage plant of forlorn Lordsburg, New Mexico to see a Black-bellied Whistling Duck. Similar ponds in New Mexico gave me a chance to see White-rumped Sandpiper, Semipalmated Plover, Short-billed Dowitcher, Wilson’s Phalarope, Red-necked Phalarope, Baird’s Sandpiper, and Solitary Sandpiper. All of these were in places that were arid for tens of kilometers in all directions. (Except for the Rio Grande, which does not form mudflats that attract shorebirds, having been channelized by order of state legislatures.) It demonstrates how shorebirds, while flying thousands of miles south in the fall, mostly over dry land of the interior US, will not pass up an opportunity to exploit a wetland, small though it may be. A sewage pond lacks mud, the key ingredient for shorebird dinner, but it does possess insects in copious numbers.

In Vermont this fall, a birder alerted me to a Solitary Sandpiper in a flooded pasture nearby. Intrigued, I went there and found a pair of Stilt Sandpipers, a rarity away from lakes and oceans (at least in the East). The spot, on Old Silo Road near Barnet, is interesting. In the floodplain of the Passumpsic River, water collects there in spring and fall for a few weeks at most, before disappearing by evaporation and slowly draining to the river. Hoof action from the cows gives rise to mud and shallow puddles that mimics the mudflats around marshes. It becomes a bit of a shorebird magnet. Solitary Sandpipers were there for the whole season. The pair of Stilt Sandpipers stayed only a day (so far as we know). But what a day it was, for the nutritional requirements of a long-traveling sandpiper. Stilt Sandpipers breed in the Canadian arctic, and then fly as far south as Argentina – thirteen thousand kilometers to the wintering grounds. That requires a whole lot of calories.

Stilt Sandpipers in a farm field, Barnet, Vermont

Other birders found a group of gulls at Moore Dam, on the Connecticut River on the state line between New Hampshire and Vermont. I have visited the spot many times in the last few years, with almost no result. The Moore Reservoir just doesn’t seem to do much for avian wildlife. My suspicion is that the water level is yanked up and down to satisfy hydroelectric power demand, and this wreaks havoc with the aquatic food chain. Industrial pollution from past mill operations is also a factor. Ducks and loons just can’t find much to sustain them. Gulls have been few and far between. But in late August, a small group of gulls found their way to the dam, perching on those red buoys guarding the dam structures. The birders found the usual Ring-billed Gulls and Herring Gulls, but also a few Great Black-backed Gulls. The last of these is mostly coastal in distribution, but also makes use of the Great Lakes in winter, and sometimes the Connecticut River farther south. A sharp-eyed observer found that one of the larger gulls didn’t quite fit the pattern, and called out a Lesser Black-backed Gull among them – a coastal bird for sure. That drew another birder, who noticed a small, brown-colored bird in the flock that proved to be a juvenile Laughing Gull. Another coastal species. Yet another birder noticed a tern, which proved to be a juvenile Forster’s Tern. This one uses the interior of the continent routinely, but is rare this far north. These birds were joined by one juvenile Bonaparte’s Gull, an uncommon visitor to the area.

Laughing Gull, out of place at Moore Dam in New Hampshire

What was going on here? A few days prior to the gulls’ appearance, Hurricane Debby pushed through the southeastern US. (It hit South Carolina in the first week of August.) Storms have a way of stirring things up for birds. High winds will push a few of them northward. Some of the birds, especially juveniles with no experience, will drift inland. When the winds dissipate, the birds will find some suitable patch of habitat to land on. In this case, the Moore Reservoir on the Connecticut River was the draw. I observed this flock for several hours spaced across a few weeks of time, and I almost never saw them feeding successfully. They perceived the large body of water to be appropriate, but (being mostly juveniles) they did not recognize that there was very little food there. They eventually shipped out and likely joined their compatriots in better parts to the south. Opportunism drove them to make use of Moore Reservoir, but it was a short-lived impulse.

The ultimate example of opportunistic use of “habitat” must be an example from the northeastern US. Dairy farms generate a lot of manure, which is collected and processed for spreading on hay and corn fields. Manure is initially stored in an open pit, where it becomes a breeding ground for insects. Passing shorebirds take notice. In Vermont, a few of these pits become some of the best places to find shorebirds, since natural mudflats are almost impossible to find. This fall, I found a juvenile Baird’s Sandpiper at a pit near Hardwick. There were large numbers of Least, Semipalmated, Solitary, Spotted Sandpipers, and Killdeer at the same spot. Birding at a manure pit makes birding at a sewage plant seem positively fragrant.

Baird's Sandpiper, at a manure pit near Hardwick, Vermont

Clearly, patches of habitat are needed by migrant birds moving long distances in August, September, and October. What can humans do to help? First of all, we need to care for our wetlands. We have been altering them for human uses and human convenience for centuries. Many wetlands – thousands of square miles worth – have been altogether destroyed. Many have been modified in a quest to reduce mosquito-borne malaria. Many midwestern wetlands have been filled in to grow crops. Although it is hard to quantify, these actions have certainly resulted in population reductions for birds amounting to millions, and perhaps a billion. The modern form of ecological science has begun to quantify the damage, but much of the loss cannot easily be reversed without economic disruption to coastal city populations of people like you and me.

Second, we need to improve the way we manage the wetlands that still remain. Water levels can theoretically be managed carefully to sustain mudflats. This is true for both private and public lands. Reservoirs are mostly managed by the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation. Both have dreadful histories of monitoring wildlife populations on and near reservoirs and in the rivers they are situated on. The agencies comply with the Endangered Species Act, but just barely, and often only under pressure from conservation group lawsuits. Many hydroelectric dams in the east, like Moore Dam, are privately owned, and conservation goals are not valued highly.

One might expect better performance from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which operates National Wildlife Refuges. Indeed, many NWRs today contain some of the best habitat in the country for waterfowl. But there are still problems. NWR managers normally feel that their mandate is restricted to ducks and geese, which generate significant revenue through hunting. Water in NWRs is managed to optimize duck habitat, but this doesn’t always work for shorebirds. Production of mudflats requires attention to the timing and amounts of water in impoundments. The showpiece for shorebird management is the legendary Bombay Hook NWR in Delaware. (The odd name seems to come from a dark chapter in its history, when the wetland was used to train bomber pilots for World War II combat.)

Scanning for shorebirds at Bombay Hook NWR, Delaware

Congress really needs to act to change the USFWS mission to enhance and preserve shorebird habitat on all refuges, even if waterfowl habitat suffers a bit. Congress should also force private dam owners to examine their impacts on wildlife. They operate at the behest of the people on whose land they occupy, so corporate goals should not be allowed to trump the public interest.

A mass of shorebirds at Bombay Hook NWR, Delaware, May 2024. Dunlins, Semipalmated Sandpipers, Short-billed Dowitchers, Semipalmated Plovers, and Black-bellied Plovers.

Sage Grouse

 Sage Grouse

In nearly four decades of birding, I had never managed to make contact with Sage Grouse. It is mostly a resident of Wyoming, southern Idaho, eastern Montana, and eastern Washington, places to which I have rarely or never ventured. This summer we traveled to northern Colorado to see them at the southeastern edge of the bird’s range.

Greater Sage-grouse, Coalmont

The Sage Grouse is well named.  It is intimately tied to sagebrush, especially the species known as Big Sagebursh, Artemisia tridentata (the leaf being three-toothed in shape). Before European settlement, tridentata occupied vast areas of the American west (270 million acres), and it was healthy. (Varieties of this shrub can be bought in nurseries in New Mexico, and they do well in the yard with no supplemental water – as we learned when living there.) This made the Sage Grouse happy and it thrived. There are several closely related species of grouse in North America, likely deriving from some original grouse-like bird before specializing into the continent’s unique habitats. Sage Grouse decided to settle down in the semi-arid, mostly flat areas between mountain ranges in the upper northern portions of the American west, including nearby parts of Canada. The vast regions of Big Sagebrush were also colonized by specialized bunchgrasses that occupied the places between shrubs. The Sage Grouse found good use for that too, with the tall grasses helping to hide chicks from predators. In the long cold and windy winters of the region, the Sage Grouse learned to survive by eating sage leaves. The unique characteristics of this habitat caused the species to differentiate from the other grouse like Dusky Grouse, which kept to the mountains, and Greater Prairie Chicken in the tallgrass prairie to the east.

Native American tribes would have been intimately familiar with the Sage Grouse. The lavish and energetic displays of males during courtship must have been witnessed and marveled at by generations of tribal people. It doesn’t seem too far-fetched to imagine that spring-season Sage Grouse dances at lek sites were part of the inspiration for tribal dances that one can still experience today. The tribes would have hunted the abundant grouse in appropriate season, and would have treasured the breeding plumes of the male birds as precious and rare. They would have been expertly informed about where the grouse thrived and what it needed to perpetuate.

These lessons, like so many of the period, were lost on European settlers, who were oblivious to the specially-adapted species until the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1806. The settlers were obsessed with raising livestock, which became a lucrative business once the railroads were established in the late 1800s. At first, coexistence was possible; after all, the semi-arid plains of Wyoming and Montana were not particularly attractive places to raise a family. But livestock-raising quickly turned into an industry, and the two were set on a collision course that would become contentious in 2005. Conservation groups noted a steep decline in Sage Grouse numbers in that era, resulting in a petition to force federal and state governments to take protective action.

After studying the maps in field guides and in eBird, I settled on the headwaters of the North Platte River, in north-central Colorado. One of the premier Sage Grouse locations is the expansive Arapaho National Wildlife Refuge near the town of Walden. Tourism is important but not a dominant economic force in this remote region of large flat sagebrush-grass flats ringed by three towering mountain ranges, which feed snowmelt into the meandering streambeds that feed ponds and eventually merge into the river. The Arapaho, nicely named after one of the tribes of the region, was established in the mid 1960s. The main purpose was habitat for nesting and migrating ducks and geese, who were losing ground to agriculture in the Midwest. An incidental benefit was the preservation of Big Sagebrush and the aptly-named Sagebrush Steppe habitat. This is yet another example of how habitat preservation for one group of species brings benefits to many more, a not-so-subtle feature of public lands management that is quickly forgotten in every case of proposed new refuge or park establishment. 

Sunrise at Arapaho National Wildlife Refuge. In the morning haze of distant forest fire smoke.

We began our refuge tour at sunrise, noting a great many perched Swainson’s Hawks waiting for warm air to soar in. Brewer’s and Vesper Sparrows were camped out with Sage Thrashers at the top of almost every sagebrush. A thrilling Long-tailed Weasel bounced along just off the road, looking for breakfast in the fields of White-tailed Prairie Dogs, which scampered across the road at every bend. American White Pelicans paddled around improbably in the ponds, a Sora sounded off, and American Coots were too numerous to count. Every large puddle held a few Wilson’s Phalaropes gathering insects on the surface. White-faced Ibis floated over in formation.

Swainson's Hawks near Coalmont, Colorado. Juveniles waiting for the next feeding.

Our first Sage Grouse appeared in sage and tall grass off the refuge road in the dim early light. They were unexpectedly large for grouse, much more so than the Dusky Grouse to which I was accustomed from New Mexico. They seemed weirdly huge, as if they had stretched beyond their prescribed body contours. Initially at rest, they perked up when I stopped the car, and mildly alarmed, soon wandered off into the sage. The light was challenging because the skies were filled with smoke from distant forest fires to the north and west in other parts of the continent. But we could make out the fine white markings on the back, a black belly, and long tail. A disjunct population of these birds occurs further to the south in Colorado and to a limited extent in eastern Utah. Having no contact with the rest of the species for probably millennia, it was declared a separate species a few decades ago, the Gunnison Sage-grouse. In the Arapaho, the new name is Greater Sage-grouse. Greater indeed, for these birds seemed to stalk off with aplomb. They melted quietly into sagebrush and out of sight.

White-tailed Prairie Dog, Arapaho National Wildlife Refuge

Oddly enough, these birds were not far from a herd of cattle. The refuge permits livestock in small numbers, reportedly to shake up the vegetation a bit and promote the growth of young sagebrush. Not being a big fan of arid-lands grazing, I was skeptical, but I must say that judging by the vegetation, the grazing is light indeed. Maybe someday the cows can be replaced by American Bison.

Cattle herd in the Arapaho National Wildlife Refuge. Notice the relatively healthy sage and grass: the grazing intensity is light here.

Later that morning we found a trio of Greater Sage-grouse in the area around Coalmont. They first appeared sitting in the middle of the gravel road, apparently taking in some sunshine in the cool morning air of about 6 degrees C. As we approached, they lost patience and took to the air. They flew strongly and with purpose on large wings, a few feet off the ground, and slowly dropped over the horizon. We found a large group farther down the road near a lake. Two adult females were chaperoning 6 young birds. We stayed silent and got close looks in the tall grass, before they slowly wandered off and disappeared. It was a perfect illustration of their need for luxuriant grasses. Although it appeared to be private land here, both sage and grasses looked healthy. Several Pronghorn wandered around as well, trotting through the sage with a supreme ease.

Greater Sage-grouse near Coalmont, Colorado

In the 1990s, wildlife observers and biologists became worried about a decline in Sage Grouse numbers, and a shrinking of the range. The causes were documented well by researchers. Habitat alteration by residential and commercial development and by a growing number of oil and gas wells were contributors. Fences and poles provide perches for predators that enhance their success at grouse capture. The intrusion of exotic plants is another factor. Livestock grazing, prompted by a growing national demand for MacDonald’s cheeseburgers, has also been mentioned. Many ranchers protested the analysis. Cows eat grass and Sage Grouse eat sage, so what’s the problem?

The impacts are many. Livestock can trample the sage shrubs as they forage, threatening the health of the plants. Heavy grazing causes the grasses to decline and even be eliminated. That leaves Sage Grouse chicks easy to spot by predators, causing a dent in nest productivity (the number of chicks fledged each year). The reduction of grasses alters the insect life, which adult and young grouse need for growth. Cow herds tend to bring in Cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum), an invading annual species from Asia that chokes out the natives. (I personally witnessed the dramatic growth of Cheatgrass in northern New Mexico in the 1990s and 2000s. The ground grows eerily green very early in the spring, and then quickly turns inedibly brown and shades out native perennial grasses that green up much later.) Incubating adults may abandon their nests when large herbivores come too close. Livestock are also devastating to fragile riparian areas that the grouse sometimes use for water and forage. Sagebrush can fall prey to ranchers who use heavy equipment to rip it out of grazing areas, in a desperate but usually fruitless attempt to increase the grass cover on the land. We saw a few areas like this in our drives around the area.

In theory, we have land managers who are federal employees and can watch out for these negative impacts on native wildlife, working in agencies such as the US Forest Service (USFS) and Bureau of Land Management (BLM). In practice, it is a different story. One of the conservation groups observed shrewdly, “the BLM is trapped by federal law, and compelled by politicians, local resource users, and its own organizational culture to continue livestock grazing even to the detriment of fish, wildlife and watersheds.” I have been known to cynically refer to BLM as the “Bureau of Livestock and Mining.”

In the face of this, conservation groups filed petitions in the 2000s to get the federal agencies to declare the grouse endangered. The US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) agreed in 2010 that the bird should be classified as endangered, but that they lacked the money and staff to do so (the dreaded “warranted but precluded” designation). Conservation groups like the Center for Biological Diversity and the Western Watersheds Project kept the pressure on with negotiation and the threat of lawsuits. In 2015, it seemed like a victory for the conservationists was imminent.

It was not. Enter our beloved US Congressmen. They included language in appropriations bills in 2015 to prevent the USFWS from declaring the bird endangered. Now, this creates all kinds of confusion over the role of government agencies. The USFWS is ostensibly supported by Congress. Funds are allocated to them annually by Congress to carry out a prescribed mission. But now we have Congressmen dictating what actions they can and cannot perform? That seems blatantly contradictory. What is the use of having an agency to protect endangered species if Congress has its hand on the steering wheel? The USFWS, under pressure from western Congressmen, issued a statement in 2015 that they would rely on a land management plan as an alternative to Endangered Species Act listing. They trumpeted it as “an unprecedented conservation partnership” and claimed to be protecting 90% of the 173-million acre range of the bird.

Pronghorn near Coalmont, Colorado

Then Trump got elected, and things got worse, as you might guess. In 2018, Trump ordered political appointees (Ryan Zinke) to gut protections for the Sage Grouse, carving out nine million acres of land to wind and solar farms, drilling, mining, and cornfields for ethanol production. The recent Supreme Court decision on the Chevron doctrine (2024) is likely to complicate things even further. The rationale of the Congressmen (mostly western-state Congressmen) is that local authorities are already doing everything they can to protect habitat and ensure the grouse’s future. Is that true? The way to assess those programs is to look at numbers of birds detected in surveys, and those numbers continue to shrink.

Lark Bunting in Colorado

And that leaves us at a standstill. Both species of Sage-grouse are in a downward spiral, and both forms of government (state and federal) are standing around with their hands in their pockets. The likely outcome is that the birds will eventually become critically endangered. It might get to the point of no return, with no amount of money able to retrieve them. The bird with such a facility for vanishing into the tall grasses might end up vanishing into the aether instead.

Greater Sage-grouse, before disappearing into the tall grasses

We didn’t stay in the Walden area long enough to get an idea of how local people think about these issues. But one minor bit of insight comes from a roadside sign related to different wildlife issue. In November 2020, Colorado held a referendum on reintroducing wolves to the state, as a way to supplement the highly successful effort in Wyoming and its spillover effects in Montana, Idaho, and Washington. There was controversy over the proposal, and the vote was very close, but voters approved the proposition, and Coloradans are looking forward to hosting wild wolves for the first time in a century. In Walden, a landowner voiced his or her scorn over the reintroduction program with a prominent sign saying “If you voted for reintroduction of wolves, do not recreate here. You are not welcome.”

Roadside sign just north of Walden, Colorado

One would be hard-pressed to find a sadder manifestation of entrenched attitudes toward wildlife. Is this landowner really prepared to reject the revenue from wildlife tourism? In our short trip, we spent several hundred dollars to see Greater Sage-grouse, on rental car, gas, hotel bills, restaurant meals, and groceries. We participated in keeping Colorado businesses active and prosperous, just to see a rare resident bird. We plan to do so again in the future, since Greater Prairie Chicken and Sharp-tailed Grouse are still on the list. All of this provides a badly needed shot in the arm to Colorado’s economy. Doesn’t that count for something?

 

Variegated Fritillary. Near Zimmerman Lake, Colorado.

The Birds of Oppenheimer

 The Birds of Oppenheimer

Last year’s powerful film Oppenheimer moved people in many different ways and was granted many awards. Given my professional activities, my interest in the film embraces many dimensions. One worth capturing on this blog is the film’s depiction of the landscape and its wildlife, which was my preoccupation for three decades (still burning strong today).

The siting of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos is a story documented by numerous historians and popular science writers, in greatest detail in “American Prometheus,” the fabulous book by Bird and Sherwin that inspired the movie. Oppenheimer had strong connections with northern New Mexico that trace back to his childhood. Although his professional life was centered at other places (Berkeley, Pasadena, Princeton, and Europe), he returned many times to vacation in New Mexico, ultimately purchasing a cabin there at the southern end of the Pecos Wilderness in the Sangre de Cristo Mountain range, east of Santa Fe. Today there are Forest Roads passing quite close to the cabin site; I went to that general area many times for hiking and wildlife watching, so I have a profound understanding of the allure. When Groves and Oppenheimer sought a site to build the bomb, they initially looked at picturesque Jemez Springs, northwest of Albuquerque in the southern part of the Jemez Mountains (American Prometheus p. 205). Groves didn’t think much of the canyon location, so Oppenheimer suggested the Pajarito Plateau, where he had taken long horseback rides on his visits. (Those rides must have begun in Santa Fe, not the inconveniently remote cabin location in the Sangre de Cristos.) The film depicts this search briefly but plausibly. Oppenheimer knew about the Los Alamos Ranch School on the plateau, and suggested that Groves consider it. (“Los Alamos” refers to the gallery forests of cottonwoods in the wet spots of the canyons.) Oppie would have known at that point that the view is inspirational and the mesa tops suitable for construction. The jeep ride from Jemez Springs to Los Alamos, along logging roads, must have been quite an adventure in the early 1940s, and would have taken easily a half day. But Groves was sold, and history was made. Hans Bethe and George Kistiakowsky were two of the legendary scientists on the project who appreciated the selection of that site, bringing back their own childhood memories of the Swiss alps, and they spent spare hours hiking up to the peaks above the project site. (My late professional colleague Tony Arrington was a graduate student of Kistiakowsky’s, who was raised in Kyiv Ukraine and then taught chemistry at Harvard.) They also carved ski trails out of the forested slopes – Kistiakowsky put leftover explosives to good use to bring down the bigger pine and Douglas Fir trees. (He needed practice on implosion design, after all.)

Gallina Canyon, Jemez Mountains. Ponderosa Pines that have escaped the axe. I don't know if Oppenheimer ever made it there, but it is the kind of place he talked about often.

The plateau where the Los Alamos laboratory is situated today did not get its name until quite late in the history of human settlement and use. The predecessors of today’s native American Northern Pueblos used the plateau about a thousand years ago (and likely much longer); ancient cliff dwellings can still be visited today in Bandelier National Monument, in Frijoles Canyon and other places. Early Spanish settlers left their mark in the 1600s-1700s; they carved wagon paths and brought livestock to graze, cut firewood, and expanded on the trails that the native Americans had left. Adolph Bandelier and Edgar Lee Hewett studied archeological sites on the plateau in the late 1800s. The story goes that Hewett thought the plateau needed a name. He must not have gotten input from the numerous Pueblo people who were close by, or maybe they did have names for it that Hewett chose to ignore.  But he landed on “Pajarito,” which means “little bird” in Spanish. I have wondered which little bird Hewett was inspired by. If he spent a lot of time there in July and August, he would certainly have seen four species of hummingbirds visiting the abundant penstemon wildflowers (Broad-tailed, Black-chinned, Rufous, and Calliope Hummingbirds). Or maybe he noticed the flocks of Bushtits using the Pinyon Pine and One-seed Juniper that were abundant on the mesa tops. Or the many Pygmy Nuthatches in the tall stands of Ponderosa Pine.

The southern tip of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains as seen from the Pajarito Plateau. At sunrise in December.

When it came time to film the 2023 movie, the director was faced with a problem of his own. The town and lab of Los Alamos are thoroughly developed, and the kinds of uncontaminated views that Oppenheimer appreciated no longer existed. So Christopher Nolan opted for Ghost Ranch, about an hour’s drive north of Los Alamos. It is a place of great beauty. With red rock cliffs looking over a wide valley, it is generally regarded as one of the most beautiful spots in the state, which Georgia O’Keeffe would reiterate. The iconic figure of Cerro Pedernal (“flint hill”) towers over the southern edge of the valley through which the Rio Chama meanders (or did, until Abiquiu Dam was so rudely imposed in 1959).

Cerro Pedernal looming above Ghost Ranch on a winter morning

Ownership of Ghost Ranch is a combination of private, US Forest Service, and Bureau of Land Management, preserving the kind of vistas that have provided backdrops for many films. The bird life of Ghost Ranch shares much in common with pre-development Los Alamos, making it a nice substitute, as you can experience today driving along Route 84. Like much of the land in the state, Ghost Ranch is both arid and overgrazed by cattle, which is a shame. But movie cameras don’t get close to the plants, so the defect is glossed over. A few other scenes capture Oppie moving with friends on horseback through the landscape, and these were mostly filmed in central Santa Fe county, where the Ortiz Mountains, Sandia Mountains, and Sangre de Cristo Mountains provide the backdrop. I know this because I recognize the peaks in the camera footage, and because the landscape is clearly pinyon-juniper (“P-J”) scattered among forbs. I spent many thousands of hours making my own bird-finding drives in that area along Rte 14, Rte 285, and the intervening dirt roads. (I carried out Breeding Bird Surveys for almost twenty years.)

Last week I watched Oppenheimer for a second time, so I could pay more attention to the details. It was a reminder for me of a dramatic device used by sound editors of Hollywood movies. When the action shifts from an indoor conversation to the outdoors, the sound editor sprinkles in a few bird sounds to cleverly clue in the audience. Listeners who are birders like me have this secondary auditory experience as we watch. It is mostly a pleasurable one, but with caveats. Hollywood sound editors don’t pay much attention to using the right bird sounds in the right locations. This is not just a minor issue for us; we spend huge amounts of effort searching for birds in local patches of suitable habitat at suitable seasons and time of day, so this stuff matters – a lot. Movie sound editors obviously choose bird sounds that are loud and distinctive to make an impression. That’s reasonable, but I wish they would try harder to get the right ones. So, specifically, “Oppenheimer” at about the 1:01 mark shows Oppie rolling into the lab site at Los Alamos to the call of a Cactus Wren. At the 1:27 mark, Kitty searches for Oppie on horseback in a dark, late afternoon canyon with snow patches on the ground, and a Carolina Wren sings out.

Cactus Wren, on a Cholla cactus near Blue Grama grass. Santa Fe county, NM

Those are North American birds, so what is there to complain about? Plenty. Cactus Wren is not a bird of the Pajarito Plateau. It is common in southern New Mexico, where the landscape is a lot lower, flatter, and more arid. Now to be sure, Cactus Wren is slowly on the march to the north. Most of us believe this can be attributed to overgrazing by cattle that has caused Cholla Cactus to move north and to colonize flat sunny spots where the competition from palatable grasses has been eliminated. Cactus Wren really likes Cholla, because it provides perfect sites for nest building, and it probably supplies the right kind of insect life for Cactus Wrens to thrive on. In recent decades, the northern extent of the range of Cactus Wren had been Socorro (Hubbard, John P. Check-list of the Birds of New Mexico. 1968), quite a ways south of the lab site that was being portrayed in the film. Those of us who bird in Santa Fe county got kind of excited when Cactus Wrens moved in and set up shop in 2014. Today, they seem to be entrenched there, at least in small numbers. But they are still restricted to places like the Caja del Rio plateau, across the Rio Grande and east of the Pajarito Plateau and significantly different because of the slope, predominant vegetation, and soil conditions. Cactus Wren was non-existent as far north as Los Alamos in the 1940s, decades before range expansion kicked in. So, sorry sound editor, but that particular bird call is incongruous in that setting.

How about Oppenheimer’s Carolina Wren? It is one of the loudest and most distinctive bird songs in North America, heard commonly because they are well adapted to human residences. But, as the name suggests, it is a bird of eastern North America, not New Mexico. West of the Mississippi, the wren family is represented more by Bewick’s Wren, Canyon Wren, Rock Wren, Cactus Wren, House Wren, and Marsh Wren. Here again, it is important to point out that Carolina Wren is slowly expanding westward. Nobody is quite sure why this is happening, because the North American west was never thought to provide the right habitat. Perhaps it is growth of human settlements. So Carolina Wren started to gain a foothold in New Mexico near Socorro on the Rio Grande, in dense riparian areas, in the late 1990s. I found one in Santa Fe county in the autumn of 2016, but it was a brief visit only. In the 1940s on Pajarito Plateau? Certainly not, as attested by published sources on bird distribution. (The most recent and most detailed of these is the treatise by ornithologist Sandy Williams.)

Carolina Wren. A rare vagrant at the Santa Fe Canyon Preserve, 2016.

The service provided by film sound editors is a vital one. I think it is wonderful when a film is enhanced by the right bird vocalization in the time and place of the film script. It adds an element of authenticity and realism. But, jeez guys, get it right. Bird songs and calls can only very rarely be captured by the microphone in the filming process, so they are almost always added in at post-production. Today we have voluminous sound libraries  that are available  at everyone’s fingertips – let’s use them! In the case of “Oppenheimer”, instead of piping in a Cactus Wren, it would have been great to use sounds of Pinyon Jay, Acorn Woodpecker, Northern Flicker, Western Wood-Pewee, Ash-throated Flycatcher, Plumbeous Vireo, Steller’s Jay, Juniper Titmouse, Black-headed Grosbeak, Bullock’s Oriole, White-crowned Sparrow – so many to choose from. Instead of the ringing song of Carolina Wren, it was a missed opportunity to use Canyon Wren, one of the most beautiful North American bird songs. They are commonly heard today in Los Alamos Canyon, above the town. Or how about a Grace’s Warbler?

Canyon Wren. Diablo Canyon, Santa Fe county, New Mexico

I make the same plea to Ken Burns, who has created so many wonderful films about American history. Burns’s editorial team makes frequent use of bird sounds, adding much to the film experience. But there are too many times when they choose a jay, oriole, sparrow, or warbler from the wrong side of the continent or the wrong elevational range or the wrong season. Surprising, in light of Burns’s exceptional focus on accuracy.

In years of watching films and television documentaries, I have found it amusing to note what bird sounds are selected to populate the soundtracks. One common call is the Boreal Owl. Ironically, Boreal Owl is one of the most difficult species to find in North America, at least when it is singing, which happens only when the snow is too deep for humans on foot. Not so rare in movies. Prairie Warbler is a frequent guest on programs, often mislocated in western places where it doesn’t occur. The fierce call of the Red-tailed Hawk is frequently heard on television ads. It is a piercing, descending scream. Amusingly, though, it usually accompanies the video image of Bald Eagle. Apparently, Madison Avenue thinks that the very different, whimpering call of the eagle is not what it should be, if you aim to sell stuff. British period dramas are fond of using the repetitive call of the Chiffchaff and the low hoot of the Eurasian Collared Dove. For Africa, the favorite seems to be White-browed Coucal, which I have nicknamed the “David Attenborough Bird.”

Red-tailed Hawk, Jemez Mountains, New Mexico

One additional comment about Oppenheimer pertains to the weather. The Trinity Test, the first explosion test of the newly designed bomb, occupies much of the middle part of the movie. The scene depicts a long delay in the test, at today’s White Sands Missile Range, due to a rainstorm. The portrayed project scientists and technicians don thick rubber raincoats or huddle indoors in a fierce, wind-driven rain. It appears to last for hours, causing everyone to mill about in nervous anticipation. In New Mexico, in mid-July?  Wait a minute. It doesn’t rain like that in the southwest. July is the month of afternoon thunderstorms, and it rains alright, but in any one location, it never rains for more than about fifteen minutes. The rain can be intense, but brief. And on a hot summer day, it usually feels nice to let your clothes get a little wet. In my thousands of hours of bird finding in the southwest, I never took a raincoat with me. Historical accounts say that there was a storm delay on that famous day (or infamous, to some). It was highly unusual that there was storm activity in the early morning at 4:00. But it was only a short one, and the intensity of the storm was “hollywood-ized” in the film as a tension-building device for dramatic effect.

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There is a tragic side to the otherwise compelling story of the site selection of Los Alamos. While the Pajarito Plateau provided enough flat spaces for the bomb development work, the plateau was subdivided by canyons with small and slow-moving streams. The canyons became the inevitable repository of chemical waste from the handling of nuclear materials. In the desperate scramble of wartime, there was no time even to consider waste disposal. Later, in the 1950s and 1960s, national standards for waste treatment were lax because fate and transport of chemicals and radionuclides was not well understood. Technologies improved in the 1970s and later, reducing outflow to the canyons, but the damage was done, and the canyons accumulated legacy materials. Analytical chemistry technologies made enormous strides during that same time, enabling the precise determination of even the most trace radionuclide quantities in soil, vegetation, and rock, and there are multiple, well-documented contamination areas that are known today. A program  exists today to keep track of these legacy sites, but unfortunately there is no practical way to clean up all of them without destroying the canyons as ecologically important areas for wildlife and spring runoff management. Ironically, if Oppenheimer had less love for New Mexico’s topography and scenery, and Groves had chosen some flat, featureless area for the Manhattan Project, the chemical and radionuclide waste problems would be far less pressing today. But that’s not the way it worked out.

Puffin

 Puffin

In June, we ventured a few hours out of the Northeast Kingdom to see one of the Atlantic’s amazing seabirds. We drove east through the White Mountains and wound our way to coastal Maine. We boarded a large boat in mid-morning and steamed out of the harbor toward Eastern Egg Rock. We were excited about the excursion, but it was raining slightly. Then it rained harder. We approached the island (i.e. the rock) and it rained harder. The boat circled the island (or at least half-circled, staying out of the wind), and we got some very wet looks at Atlantic Puffin.

Atlantic Puffin taking off from the water. Eastern Egg Rock

This spectacular American seabird, sporting a rainbow bill and tuxedo, is only just barely American. It persists at only five places off the coast of Maine (Eastern Egg Rock, Machias Seal Island, Matinicus Rock, Petit Manan Island, Seal Island). It breeds in much larger numbers in Canada (and also in the UK and Scandinavia). But seeing one in the US is another one of those birding pilgrimages.

I saw my first Atlantic Puffin decades ago on Machias Seal Island, which is the best place to get close looks and spectacular photos.

Atlantic Puffin, Machias Seal Island off the coast of Maine. Summer 1986

But in recent years, it’s become very difficult to get there. Machias, oddly enough, is a disputed island close to the border. It’s hard to imagine that the US and Canada could not have resolved the ownership question, but the ongoing dispute has the result that there is only a single boat allowed to land on it. Tickets for those boat rides are almost impossible to get, so we opted for Eastern Egg Rock. 

Eastern Egg Rock, off the coast of Maine

A company operates out of Boothbay Harbor, from which it takes an hour to get to the rock. Puffins were reintroduced there in the 1970s. There are now as many as a few hundred breeding pairs. When we got there, it was a crazy scene as puffins loafed around on the water beside the boat, and perched on rocks. Despite its large size, the boat pitched up and down a lot, making photography in the rain nearly impossible, so we tried our best with binoculars.

Puffin in the rain, Eastern Egg Rock

There are some other good things to look at that occur in smaller numbers, but the conditions were not favorable. After a half hour of circling, the boat headed back to port. We were soaked and not feeling very satisfied. So we sat in a brewpub that afternoon (the Bath Ale Works, with fantastic beers, on Route 1 just past Wiscasset). We bought tickets on a Hardy Boat cruise for the next day, which operates out of New Harbor nearby. We were rewarded with a sunny day, a bit windy, but much better for seeing. The onboard tour guide, employed by National Audubon Society, explained that sunny days mean fewer puffins. Rain brings more puffins because the horizon is obscured, causing them to stay closer to find fish. So on our sunny day, we had a few dozen instead of a few hundred, but it was thrilling nonetheless.

Puffins. Eastern Egg Rock

Another target bird for us was Roseate Tern, a rare and threatened tern that also has a very limited breeding range in the US. We sorted through the thousand or so Common Terns and found two or three Roseates, which appear as gleaming white in comparison, with all-black bills. They seemed to fly with a lot of elegance. I managed a few distant photos that are passable, but will not win any awards.

Roseate Tern on the right, with Common Terns

Roseate Tern on the left, with Common Terns

Roseate Tern, center, with Common Terns 

Arctic Terns were also present in small numbers, but much harder to pick out in the crowd.

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The ability to enjoy puffins on Eastern Egg Rock is attributable to a single person: Stephen Kress, a man of vision and determination, two traits that have all but disappeared in today’s America. Kress’s story  is known to a few birders, but holds some important lessons. He was a young bird researcher in the sixties when he stumbled on an obscure reference to a former breeding colony on Eastern Egg Rock. The colony was wiped out by egg hunters in the late 1800s. Kress must have thought, “that’s something that needs to be corrected,” and he began a hugely laborious task. He persuaded the Canadians to let him take hatchlings from a well-established colony up north, and brought them to Egg Rock and fed them by hand in 1973. It worked: they ambled out into the sea when fattened up and fully feathered. They would return a few years later when mature. At least, that was the theory.

Kress continued releases for several years. He pioneered seabird recovery methods. He posted puffin decoys and played puffin calls through speakers on the island – he must have hauled over a generator or some large and heavy batteries.  He removed gulls from the rock, which would have made quick work of any chicks. He encouraged terns to nest, which happened seven years into the project. This was a key step: the terns would harass the gulls better than human effort could. Terns had also disappeared partly through the feather trade. Our Audubon guide showed us a historical photo with a hat on a woman’s head sporting an entire Common Tern carcass. (A bizarre and gruesome chapter in the history of fashion.) Researchers on the island today report seeing mobs of terns attacking Great Black-backed Gulls who dare to prowl.

Stephen Kress released and released, but no birds were returning to breed. In 1981, it was eight years into the project. His critics were telling him it was hopeless. One biologist asked what the point of this was; after all, there were thousands of puffins on Iceland. (A bureaucrat, undoubtedly, with no sense for the future economic impact that is so obvious today.) The Canadians initially prohibited the taking of nestlings from their territory, and only slowly relented. Kress must have been running out of money and hope. And then things changed. In July of 1981, he saw an adult puffin carrying fish in its bill onto the rocky shore. Nesting!

It’s obvious now that the project succeeded beyond everyone’s expectations. There are a few hundred nesting pairs of puffins on Eastern Egg Rock. Kress’s project has expanded to many more islands in the northeast. Kress’s methods have been extended to many species of seabird and many parts of the world. His impact on bird restoration is difficult to understate.

Locally, the Puffin Project  has had impact no less momentous. The two boat companies that we signed up with, Cap’n Fish’s Cruises and Hardy Boat Cruises, are filling seats on large tourist boats daily through the summer months, with happy tourists coming from every state and a few foreign countries. (Oddly enough, many of the people on our boats had no binoculars, apparently thinking that the birds would be twelve feet away. That is another expectation to correct.) These people are filling hotels, B&Bs and restaurants in Boothbay, Wiscasset and Damariscotta, and refilling at local gas stations. They are also paying entrance fees at the Coastal Maine Botanical Garden and the nearby state parks. That’s what we did! The economic impact on the local area is huge. All stemming from one person’s determination to bring back a bird that had been eliminated by short-sighted resource exploiters of the nineteenth century.

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The resistance that Stephen Kress encountered in the early days of the Puffin Project is not uncommon for wildlife and habitat restoration projects. Whether the issue is bison and wolves in Yellowstone, whales in New England, Monarch Butterflies in Mexico and California, California Gnatcatcher, or Black-capped Vireo in Texas and Oklahoma, wildlife restoration brings visitors, which brings economic gains. It’s sad that in every case, the initial response to a proposal to restore the species is negative. Politicians, mostly Republican but sometimes joined by Democrats, drone on about the impact of the project on local companies, adjoining landowners, future residential development. Invariably, the evolution of these projects proves them wrong. The often miniscule finances of the previous resource extractors become dwarfed by the tourism that takes its place. These projects bring back habitat, which makes life more livable for locals and makes parks more attractive for visitation. I walked the streets of Boothbay Harbor, Maine, which began life as an industrial center for lumber, whale oil, and shellfish. Today, it is a much larger and busier place with people drawn to plovers, terns, puffins, and whales (seeing, not hunting).

The pressing problem now facing Maine and the other coastal states is the lobster industry. Overfishing of this creature is indisputably evident when you are aboard Cap’n Fish’s boat. The nearshore is peppered with lobster traps in numbers that are beyond belief. The skipper of the boat is forced to constantly weave between them most of the way out to the destination. I was shocked to see that even remote Egg Rock itself is surrounded by lobster trap buoys. The situation is like some freakish throwback to World War II harbor mines, but with the intended victim being the claw-bearing creature prowling the bottom for passing food scraps. Lobster over-fishing has depressed the catch, which has raised restaurant prices, which has induced more people to take up the lucrative fishing trade, which …. You get the picture. There is good evidence that the proliferation of traps has become a leading cause of death of Northern Right Whales who become entangled while going about their normal foraging. In the inevitable fight between whales and fishery jobs, the politicians can be counted on to dismiss the plight of the whales, as we are now seeing in newspaper headlines. How sad, and how tragically predictable that is.

Let us celebrate the Atlantic Puffin, and the North Atlantic Right Whale. Together, they represent an America that we almost lost, but which stubbornly holds onto life off the coast of Maine.

 

 Fox Den

The Red Foxes seen frequently on our property have taken the next step. After seeing some suspicious tracks in the snow in late winter, I set up the trailcam at a strategic spot one night. Retrieved the next morning, the camera was filled with photos. A den, with fox cubs!

At the den entrance, keeping watch in the morning.

We found this spot through canine curiosity. Both our dog and the neighbor’s dog seemed to be lingering around a particular spot on a hillside near our house. I mounted the trailcam there one night, but it got nothing. I waited about a month, and found many more tracks in the late spring snow during a daytime visit. So I mounted the trailcam once again, and captured the critters in the middle of the night. A fox family!

It's a bit hard to see, but two cubs are in the shadow behind the adult

Mom and Dad made regular visits through the night, according to the trailcam. They visited at 8 pm, 10 pm (adult bringing food), midnight, 2:15 am, 4:30 am, 5:50 am, 6:04 am, and 9 am. Then I arrived, and the parents put the kids to bed for the day. At 6:04 am, there was a photo of Mom at the den entrance nursing two of the young. Looking through the photos, we counted six young ones in total.

Nursing time at 6 am

As I noted before, the Red Fox doesn’t get much respect in Vermont. It gets hunted  for three months each year. It is an excellent predator of rodents, but it’s been known to grab the occasional chicken from the coop. To the fox, this is just a meal found in nature; a poorly installed wire fence is simply an obstacle like a pile of logs that must be navigated, not a symbol of ownership by a farmer or homeowner. It must hurt to lose a chicken that way, but we live amongst wildlife, not in our own imaginary bloodless world.

The kids playing in the yard

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Speaking of which, one of the burning issues in Vermont today is predator control. Our legislature just finished up a round of discussions on something called Senate Bill 258 (S.258). The bill has two components: place two non-hunters on the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Board, and change the way Coyotes are hunted in the state. The bill has produced heated debate from every corner. It is currently stalled, by being bottled up in committee, but it awaits a renewed attempt next year.

S.258 is pretty much the same contentious issue that has arisen in almost every state in the country. When people find out how predators are being handled by hunters in the state, there is outrage. The majority of hunters are respectful, warm, kind, and wonderful people, controlling the White-tailed Deer population as a much-needed service. A few of them exhibit despicable behavior. The element of this issue that has raised eyebrows is the use of packs of hounds to find and kill predators. This is a comparatively new method brought about by technology. It is not traditional. Hounds are outfitted with GPS locating devices and set free as a pack. The “hunter” sits in his truck with the motor running and waits until his pack has surrounded or treed something. Then he notes the location, walks through the woods to get to the spot, and dispatches the Coyote (or the fox or bear, or in other states, the Mountain Lion or even the Jaguar).

Many Vermonters would like to dispatch this execrable method. A few die-hard hunters want to keep it. Thus the argument.

The words that always arise in these debates are “tradition,” “culture,” “heritage.” Let’s examine those. To be sure, there is nothing at all objectionable about a hunter on foot with a dog at his side, walking through the woods to find game. It’s been happening for thousands of years on every continent, with spears and arrows. It’s been common for hundreds of years with a shotgun or rifle being the implement. But GPS devices? Come now. They’ve become cheap in the last few years, and that’s not long enough to qualify as “tradition.” What makes it worse, though, is that the one dog has been replaced by a pack, sometimes five or ten. The photos (to be found in seconds on the web) of a group of hounds mercilessly baring their teeth and barking uncontrollably a few feet from an exhausted Coyote or fox are really hard to take. The action of the hunter simply walking up and blowing away at a motionless animal from the sporting range of 10 feet is also really difficult to countenance. In some cases, the Coyote is sick or injured before the event, and the dogs will kill it in the way of canines protecting a territory. But these Alpo-fed hounds are not hungry, nor defending a true territory.

Feeling the pressure from many citizens, the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Board took action. They proposed new rules for hunting Coyotes. That’s good, but the legislature believed the rules did not go far enough. The VFWB proceeded anyway, ignoring input. The Board is composed of hunters, anglers, and trappers who are private people appointed by the Governor. They don’t like taking input. So a few concerned senators drafted S.258, mostly to get more voices of reason on the board. Senator Chris Bray from Addison, VT has been leading the charge. The senators propose to replace some members of the Board with non-hunters who have some kind of professional experience with wildlife management or research.  A very reasonable approach.

But Vermont’s hunters have protested with indignance. It is easy to find their objections online, and some of it is dismissive, derisive, crude, hostile, belittling, and contemptuous. For their part, the animal rights groups are quick to weigh in, condemning hunting in all forms as inhumane, and things get ugly really quickly. In the words of Rodney King, “can we all get along?”.

I know a few hunters, and I think it’s important to point out that the most vocal hunter in this conversation is not the average hunter, which is often the case in public debates. Many hunters want to go on hunting the way they are accustomed to, and they privately voice frustration with the radicals. But they are feeling the loss of opportunity as more private landowners close off access and hunting seasons contract to protect populations. A phenomenon occurs with the reasonable hunters not openly condemning the radical hunters, and the radical voices seem to be the only ones in evidence. Trumpism, anybody? The demise of the Republican Party?

One line of objection is to portray the voices in favor of the Coyote as being out of touch with rural reality, and as being “out-of-staters” from the city dictating to locals. Hmmm. I have heard that view before. One hears this claim in predator control debates In Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, New Mexico, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Wisconsin, Arizona, Tennessee … you get the point. By dismissing the wildlife advocates as “coming from out of state,” the hounding lobby is pretending to be blissfully unaware of the fact that nationally, attitudes have changed, and people everywhere want to have a voice in how predators and all wildlife are managed. These issues are no longer the purview strictly of those who buy hunting and fishing licenses. In a similar vein, we should no longer allow logging companies to have the sole voice in forest management practice.

In my beloved New Mexico, three contentious issues of the past come to mind. Cock fighting was defended for years as “heritage” and “tradition” until wiser minds finally took the center and ended the barbaric practice in 2007. Coyote-killing “contests” were defended for years as necessary to control the population until the highest elected officials found it unwise to reject the findings of research to the contrary. It was banned in 2019. The effort to reintroduce the Mexican Gray Wolf was proposed for decades by wildlife advocates, and opposed bitterly by the ranching lobby as causing the death of their centuries-old livestock operations. The feds finally re-introduced a small number in 1999, and they have remained isolated in wilderness areas, where abundant elk provide most of their sustenance. (A few are wandering, which is a natural part of range expansion.) In all three issues, the dreaded phrase “out-of-staters” was trotted out as the conspiratorial cause of destroying “our way of life.” Boy, these out-of-staters do get around, don’t they? They come from out of state in …. every state. (Pardon the Jon Stewart sarcasm.)

S.258 did not manage to get to the finish line this year, but we advocates need to keep trying. For myself, I will keep quiet about the exact location of our Red Fox den. A few foxes running through our fields and prowling in our woods are a good thing. And they will be kept in check by their larger cousins, the Coyotes, who we hear in a night-time chorus about once a month. The pets in the neighborhood seem to be surviving.