It wasn’t raining, and that was good enough for me. The gray sky threatened to change its mind at any moment, but I was willing to take the risk: I stuffed a raincoat in my pack, optimistically right down at the bottom, and started driving toward the Gorge. My destination was an unpromising gravel lot in Cascade Locks, wedged between I-80 and a modest residential neighborhood. West of the trailhead the Columbia Gorge Trail stretched off through a scrubby meadow clogged with Scotch broom; to the south, the Pacific Crest Trail wriggled through a burned clearing full of blackened snags. My optimistic raincoat and I went south.
Back in grad school, I was asked to give a territorial acknowledgment at the start of a meeting. I had never heard a territorial acknowledgment before moving to Canada: in certain circles, they’re a very common Canadian practice. Even as they’re gaining ground here in the US, there’s increasing criticism of land acknowledgments as performative and even harmful, especially when the speaker or writer bungles names, terms, and concepts.
In my experience, there are two different kinds of land acknowledgments. One is big and elaborate: it’s a presentation, a ceremony, a discussion, something that educates the listener or reader and invites them to think deeply about their position and includes a call to action. This type of acknowledgment takes time, maybe a lot of time, to produce, and involves some hefty research and preparation. It’s what I wrote, and I include it below for your reference. The other kind is short and perfunctory: someone stands up in front of crowd, reads a few lines off a sheet of paper that they probably copied from the internet, and then sits back down again. It’s fast and easy to put together and honestly pretty cringeworthy.
This post is mostly just a roundup of resources I used to write my land acknowledgement, but I want to take a moment to offer a few of my own thoughts about land acknowledgments.
It should be obvious that the cringe-y read-off-a-piece-of-paper kind of acknowledgement should be avoided at all cost. If you don’t have the time to do it right, don’t do it at all: such indifference is more insulting than silence. Worse still is dishonesty. If you are only giving an acknowledgment because you are required to, if you don’t believe in the words—or the work—then you insult not only the Indigenous people you claim to acknowledge, but also your audience and yourself.
A brief acknowledgement need not be perfunctory, especially if it is honest and heartfelt. Put down the paper or the cue cards, look away from your PowerPoint slide, whatever—just talk to your audience about what’s important to you. It’s better to say, “this is the ancestral of land of many tribes and nations whose names I don’t have memorized” than to read off a long list of names in a stumbling monotone. A short acknowledgement, by necessity, has a different role than a longer one: it’s job is spark thought, interest, and curiosity rather than to educate, inform, or discuss; it’s there to disrupt and challenge rather than guide and engage. Lean into that.
Is a land acknowledgment right for you? That’s a controversial question. This article from Vox offers an example of a real-world bar that offers a perfunctory acknowledgement on its menu, but could hypothetically rise above mere performance by donating proceeds to a nonprofit that benefits Native youth. It’s a great example of how a business can pair a land acknowledgment with meaningful action. But what if the bar is already donating money to help Black youth? Or a local houseless shelter? Or a nonprofit that supports entrepreneurs of color? There are so many good causes to support. Each one is important in its own way, but no one person, household, or business can support them all. Of course an Indigenous filmmaker being interviewed by Vox about land acknowledgements is going to suggest an Indigenous cause take top priority. But what would a Black farmer say? A Latinx fashion designer? Maybe you don’t have the time, energy, resources, or, frankly, passion to put together a great land acknowledgment, and maybe that’s ok. Just as long as you do what you can where you can.
I was tapped to give the territorial acknowledgement last month, but was unable to do so because I was wrapping up the last of my fieldwork. Now that my fieldwork has been successfully wrapped, I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge the traditional lands, not just of the nations where I live and do my “office work” here in Burnaby, but also where I have done my fieldwork.
My research has taken me into some pretty remote forest in the lower mainland and sunshine coast. It can be tempting to think of these forests as unchanged and unchanging places of pristine nature, and that myth is one colonizers have always found convenient because it gives them an excuse to seize “empty” or “unused” land. But of course these forests have been altered and managed by humans for millennia.
Of course, the most common sign of management is modern and very obvious: big, ugly clearcuts. But an older and more subtle sign is the presence of culturally modified trees. If you aren’t familiar with CMTs, as they’re referred to, these are living trees which have been altered by indigenous people as part of traditional forestry practices. The kind I saw most often were cedars with a vertical scar along their trunk where a long strip of bark had been pulled free.
If you know anything about indigenous peoples in the Pacific Northwest, you know cedar is kind of a big deal. It’s used to make everything from clothing to canoes, and is the most common tree used to make totem poles. Harvesting cedar bark in strips, when done right, does very little damage to the tree and leaves it alive and healthy.
Although indigenous practices like bark harvest continue today, this kind of traditional forestry has little or no place in conventional forest management. Indigenous people are largely excluded from forestry, interacting with the industry as stakeholders rather than managers. As of 2017, less than 12% of timber tenures, which allow an organization to harvest trees on crown lands, were held by First Nations in BC. (About 95% of the timber in BC is publicly owned.)
They’re also excluded from the science that informs good forest management. Indigenous people make up a tiny fraction of biologists and researchers, something we’ve discussed while planning our BIPOC scholarship. And much of the research that takes place on their lands, current or traditional, rarely does more than “consult” with Indigenous communities—if that. And so I would like to acknowledge the nations on whose land I have conducted research, including the Shíshálh (see-shelt), Lil’wat (lil-watt), Stó:lō (staw-low), and Nlaka’pamux (ent-la-cap-um) nations, along with others I’m sure I have missed. And of course, I also live and work on unceded Coast Salish territory, including the traditional territories of the Musqueam (mus-kwee-um), Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh (sail-wha-tooth), and Kwikwetlem (kwee-wet-lum) Nations.
Last year was the first in which I kept a year list. For a long time I had resisted the idea because, as much as I enjoy record-keeping, data, and stats, keeping year lists, state lists, and county lists seemed a bit… extra. I had a life list and that seemed like enough. But I writhed with envy every time my friend L. shared a birding story with me. I wasn’t jealous of her birding skills—I’m not half the birder she is and I’m comfortable with that—but I wanted to spend more time birding, more time honing my skills, and I just never seemed to make that a priority the way she did. It finally occurred to me that a year list might be just the thing to motivate me.
Amazingly, it worked. From 2016 to 2021, the number of species I saw each year (according to eBird) ranged from about 100 to 150. In 2022, that count jumped to 204 species—and I think that’s nothing to sneeze at! Here’s a breakdown of the birds I saw (and didn’t see!) this year:
Total species: 203 species
Total families: 49 families (approximately; depends on your current taxonomy)
The complete set: Nuthatches! I saw a Red-Breasted Nuthatch in January of last year here in Portland. White-Breasted Nuthatches can also be found in the metro area if you know where to look, but I saw my first on the east side of the Cascades. I rounded out the collected with a Pygmy Nuthatch in Bend in June. (There were several families for which I saw all the species realistically found in Oregon. Some of them, like Wrentits and Dippers, feel like cheating to count because there’s only species present.)
The missing piece: Swallows! I was so close to getting all of the swallows, but never managed to find a Purple Martin.
The total loss: Everything pelagic, including Albatrosses, Petrels, and Storm-Petrels. The only reason gulls don’t join this category of disappointment is that I did ok on the terns.
Favorite bird: California Quail. We used to have a covey living in my parents’ neighborhood, which would sing their distinctive “Chicago!” song and sometimes run through our yard… until the wild meadow where they nested was bulldozed to make way for a Subaru dealership. (I hope the irony isn’t lost on you.) This was the first year I’ve seen them in Oregon since then.
Least favorite bird: Song Sparrow. Not that I don’t love Song Sparrows, overall, but this year I spent a lot of time looking for unusual sparrows and the Song Sparrows kept getting my hopes up.
Greatest rarity: Least Tern seen at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in May. I overheard someone say one hadn’t been recorded in Oregon for 30 years. The tern looked absolutely miserable and I didn’t have high hopes for its survival.
Hardest won: Short-Eared Owl. I actually led two guided nature walks to help people see this one, which was a lifer for me. Absolutely worth it, but I put in a lot of hours and work on my own and with the public to earn this. Runner-up is the White-Headed Woodpecker, which I found in a clearing outside Ashland after bushwhacking my way into a clearing that turned out to be full of hornets!
Close call: Black-Crowned Night Heron. I visited the Koll Center Wetlands three times looking for this bird before I finally found it, just days before the end of the year. Whew!
The one that got away: Black Swifts, which I thought would be a sure thing at Salt Springs in the Willamette National Forest. No dice, and I never got a chance to look for them again.
This year kicked off to an inauspicious start: on New Year’s Day I went out birding and was immediately confronted by a flock of scaups. Greater? Lesser? Maybe this year I’ll figure it out…
For a while now I’ve had a dream of perfecting a handful of recipes. You probably have the same dream: to possess a small store of reliable recipes you can whip out for bake sales, dinner parties, and date nights, and cook with confidence because you know they will always, always come out just the way you want them to.
What’s that? You mean this isn’t your dream, too? No one does bake sales anymore (thanks, covid) and dinner parties are old-fashioned? Surely we still have date nights!
Well, at any rate, it’s my dream, and for a while it seemed like it was going well. I made a truly astonishing number of chocolate chip cookie batches until I found one that was just right, and found the perfect gingerbread cookie recipe on the second try. But then I tried brownies and here, dear reader, is where I ran into trouble.
Five different recipes later and not only had I not found one close to what I was looking for, I didn’t have the slightest idea why none of them worked. Worse, I was beginning to experience an existential crisis. Did the perfect brownie even exist? Could it exist? Was the platonic ideal of a brownie I held in my mind–thick, fudgy, a little chewy, dark but not bitter–something I could ever produce? Maybe brownies were just inherently disappointing. In desperation I turned to a box mix, reasoning that something so highly engineered would at least make a good baseline, a starting point. I was wrong.
I stopped after that. Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t given up: the search for the perfect brownie does not end here. But it does pause here, because if I see another brownie I may do something drastic. In the meantime, I want to leave some notes here so I can more easily pick up where I left off.
Recipes
Of course the first recipe I tried was from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. I had taken a stab at his recipe several years ago and made a few tweaks that I felt improved it, but coming back to it I felt even my modified version was disappointing.
From there I moved on to, naturally, Smitten Kitchen and Deb’s favorite brownies. For once, I was disappointed by SK: we liked the flavor but found the texture too cakey to be the fudgy brownie of our dreams.
Who else was a reliable source for baked confections? King Arthur Flour came to mind, and I found their fudge brownies recipe. I’d already started measuring before I realized the 2 cups of chocolate chips in this recipe are mix-ins, not melted in: all the chocolate flavor in the brownies comes from cocoa, not melted chocolate. This was a disappointment to me because I feel cocoa brownies, like cakey brownies, are in their own class–potentially delicious, but not to be compared to fudgy brownies. I also feel that mix-ins may be acceptable but are usually a bad idea and should never be necessary. Still, I’d already started so I persevered and found, again, the texture to be all wrong.
A couple of links led me to a different King Arthur recipe, this one for deep-dark fudgy brownies. I was instantly skeptical about the presence of powdered sugar but decided to give it a shot. This was our least favorite brownie. MC declared it to not even be a real brownie and said it tasted like stale frosting. I found the flat, sweet flavor of the powdered sugar utterly overwhelming and the texture a little gummy. I won’t say we didn’t eat them–they were still made of sugar and chocolate, after all–but we didn’t enjoy eating them.
Eventually, it occurred to me to try one of my go-tos for reliable recipes: Tartine. The newer Tartine cookbook provided my perfect gingerbread cookie recipe, so I gave their brownie recipe a shot. In a twist on tradition, they have you beat your eggs and sugar to the ribbon stage as you do for some cake recipes. This puzzled me, since that technique is used to add fluff or loft to cakes and seemed counterproductive in a brownie recipe. I wound up making this recipe twice, once as written and once using the same ingredients but following a more traditional brownie-making method. Both bakes came out about the same. We agreed this was our favorite recipe so far but, ironically, we found it too fudgy. If you’d blindfolded me and put I bite in my mouth I would have guessed it was slightly stale fudge, genuine candy, rather than a baked good.
Bittman
SK
KAF: F
KAF: D-D
Tartine
Chocolate (oz)
1.5
1.5
0
0
3.2
Cocoa (cup)
0
0
0.3
0.2
0
Butter (cup)
0.25
0.25
0.25
0.166
0.15
Sugar (cup)
0.375
0.65*
0.56
0.166**
0.45***
Egg
1
1
1
1
1
Flour (cup)
0.25
0.3
0.375
0.3
0.2
* SK uses unsweetened chocolate, thus the higher proportion of sugar; ** KAF uses powdered sugar; *** T uses brown sugar
At some point I’ll return to this quest and continue searching for the perfect brownie… until then, I think I’ll go bake something without any chocolate in it whatsoever.
Birding is a great hobby. You can go as hard (or not) as you want. You don’t need a lot of fancy gear–only a pair of binoculars and bird guide. Learning to identify birds may be challenging, but is always fun. There’s one big barrier, though–how do you find the birds?
eBird’s hotspots make answering this question a lot easier than it used to be, but unless you’re plugged in to your local community of birders you can miss out on all the insider knowledge. Which pullouts off the highway offer the best views of the ocean? When is the best time of year to visit a park? What random stands of trees, ponds, and freeway rest stops are known for catching rarities?
A friendly guide like Birding Oregon by John Rakestraw is a great help in solving this problem. John’s book is thorough, concise, and contains no maps whatsoever. No maps! Who writes a guidebook and includes no maps? It’s a deliberate artistic choice. “A 6″x9″ format does not lend itself to mas that are particularly useful,” John writes. “They would show either a very small area with no context, or a larger area with no detail.”
Here John and I appear to have artistic differences. While I agree that a map sized to fit in a standard paperback book is unlikely to useful for navigation, I find I still want maps for planning. Which of the sites he describes are clustered closely and can be visited together in a day, and which require a long detour to reach? Which would make a good driving break while traveling across the state? A map would help me decide.
Not yet September, and fall is already chasing summer away: the afternoon light has lost the gold of midsummer; the mornings are cool and smell like things leaving. Two months after we retreated from Sigurd Peak in defeat, I still haven’t written anything about the field season. Perhaps it’s because time seems meaningless these days: two months, two days, two years—it’s all feels the same. Perhaps it’s because the field season was so miserable.
Sunset over the mountains near the Utzilus site.
It’s hard to say what, exactly, made the season so. Certainly the pandemic made things challenging, adding a level of uncertainty and stress to work that is inherently uncertain and stressful. The weather undoubtedly contributed, being so cold and rainy that we were forced to reschedule trips and dig out our down jackets even in late June. As always, the work was physically grueling and emotionally exhausting. But perhaps the worst was that we only found two nests.
My morning routine involves covering my feet in duct tape to prevent blisters.
This is not to say that the season as a whole was a bust. Because of the pandemic, our crew was divided into strict teams. Other teams found a number of nests, even more than last year. But Gina and I, despite all our effort and suffering, found only two—and one of them failed less than two weeks later. The season’s last straw was a minor injury while scrambling up the steep and rocky Sigurd Valley Trail that ended our final stint early and on a downcast note. And so, as I spread my dripping tent out on the floor of my room to dry, I was glad the season was over and I felt no desire to write a single word about it.
A beautiful day in the Squamish Valley.
“What happens to your birds after you’re done with them?” my physiotherapist asked, after I told him I studied northern goshawks. “Do they get to go back to the wild?”
“Oh, no,” I said. “They were always in the wild. We just stop bothering them.”
That’s my favorite thing about “the wild”: it was always there. Before I drove up the Squamish Valley, before I climbed up the Ashlu Canyon, it was there and the goshawks were there in it. And even though I am no longer in it with them, and may never be again, it makes me glad to know those goshawks are still out there. I just stopped bothering them.
Our last, gloomy day in the field, looking out over the confluence of the Ashlu and Squamish Rivers.
But when she at last put on gray shawl over the gray dress and went out into the street, Sophie did not feel excited. She felt overwhelmed. There were too many people rushing past, laughing and shouting, far too much noise and jostling. Sophie felt as if the past months of sitting and sewing had turned her into an old woman or a semi-invalid. She gathered her shawl around her and crept along close to the houses, trying to avoid being trodden on by people’s best shoes or being jabbed by elbows in trailing silk sleeves.
Brendan Koerner describes his son’s painstakingly created paracosm, constructed with Google Maps and a stack of handwritten notes, as an exercise in escapism and control. Cartographers, Koerner notes, are often drawn to maps as a way to escape reality, the same way bibliophiles are drawn to books. For someone trapped inside an apartment during a pandemic, the baseball stadiums of New England are no less fantastical—or inviting—than the soft green hills of the Shire.
I’ve been less trapped than most, thanks to my fieldwork. But while getting out of the city (heck, even getting out of my house!) and into the forest has been an incredible relief after weeks spent within a few blocks, it has also brought with it a large amount of stress and uncertainty. Far from being new, this is just another layer of stress on top of the existing pile of worry, anxiety, and desperation called graduate school. In reality, I’ve felt trapped since long before the pandemic began.
For someone who has moved every six months for the past seven years, staying in one city for three years has been a difficult adjustment. It’s been made even more difficult by a student’s budget and time commitments that render even short trips somewhere between implausible and impossible. So, like Koerner’s son, I started making a map.
The map is still in it’s early stages, and I’m in no hurry to finish it—after all, once it’s done what will I do for escapism??—but as it grows I hope to share it with you so that maybe you, too, can be inspired to find joy in places you can’t be.
“I’m not getting goshawk tingles,” I said, craning my neck to stare at the trees soaring up around me. “I’m getting a goshawk hard-on.”
Sunset at one of our campsites.
It was beautiful forest, perfect goshawk habitat, and I would like this to be a story about how we found dozens of goshawks living in it. But this is actually a story about how we spent eight grueling days in the field and didn’t find any goshawks at all.
Our first site was hard bushwhacking: heavy underbrush made every step a struggle and tumbled boulders hidden beneath a thick layer of moss threatened to roll ankles. In the afternoon we heard a male goshawk call, and over the next day and half we heard both the male and his mate call several times, but were never able to find them or their nest, no matter how many rocks we tripped over.
Soggy weather on the “Sunshine Coast.”
The weather turned wet and miserable, so we abandoned that site in favor of trying to re-locate one of the birds we tagged last year. We struck out there, too, unable to pick up even a trace of his signal. We moved on to a third site, where I had such goshawk tingles I was sure we would finally find a nest. But the beautiful forest was completely silent. Finally we turned to our last site, which has had goshawks for the past three years, one of which we tagged last season. Yet we couldn’t pick up the signal and none of the nests were active. Exhausted, defeated, and soggy, we retreated to the city for hot showers and the comfort of our own beds.
Bird, Wandering 