nature

The (birding) year in review: 2022

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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.

Black-Capped Chickadee by Peter Lewis (Unsplash)

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…

Can nature amend history?

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In a twist of irony, Grand Teton National Park was created by a series of shady land deals orchestrated by John D. Rockefeller, Jr, son of the famous oil tycoon. Nowadays, underhanded land grabs and Big Oil are the archenemies of conservationists and environmentalists, but Terry Tempest Williams paints Rockefeller and his plan in golden, glowing colors. The land became a national park, piecemeal, between 1943 and 1950, leaving only the JY Ranch in the hands of the Rockefeller family as a beloved summer retreat. In 2001 this, too, passed into the hands of the National Park Service, at the request of Rockefeller Jr.’s son, Laurance. The ranch itself was dismantled and reconstructed outside the park, and the land on which it had once stood was rewilded, returned to it’s pre-ranch state. Williams explains the motivation for the land transfer:

This gift marked a continuation of John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s philanthropic legacy to national parks. The ranch, purchased in 1932  for $90,000, roughly $45 an acre, is valued today at more than $160 million. But as Laurance Rockefeller said, “Father’s greatest gift to the national park was not his generous donation of land, but rather his vision that people can live in harmony with nature.”

But the vision realized by the gift and the rewilding is not one of harmony, but segregation. The deconstruction of the ranch is a clear message that humans can live in harmony with nature, and nature with humans, but they cannot do so while living in the same place. That kind of thinking is not only sad, it’s dangerous—but it’s also unfortunately common in conservation.

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Extinction

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Humility in born in wildness. We are not protecting grizzlies from extinction; they are protecting us from the extinction of experience as we engage in a world beyond ourselves.

—Terry Tempest Williams, The Hour of Land

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I think of what wild animals are in our imaginations. And how they are disappearing—not just from the wild, but from people’s everyday lives, replaced by images of themselves in print and on screen. The rarer the get, the fewer meanings animals can have. Eventually rarity is all they are made of. The condor is an icon of extinction. There’s little else to it not but being the last of its kind. And in this lies the diminution of the world. How can you love something, how can you fight to protect it, if all it means is loss? […] I know that some of my friends see my keeping a hawk as morally suspect, but I couldn’t love or understand hawks as much as I do if I’d only ever seen them on screens. I’ve made a hawk part of a human life, and a human life part of a hawk’s, and it has made the hawk a million times more complicated and full of wonder to me. […] She can resist the meaning humans give her. But the condor? The condor has no resistance to us at all.

— Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

A Desert Adventure, Day 6

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View of the Grand Canyon from the top of North Kaibab Trail.

The Grand Canyon.

The sight of it inspires different emotions for different people, most of them very strong emotions. For me, it inspires a kind of disbelief and despair. Disbelief because it is so big, so grand, so… so much that my mind cannot grasp it. Walking along the rim of canyon, I start to wonder if it is even real. If the park staff printed a really, really long poster and suspended it from a scaffold… would I really be able to tell the difference? It is unreal the way the solar system is unreal, the way those vast distances and massive objects just cannot exist in the same reality as coffee mugs and car keys and you and me.

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Looking down to the continuation of the Kaibab Trail and the inner canyon.

And despair, because of course it is real, the way both car keys and Jupiter are real, but there is no way to ever convey its reality to someone else. I could write pages of description, and you would still not understand what it is like to stand on the edge of canyon. I could take thousands of photos, and not a single one of them could capture it immensity. The Grand Canyon makes me put down my camera because… what’s the point.

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The Kaibab Trail switchbacks down, down, down.

And so I will say very little about the Grand Canyon except that we hiked part of the North Kaibab Trail, and part of the Rim Trail, and that it was more than I can ever, ever convey to you.

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A team of mules takes a break while heading up the Kaibab Trail.

A Desert Adventure: Day 5

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On the day Ashley and I turned thirty and our youth died forever, we broke camp in darkness and drove out into the desert. For all that the Navajo National Monument feels remote, it’s actually quite close to civilization: we passed a school bus on our way west. A little outside the town of Page, we pulled into a nearly-empty parking lot and settled in for a long wait. We were here to see the famous Antelope Canyon.

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A Desert Adventure: Day 4

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The rising sun casts cool shadows over the Colorado River.

We woke on the banks of the Colorado River. This far north, the river was a tiny thing. The canyon it had carved through the red Moab rock was equally small, the walls barely high enough to delay the sunrise. In a few days we would see the Colorado again, but by then it would be a powerful river sunk deep within one of the largest canyons on the planet. The thought was almost too much to wrap my head around.

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A Desert Adventure: Day 3

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Red rocks and blue skies near the entrance to Arches National Park.

I won’t say the showers were worth the expense and disappointment of staying in a KOA, but they were nice. We started the day (Day Three) clean and well-rested and refreshed, and then it was a short drive from Green River to the first of our major destinations: Arches National Park.

Ever since I read Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey, Arches has seemed like a pilgrimage site to me. I was excited by the prospect of finally seeing it for myself—and of spending most of a day outside of a car.

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Sometimes

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Sometimes—okay, let’s be honest, usually—when I try to plan something, I get stuck. It’s because I’m terrible at planning things. When there are more than three things to juggle in my head I start dropping them, and adding time just makes everything worse. Getting the ideas out of my head and onto paper helps—sometimes. But sometimes I just stop planning and start doing, with the (naive, optimistic) assumption that I’ll figure things out as I go along. Sometimes it works.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

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