Bird of Passage: April 2025
Searching for sandhill cranes, then and now.
First things first: thank you to the new subscriber and pre-existing subscribers who were chosen at random to receive my extra copies of the paperback edition of Flight Paths, and thank you also to each and every one of you who supports my work by letting me send you this email every month. I’ve reached out to the two winners via email to find out where I can send their signed books!
The high point of March for me was being the keynote speaker at this year’s Othello Crane Festival. The area around Othello, Washington, was once a sagebrush desert, but it was irrigated for agriculture beginning in the 1950s. Eventually, migrating sandhill cranes on their way from California north to Alaska began to stop in the area in spring to forage in the farm fields and artificial wetlands, and in 1998, the city started hosting an annual festival with crane-viewing tours and other events.
I’d been to the festival once before, back in 2014. This may be a cliché, but I feel like I was a completely different person then. I was living in rural eastern Oregon, working at a tiny, disorganized environmental nonprofit in a tiny cattle ranching town. Knowing I was interested in birds, my boyfriend of about nine months suggested we go to the festival together. My memories of the weekend are fuzzy, but we definitely got close looks at cranes and I think it helped set him on a path toward becoming a bit of a birder in his own right.
It was fun, but a little surreal, to go back over ten years later as the featured speaker. Today I’ve been married to that guy for almost a decade. I’m a mom, a cancer survivor, and (the reason I was there) a published author. The world has changed, too, and not for the better; it’s almost hard to believe that when I was last in Othello, Barack Obama was president and the world’s nations were gearing up to negotiate the Paris Climate Accords.
Once again we boarded a school bus, this time accompanied by a child whose birth was still four years into the future in 2014. Once again we trundled down country roads as dusk fell, between fallow farm fields and stacks of hay bales. This time the only cranes we saw were far away—distant gray shapes that blended in surprisingly well with the brown fields.
And yet. Just as my son, by far the youngest kid on the tour, was starting to complain about being bored, we got off the bus to try to get a better look at some of those distant cranes. My husband picked him up so he could take a peek through a spotting scope—and his eyes lit up.
“I see them!” he cried. “I see them dancing!”
His whole attitude instantly turned around. We wound up at the edge of a reservoir where flock after flock of cranes was flying in to roost for the night, and as he scrambled around on the rocks and explored clumps of sagebrush, he declared the crane tour to be the second-best thing he’d ever done in his life (after rockhounding—he’s an aspiring geologist).
I want to experience life the way he does—wholeheartedly, joyfully, open to wonder. As I creep closer to age forty, I don’t know if I’ll ever fully get back into that mindset, at least not for more than a moment at a time. But I’m glad I have my kid’s example to follow.
Words About Birds
It’s a tough time for freelancing—I know I’m not the only one struggling to sell stories this year. But I’ve been trying to keep busy, and one little project I took on recently was writing a list of ten charming facts about chickadees for Mental Floss. If you want to learn a bit more about what chickadees eat, how they communicate, and more, check it out.
The coolest bird story of the past month, if you ask me, was the coot trash nest from the Netherlands. Urban coots there have been reusing the same nests for decades, adding another layer to them each year and, unfortunately, often incorporating a lot of plastic waste. The result is that some nests turn into trash time capsules, with dateable layers of snack wrappers and other debris going back to the early 1990s (and, after 2020, lots of disposable face masks). Kinda horrifying but kinda cool.
I’m also a sucker for any story involving Charles Darwin, so I enjoyed learning about the Galápagos Rail’s rediscovery on Floreana Island, where it hadn’t been seen since Darwin first described it there in 1835. This nearly-flightless bird still lives on other Galápagos islands but was thought to be extinct on Floreana until researchers spotted it there earlier this year. It’s unclear whether these birds are survivors of the original Floreana population or immigrants from another island.
Less fun: the latest on seabirds and plastic ingestion. Sable Shearwater parents often feed bits of plastic trash to their chicks, because to a seabird, it can look and smell like food. Blood tests on chicks from Lord Howe Island with high levels of plastic in their stomachs showed signs of all kinds of serious health problems, including neurodegeneration similar to Alzheimer’s disease. Yikes.
I don’t want to end this section on a downer, so here’s a thought-provoking essay on whether birds can truly make art. To attract mates, male Satin Bowerbirds arrange twigs into delicate archways and decorate them with carefully arranged collections of blue objects. But is this art? This piece gets into some really philosophical territory as it looks at different ways of defining what “counts” as art.
Book Recommendation of the Month
The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoë Schlanger. I guess I’m on a plant kick (last month’s book pick was Twelve Trees), but who could resist a book that delves into the question of whether plants can be considered intelligent and maybe even… conscious? The Light Eaters is as much philosophy as it is science, covering how the way we think about plants has evolved over time and making a case that we should reconsider them as beings with their own agency.
Upcoming Events
Apr. 10: Book talk for the Pendleton Bird Club (Pendleton, OR)
Apr. 12: Book talk for Western Field Ornithologists (virtual)
Apr. 22: Book talk for North Shore Audubon Society (virtual)