My friend Stephanie made the comment, "I agree there is no better smell than the sagebrush and fir. That, along with the serenade of the Wyoming meadowlark...heaven!" Stephanie is so right, but until she said that I had not realized something.
There is something wrong out in the sagebrush grasslands. I discovered it yesterday, mostly because Stephanie's words were ringing in my ears. I made an eight mile mountain run up City Creek, which is right behind my house. I was thinking about one of my favorite birds, the western meadowlark--Wyoming meadowlark, as Stephanie referred to it. Anyone who grew up when I did or before, and who grew up in the same beautifully open country I did, grew up to the song of the meadowlark. I listened to them so often, in fact, that coupled with my proclivity to imitate animal noises (a habit that used to highly annoy my sister) I became very good at getting the meadowlark to call back to me.
But it was on yesterday's run that I realized...my friend the meadowlark is gone. I think I heard one early this spring. One lonely meadowlark, trilling out his song from somewhere out in the sage. I enjoyed it, but thinking they would be around all summer I took it a little bit for granted. I haven't heard one since.
Unfortunately, it's not just the meadowlarks that have vanished. It's the native finches, the tanagers, the warblers, the song sparrows. So many beautiful songbirds that used to fill the forest and prairies seem to be vanishing. They have been replaced by starlings, house sparrows, house finches and pigeons, at least in our neck of the woods.
And I guess somewhat poetically they have also been replaced by another bird: the turkey vulture, otherwise known as buzzard. When I was a kid the vulture was pretty rare. I still stop to watch them because they are so big and graceful and interesting. But now you can watch flocks of them soaring the heights. Ironically, most of ours live in the huge trees in the local cemetery.
So is the boom in the vulture population a sad comment on the death of our songbirds? I don't know. I don't know if anyone knows. All I know is that on my eight mile run, with Stephanie Wray's words so fresh in my mind, I was a lonelier man without the song of the meadowlark.
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Dear Kirby,
ReplyDeleteThat's funny, I was just wondering I haven't heard our meadowlarks lately, either. I don't remember if they left before the farmers harvested their wheat, or after. Now all we hear is the killdeer who are eternally paranoid, it seems!
Love,
Marq
Hi Kirby
ReplyDeleteLiving in a suburb of a large industrial town I don't hear many songbirds, sometimes as I sit at my computer I hear a nearby blackbird but he is harrassed by magpies, occasionally i hear a robin and they have a sweet song but mostly we have house sparrows and starlings but believe me their numbers have dropped dramatically, one bird we have in summer now is a seagull, they used to all disappear back to the coast in the summer but not now, to hear more birdsong I need to go to our local woods which I have just written about on your nature blog when you sort of urged people to get to the woods and trails.
I obviously don't know where your meadowlarks have gone but the disappearence of wildlife is worldwide it seems.I used to visit the remote islands off the west coast of Scotland known as the Outer Hebrides or Western Isles and during my time there we used to go as far north as we could to a lighthouse and its grounds and people used to wander as far ro the edge as they dare and watch for seals and seabirds, when I first went there were a lot, but a few years ago, maybe three or four, I went there again and wondered what was different and it occurred to me that the seabirds had all but vanished, a scary thought, where have they gone, is this what they call global warming, is the sea telling us something inasmuch that there isn't enough in our seas to sustain the seabirds, it was a chilling thought and unfortunately probably true as the seabirds have never returned .