A dwarf spring garden grew here: recumbent firs and spruce, no more than a foot or two high, clung to the rocky substrate. In the openings, dwarfed flowering plants hugged the gravelly soil—False Hellebore (liberally glazed with frost), Diapensia, Mountain Sandwort, Bunchberry, and Clintonia, alongside dwarfed versions of Bog Laurel, Labrador Tea, Blueberry, Mountain-ash, and other woody plants. Everything lay low, hiding from the desiccating effect of the relentless summit wind. Here the brief alpine spring was still only arriving, soon to be followed by a short summer before the advent of the long autumn and winter. I had finished my journey in a high place where spring arrives in early July, a hundred days after my start in the Deep South.
As I rested and let the sun hit my face, I heard the tinkling trill of a snowbird—a Dark-eyed Junco, singing from a perch in a dwarf Balsam Fir. A minute later a raven soared overhead and gave a single low croak, his wings grabbing the stiff breeze. A Myrtle Warbler, one of the migrant songbirds I’d followed from Texas up the Mississippi and into Ontario and New York, gave its sad, musical, rambling trill from the thick carpet of firs downslope, reminding me of my first climb of this very peak in July 1965, when I was thirteen years old: a half century ago.
LAST OF THE BREEDING WARBLERS
After three months of effort, I had seen all the East’s breeding wood warblers on their breeding habitat, from Louisiana to Minnesota and from Ontario to the Adirondacks. The last two species (Black-throated Blue and Blackpoll Warblers) had drawn me back here to the mountains, and in many ways both are iconic wood warblers—well known, beloved, and widespread. They breed in the North Woods, wintering in the Caribbean, Central America, and northern South America.
The Black-throated Blue Warbler (quest bird number 36) is a favorite of many birders. It is a common breeder in mature mixed forests of the Adirondacks. There are few more handsome birds; the male is simply but elegantly plumed in slate blue, black, and white. It forages in the understory, so it is visible at eye level, and the male’s buzzy song, zeeoah zeeoh zeee?, alerts the birder to its presence. The bird is among the easiest wood warblers to track down in the forest. It is an eastern species, breeding in the Appalachians and upland New England, but is essentially absent as a breeder from the Mississippi drainage. That’s why I was seeing it on its breeding habitat for the first time here; in fact, I had first seen the bird on its breeding grounds in the central Adirondacks back in 1965.
The Blackpoll Warbler, a widespread migrant and the last of my quest warblers, prefers mountain summits of balsam fir as a nesting habitat. That’s why I had climbed Algonquin Peak, whose upper slopes are a sure place to find the bird on its late-spring breeding territory. The Blackpoll traditionally has swept through the woods of the East Coast on its way north, its passage announcing the end of spring migration. It holds all sorts of memories for those who love warblers, yet sadly, in the past two decades, its numbers have declined substantially. I recall encountering thirty or more on a spring morning in Washington, D.C., but now I rarely hear or see more than one or two in a day. It is alarming when a commonplace species becomes scarce. What has gone wrong?
THE ADIRONDACKS—THEN AND NOW
What I saw in my five days in the Adirondacks reminded me of what I recalled from the 1960s and 1970s. I was unable to detect major changes to the wild lands or the built environment; I visited the towns of Tupper Lake, Saranac Lake, and Lake Placid, and all were still picturesque, compact, and pleasingly old-fashioned. Perhaps this is not surprising, as the population of the Adirondacks has increased very little since 1900. At that time, it was 100,000, and in the year 2000, it was still only 130,000. The Adirondack Park Agency (APA), created in 1971, has successfully prevented the overdevelopment of this great forest reserve. The goal of the APA is to balance environmental concerns with economic development, and thus there has been concentrated development in centers of tourism (such as Old Forge and Lake Placid) while increasing amounts of wild land has been bought by the state and placed under strict protection. Again a comparison: in 1900, there were 1.2 million acres of state-owned land. This number had nearly tripled by the year 2000, while the number of sawmills in the park dropped by 50 percent in the same period.
Still, some negative trends are apparent, such as the advent of acid rain and climate change. The former is caused by sulfuric and nitric acids produced by the combustion of fossil fuels (sulfur from coal, nitrogen from coal and gasoline). These pollutants from power plants, industries, and automobiles travel hundreds of miles from their sources and fall with rain into the lakes and high-elevation conifer forests of the Adirondacks. With its high levels of precipitation, impermeable bedrock, and relatively high elevations, the Adirondack region has been particularly vulnerable to acid rain, which releases aluminum from soils. The aluminum and the acid itself kill fish and other aquatic species. Luckily, the Clean Air Act has reduced the impact of acid rain over the last decade or so. As a result, the population of an iconic Adirondack bird—the Common Loon—has rebounded to healthy levels. I did not see evidence of acid rain in my hike up Algonquin, but it historically has damaged conifers on certain summit forests and impacted lake fisheries. There has been progress, but this is a long-term phenomenon, requiring a long-term solution. Our government should not give up on the fight for cleaner air and cleaner water.
Climate change, too, is impacting the Adirondacks. I did not notice its effects in my visit, but it has had impacts on the birdlife. For instance, two of the specialty boreal bird species I encountered in northern Ontario, the Spruce Grouse and the American Three-toed Woodpecker, have, since the 1960s, declined to the point of disappearance in the Adirondacks. Most experts assume the demise of the local breeding populations of the two species is the result of climate change. Just what physical or biotic stressors are harming these two special birds is unknown, but the declines appear real.
Changes in the area’s winter birdlife have been well documented in a paper by Larry Master that analyzes the results of the Christmas Bird Count over a sixty-year period in the central Adirondacks. More than a dozen bird species absent from early counts have become commonplace in more recent counts, including the Canada Goose, Hooded Merganser, Common Merganser, and Great Blue Heron—all of which require open water for foraging. Now Adirondack lakes freeze later in the autumn and melt sooner in the spring. Today the Adirondacks see much reduced snowfall and many fewer severely cold winter days than they did fifty years ago.
So, acid rain and fewer cold and snowy winters are serious changes in the Adirondacks. How these ongoing chemical and meteorological changes shall further alter the region is unknown, but additional biotic impacts may show themselves in decades to come. The world is changing, and our favorite places will change with it.
TROPICS BOUND
The last stage of this story of migrant songbirds takes place here in the Adirondacks. The warblers and vireos that nest in June and early July find themselves in a holiday feasting period in late July and August and into September. During this time, adults and hatching-year birds seem to follow distinct courses, though only pieces of this story have been delineated. Adults search out productive staging areas where they can forage on rich food resources, and probably young birds do the same thing, though apparently not in the same locations. The two age groups also appear to take different pathways to their winter homes in the Tropics. Both groups do seem to drift eastward in the last weeks of summer, heading toward New England, but long-term bird-banding operations in New England show that adult songbirds tend to concentrate in rich interior forest areas, while young birds tend to end up on the coast. Recall that older birds have experience with this southbound trip, whereas younger ones do not and so must follow instinctual impulses.
We do know that two of our focal species, the Connecticut and the Blackpoll Warblers, carry out a remarkable southbound journey as adults. Both species move east from their breeding habitat to the coast of New England (Blackpoll) or the Mid-Atlantic (Connecticut) and then depart sou
theastward out over the ocean, making a nonstop flight to the northern coast of South America. Some small number of individuals of both species touch down in Bermuda, which is on the flight path southward. The hardiest individuals that make the whole overwater trip fly nearly two thousand miles—a flight that might take as much as eighty hours. This heroic journey requires incredible reserves of energy, which is why the birds spend weeks bulking up in the interior of New England in early autumn before they make the flight. The Blackpoll has been shown to double its weight prior to departure from New England so that it will have the necessary energy stores for its trip. Earlier in this book, I discussed migrant songbirds’ northbound flights across the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. Yet even those flights pale in comparison to this autumn trek to South America. It is the most amazing feat of any Neotropical songbird migrant that we know of to date—the mind-boggling end product of the process of organic evolution operating on tiny songbirds over tens of thousands of generations.
EPILOGUE
Swainson’s Thrush
Here in this wild and beautiful spot amid the mountains, the dark woods, the rising mist, the new moon hanging above the silhouettes of the peaks, we waited, in spite of the night chill, until the last sunlight of the spring had ebbed from the sky.
—EDWIN WAY TEALE, North with the Spring
From my Adirondack campsite, I drive home, heading into the glossy blue-gray skies of the hot Mid-Atlantic, where cicadas drone in the afternoons and pop-up evening thunderstorms douse suburban yards. I spend my last night on the road camping at Shawnee-on-Delaware, at the Water Gap in eastern Pennsylvania, where I listen to the songs of summer birds—Indigo Buntings, Yellow-throated Vireos, and Great Crested Flycatchers. Spring is done, finally, for me.
I think back to my brief stay on the summit of Algonquin Peak, where I’d called in to chat live with Ray Brown on his Sunday-morning radio show, Talkin’ Birds. It had given me a chance to reminisce about my three months on the road, driving 12,891 miles, biking several hundred miles, kayaking several dozen more, and walking some unknown but substantial distance. I’d encountered 259 species of birds, including all 37 quest warblers, along the way. I told Ray’s audience that my trip was all about the nature of “place.” The long road trip had brought me to an array of marvelous southern destinations, led me to a lonely Jack Pine forest in Canada, and ended in a place filled with treasured childhood memories. Many of the southern locales were special for their novelty. The sojourn in northern Ontario took me to a distant land that fell short of my high expectations but nonetheless surprised and educated me. The last place I visited harkened back to my past. It was fine to end my journey in the Adirondacks—as wild and bountiful as it had been when I spent my first summer there as a twelve-year-old.
Plenty of writers out there have cataloged the environmental losses we have suffered since the 1960s. There’s no denying that we have forever lost some of our precious natural heritage over the ensuing decades. At the same time, however, there have been conservation successes, both small and large, and we have discovered more about nature’s capacity to restore itself. Today, after all, there is more forest land under conservation in the Adirondacks than there was in 1964, when I first visited. That’s good news. We must remain hopeful and continue to work to conserve and restore what we love.
My wondrous experiences in the Tensas Basin, Delta National Forest, Wyalusing State Park, Crex Meadows, and Pukaskwa National Park showed me that North America remains filled with unique green spaces worth visiting and protecting. Seeing a singing Connecticut Warbler in northern Ontario was fantastic but no less special than seeing a singing Bicknell’s Thrush on Algonquin Peak. There are many tantalizing bird encounters to be had on this broad continent, and we can all be out exploring our favorite old haunts and discovering new destinations near and far. It makes our souls sing, and it keeps us young at heart.
On the nature conservation front, there is work to be done. For the beloved Neotropical migratory songbirds, the challenge is clear: we must pull together to conserve, restore, and expand critical blocks of forest habitat that the birds require for their breeding territories, their winter homes, and their various stopover sites in between. These blocks of habitat should be doubled or tripled in size. If we succeed in this big task, we can reverse the decline of our songbirds and bring them back to the abundance celebrated by Edwin Way Teale in his 1951 book. We need to throw our support behind institutions working on behalf of nature in North America—ones such as the Houston Audubon Society, the American Bird Conservancy, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, to name only a few.
In many places, we have moved in the right direction. Think again of the Adirondacks: when young Theodore Roosevelt first did his bird studies there in the 1870s, not a single acre had been protected. In 1885, as governor of New York, Roosevelt created the Adirondack Preserve—a first step. Coincidentally, Roosevelt, by then vice president, was climbing Mount Marcy in the Adirondack High Peaks in 1901 while President William McKinley lay in the hospital, felled by an assassin’s bullet; McKinley soon died, making Roosevelt president. Roosevelt’s love of the Adirondacks and other wild places in America inspired him to create the first national parks, based on the Adirondack model.
White-throated Sparrow
At the time of Roosevelt’s presidency, many private forest tracts in the Adirondacks were being heavily logged, and large-scale timber felling was happening in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ontario. Today many of the areas logged in the early 1900s are classified as protected forest, never to be logged again. Yes, the ancient forests—the virgin woods—are mostly gone from the East, but the expansion of mature forest cover throughout the East has risen relentlessly since the 1930s. Today its extent is considerably greater than it was in the year 1800. Wildlife species that were completely extirpated from the East, such as the Wild Turkey, Fisher, and North American Beaver, are now back in force, settling in suburbs and visiting backyards. Let’s never forget Nature’s regenerative capacities. Were Edwin Way Teale alive today, he would be amazed at the regreening of the East, especially in and around urban areas. That said, he probably would express worry over the future of the Neotropical songbird migration phenomenon. He would be surprised by the impact of human demography on the forests of Central America, northern South America, and the insular Caribbean. He would, I believe, assert the need for every citizen to take notice and to work to conserve or restore those special green spaces that still exist. Reaching out to our compatriots south of the U.S. border is something we need to do more, sharing best practices and helping our counterparts in the Tropics to see the biotic linkages that migration produces. They must conserve their backyard as we continue to conserve ours. Organizations such as the American Bird Conservancy are working with partners to bring about full-life-cycle conservation of migratory birds. Conservation biologists such as Pete Marra and his research team at the Smithsonian are continuing to ask the questions that help us to better understand the mechanics of migration and the particular points of vulnerability that need shoring up. Such understanding will inform the actions we’ll take to reduce the threats posed by lighted tall buildings, transmission towers, wind turbines, and free-roaming cats—as well as the more familiar threat of habitat loss.
I remain hopeful. This hope may come with age and experience; comparing my encounters with wild nature in the Mid-Atlantic region in the 1960s to those I’ve had today is enlightening. In the spring of 2016, a family of five Common Ravens (our largest songbird) spent several weeks in my suburban neighborhood, adjacent to the Potomac River and Washington, D.C. By contrast, in the 1960s, a raven was a very rare sight anywhere east of the high, rocky ridges of the Appalachians. In the same vein, today Bald Eagles nest along the Potomac River and pass overhead in and around the nation’s capital on a regular basis. I counted more than twenty-five of them on a recent Christmas Bird Count on the Virginia side
of the mid-Potomac. By contrast, a Bald Eagle would have been a rare sight indeed along the Potomac in the 1960s. The same story can be told of the Osprey, the Peregrine Falcon, and a number of other once imperiled species.
I see reason for hope, but I also make a plea for vigilance on behalf of wild nature. More citizens’ action, undertaken by more of us working in concert, can lead us to a new and better world. Let’s all raise the flag for wilderness, wood warblers, and all things wild.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I offer thanks to those who made my journey possible. My mother got me started in the nature business. My brother, Bill, became my first fellow naturalist—we saw some great birds and collected some awesome butterflies in our day. We have never forgotten seeing our first flock of Evening Grosbeaks in 1962. Martha Schaeffer and various other ladies of the Maryland Ornithological Society, with its little museum on the third floor of the Mansion at Cylburn Park, offered weekend nature study and kept interest growing in many youngsters, myself included.
Many advised and aided me in planning and executing the 2015 road trip. A number of beautiful green places that I visited had to be excluded from this narrative to keep the book compact. I apologize to those who kindly aided me in those wonderful places that, sadly, are no longer featured in the story. I wish I could have included every place I visited.
Here are those who assisted on the field trip and who aided preparation of the manuscript: Vanessa Adams, John Anderton, Isaac Betancourt, James Brown, Mia Brown, Ray Brown, Emily Cohen, Nathan Cooper, Marie Correll, Evan Dalton, Jeff Denman, Aditi Desai, Don DesJardin, Peter Dieser, Scott Ellery, John Faaborg, Adele Faubert, George Fenwick, Rita Fenwick, Tracy Fidler, Gabriel Foley, Susan Fulginiti, Steven Goertz, Mark Guetersloh, Tim Guida, Christian Hagenlocher, Larry Heggemann, Bridget Hinchee, Marshall Howe and Janet McMillen, Rich Kazmaier, Erin Lebbin, Bobby Maddrey, Pete Marra, Todd Merendino, Frank Moore, Merrie Morrison, Musselwhite Mine, Gary Neace, Clare Nielsen, Mike Parr, Kelly Purkey, Kacy Ray, Nathan Renick, Mark Robbins, Paul Schmidt, Cliff Shackelford, Don Sisson, Lela Stanley, Keegan Tranquillo, Kinney Wallace, and Sister Mary Winifred. The American Bird Conservancy sponsored this adventure. And nine close friends—you know who you are—generously underwrote the costs of the field trip reported on here. They, along with a grant from the Georgia-Pacific Corporation to the American Bird Conservancy, made my pilgrimage possible. Roger Pasquier, Jared Keyes, Laura Harger, Grace Beehler, Carolyn Gleason, and Dominic Nucifora provided useful editorial direction to my revisions of the original draft. Bill Nelson prepared the endpaper maps. Carol Beehler designed the book and advised me on various issues. To these and others, I offer my gratitude.
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