Innholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2022 i Audubon Magazine

Around the world, climate change is reshaping habitats already at their limits. In northeastern Minnesota, near the Canadian border, lies a boreal biome at the southern edge of its climate range. This swath of mixed coniferous forest transitions to temperate forest to the south and drier woodland and prairie to the west. Warmer winters, longer and hotter summers, and more variable precipitation ranges are now transforming the region, and these shifts have profound implications for vegetation and wildlife. Benjamin Olson began photographing this ecosystem in 2008 at age 19. “The changes in the wildlife, landscape, and weather I’ve seen are significant,” he says. “What keeps me going when it becomes too much is this: We get to watch major ecological evolution within our lifetime. While this is depressing in some…

Down Tern A small, black-capped seabird with a striking eye stripe and sooty feathers, the Aleutian Tern is one of Alaska’s lesser-known species. It might also be one of the nation’s most imperiled. Recent research suggests that the bird’s U.S. population has crashed by as much as 80 percent in the past few decades. Now, a group of biologists has launched an ambitious plan to count every Aleutian Tern in the state in a race to assess how dire the situation is—and whether the bird should be considered endangered. Read more about their efforts at audubon.org/aleutiantern. RE: “A Bird by Any Other Name” What a great article! I am fully in favor of removing all human names from birds. I think it best to not debate whether certain people were…

THERE MAY BE NO PRISTINE swampland in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, but one morning in March, Emile DeVito stepped off a sand road in Brendan T. Byrne State Forest and into the closest thing: a shady stand of Atlantic white cedar trees, at least 140 years old, growing alongside a creek. They stood straight as needles in the mucky soil and formed a tight canopy overhead. Sunlight leaked into the understory as if through an attic window. Hopping across the soft hummocks around the trunks, DeVito, an ecologist with the nonprofit New Jersey Conservation Foundation, paused and gestured at the surrounding swamp. “This is what we want,” he said. “We had 100,000 acres of this. And this is a whisper of what we had because the trees were way…

FLORENCE, MONTANA William Blake retrieves data from a Motus station along the Bitterroot River. The system detects and records tagged birds, including Lewis’s Woodpeckers, that pass by. THE LEWIS’S WOODPECKER is one of the West’s avian gems. It has a ruby-red face and emerald feathers draped across its back like a cape with a silver cowl. In summer it swoops and circles over woodlands west of the Great Plains, performing aerial acrobatics as it hunts insects on the wing. While wintering in forests of the far West and Southwest, it aggressively defends caches of stored nuts from piratical Acorn Woodpeckers. Captivating as it is, however, there is still much we don’t know about the bird’s movements and biology—or what has driven its population to decline by about half since the…

THIS SPRING, JACOB CRAWFORD walked through a lightspangled forest of beech and maple in central Vermont and came across a dark and shady patch created by a stand of towering white spruce. From the top of the tallest tree, a Yellow-rumped Warbler sang. A pair of tiny Golden-crowned Kinglets peered out from the shelter of dense needles. He turned to Lynn Blevins, the forest’s owner, and explained the scene. The spruce patch, he said, provided birds with thicker foliage to hide in and different insects to feed on. This habitat diversity made her property more welcoming to a wider range of avian species than one populated by leafy trees alone. “Birders are building this community of people who care for the land.” Since 2019, a program called Birder Broker has…

Night hangs over the Hoopa Valley Reservation. Stars spill toward the evergreen horizon as Mark Higley, a wildlife biologist for the Hoopa Valley Tribe, places a speaker on an unpaved road. Soon a recorded bird call—Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?—tumbles down the Northern California valley. A few minutes later, the faintest of replies. These hoots slowly build as the Barred Owl draws closer, bracing for a turf war, until the calls are almost on top of one another, on top of Higley, filling the entire night. Then a handsome young male materializes in a copse of hardwoods, calling expectantly. Higley points a 12-gauge shotgun at the dark-eyed bird, eponymous horizontal bars resplendent on his upper breast, and the crack that follows shatters the air. Wings splayed,…

THIS OIL PAINTING OF A WESTERN TANAGER CROSSING A ROCKY EXPANSE BEGAN AS A BIT OF clay. The piece is part of George Boorujy’s series in which he puts himself in the position of future humans and imagines rituals they might enact in a climate-devastated world. He sculpts objects that could be part of these rites of survival and passage, then paints them into apocalyptic landscapes. The tanagers’ heads, splashed with bright paint to evoke their brilliant plumage, rise from a roughly formed body, as dull-colored as the clay used to sculpt it. The strokes of the artist’s hands are evident in the hamstring, straining to make a difficult ascent. To Boorujy, the two heads evoke a cradled infant, but he welcomes interpretations. The piece was largely inspired by the…

THIS SUMMER, I WAS LUCKY enough to spend some time on Hog Island, Audubon’s 86-year-old nature camp situated off the coast of Maine. Each year, Hog Island hosts a variety of programs, including Arts and Birding, Coastal Maine Bird Studies for Teens, and Educator’s Week. The people I met—educators, Hog Island staff, and the scientists of the Seabird Institute—confirmed for me how much of the necessary work to protect the places we all need is accomplished by people acting locally. And when I thought about that, I thought about all of the work that Audubon chapters accomplish at the grassroots level and Audubon staff who partner with them to provide guidance and resources. Take, for example, the chapters addressing the climate crisis head-on and engaging with members of their communities…

A FEW YEARS AGO, DETROIT’S Callahan Park was indistinguishable from an abandoned lot, its overgrown turf grass strewn with litter. While the city has been in economic recovery mode since its 2013 bankruptcy, some areas have rebounded more than others, and many of its more than 300 parks look much like Callahan once did. Today, however, Callahan Park is blanketed in a lush meadow, with pathways winding through colorful native plants like coneflower, milkweed, and wild bergamot. “It’s a place you can really relax,” says Princess Dennis, vice president of the local community association. With two acres planted in 2019, Callahan became the first of five parks transformed through the initial phase of Detroit Bird City, a project led by Detroit Audubon in partnership with the city. The makeovers are…

MEN HAVE HISTORICALLY OVERSEEN most forest management in the southeastern United States, where the vast majority of woodlands are privately owned. As more women are inheriting or purchasing land for the first time, demographics are changing. But navigating the male-oriented world of forestry can be difficult and overwhelming for women who are newcomers, as a recent study from the University of Georgia found. That’s why nine forestry professionals formed ForestHer NC in 2019. The group holds workshops on topics ranging from prescribed burns to bird identification to property taxes, attracting about 3,000 participants so far. Their goal is to empower women by offering education and community; nonbinary people, men who feel shut out by traditional forestry culture, and families are also welcome. “There’s definitely a component of ‘Well, if they can…