Part 1: Ectoparasites

Setting out nest boxes seems like a low-maintenance kind of thing—you set out a high-quality birdhouse in a good location, and birds nest in it—end of story. But after the babies leave the nest, it’s important to clean out the nest box as soon as possible.

Parent birds keep up with nest sanitation as best they can. Baby bird poop is produced in “fecal sacs” with a sturdy membrane, and nestlings have the useful habit of pooping right after swallowing food, while the parent is usually right there to deal with it. 1

But babies being what they are, sometimes they poop when the parent isn’t present, or two babies get fed at the same time and the parent takes one sac, not noticing the other, and little by little, poop accumulates. That’s seldom a significant problem. By far, the more important issue as far as nest sanitation goes is the infestation of parasites, something parent birds have no control over.

Mites, which multiply quickly in old nest material, feed on both nestlings and brooding adults. Lice can transfer from parents to baby birds. Bird fleas, which feed on blood, complete their life cycle in nest lining. Black flies feed on incubating parents as well as nestlings, but are more a problem for birds whose nests are in the open, not in cavities.

Perhaps the worst scourges for cavity nesters are blowflies. They lay their eggs in nest material, and after hatching, the gray maggots use mouth hooks to pierce the skin of nestling birds to feed on their blood.

Mites, lice, fleas, black flies, and blowflies are all ectoparasites, feeding on their hosts externally (though some may work their way into ear or nostril openings). Heavy infestations can cause anemia, stunted growth, or tissue damage inside the nostrils causing a deformity called “shovel-beak.” Many nestlings survive, but fledging can be delayed, reducing the number of offspring the parents produce that season. After a severe winter, ectoparasites aren’t usually too big of a problem for the first nests, but when birds reuse a nest box or cavity that season, the parasites will be present from the start.

How can we protect nesting birds from these scourges? When I first learned about tick- and flea- preventive medicines, which are taken up in the skin and fur of cats and dogs, I thought that setting out a treated pet’s fur for birds might kill the parasites without hurting the birds, but studies have shown that the treated fur directly harms baby birds. I wrote about the issue in 2025, when scientists in the UK examined the fur lining in 103 nests of Eurasian Blue Tits and Great Tits collected in 2020. The species were chosen because, like our own chickadees and titmice, they virtually always line their nests with fur.

The scientists found that in every single nest, the fur was contaminated with at least 2 pesticides—in some, as many as 11—each one in common veterinary use to protect livestock and pets. But are these pesticides actually dangerous for birds? The researchers discovered that the more of these pesticides present in the fur incorporated into a nest, the fewer eggs produced and the higher the chick mortality. So when it comes to setting out fur from treated pets for your local nesting birds, please, just say no.

One reader took issue and I responded to her here.

I was a licensed wildlife rehabber for over ten years, but no one ever brought me baby birds that had been injured by ectoparasites. My more experienced friend, Koni Sundquist, dealt with heartbreaking cases of baby bluebirds and swallows that were suffering badly from blowflies. Koni, like a great many other knowledgeable people (including me until recently), called blowflies “botflies.”

Part 2: Internal parasites

Entomologists, like virtually all zoologists except ornithologists, make little effort to standardize the common English names for their subjects, and many people use the same common names in reference to more than one species or group. But “true” botflies are internal parasites. (The word bot has been in use in English since the 15th century in reference to the botfly maggots infesting horses.)

Botflies found in Canada and most of the United States belong to the family Oestridae, and their hosts are almost exclusively mammals. The botflies that infest birds belong to the family Muscidae and the genus Philornis; they are found mostly in Central and South America, though two species can be found in the southern states. Ridgway’s Hawk, an endangered raptor found only on the island of of Hispaniola, was suffering huge losses of nestlings due to botflies; conservation biologists from the Peregrine Fund, with grants from the Morris Animal Foundation, found that spraying the nestlings with an insecticide used on dogs and cats seemed to be helping. A botfly species that was introduced in the Galápagos Islands has become a scourge for endemic birds there. Again, bird botflies aren’t an issue in the Upper Midwest.

This summer, I had an extraordinary experience with a botfly of the species that infests eastern gray squirrels, fox squirrels, and eastern chipmunks (and much more rarely flying squirrels and American red squirrels); the species is commonly called the squirrel botfly. Its scientific name is Cuterebra emasculator, based on the misconception that it feeds on the testes of squirrels—in fact, the larva doesn’t start feeding when it enters a rodent until it finds a place just beneath the skin, where it settles down to feed on lymph fluid and possibly some cellular debris and leukocytes, not muscle or organ tissue.

Adult squirrel botflies look rather like dully colored bumblebees.

They emerge in early summer and search for a mate. Females lay as many as 1,000 eggs, which look like grains of rice, on twigs, branches, and vegetation where a host might come by.

The larva develops within the egg into the first instar and then waits to emerge through the operculum (sort of a trap door) at one end of the chorion (what we call the eggshell in insects) until it senses heat or carbon dioxide from a nearby host. Then it pops out and sways back and forth on the substrate until it contacts and works its way onto the host animal; it then moves around searching for an opening—the mouth, nostrils, anus, or an open wound. Once inside, it moves around within the host’s body for up to a week until it finds a spot under the host’s pelt to settle in. Then it molts into the second instar and creates a visible hole to the outside, called a “warble pore,” that lets air in for breathing and allows it to eliminate excrement.

The anterior end of the larva is inside the host, the posterior end at the pore. The host’s tissue surrounding the larva forms a pocket, or “warble,” that encapsulates the larva and feels rather hard.

After a week or so in the warble, the larva molts into its third, final instar.

This is quite pale to begin with, like the first and second instar stages, but is covered with cuticular platelets that stiffen and darken, eventually becoming dark brown.

It takes about four weeks from hatching until the larva is mature; it backs out through the warble pore, drops to the ground, and burrows into the soil to pupate. The dark brown pupa remains in the soil through autumn, winter, and spring, and emerges as an adult the following summer to start the whole process again.

As with most obligate parasites who spend an important part of their life cycle in a host and emerge while the host is still living, Cuterebra emasculator seldom does permanent damage to the squirrel or chipmunk as long as it was an active adult or juvenile. Infant squirrels still nursing in the nest are another story. Sometimes a first instar bot that hasn’t worked its way into an opening on the mother moves to one of her babies. Many squirrel babies in the first litter of the year have left the nest by the time botfly eggs hatch, so aren’t affected until they’re big enough to survive. When I was a rehabber, I once raised a baby gray squirrel from a second nesting, in mid-summer. That poor little thing had a botfly inside its head and didn’t make it.

Because adult Cuterebra emasculator look like bumblebees, some flycatching birds avoid them, but they are nutritious and not the least bit dangerous. Some birds eat ticks and botfly larvae on large mammals—examples are the Canada Jay of North America…

…Giant Cowbird,

Yellow-headed Caracara,

and Smooth-billed Ani of South America...

… jackdaws in Europe, Asia, and northern Africa;

and oxpeckers in Africa.

Except for that long-ago baby squirrel, I’ve never noticed any other squirrels or chipmunks infested with a botfly until August. Several eastern chipmunks live in my little corner of Peabody Street, including two individuals who I know personally.

The first is a female who I first noticed in the summer of 2024, which I think was the year she was born. My son Joe was in town, and he’s the one who first started feeding her peanuts out of the hand, but she apparently generalized his friendliness to just about everyone she encountered, at least in the short-term. That summer, she was so trusting that she even let me pull up her back end to confirm that she was a female. She came here for food, but her burrow seemed to be two doors down—that’s always where she headed after loading up on peanuts. I named her Dizzy because when her cheeks were stuffed, she reminded me of Dizzy Gillespie.

On August 25, 2024, I discovered that either an accident or a predator had ripped off half of her tail. A thin string of vertebrae was still there.

By August 28, that had broken or fallen off.

She got through the winter of 2024-25 just fine, and come spring, she started coming around when she was pregnant and then while she was nursing. She’d become much more wary of people but still came reliably to me if I was anywhere in the back or front yard, and to other people if they were on the patio, especially if I was around, too.

This year, Dizzy appeared once in early spring, but she must have found a closer food supply because it was weeks before she came back—I was afraid she’d died. Now, in the past couple of weeks she’s been by every day again—her friendliness and short tail make her easy to recognize. Meanwhile, this summer a new, young male started coming by. I call him Bizzy.

In July, one day I noticed that Bizzy had a lump about halfway down his left side. At first I was afraid that it was a tumor, but he seemed perfectly healthy and didn’t seem bothered by it—he even let me touch it to see how hard it felt. When I saw the warble pore, I realized this was a botfly. Unfortunately, I wasn’t taking as many backyard photos this year as I did last year, so I didn’t document it in the lump stage.

But on August 24, I was outside with my camera for several hours watching a monarch butterfly who had just emerged from the chrysalis. I’d set up a lawn chair by the milkweed, and all morning Dizzy and Bizzy came by for peanuts. Suddenly, at 9:57 am, I noticed that the lump on Bizzy looked weird, and realized that the larva was, right that very moment, in the middle of emerging. There I was, holding my camera, so of course I clicked away.

Bizzy didn’t stick around long—as soon as he had a big peanut in each cheek and one in his mouth, off he ran, and when he returned, the larva was gone, a gaping red wound with a hole where it had emerged.

Bizzy didn’t scratch or wash the injury or anything while I was watching—I don’t think the botfly caused him any discomfort from start to finish, and by the next day the wound wasn’t red at all. I took photos yesterday and you can hardly tell it was ever there.

No matter what the topic, my starting point for learning about anything is Wikipedia. They had an excellent entry for botflies and a short one about Cuterebra emasculator. My photos seemed useful in both, so I added them, along with life history information that I’d I unearthed that from the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences website.

I love living in a world where a resource like Wikipedia is so freely available and where any of us can contribute—not for money or fame, but simply because it’s a Good Thing. That’s what civilization is all about.

When I was in seventh grade or so, my dad took the five of us kids and his second wife’s little boy to Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. We went in at the entrance by the agricultural exhibits, and I made a beeline for the big incubator where people can watch baby chicks hatch. One egg was in the process—I could see the tip of the chick’s beak working on the crack where it had pipped. Another egg, so far without any discernable pip, was rolling around a little. There were a couple of fluffy chicks walking about and one who had just hatched; the little guy was all wet, lying prostrate, head on the floor of the incubator, neck outstretched, its hind end still in the shell.

The other kids and my dad got bored quickly, but I was rooted to the spot. I couldn’t bear to leave until I was sure that the hatchling would be okay, and that the little guy working so hard to crack that shell would make it out of the egg. I begged my dad to let me stay there while the rest of them explored the museum. Neither museums nor children were his milieu, so I think he was relieved to have one less kid to keep track of.

They were gone for at least a couple of hours, and I was mesmerized the entire time. I got to see the exhausted little hatchling pull all the way out of the eggshell, dry off, and start walking about; the chicks from the two hatching eggs emerge and dry off; a couple of other hatchings from start to finish; and the first pips in a couple of other wiggling eggs. A museum staff person asked me a couple of times if I was lost or had gotten separated from my family; he looked a little skeptical when I said I was fine. I was used to doubtful and pitying looks from adults so that didn’t faze me. I was in heaven.

One of my defining characteristics from the time I was a little kid through this very moment is that when something catches my interest, I can gaze at it for hours. A long time ago, when I took the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Home Study course (which has since evolved to their Bird Academy), one of the assignments was this:

Spend at least 10 minutes (preferably 20) sitting or standing still at a natural area of your choice. To give yourself a new experience, it would be best NOT to choose your backyard. Then, write a short paragraph describing your observations of birds. Did you see anything that you have never noticed before? Did you enjoy your experience?

I spent those 20 minutes at my mother-in-law’s place in rural Port Wing, Wisconsin, on a January day when the temperature was 17º F and the northwest wind was blowing at about 10 mph. I saw only 3 species—two flocks of chickadees, one pair of Hairy Woodpeckers (during the time I watched, each time the female went to a new tree, the male alighted in the tree where she’d just left), and one Fox Sparrow.

I wrote:

I heard an unfamiliar high, soft, “whispery” call note that proved to be a Fox Sparrow. [My mother-in-law] noticed it on several occasions this winter, from her living room window, but it stayed > 60' from the house and feeders, picking up sunflower seeds on the ground. It only “scratched” once in the 7 minutes I followed it—stayed hunkered down between tree roots, with the trunk protecting it from wind, then ran to another base of a tree, sometimes picking up a seed en route but not stopping to eat till it came to another wind-breaking tree. I watched it eat 7 seeds; each one it “chewed” open on the left side of its beak. Do they exhibit “handedness”?

I’ve never figured out the answer to that question—I hardly ever see a lone Fox Sparrow here, and when they’re in a flock, often mixed with other sparrows, it’s very hard to track one individual for long.

The Fox Sparrow is a species I never rehabbed, so I never studied one at extremely close range. But I have been very aware of that “handedness” (would you call it “beakedness”?) in crossbills.

Every baby crossbill hatches with its bill straight, but as soon as it fledges and starts trying to extract seeds from cones, the lower bill starts crossing to the right or the left, whichever side the bird consistently faces toward the cone. It appears that the bird’s innate “handedness” is what makes the beak cross one way or the other.

To pry open the scale, the crossbill positions the crossed tip of its lower mandible against the cone to brace it as the upper bill slips under the scale. Then, with a twist of the head, the scale opens and the bird’s thick, muscular tongue pulls out the seed.

I’ve spent hours and hours watching crossbills, but I seldom figure out which way the lower bill crosses until I get home and can study my photos. I wasn’t even thinking about which way the bill crossed when I rehabbed an adult male Red Crossbill in 1997. (I produced a radio program about that experience. I can’t find the recording, but the transcript, which includes an actual reference to Donald Trump {yes, in 1997!!}, is here.)

That captive bird ate various seeds plus seeds from some pine cones that friends brought me, but I was too busy with kids and education birds to gaze at him and see that crossbill feeding technique in action. Indeed, I never saw exactly how crossbills work that crossed bill until I watched this short video, much filmed in slow motion, by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

The crossed-bill adaptation is so effective that crossbills can eat as many as 3,000 conifer seeds in a day. The bill isn’t nearly as efficient at opening other kinds of seeds, but for a few days in the 1980s, a male Red Crossbill brought a fledgling to the sunflower seed feeder on my front porch, cracked open seeds, and gave the little tyke lots of sunflower hearts. It was the only time in my life I’ve watched a Red Crossbill feeding a chick, and it wasn’t even feeding it the “right” food! Sadly, that was before I was photographing birds.

Watching any bird at length virtually always inspires questions—that’s the lovely thing about this kind of experience. Studying wild birds and museum specimens, ornithologists learned that about half of Red Crossbills have lower bills crossing to the left and half to the right, while in White-winged Crossbills, three times as many birds have bills crossing to the right as to the left.

This is the sort of detail I could miss even spending hours gazing at a big crossbill flock, but when I worked at Cornell, I checked out their museum specimens. Sure enough, 22 of 41 Red Crossbills in the collection crossed one way, 19 the other. But in White-winged Crossbills, a much higher percentage of birds have lower bills crossing to the right than to the left—in our collection it was 32 of 46 birds, or 70 percent.

In the past few weeks I’ve had a few opportunities to watch something specific in the natural world for long periods simply to savor and wonder, but oddly enough, these experiences involved insects, not birds—some Monarch caterpillars, chrysalises, and newly emerged butterflies; and of all things, a botfly larva. The caterpillar stories are at least tangentially related to birds—I took one in to protect it from my House Wrens along with two much tinier stowaways on the milkweed stalk. The botfly larva saga involved a chipmunk named Bizzy. But those are stories for another day.

My daughter and son-in-law moved to Duluth from Brooklyn, New York, in April 2020, during the pandemic. She was pregnant at the time, and they lived with us, both working remotely, until Walter’s first birthday, when they moved into a house just 3 miles away, on Tischer Creek. I was in heaven getting to spend so much time with Walter while Katherine and Michael were working, plus I got to start a new yard list!

The house they moved to is next door to a good birding friend of mine, Bruce Munson, so he and I started texting back and forth when one of us saw a good bird, like Great Horned Owl, Blue-gray Gnatcatcher, and Wood Thrush. This year on January 23, while I was babysitting, he spotted a Barred Owl in his backyard, close to his house. I couldn’t see it from my daughter’s place but went over and saw it through his window. I don’t usually bring my good birding camera when I’m babysitting, but I got some photos—poor, but better than nothing—and a video with my phone.

When a rarer bird is involved, to get the word out to a wider circle, Bruce and I both post to local rare bird report text group. Early in the morning on May 17, 2022, I spotted a bird at my feeders that isn’t rare in most of the state but is very unusual up here—a Field Sparrow.

It was new for both my backyard and county lists, so I sent a text to the group before heading to Walter’s to babysit.

The birders on that list know they can come right into my backyard as long as they close the gate behind them so our dog doesn’t get out. Several birders showed up to see it.

Then I got a group message from Bruce, who’d spotted a mega rarity—a White-winged Dove. And what on earth—he was looking at it in my backyard! I can’t remember if there was ever a time when over a dozen birders saw a rarity in my backyard before I even knew about it. My son-in-law Michael had a pretty flexible schedule that day so he gave me time off for good behavior—I raced home and voilà!

The White-winged Dove is a bird of the American Southwest, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America. In 1758, Carl Linnaeus gave it its scientific name, placing it in the same genus as all doves and pigeons at the time, Columba. In 1838, French naturalist Charles Lucien Bonaparte moved it, along with the Mourning Dove and several similar species, into a new genus, Zenaida, named for his wife, Zénaïde Laetitia Julie Bonaparte. But Linnaeus’s specific epithet for the White-winged Dove, asiatica, still remains even though it’s very wrong. The type specimen was apparently marked as from the “Indies,” and Linnaeus must have thought the bird hailed from the East Indies (Asia) rather than the West Indies.

In recent decades, the White-winged Dove has been extending its range northward. Several birds were released in Dade County, Florida, in 1959, and after the introduced population got established, it expanded its Florida range northward, too. Now I see it just about every time I visit my son in Orlando.

Some plucky White-winged Dove individuals have wandered far, far beyond even those range expansions. As of this year, there have been more than three dozen sightings of White-winged Doves in Minnesota. (Here is a link to the Minnesota Ornithologists’s Union’s list of these reports.)

The first two Minnesota sightings were all the way up here in Duluth. Parker Backstrom spotted the first when he was counting migrating birds at the Lakewood Pumping Station way back on October 13, 1985. That was less than a week after my son Tom was born, so I’d taken a few weeks off from counting which was just as well—Parker had way more experience than I did with southwestern birds, and I really might not have recognized it.

The second Minnesota record of White-winged Dove was on September 15, 1994, at Hawk Ridge. Like the first, it was a fly-by, so no one not there at that moment had a chance of seeing it.

The next Duluth sightings, 15 years later, were both in the fall of 2009. The first was in August, just a few blocks from my house, and the second was in October at Erie Pier—that bird stuck around for 7 days so was seen by many, but not by me. I missed them both because I was working at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York at the time.

We went another 12 years before a White-winged Dove was reported in Duluth again—the one in my own backyard. Among the many birders seeing it, someone would have sent out the alert, but I was thrilled that it was Bruce Munson, posting from my place while I was next door to his.

This week, Bruce texted the group about a wonderfully cool rarity—a Carolina Wren! I’d heard and taken photos of one on Park Point on April 10, 2024.

There’ve been a few other recent Duluth and northern Minnesota sightings of this southerly bird, including on August 14 when one was reported all the way up in Grand Marais. But this beautiful, charismatic wren with the big, beautiful voice—the state bird of South Carolina—is always lovely to see and especially to hear.

Bruce originally heard and saw it in the morning on August 25, but it flew off before I could get away. Then about 5:00 pm he saw it again and texted me, and I was there in a flash. It disappeared just before I got there, but Bruce and I kept a lookout. A thunderstorm was looming and I was close to giving up when suddenly a beautiful song rang out. I had the bird in view for a minute or two on a closed umbrella on Bruce’s deck.

It took off just before the downpour materialized. I retreated to my daughter’s house to spend time with Walter until the storm let up and then headed for home. The bird must have stuck around somewhere—Bruce heard and saw it again this morning, the 26^th.

Neighbors share gossip, cups of sugar, and a lot of other things, but Bruce is the best kind of neighbor. He shares wonderful birds.

One of the things I discovered when I was researching my book, 101 Ways to Help Birds, is that a dangerous fungus, Aspergillus flavus, attacks peanuts and corn. This mold produces aflatoxins, which are extremely dangerous for humans and other animals. Aflatoxins are in the news right now, as I learned when I was doing my obligatory reading this morning, which always includes Walt Hickey’s Numlock News.

Today, Hickey wrote:

Peanuts

The peanut is a very important agricultural product of Senegal, grown on 40 percent of the country’s farmland and a staple ingredient of nearly every dish in the national cuisine. The crop is beset by a devastating fungus, however, that has had disastrous health impacts: The fungus produces aflatoxin, which is a carcinogen that causes liver cancer, and is responsible for 4,000 cases of liver cancer annually, according to the African Union. There’s a possible solution, though; closely related fungi in the same family have been discovered to outcompete the poison-producing fungus, and this year, the government will test the product —Aflasafe — on 50,000 acres of the two million acres of peanut farms.

Senegal’s human health crisis right now may justify limited testing, but as we’ve learned in so many cases, introducing a plant or animal (or maybe a fungus) to solve one problem almost always causes entirely new problems, so it’ll be some time before we learn whether Aflasafe lives up to its name.

Here in the United States, domestic and imported peanuts and corn are often contaminated with aflatoxins, so products containing either are regulated and must pass inspections to be sold for consumption by humans, livestock, and pets. But there are no regulations prohibiting contaminated peanuts or corn to be sold for wildlife feeding, so I never buy them from wildlife- or bird-feeding stores unless there is some way of making certain they were inspected and approved as safe for pets and livestock.

To keep my backyard crows and Blue Jays safe, I always buy peanuts only at the grocery store. Small feeders that are freshened frequently are better than large ones. I use caution when offering bird-feeding mixtures that contain peanut hearts and never allow peanuts to get damp, so I always bring them in during rainy spells.

Peanut butter is nutritious and has a high energy content, so it is often a component of bluebird food mixtures. People often smear it into the crevices of tree bark or stuffed into the holes of hanging log feeders for birds to take as it is. Hanging old pinecones stuffed with peanut butter on tree branches is a delightful project for small children, and chickadees usually discover the tasty treat quickly.

Peanut butter is virtually always sold for human consumption, so is safe from aflatoxins. But peanut butter sweetened with Xylitol is extremely dangerous for dogs. It should be clearly labeled with a strong warning about how lethal it is, because a great many dog owners offer peanut butter as a special treat, often smeared in Kong toys, but in this anti-regulation oligarchy we find ourselves in, I’m not holding my breath. To my knowledge, Xylitol has never been tested on birds. To be on the safe side, we never buy brands that use it.

I also never offer birds “natural” peanut butter because the oils separate, easily gunking up bird feathers. Many people worry that, because of its sticky texture, any kind of peanut butter could gum up bird mouths. I’ve never seen that, but mixing peanut butter with a generous amount of cornmeal makes it grittier. In summer, peanut butter may get too goopy to use even with cornmeal, but during northern Minnesota winters, I offer unadulterated peanut butter—when frozen, birds have no problem whatsoever with it. They don’t seem to have a preference between chunky and creamy.

I hardly ever offer cracked corn in my yard, but when I do, I purchase it at a local specialty store, Dan’s Feed Bin. Food sold for poultry and livestock is inspected for aflatoxins.

Never buy corn sold in non-breathable plastic bags, because condensation fosters fungal growth. And never EVER offer corn that is coated with a red dye, which means that it has been treated with fungicides and is intended for planting—it’s highly toxic to humans, other mammals, and all birds.

Many of the birds who like cracked corn are ground feeders, but spreading corn on the ground may increase the likelihood of contamination with fungus. Spread only a small amount at a time and be very conscientious about keeping the feeding area raked.

There are some exceptions, but overall, feeding birds doesn’t provide nearly as many benefits for birds as it does for the people who enjoy them. But no matter how fun and rewarding bird feeding can be, it’s wrong to give them anything that could harm them. If we do offer peanuts and corn, the least we can do is fully understand the potential for danger and make absolutely certain that what we set out is safe.

This week, I heard a meteorologist on the radio say that “meteorological autumn” begins on September 1. Of course, astronomical autumn won’t come till three weeks later, on the equinox which, this year, falls on September 22. The equinox is what calendar makers usually mark as the first day of fall.

I’ve always thought of Labor Day, which can fall anywhere from September first through seventh, as the last day of summer. When I was a student, and then a teacher, and then a mom with kids in school, it always felt like the first day of school was the first day of autumn. Back then, school always started after Labor Day, but that’s no longer a given, even in Minnesota.

My sense of Labor Day marking the end of summer, rather than the start of autumn, was reinforced when our high school, in a working-class suburb of Chicago, had a woman who ran a charm school come to the girls’ gym classes to teach us how to act like proper young ladies. She emphasized that we should never, ever wear white dresses or shoes (except at our own wedding) after Labor Day until Easter Sunday. But wearing white on Labor Day itself was just fine.

The Minnesota State Fair is always scheduled for the twelve days leading up to and ending on Labor Day.

Yet Port Wing, Wisconsin’s annual Fall Festival is always scheduled for Labor Day weekend, and I never questioned that—somehow the holiday weekend does dual duty, marking both the end of summer and the beginning of fall.

I never paid the least bit of attention to most sports until high school, when our football team played in autumn and our basketball team in winter. I thought of baseball as strictly a summer sport. Yes, I know a lot of kids in a lot of places kept track of baseball well into the school year, but I was a Chicago Cubs fan. For us, baseball season was always pretty much over before the school year started.

So there are many different ways to pinpoint when we transition from summer to autumn. When I became a birder, I learned of yet another way: we kept track of the four seasons based on annual cycles of migration, breeding, and hunkering down for winter. For state and continental seasonal reports, winter was defined as December through February; spring as March through May; summer, the shortest season, as June and July; and autumn, the longest season, from August through November.

The birds themselves, both as individuals and as species, see seasonal transitions with much more nuance. Some shorebirds on the tundra are done with nesting and already on the move in July.

Some hardy ducks and geese hang on in north country until lakes and rivers freeze in December, January, or even February. A few hardy species, such as Great Horned Owls, Canada Jays, and crossbills, may start nesting in February up here.

Some waxwings and goldfinches may be in the early stages of nesting in August.

I’ve always loved Gershwin’s song, “Summertime.” As a small child, the living really was easy—I loved sitting in my apple tree for hours, reading books and watching caterpillars. But what is for many of us the vacation season is the time of endless work for birds. The House Wrens on my corner of Peabody Street have been spending just about every waking moment in a frenzied search for food for at least two batches of babies.

The male Pileated Woodpecker who supplanted BB here has brought his daughter to my yard twice and his son once. Those young birds make a soft but insistent little call pretty much constantly, relentlessly pressuring their poor dad, who is looking pretty bedraggled now.

As young birds grow independent, adults can stop giving the lion’s share of the food to them. Even then, summertime won’t be easy—molting, preparing for migration, and then setting out on the long journey are taxing, too.

I took a walk at Waabizheshikana—what we used to call the Western Waterfront Trail—this week, and fall was in the air. A small flock of warblers was flitting about in the vegetation at the start of the trail —Tennessee, Black-and-white, and American Redstarts were the ones I got clear looks at.

An Ovenbird in dense, leafy vegetation found the one spot where I could take several unobstructed photos as it posed for me.

But overall, it was a very quiet morning—literally so. In one spot I came across a Red-eyed Vireo family, one making querulous calls. On my two-hour walk, a Blue Jay yelled out just once or twice, a Veery making a couple of raspy veer calls, and one catbird mewed, but that was it. I turned on my Merlin app a few times to see if this was an issue of my hearing impairment, but no, the birds were pretty much silent.

I always have trouble hearing one of my favorite August birds, the Cedar Waxwing, but Merlin didn’t pick out any, either, even in the berry bushes where they usually abound.

I found three catbirds where usually I’d have found several. Based on the catbird disappearance in my own backyard after our intense heat and the horrible air quality, and now this, I’m wondering if waxwings and catbirds might be more vulnerable than most birds. But numbers of just about every species were lower than I’d have expected.

Nighthawks are migrating now—there were about 4,000 counted a couple of nights ago. This is of course thrilling, even if when we moved to Duluth 45 years ago, that would have been just an average night. The seasonal counts now total about what we used to have on several single nights back then, but young people don’t see the loss—their expectations started out much lower.

One happy surprise was a young Red-headed Woodpecker—I didn’t see the parents, but with all the dead ash trees scattered about, there were plenty of places where it might have been raised. Even as many of my fears about climate change, habitat destruction, and everything else are clearly materializing, there is always hope.

One of my pet peeves is discovering yet another ostensibly authoritative source claiming that Blue Jays forget where they hide some of the many thousands of acorns they cache away each year. Apparently a lot of otherwise knowledgeable people think it’s forgetfulness that allows some of the acorns jays hid to sprout into oak trees.

Forgetfulness? Haven’t these writers ever put money in the bank to save for the future? Most sensible people, if they take in more money than they need immediately, try to save at least some of the surplus, many saving more than they’re ever likely to need, because what if something unexpected happens? Meanwhile, whether we are a person or a Blue Jay, the wealth we squirrel away grows in value over time, though in a more genuinely lucrative way for the jays. The money I put in the bank earns interest—not much nowadays, but better than nothing. But that’s just money. Any extra acorns Blue Jays hide reap a much more valuable harvest for themselves, their offspring, and future generations.

Whether in an oak tree or on the ground below, Blue Jays sort through acorns, selecting the most viable ones to store away. If you watch jays taking peanuts at a feeder and carrying them off, you can see that they pick up several before choosing one. Long ago, when I was feeding peanuts to two Blue Jays on my front porch, a couple of times I weighed each peanut and kept track and yes, the birds invariably chose the heaviest first.

There is an obvious, visible size difference between peanuts with one, two, or three kernels. When two are the same size, with the same number of kernels, any weight differences are due to older ones drying out—the fresher they are, the heavier. Acorns vary in size depending on the species of oak; the ones from a single tree are all the same size. In this case, the lighter ones usually harbor a caterpillar or, more often, an acorn weevil grub.

The acorn weevil is a tiny beetle with a long snout. The female uses that snout like a drill to bore a microscopic hole into a developing acorn. Then she lays one or more eggs inside and plugs the hole with one of her droppings, called frass.

As the acorn ripens, the eggs hatch into tiny, legless grubs who devour the dense, nutritious kernel. As the kernel breaks down, the acorn loses water vapor and draws in air; the grubs’ growing bodies and the frass they produce weigh less than the original kernel. They finish eating the acorn contents in late fall or early winter, after the acorn has fallen to the ground.

The grub chews a perfectly round hole—about 1/8 inch in diameter—through the wall of the acorn, crawls out, and burrows into the soil for a year or two before pupating and emerging as an adult weevil who repeats the process.

The heaviest acorns are healthy and insect free. Using weight and probably some other cues, Blue Jays select viable acorns with 88 percent accuracy. They can carry a few acorns in their throat pouch (technically, their gular pouch) and one or two more in their beak without causing any damage to the acorn.

They hide each acorn separately, tucking it into the soil and covering it with a leaf. That leaf does double duty, hiding the acorn to make it less likely that another jay or a squirrel will notice it, and keeping it moister so if the jay doesn’t retrieve it, it’ll be even more likely to germinate. Because the jays hide each one individually, usually in an open area with loose soil, the spacing and sunlight give each one that germinates a better chance of surviving.

This is a perfect example of symbiosis—two species profiting by providing mutually-beneficial services. Oak trees produce huge numbers of acorns, but the heavy seeds drop almost directly below the branches they grew on where they’ll be too shaded and crowded to grow. But these acorns are an ideal food source for Blue Jays. Squirrels and chipmunks eat acorns, too, but they exploit the tree without nearly as much payback for the oaks. Indeed, chipmunks hoard most of their acorns in their burrows, making it very unlikely that any of their stash will germinate. Squirrels “scatter hoard” many of their acorns in soil as jays do, but they don’t select viable acorns with as much accuracy as jays, they tend to hide their acorns closer to the parent oak or other trees where each acorn will too shaded to thrive, and they often hide several acorns together in piles called middens, inhibiting germination and making the acorns more vulnerable to fungi. The two-way partnership between oaks and jays is much more mutually helpful.

When I was a licensed wildlife rehabber, I raised many baby Blue Jays and took care of several adults. It was fun watching them hoard things in the house—they’d tuck food (peanuts, sunflower seeds, and acorns) and toys (legos, buttons, coins, and other little items) in the folded crevices of our draperies and spaces between the cushions of our sofa, under the edges of area rugs, and inside the loose legos and other things in our toy box and the “lego drawer” in our play area. Sometimes they’d go back and retrieve them, eating food items and tucking toys in new places. They engaged in this as children play, seeming to genuinely enjoy hiding and retrieving things.

During the time I had my education Blue Jay Sneakers, we raised a baby squirrel we called Chuckie. When Chuckie was little, and then after she became a neighborhood squirrel with indoor privileges, she’d hide peanuts and acorns in the same general places Sneakers did, and they’d both dig up each other’s food items, eating them on the spot or hiding them elsewhere. Chuckie’s focus was always food-related, while Sneakers really seemed to do it more for fun, hiding and retrieving legos with as much alacrity as she did food. An activity that gives pleasure in the doing with the bonus of providing a reliable food source later is great for jays, and because it is so seemingly pleasurable that they hide up to 5,000 acorns each fall, way more than they’re likely to need over the winter, the ones never retrieved are great for the oak population.

Of course, it is possible that jays forget some of their hiding places, but no one has ever proven that or even conducted a study that suggests that. It’s much more likely that they hide more than they need as insurance and that hiding them is fun than that they’re forgetful.

Food, fresh off the tree or cached for later, is just one way that Blue Jays profit from oak trees. It may take between 20 and 50 years for a just-sprouted oak to mature and produce acorns, well beyond the average lifespan of virtually all jays.1 But every spring and summer, baby oaks just two or three years old already harbor caterpillars vital for Blue Jay nestlings, so a great many older Blue Jays may reap rewards from the oaks they themselves planted beyond the value of cached acorns. And by the time an oak is 10 or 15 years old, it’s large enough to furnish favored nesting sites. That is within the lifespan of a good number of jays,2 so it’s probably not too uncommon for an individual jay to nest in a tree that he or she planted.

Do Blue Jays think all this through? We have no idea, but it’s unscientific to attribute to “forgetfulness” the many oak trees sprouted from acorns cached by Blue Jays. Did they leave those acorns “unwittingly”? That, too, is an unscientific judgment. The complex, mutually beneficial relationship between jays and oaks deserves more respect. Symbiosis is a lovely thing.

2

According to the Bird Banding Laboratory’s “Historical Longevity Records of North American Birds,” at least five banded Blue Jays have survived between 15 and 17 ½ years.

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At this very moment, I have a hummingbird feeder on my home office window along with two small feeders—one filled with a seed mixture formulated for cardinals, the other with a concoction called “Bluebird Bugberry Blend.” Several songbirds and a Downy Woodpecker come to the two feeders, but my chickadees and nuthatches don’t limit themselves to them—they regularly sip water from the center moat of the hummingbird feeder, too.

I spend a lot of time chasing off starlings and, even worse, pigeons, who are much too big for the tiny feeders and end up spilling more than they eat. I love pigeons but they don’t need subsidies, and it’s illegal to feed them in Duluth.

If I clap and wave my arms at them from my desk, they fly off, but my hummingbirds, chickadees, nuthatches, and cardinals usually take that in stride—they sometimes even stick around when I rush up to the window waving madly. I don’t know how they came to the realization that they have favored status with me. Do they know that they’re the reason I fill the feeders in the first place?

My Blue Jays didn’t get that memo, at least not about those window feeders. Every morning I bring out a cup of sunflower seed, a handful of small suet balls, and a handful of unsalted peanuts in the shell, scatter them in my big backyard tray feeder, and make a particular whistle. The crows and jays fly in almost instantly, even with me still standing right there.

But when a jay comes to the window feeder, if I move a muscle, and it’s impossible not to at my treadmill desk—zoom—there it goes! One of my local adults has been coming close enough to the window to let me see its disheveled appearance, but if it comes to the feeder, it’s when I’m not in my office. (Parent Blue Jays hold off on molting until their babies don’t need many feedings anymore, so this time of year it’s easy to tell the young—all in perfect plumage—from the adults.)

The Blue Jays and crows pretty much finish everything before the pigeons show up. Before I had pigeons visiting so much, I used to keep that tray feeder filled with sunflower seeds whenever I had Blue Jays or other flocking birds, but with the pigeons it’s not worth it, and as a bonus, there isn’t anything left to attract bears, so maybe they’ll give us a break this year. We did have a bear in our yard last night, according to the big pile of scat he or she left, but my feeders were untouched and our fence wasn’t damaged, making this bear just as polite as the skunk who was nosing around under my feeders last month. When it started moving toward our patio, I opened the backdoor and told it, “Uh, uh. You must not come on the patio!” and the pretty little thing turned and walked away.

I’d had a pair of catbirds coming many times a day who also seemed to recognize their protected status at the window feeders. They spent a lot of time in my juneberries and dogwood, and I think were nesting in the back of my yard, but they disappeared during that extreme heat and horrible air quality last month, and I haven’t seen them since. I could count on seeing catbirds each and every day last summer, and until that terrible few days, they were following the same pattern this year, so I’m pretty sure the combination of record-breaking heat and dangerous levels of particulates in the air killed them. My neighbor has still been seeing one catbird in her yard, so there were at least some survivors.

My female cardinal also disappeared for a while, but I think she was just on eggs because she’s back again. The two fledglings that had been begging persistently from the male are still following him sometimes but seem to be getting their own food now, so if the female has produced a new batch of eggs, Dad and she will soon have more babies to feed.

With the heat, I took my hummingbird feeders in for a while. One or two hummingbirds kept visiting the two fuchsias in hanging baskets on my front porch, and I’d also occasionally see them at some early-blooming bee balm, but I wasn’t seeing much other hummingbird activity. Now, as always in August, suddenly they’re back in force, feeding at my bee balm, wild bergamot, those fuchsias, and my window feeder. I always put a bunch of my houseplants out on the patio for the summer, and this year hummingbirds are suddenly visiting my crown-of-thorns plant. There are no hummingbirds in Madagascar where the plant is native—there, it’s pollinated by insects and its thorns and toxic sap keep mammals and any birds that try to perch in it at bay. Hummingbirds don’t have to worry about that.

Flickers have been very regular in my yard this summer, apparently nesting in one of the big trees in back. There are plenty of ants in both my front and back yard, so I usually see them on the ground.

But for the past couple of days, I’ve been seeing a male and a female occasionally visiting my suet feeder. Up until last year, the flickers I’ve associated with feeders were the red-shafted subspecies of the West, not our good old yellow-shafteds. It’s fun watching a familiar, common bird develop new behaviors and routines.

I hadn’t seen a Pileated Woodpecker on Peabody Street in several weeks, right up until today. Both a male (not my banded male “BB”) and a female had been visiting virtually every day well in to June, and I was pretty sure they were nesting nearby. Sure enough, today the male brought his daughter!

Meanwhile, that male seemed to displace BB this past December, and I haven’t seen him once in 2026. He may well still be out there—Pileateds can be long-lived and they range pretty widely. BB was originally banded a mile from here at Hawk Ridge. I saw a female bearing a band once last year; she may have become BB’s mate and led him to her territory—female woodpeckers get to call all the shots.

I feel bereft without him—it was so joyful knowing and regularly seeing a recognizable individual of such an iconic species for so many years (2021 through 2025), and even more joyful because BB was so tolerant of me. But it’s wonderful to know that the neighborhood is still welcoming Pileated Woodpeckers. For all I know, this one could be BB’s son.

That’s the way it is in the natural world—so many comings and goings, rhythmic and predictable, arhythmic and unpredictable. When you pay attention to what’s happening out there, even in your own backyard, life really is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get, but it’s certain to be sweet.

Scientists keep learning more and more about birds. New studies are showing that more female birds sing than scientists used to think, that birds are much more intelligent than they used to believe, and that birds are increasingly endangered by climate change, virulent diseases, the horrifying decline in flying insects, and other threats. It’s hard for me to keep up with current research, leaving me very little time for anything that doesn’t relate to birds. But I have a few diversions that aren’t at all bird-focused, and one recent discovery that I treasure is Hunter Biden’s blog.

But oops—I can’t say Biden’s work is entirely unrelated to birds. He’s as wonderful an artist as he is a writer, and two weeks ago he added to the end of one of his Substack posts the image of an acrylic painting he did in 2023. I wish I could show it here but it’s of course copyrighted. The painting is titled “Hummingbird of the South.” (That title links directly to the image.) All his artwork is colorful, fanciful, and intricate; the three exquisite hummingbirds in this painting conjure all the loveliness of the hummingbirds I saw in Ecuador in December with a cool Sendakian whimsy. I particularly loved his depiction of the iconic Sword-billed Hummingbird because it seems so true.

I don’t know that I’d have written a whole post about the painting, but last week Biden wrote a post, “What Was Still Alive,” that took my breath away even more than his painting did. Writing about his recovery from addiction, he wrote that he

had begun to believe, cautiously, that a future might exist that was not defined entirely by the past. Not a clean future. That was never possible. But a livable one.

Reading this flooded my mind with thoughts about my own recovery processes. In 2015, I had my first heart attack, which staged an encore in 2020. In 2017, I had a bout with breast cancer, and had a bilateral mastectomy in 2023. I recovered from both, but was left with all kinds of doubts about my future.

I’ve been increasingly reluctant to sign up for birding adventures scheduled more than a few months in the future, my mind crowded with what-ifs. My age certainly figures into this, being half a decade older than that biblical “three score and ten.” Russ’s mom made it to 90 with her body and mind intact, but none of my grandparents or parents made it out of their 70s alive, my little sister died at 53, and my older brother at 66. Heart attacks and cancer are part of my family legacy; longevity is not. But then again, neither is birding. Our families may shape us genetically and environmentally, and bestow upon us both gifts and limitations, but they do not define us.

And right this very minute, I’m doing fine. I have to work a lot harder to stay fit than I did when I was younger, and have to keep reminding myself to drink water knowing how critical hydration is for mental clarity and good health as we get older. I try my best to stay mindful about this every single day, but expecting my brain and body to endure week to week or month to month, much less season to season or year to year, seemed tenuous. I only went on that trip to Ecuador because there was a last minute cancellation.

Hunter Biden has endured much, much more loss in his life than I have, and his journey to sobriety has included mountains of roadblocks I cannot begin to fathom. So the fact that he can keep on keeping on makes me think maybe I can too; his words give me hope. He wrote:

You begin to think in seasons again. Next year becomes imaginable. So does the year after that. Not as a guarantee. As a possibility. That possibility is fragile, but it is real. And once you feel it, you protect it carefully.

And on that hope, I’ve signed us up for a trip to the Galápagos next August (more than a year away!) and started dreaming again about places Russ and I would both love to visit. Australia? New Zealand? Of course we’d get trip insurance, but we’ve been purchasing that for just about all my trips in recent years. As Biden said, there are no guarantees. Possibilities are enough.

I just started a “Buy me a coffee” thing for people who want to support my work but don’t want a paid Substack subscription. I am committed to providing all my content for free to anyone who wants to read it, but every bit of support does help me keep working. I have to pay for my website host, my Flickr Pro account, the Adobe software subscriptions that allow me to edit my photos and podcast, the Microsoft Office software that I use for writing and presentations, my Zoom account, recording and photography equipment… It adds up. You can give a one-time tip for as little as $1 if you click on the button. Thank you so much!

In the past two years, I’ve been to Hawaiʻi, Florida’s Dry Tortugas, and Cuba, and I’m headed to the Galápagos next summer, so I’ve been thinking a lot about islands—how because of their isolation, most islands in the ocean evolve entirely different species than those on the nearest mainland.

Australia, New Zealand, and Madagascar were originally attached to the ginormous Gondwana, so both plants and animals were always present on them, but those big islands were separated from their original mainland for so many millions of years that a great many of their plants and animals evolved into unique forms found nowhere else on earth. Japan and the British Isles separated from their continents much more recently, so their flora and fauna have hardly changed. Japan has one extinct endemic bird species (that is, a bird found naturally nowhere else on earth), the Bonin Grosbeak, and one living endemic species, the Bonin White-eye.

The British Isles have two endemic birds, the Red Grouse and Scottish Crossbill. I’ve never been to the U.K. so have seen neither, but the Red Grouse used to be considered a subspecies of the Willow Ptarmigan, which I have seen in Alaska. 1

The Galápagos and Hawaiian Islands are volcanic—they erupted out of the ocean with no life forms whatsoever on the hot lava. The Galápagos Islands are about 605 miles from mainland South America; Hawaiʻi is much more remote—2,300 miles from the nearest continental land to the east (southern California) and about 3,850 miles from the nearest continental land to the west (Japan).

As the lava cooled, little by little, seeds, insects, and ballooning spiders carried by air currents over the vast ocean found their way to the islands; sea turtles, sea snakes, and sea mammals swam there; and bats and birds flew there. And evolutionary biologists believe that some land reptiles, perhaps stranded on floating mats of vegetation, floated as far as the Galápagos. (Every land reptile found in Hawaii was introduced by humans.)

Of course, all these plants and animals came from somewhere else, but being isolated from everything, and on a volcanic island with nothing familiar, every organism that found its way to one of these emerging volcanic islands quickly died or had to adjust and adapt to survive in the strange new world. If they not just survived but lucked into finding someone of the opposite sex so they could reproduce, little by little their descendants evolved into species found nowhere else on earth. Mates weren’t too hard to find when a bird arrived in a group. The Nēnē (Hawaiian Goose) evolved from the Canada Goose.

DNA studies found that all fifty-or-so species of Hawaiian honeycreepers evolved from a single flock of what were probably Common Rosefinches, a widespread species of Europe and Asia.

The closest known relative of all 17 Darwin’s finches is the Dull-colored Grassquit of South America, which I’ve never seen.

I’m more mystified about how owls made their way across so much ocean and managed to find mates. The Short-eared Owl is found as a native species on every continent except Australia and Antarctica, but somehow made its way to both the Galápagos and the Hawaiian Islands long, long ago and reproduced. Both island groups are still too similar genetically to our Short-eared Owls to be considered new species.

The Barn Owl, native to six continents including Australia, is also native to the Galápagos. Barn Owls live in Hawaiʻi, but in this case were introduced by people.

The Caribbean Islands are a mixed bag. As far as I can work it out, the Bahamas formed over 150 million years ago atop moving tectonic plates below the ocean surface. Limestone formed above these plates in shallow ocean waters as calcium carbonate from corals, shellfish, and other oceanic organisms accumulated over time. This was also how the upper and middle Florida Keys formed, but even though the Bahamas are barely 50 miles from Florida, there are big geological differences. The Bahamas sit on the “Great Bahama Bank” and “Little Bahama Bank” that have been accumulating miles-thick layers of sediment for over 100 million years, while most of the Florida Keys are along the edge of the shallower “Florida Platform,” tied closely to Florida and North America’s geologic history. The Dry Tortugas are considered part of the Florida Keys but have a different geological origin—they’re far younger, and developed as a coral atoll shaped by modern sand and coral rubble accumulation. Unlike the more stable, rock-based upper keys and the Bahamas, the tiny islands making up the Dry Tortugas are continually reshaped, eroded, or relocated by tropical storms, ocean currents, and wave action. The 700 islands making up the Bahamas include just 6 endemic birds, and the Keys have no endemic birds at all.

Cuba has an entirely different geologic origin from the Bahamas or the Keys. All the Greater Antilles islands exist because of the relative motion of the Caribbean plate and surrounding plates along with volcanism and a process called obduction. If you understand geology better than I, you can read a great article from the Geological Society of America, “The Geology of Cuba: a Brief Overview and Synthesis.”

Anyway, Cuba is the largest of the Greater Antilles islands. As a whole, the Greater Antilles has 109–143 endemic species (depending on current taxonomy). About 27 bird species are endemic to Cuba alone, and 22 other Greater Antillean endemics are found in Cuba as well as other islands. For example, the Cuban Emerald is endemic to the Caribbean Islands but not to Cuba, because it’s also found in the Bahamas.

But the Bee Hummingbird, the smallest bird in the known universe, is found nowhere on the planet except Cuba.

The proximity of the Greater Antilles to North, Central, and South America, within a major migration route, explains how so many birds found their way there in the first place. The year-round subtropical climate and the nature of islands kept many of those wanderers from heading out over water again, so that over time, they evolved special adaptations for life in their new world.

All in all, whether it’s tectonic plates or two scientific disciplines colliding, we get some pretty interesting results!

Tomorrow night, Thursday, July 30, at 7:00 pm CDT, I’ll be doing a Zoom presentation about the birds of Cuba. If you are a subscriber, free or paid, you’re invited. Thanks to my generous Substack paid subscribers and people who’ve made donations via “Buy Me a Coffee,” I’ve been able to upgrade my Zoom plan so I don’t have to panic if I get close to 100 participants. If you are a free subscriber, you’re still very welcome to all my work, too!

Here is the Zoom link.

I just started a “Buy me a coffee” thing for people who want to support my work but don’t want a paid Substack subscription. I am committed to providing all my content for free to anyone who wants to read it, but every bit of support does help me keep working. I have to pay for my website host, my Flickr Pro account, the Adobe software subscriptions that allow me to edit my photos and podcast, the Microsoft Office software that I use for writing and presentations, my recording and photography equipment… It adds up. Please don’t feel obligated, but you can give a one-time tip for as little as $1 if you click on the button. Thank you so much!

Russ had a milestone birthday in February—he turned 75. I’ve always given him nine months to test the waters before I jump in, so I’m waiting till November to mark that milestone. Russ also retired this year, but I can hardly do that—it’s only possible to retire if you have an actual job. I get to keep doing what I do ad infinitum, or at least until my brain or body gives out.

Anyway, we like to celebrate milestones, and having three big ones this year calls for a huge celebration, so this week we signed up for a trip next summer to the Galápagos Islands with “Alvaro’s Adventures.”

How did we choose that particular company? Mostly because I got to meet and spend a bit of time with Alvaro Jamarillo, the company owner and guide, in 2007, when I was invited on a fam tour1 of Guatemala. Alvaro and I were in the same small breakout group going up a volcano to see one of the rarest birds on the planet, the Horned Guan.

Alvaro, two other professional tour leaders, and I stayed at a lovely coffee plantation literally at the end of the road. Two local guides, one experienced and one a teenager just starting to learn English, woke us up at 2 a.m. so we could reach the highlands at dawn—the best time to view the guan munching its leafy breakfast in the treetops. We started out in a jeep that took us up and up the volcano along a bumpy trail much too narrow to accommodate even a small truck. Branches whipped our faces as we rattled along in the dark. After an hour, the trail ended and out we hopped, flashlights in hand, to hike a narrow path hacked by hand through the forest. It was 3:30 am when we started, too early for even a slight grayness on the eastern horizon, and we had a long way to go before we reached the area far above where the guan was supposed to be—they said it would be at least a three-hour hike.

The other three birders were gung-ho guys in their thirties, antsy to charge forward and get that lifer. None of them brought a camera or spotting scope—one even forgot his flashlight. I tend to be pretty laid back and philosophical even when I’m excited—I figured I was either going to see the guan or I wasn’t, and if I did, I wanted a photo, so I needed my spotting scope. I was twenty years older than the oldest of them, we were at a high elevation, and I’m a pathological moseyer even under the easiest of circumstances, but I didn’t want to slow them down, reducing their chances of getting the bird. So the more experienced guide took them ahead while the younger stayed with me, carrying my scope. Every now and then, in the pitch darkness, we tripped on stumps of saplings jutting out of the ground. Our boots kept sinking into the coarse, loose volcanic ash, making the footing even more treacherous. And with every step, my feet seemed to be getting heavier, which they actually were, since so much ash was seeping into my boots.

My Spanish was rusty, but my guide and I managed to carry on a conversation. With the endearing tactlessness of a kid, he asked how old I was, and when I said 55, he gasped with surprise, blurting out that I was older than his grandmother! He said I might even be the oldest woman ever to have made that trip. He was very impressed—for him, my age was definitely a feature, not a bug.

The others hiked at a rapid clip and found the guan around 7:30. Their guide alerted mine on his cell phone. We still had a long way to go—it took us about an hour to catch up. But those wonderful men kept the guan in sight the whole time to make sure I saw it too.

The bird was worth every moment of the hike, every grain of volcanic ash scraping against my feet inside my boots.

Horned Guans are as big and plump as turkeys, with iridescent black and white plumage and a brilliant red horn jutting out of their forehead as if they were unicorns. I gazed at it for half an hour but never saw the entire bird at once—wherever it moved in the canopy, leaves always managed to obscure parts of it. I snapped dozens of photos with my pocket-sized camera through my spotting scope. Most of the photos were out of focus and none were very good, but they are lovely mementos of this splendid bird.

My stained socks serve as a more visceral reminder of the long climb up and the longer, more treacherous trip back down through the gritty ash. I was exhausted when we finally made it back to the lodge after a five-hour descent and another hour in the jeep. The first thing others said when we arrived was that we’d want to throw out our socks. I just smiled and tucked mine safely in a bag for the journey home. I still have them.

Since he was one of the guides who stayed on the guan until I could catch up, I have warm feelings about Alvaro, and I also have a huge amount of respect for him. Born in Santiago, Chile, and raised in Toronto, Canada, he lived for decades in California but recentely relocated to Prince Edward County in Ontario. He’s an authority on pelagic birds and New World blackbirds, author of the American Birding Association’s A Field Guide to the Birds of California and the Princeton University Press’s Birds of Chile. He’s friendly and extremely generous with his knowledge, so of course I wanted to spend time with him. Where better than on a boat trip to the Galápagos Islands!

1

“Familiarization tours” are generally sponsored by governmental or tourism agencies or other entities trying to attract visitors to a country, particularly to foster ecotourism to provide local people with a financial incentive to protect wildlife. Fam tours invite writers, photographers, guides, media personalities, and other people who they hope will return home and inspire a lot of people to visit the place themselves. The Guatemala trip was my first fam tour; I’ve also been honored to be invited to fam tours in Peru (2016); Uganda (2016); Kissimmee, Florida (2023); and Guyana (2025).

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I just started a “Buy me a coffee” thing for people who want to support my work but don’t want a paid Substack subscription. I am committed to providing all my content for free to anyone who wants to read it, but every bit of support does help me keep working. I have to pay for my website host, my Flickr Pro account, the Adobe software subscriptions that allow me to edit my photos and podcast, the Microsoft Office software that I use for writing and presentations, my recording and photography equipment… It adds up. You can give a one-time tip for as little as $1 if you click on the button. Thank you so much!

I learned a little about monarch butterflies in high school—that their eggs are always laid on the underside of a milkweed leaf; that the caterpillars eat milkweed exclusively; that the milky substance in milkweed leaves and stems contains cardiac glycosides which are very toxic; and that as a result, monarch caterpillars and adults are toxic. Birds who eat monarchs get sick, so many of them avoid orange butterflies innately or quickly learn never to eat anything that looks like them. Another orange butterfly with monarch-like markings, the viceroy, gets similar protection.

I learned in high school that viceroys aren’t toxic, but oops—turns out they are. So this is not a case of Batesian mimicry (a harmless species mimicking a toxic one for protection) but of Müllerian mimicry (two similar-looking species mutually benefitting because a predator need sample just one of either before avoiding both).

Another group of bright orange butterflies, the fritillaries, are also toxic due to the caterpillars feeding on passionflower vines. Birds usually avoid eating them, too.

Some animals avoid brightly colored or boldly patterned insects instinctively, but we and our fellow intelligent species often learn by experience. When I raised baby Blue Jays as a rehabber, I noticed that while the birds were nestlings and young fledglings, they eagerly swallowed every food item I put in their mouths.

But when they got a little older and started picking up their own food items, they grew extremely selective—even suspicious. At this point, even though they’d learned to trust me, when I offered them any new food item, including wonderfully tasty treats, they took just a tiny bite and then waited a good 15 minutes before eating the rest. And they seem to retain this habit for life—when I cared for adult Blue Jays, I noticed that they always tested novel food items and waited about 15 minutes before eating more.

This made complete sense to me, because Joel Carl Welty, author of my college ornithology textbook The Life of Birds, published in 1975, discussed Lincoln Brower’s famous studies on monarchs, showing Brower’s dramatic photos of a Blue Jay tasting a monarch for the first, and presumably last, time, and then vomiting. Based on that 15-minute “waiting period” I'd consistently observed between a Blue Jay tasting a novel item and eating more, I felt a flash of recognition when Dr. Brower, in an interview on Science Friday (“The Case of the Barfing Blue Jay”) mentioned that the Blue Jay barfed about 12 minutes after ingesting the monarch.

Adult monarchs feed on nectar, no longer ingesting milkweed toxins, so their eggs are not toxic, nor are the tiny caterpillars that emerge from them.

As they grow, feeding exclusively on milkweed, the caterpillars take in more and more of those cardiac glycosides, growing increasingly toxic.

I’ve always presumed that birds avoid eating both monarchs and their caterpillars entirely, but learned the hard way a few weeks ago that House Wrens do eat them—at least the early instars. (Between hatching and pupating, monarch caterpillars have five growth stages, or instars.)

This year Russ and I planted a bunch of swamp milkweed in our yard, and so far it seems to be thriving. One day I was thrilled to find more than a dozen monarch caterpillars, all in the second or third instar stage (the first instars are so tiny that they’re hard for my old eyes to see). A few times I’ve spotted, but not been able to photograph, a female monarch in the leaves, not the nectar-rich flowers, presumably depositing an egg.

Within a few days of first discovering the caterpillars this year, every one of them vanished. I was mystified. I’d had a few caterpillars on some milkweed plants several years ago, but they all died after an airplane sprayed Bt over the neighborhood. That “harmless” insecticide used to kill gypsy moths and spruce budworm is indiscriminate about which moth and butterfly larvae it kills, but so far this year I’d not noticed any pesticide applications. The mystery was cleared up when I spotted one of my adult House Wrens meticulously searching through the milkweed for caterpillars.

Despite their aggressiveness in taking over chickadee nest cavities, I love House Wrens, and have been thoroughly enjoying seeing a lot of thriving fledglings this year. But how can I not feel ambivalent about what their parents have been feeding them?

Of course, that also brought to mind the horrible day in 2020 when I was thrilled to discover a whole batch of newly-fledged House Wrens in our raspberry patch until I realized a family of Blue Jays had discovered the same thing, and were using them as baby food. I wrote about it:

I watched one [adult Blue Jay] drop into the raspberries and come up with a little brown puffball. That was all that I had the stomach for. As I walked into the house, I could hear the baby jays calling and begging … When that parent flew in, I could hear one hungry jay stop whining suddenly to eat its breakfast.

What goes around comes around, I guess.

Back in the late 90s and early 00s, I was a writer for the Webby-Award-winning website “Journey North,” serving as their American Robin and Whooping Crane “expert” (I put that in quotes because I’m an excellent researcher and have spent a lot of time watching both species but am hardly an authority on either). Journey North focused on the migrations of many animals, from insects to whales, but had a primary focus on monarch butterflies. The monarch pages included a lot of information from and about Lincoln Brower, one of the world authorities on monarch butterflies, whose fame had gone far, far beyond photographing barfing Blue Jays.

When I got a good camera, I started photographing and video-recording monarchs at different stages of life.

I photographed some eggs and tiny caterpillars, but even with a macro lens couldn’t capture any detail.

But as our grandson Walter grew increasingly intrigued with nature and obsessed with the Kratt brothers and their show Wild Kratts, he learned about tardigrades—microscopic creatures nicknamed moss piglets. We had some mosses growing between our patio blocks, so we decided to buy a digital microscope. Russ and Walter have had a lot of fun searching for and examining tardigrades and other tiny things. Now suddenly I had a way to get a lot more detail looking at monarch eggs and first-instar caterpillars.

So last week when I looked through the milkweed and found more eggs, I started searching for new caterpillars. It took a few days for me to find a few tiny caterpillars; I brought one inside to raise so at least one of them would survive my House Wrens—this was a second instar.

Then I brought in a milkweed leaf with an egg.

On Wednesday night, the egg looked about to hatch.

I stayed up watching the tiny caterpillar within squirming about more and more as I got sleepier and sleepier. Finally, about 1 am, I collapsed into bed. But I woke up a bit after 3 and got up to see what was happening—without a moment to spare. The following video starts very soon after I started watching, as the tiny thing chews its way out of the egg shell, properly called the chorion.

After it chewed its way out, it returned to eat the chorion. It was about 2 mm long.

It was breathtaking to see this all so up close and personal. I stayed up for four hours taking photos and videos, but then collapsed into bed.

By the time it hatched, I regretted bringing the egg into the house while it was still white. Had I waited a couple more days until the egg started getting darker, the leaf would have been moister when the egg hatched. As it was, the leaf was growing a little brittle, so when the caterpillar started moving away from the mostly-eaten chorion, I painstakingly got it onto a fresh young milkweed leaf. I was pretty sure all would be well when I finally fell asleep again, but when I woke up about 11:30 am, I could not find the tiny thing at all, even using the microscope to scan every square millimeter of the leaf. To my dismay, I did find a tiny spider who looked contentedly full. I still feel horribly guilty.

The caterpillar I originally brought into the house is still doing fine, and I want to give Walter a chance to see it pupate and emerge, but after that there will be no more reason for me to ever bring any caterpillars into the house again. Yes, there’s predation in their natural world, but as my poor microscopic hatchling learned, there’s predation indoors, too.

You can watch the entire 45-minute video showing the caterpillar eating its way out of the egg, then returning to eat more of the chorion on this video. I’m clearly not very experienced at this sort of thing, so refocusing and zooming in and out is pretty sloppy, plus a couple of times I moved the leaf. But I didn’t want to edit out the bad parts because I wanted it to accurately show those 45 minutes.

I just started a “Buy me a coffee” thing for people who want to support my work but don’t want a paid Substack subscription. I am committed to providing all my content for free to anyone who wants to read it, but every bit of support does help me keep working. I have to pay for my website host, my Flickr Pro account, the Adobe software subscriptions that allow me to edit my photos and podcast, the Microsoft Office software that I use for writing and presentations, my Zoom account, my recording and photography equipment… It adds up. You can give a one-time tip for as little as $1 if you click on the button. Thank you so much!

I scheduled a Zoom program about my two visits to Cuba for this Thursday; I’m postponing it until Thursday, July 30, 2026 at 7:00 pm CDT. Here is the Zoom link.

I’m very sorry about this, but at the last minute, the Duluth City Council decided they don’t care how many thousand people signed the petition to allow Duluthians to vote on whether to develop our treasured park at the closed Lester River Golf Course—they do not want the issue on the ballot. (I wrote about the issue here.)

My dear friend Michael Bernstein, who organized the petition to call for a special election, happens to be an attorney; he sued the city when they decided not to call the legally required special election or to even bother to count the signatures on the petitions. The hearing was today, and Bernie just sent this to me:

Today, in court, the city told the judge that the number of signatures we gathered doesn't matter. Their position is that a state zoning law "preempts" our petitions — that Duluthians aren't allowed to vote on this, period. No court has ever ruled that way in a case like ours. The judge decided to wait and rule after the council acts or fails to act.

So it comes down to Thursday. Thursday, July 23. 6:00 pm. City Hall, 411 W. First St., third floor.

There are two resolutions on the agenda. One puts both measures on the November ballot — the city's own resolution says it would cost little or nothing. The other says your 8,000 signatures are legally meaningless.

Wouldn't people filling up that whole third floor in city hall say everything that needs to be said? Can you help me?

Bernie continues:

We're not asking anyone to agree with us about what should happen out there. People want different things. A park. Affordable housing for middle- and low-income people. Trails. But from everything I've heard, none of that is what's being cooked up. The mayor has insisted from the start that any plan for Lester include golf — his words, this past April: "year-round outdoor activities including, but not exclusive to, golf," alongside "business, retail and housing." A luxury golf resort developer has tried three times in fourteen years to buy that property. And honestly? Even if it's not him — even if it's any of the two or three luxury developers we've got in this town — tell me what gets built out there that's good for most of the people who live here. That's the whole point. We need a seat at the table when it comes to this land. The petitions are that seat. And the city is trying to pull the chair out from under us before we can sit down.

So I simply have to attend this meeting. I’m very sorry to delay the Zoom program—I know some people have been planning to attend since I announced it—but this is important.

During all 40 years I’ve produced “For the Birds,” my programs have combined fun and interesting stuff about birds with solid, thoroughly researched information about what we can do to help those birds we love. That means that I’ve taken controversial stands on issues that affect birds from the very start. When I’ve made errors in fact or judgment, I’ve done my level best to make the corrections as quickly as possible.

When the University of Minnesota owned the former KUMD, they never censored “For the Birds.” I’d hear about it when listeners complained, but I also knew that the station got a lot of donations specifically because of my work, and knew they aired every program I produced. When I went down to the Gulf to document how horrible the BP oil spill really was, KUMD did not fund my trip—money is tight for public broadcasting—but did give me a press pass, and in addition to the programs I produced about it, Lisa Johnson interviewed me several times and no one at the station ever intimated in any way that they wanted me to tone down my coverage.

But WDSE “The North 103.3,” the public media station that bought KUMD and now airs “For the Birds,” did NOT air the program I did about the Duluth petition. Someone high up in the station, without ever communicating to me any guidelines about topics they consider appropriate or inappropriate, not only pulled that one about this important local issue, but also at least two of the programs I did about a major national issue, lead in hunting ammo and fishing tackle (“Get the Lead Out”). I suspect they’ll not be airing at least one of the two programs I just produced about our extreme heat and dire air quality. [UPDATE: TODAY THEY AIRED BOTH OF THOSE CLIMATE SEGMENTS, THE MORE CONTROVERSIAL ONE FIRST! AIRING TWO PROGRAMS IS UNPRECEDENTED.]

That new station, “The North 103.3,” has been airing “For the Birds” every Tuesday through Friday. I knew all along that they play reruns when I don’t have a new program, but didn’t know until recently that they don’t play specific new programs if one of the powers-that-be disapproves of it. Again, no one at the station has ever been up front with me about what they want and don’t want me to talk about. Since they bought KUMD, they’ve used and received donations from listeners for my work; I get no compensation, but that has always been a perfectly satisfactory arrangement when I thought they understood that advocacy is at the very root of the term for the birds. Many long-time radio listeners count on me to speak up when birds are in trouble, and deserve to know when I’m being silenced.

On July 13 and 14, the official Duluth temperature reached 95º and 97º. On those two days, our north-facing, shaded patio reached 97º and 98º, and our south-facing front porch reached an astonishing 101º F. Our heat pump is malfunctioning, but the company has cancelled a couple of appointments already to get it repaired.

As we’ve learned in recent years, extreme heat goes hand in hand with wildfires, and this week, Duluth’s air quality was the worst I’ve ever experienced. My daughter got a screen grab when the EPA’s website was showing our Air Quality Index (AQI) at a devastating 1134! Their highest level of danger, the maroon “Hazardous” level, only goes from 301–500. We were more than double that!

For three days, from morning till night it stayed so dark that it looked as if a major storm was looming even when, meteorologically, the skies were clear. Russ and I went out to lunch on Thursday at a restaurant on London Road and could not see the lake at all. On those smoke-darkened days, our solar panels produce very little electricity.

We have two air filters in our house, both running at full strength, but even when I’d been indoors for hours my eyes were still burning, I could feel a slight burning sensation when I took a deep breath, and I could detect a faint smell of smoke. On Wednesday during some of the worst of it, my daughter saw her oncologist and I went to the dentist—in both those indoor settings we could still smell smoke. My dental hygienist told me the entire staff had been complaining of headaches. Sensible people outdoors were wearing masks.

I’m growing 6 tomato plants in pots and have to water them several times each day. The whole time I was outside, my eyes and lungs burned.

Just opening the door for the second or two it took me to get in and out, our air filters showed a spike in particulates in the house.

When the risk reaches 201 on the Air Quality Index, the purple level, the EPA website says “The risk of health effects is increased for everyone.” When it reaches the highest, maroon, level, between 301 and 500, the site says, “Health warning of emergency conditions: everyone is more likely to be affected.”

The warning issued on the hazardous days was this:

Everyone needs to cut back on outdoor activities…People with heart or lung disease, older adults, children and teens: Avoid physical activities outdoors. Everyone else: Avoid strenuous outdoor activities or keep physical activities short. Consider moving physical activities indoors or rescheduling them.

Those are sensible guidelines for humans—the ones who have options, at least—but what are animals to do? Before the heat and smoke hit, I’d been watching some delightful baby House Wrens.

Their parents are every bit as attentive and nurturing as the finest human parents, but those poor House Wrens can’t call their babies indoors when the AQI reaches unhealthy or hazardous levels.

At rest, a Northern House Wren’s heart rate was measured as 455 beats per minute, rising to 701 while incubating eggs—for obvious reasons, no one has measured the heart rate when the birds are active. Like all small birds, their respiration rate is also extremely fast. It’s impossible to assess what the heat and horrible air quality are doing to them. I’m still hearing an adult male singing but haven’t heard the tiny chips of the babies all week. I’m hoping they survived the worst of this, but there is no way to know.

I haven’t seen a hummingbird in weeks even though some of my bee balm is in full bloom. My pair of adult catbirds were coming to my just-now ripening juneberries as well as my feeders several times a day, but I haven’t seen them once since Tuesday. Where could they possibly have gone when this disaster is so widespread? Did they share the fate of those canaries in the coal mine whose deaths warned miners that the air was dangerous? There is simply no way to know.

I’m not sure which of my emotions is stronger right now—fear or fury. I’m terrified for my daughter on chemo, my little grandson, and all the other people whose health is already fragile, here in Duluth where we’re over 80 miles from the nearest fires, for all the people even closer, and all the people hundreds of miles away who are also breathing in this hazardous, smoky air. Imagine the damage to wildlife—the nestling birds and mammals too little to escape! Some of the adults and older young near the periphery of the many fires certainly survived, but 77,000 acres of burned area is a lot of valuable habitat for a lot of creatures, not even counting what the smoke is doing, both in the vicinity of the fires and spreading so widely from the actual burn.

As terrified as I am of what all this is doing right now and bodes for the future, I’m also furious. On Wednesday, the Duluth News-Tribune ran a front page headline:

Climate change drives heat wave.

High temperatures throughout Northland more likely to occur due to climate change.

Like DUH! I learned in college, more than half a century ago, that this was coming, but over the 45 years we’ve lived in Duluth, this exact newspaper has always treated climate change as controversial, presenting “both sides” when only one side had actual facts. Scientists at Exxon learned about the certainty of climate change if we kept burning fossil fuels long ago, and even as energy corporations, the Koch brothers, and so many other rich and powerful people suppressed the information as well as they could for decades, they used it to benefit their own bottom line, grooming politicians, oligarchs, and the club of powerful and wealthy insiders to ridicule climate change as a hoax.

Ronald Reagan, the affable and Hollywood-handsome spokesman for General Electric, caught the eyes, and funding, of corporate America, which was enough to elevate him to governor of California and then president of the United States. And as soon as he reached office, he famously tore down the solar panels Jimmy Carter had installed on the White House and turned the thermostat up again, telling the country that there would be no sweaters worn in his White House. And the same forces that elevated Reagan destroyed the political career of Nobel Prize winner Al Gore and more recently, even as things grew increasingly and more obviously dangerous, smeared Greta Thunberg.

Right this very minute, my tax dollars and yours are being used by the Trump administration to pay energy companies billions of dollars in “refunds” to cancel offshore wind turbine projects and abandon their federal leases, and this president still refers to climate change as a hoax, scam, and con job. As the rest of the world grows more and more independent of the fossil fuels that have put so much carbon into our atmosphere and put us all in such dire jeopardy, the United States is moving backward.

I may be filled with fear and fury, but while I was out in my yard a few minutes ago, a female monarch butterfly alighted in my swamp milkweed and allowed me to watch her for at least 3 minutes as she drank from newly opening blossoms. Her delicate tongue, as fine as gossamer, probed each tiny flower individually.

When she flew off, I went upstairs to my office where many of my African violets and Streptocarpus plants are in full bloom.

My pair of cardinals, the male recognizable because he’s missing a bunch of feathers on the left side of his nape and head, is still coming to my window feeders.

Chickadees are also visiting the feeder, and baby Hairy and Downy Woodpeckers and Northern Flickers are still chasing their parents everywhere.

There is so much loveliness in this world despite the horrors. Even the ashy dust coating my normally shiny box elder leaves is giving them a soft, silvery sheen. I can’t quite capture this with my camera, but they’re genuinely lovely in an eerie, haunting way.

Ever since that one cluster of bee balm started flowering, I’ve been finding monarch eggs and caterpillars in the nearby milkweed.

Monarchs lay their eggs exclusively on milkweed, but the adults need nectar even when milkweed isn’t blooming, so I suspect the bee balm is what attracted them to my garden in the first place.

Now that the milkweed is also blossoming, I may start seeing even more eggs and caterpillars—at this very moment, at least two eggs are close to hatching.

Not one of my tiny caterpillars has survived to pupate so far, or even to get bigger than about an inch long. I didn’t understand why they were disappearing until I found one of my House Wren parents probing through the milkweed. Toxins in milkweed make monarch caterpillars increasingly toxic as they grow, but these were apparently still too small to be a problem for the birds. I’m hoping my House Wrens will raise at least one more brood this summer, but hoping just as fervently that they’ll look further afield for baby food.

I feel sad but sort of philosophical about those tiny caterpillars—in the natural world, everything is food for something else. But in that natural world, few species eat their own kind, and usually only when their survival is in jeopardy. It’s the billionaires—ostensibly human beings too—who think nothing of harming and outright killing the rest of us and destroying the earth we all need in the name of their quarterly profits.

I just started a “Buy me a coffee” thing for people who want to support my work but don’t want a paid Substack subscription. I am committed to providing all my content for free to anyone who wants to read it, but every bit of support does help me keep working. I have to pay for my website host, my Flickr Pro account, the Adobe software subscriptions that allow me to edit my photos and podcast, the Microsoft Office software that I use for writing and presentations, my recording and photography equipment… It adds up. You can give a one-time tip for as little as $1 if you click on the button. Thank you so much!

In August 1979, my sister-in-law Jeanie and I took a road trip out West. We did a lot of camping in national parks, and WHOA! In the Big Horn Mountains, a LIFER alighted on my hand!! That was back when it was both legal and part of the culture of tent camping in national parks to share a bit of your food with the little critters who showed up at your campsite. I’d luckily set my Golden Guide on the picnic table, allowing me to page through it with one hand while figuring out that the bird on my other hand was my lifer Gray Jay! And the first sentence in the Golden Guide species account noted that it was “very tame.” Jeanie got several photos of that splendid lifer on my hand for me.

As I learned first hand literally, this bird is exceptionally approachable—indeed, we don’t even need to know one is there before it approaches us. When I’ve taken birders up the Sax-Zim Bog or some lovely spots north of Two Harbors, I’ve often brought peanuts along so they could have the same amazing pleasure I did, holding in their hand this brand-new lifer.

Fortunately, the Golden Guide showed both the soft white-and-gray adult plumage and the charcoal-gray juvenile plumage, so I never thought the new birds I was feeding in the Big Horn Mountains belonged to two different species. When I got home, I discovered that my Peterson guide showed only the adult plumage.

I’ve seen young Canada Jays in that plumage several times since, but never photographed them, so while I was planning this episode, I asked my friend Erik Bruhnke if I could borrow one of his for my blog post. He of course obliged.

Then, this past weekend, when I was birding in the Bog with my friend Paula, two parents and a young bird came pretty close, even though we hadn’t brought along any peanuts. My photos aren’t the best, but I was delighted!

My old Peterson guide and my even older Audubon Land Bird Guide called the bird a Canada Jay—the name such early ornithologists as Swainson and Audubon called it in the 1830s and 40s, and what the American Ornithologists’ Union called it in the first edition of their Checklist in 1886.

I thought the name change to Gray Jay in 1957 was to make this species’ name consistent with the other American jays named for colors (Blue, Green, and Brown Jays). But nope. In 1886, the Canada Jays in coniferous forests of the Pacific Northwest were believed to belong to a separate species, called the “Oregon Jay.” When that population was lumped as a subspecies into the wider ranging species in 1957, they changed the name to Gray Jay to reflect that both populations were included. Had they kept the species name “Canada Jay,” the subspecies’ name would be the Oregon Canada Jay.

The name change was carefully explained by Canadian ornithologist Dan Strickland in 2017 in an article, “How the Canada Jay lost its name and why it matters,” in Ontario Birds. Perhaps anticipating that the name was eventually going to change back to Canada Jay, John K. Terres, author of my single favorite bird reference of all, the 1980 Audubon Society Encyclopedia of North American Birds, used both names in the title for the species entry.

Most people in the US and Canada don’t care in the least what the American Ornithological Society calls any bird “officially.” The Cree name for the Canada Jay, Wisakedjak, entered English as “Whisker Jack” as early as 1740, and the funnier offshoot, Whiskey Jack, quickly became entrenched as its name for many. Wikipedia’s entry for the species quotes Niigaanwewidam Sinclair, an associate professor and acting head of the department of native studies at the University of Manitoba, in a post published by Canadian Geographic magazine. “To my people, the Anishinaabe, she is Gwiingwiishi…a great, wise teacher, and there is an old story that tells of her abilities to give gifts… Her lesson? That it is only in our bravery, resilience and commitments to one another that we can find growth.” I like that a lot.

Changing the name from Canada to Gray Jay was hard for Canadians to accept for another reason—the American Ornithologists’ Union used the American spelling (Gray) rather than the Canadian spelling (Grey). That must rankle, because the species has been reported in fewer than half of our country’s states but in every one of Canada’s provinces and territories. Fortunately, in May 2018, the American Ornithological Society changed the name back officially to Canada Jay.

Somehow, I’ve always had a little question mark in my head when I’ve said or written the bird’s name. Even though my favorite field guide called it the Gray Jay, two-thirds of my original bird books did not. As I learned about the controversy, despite liking the consistency of naming jays for their colors, I felt sympathetic to Canadians because this bird embodies such fundamentally Canadian values—it’s intelligent, friendly and open even with strangers, perfectly adapted to Canadian seasons, serious and assertive but quiet, dresses in unostentatious feathers—you just know if this bird was taught to speak, it would pronounce the word “aboot.”

So I’m very happy about the name change even as, eight years after the official name change, I keep calling it a “Gray Jay” or hesitating before I call it anything. What’s in a name? That which we call a Canada Jay by any other name is just as sweet.

I just started a “Buy me a coffee” thing for people who want to support my work but don’t want a paid subscription. I am absolutely committed to providing all my content for free to anyone who wants to read it, but every little bit of support does help me pay for my website, Zoom account, and all the other expenses involved in producing this! You can give a one-time tip for as little as $1 if you click on the button.)

Since I started producing “For the Birds” in 1986, I’ve always called any month with a blue moon “National Blue Jay Awareness Month.” Decades ago, I made a big deal about it whenever there was a blue moon, producing lots of programs about Blue Jays. Some provided solid information but many had sillier elements, often related to my fictitious Jim Baker and his fictitious company, “Baker’s Blue Jay Barn.” For example, in one “ad,” the “California Ravens” sang “Bohemian Rhapsojay.” (It was me doing the singing to my daughter’s piano accompaniment.)

My friend John Keenan, who voices my Jim Baker character, found a Blue Jay nesting in his yard back in the late 80s and snapped a photo. My friend Darlene Peterson made a drawing of it, and in 1988, KUMD sent supporters a t-shirt with the design as a premium—my kids and I are wearing ours in the top photo. One of the shirts held up well enough that my grandson Walter was wearing it 35 years later!

May 2026 qualified as National Blue Jay Awareness Month because there were two full moons, but between all the preparations and travel involved in giving talks at birding events in Ohio and Wisconsin, and then my daughter’s stem-cell harvest at the Mayo, celebrating Blue Jays entirely slipped my mind. In June and now July, I seem to be making up for lost time by focusing on my “Top Ten” favorite birds—the Blue Jay has, for half a century, always held the #1 or #2 position. I’m especially fond of Blue Jays because they are so deeply embedded in my family life going all the way back to when my children were little.

When my not-quite-one-year-old daughter Katie still had a one-word vocabulary, “mama,” and was just starting to pull herself up to stand, she gravitated to the picture window in our living room—that windowsill was exactly the right height for her to grab onto. Meanwhile, a pair of Blue Jays had figured out that I was feeding peanuts to a few tame squirrels on the front porch, right outside that picture window. The squirrels usually ate the peanuts right away but sometimes buried them. As soon as a squirrel hid a peanut somewhere and ran off, one of the Blue Jays would drop down, dig out the peanut, and fly away with it.

When I first noticed the jays, I started leaving peanuts on the flat railing for them. At first they wouldn’t fly to the porch until I went inside, but one day, the braver one of the pair flew in and grabbed the peanut while I was still on the porch—I’d just stepped back from the railing. By the time the more timid jay started coming in while I was still on the porch, the braver one was taking the peanuts right out of my hand. The second jay never felt comfortable with that. It did start coming in while I was on the porch if I was far enough away from the railing, but if I made any unexpected movement, it hightailed it back to the safety of the maple tree. One time I sneezed right as it alighted on the porch railing and it flew off, not returning for several days.

My little Katie loved watching these big colorful birds at close range, so when I asked her if she wanted to see the Blue Jays, she’d crawl straight to the living room window saying “Boo Jay!”

When Russ and I needed a second car for my speaking and book-signing gigs, we got a personalized license plate memorializing that. We had to pay $100 for it, but only that one time, so 32 years later, my license plate still reads BOOJAY. For decades, Minnesota didn’t let you personalize their critical habitat license plate, but now that they do, our license plate pays tribute to both Black-capped Chickadees and Blue Jays. Imagine being able to honor my top two birds on the same license plate!

I never had much of a relationship with either of my parents as an adult, but I made up for it in the in-law department. When Russ’s parents retired to Port Wing, Wisconsin, in 1980, they immediately set up a feeding station. Blue Jays are here year-round, their numbers augmented enormously during spring and fall migration. When a Blue Jay flies to a feeder, other birds instantly scatter, probably for the same reason that beginning birders at Hawk Ridge sometimes mistake Blue Jays for Sharp-shinned Hawks—in silhouette, both species have rounded wings and a long tail. And Blue Jays sometimes yell out a warning as if a predator was about; when the birds at the feeder scatter, in come the jays. But they’re not bullies—once they settle down to eat, the jays are as peaceable as most other birds. You can tell they have their aggression turned down when their crests are down.

My father-in-law and I ragged each other endlessly about Blue Jays, me calling them “Nature’s Perfect Birds” and him saying how much he hated them. For his birthday in August 1987, I started “For the Birds” talking about how wonderful Blue Jays are but said if I even whispered their name, it would ruin his birthday, so I’d talk about Bald Eagles instead—he got a big kick out of that. That Christmas, Russ and I made a poster with a large picture of a Blue Jay with a red circle/slash, saying “Port Wing Blue Jay Haters. Ellwood Erickson, President,” which he loved so much he immediately hung it in a place of honor in the hallway.

Blue Jays figured even more prominently in Erickson family life after I started rehabbing. The most memorable experiences happened the summer some Cloquet people brought me four very young nestlings after the branch with their nest crashed to the ground in a thunderstorm—a fifth had died in the crash. My kids helped me care for them from the start, and when they fledged and we started letting them spend the day outside, the little birds would fly up to the kids as much as me to be fed.

Our kids’ friends spent a lot of time at our house—we ran a pretty laid-back, friendly household, and you never knew what you would find when you came in, though all the kids in the neighborhood knew to be careful opening the door and looking for any birds underfoot. The little jays enjoyed the hustle and bustle.

That was the summer we were putting an addition on the house. During the time the construction workers were excavating the foundation, the little guys could have gotten in a lot of trouble, so I kept them indoors. One morning I had to run some errands so left the four little fledglings in the back room we were using as a playroom. When I returned and opened the door, the four little Blue Jays were sitting shoulder to shoulder on the windowsill, watching the excavator shovel moving back and forth, digging and dumping, digging and dumping. All four little heads moved in perfect synchrony, back and forth, back and forth, just like the stereotype of people watching a tennis match. The construction workers were charmed.

Our golden retriever Bunter followed me everywhere, and once during that construction chaos, I was so intent on getting out the door of the playroom without the fledglings following me that I accidentally closed the door on Bunter, too. I love telling little kids about this, reminding them that golden retrievers are hunting dogs. Bird hunting dogs. And it was a bloody sight when I returned. Two of the little jays were huddled in a feathery mass, sound asleep. The one I called Jake was sitting on Bunter’s back, hacking into the poor dog like a woodpecker, a bit of blood dripping from the tip of his beak. And the one I called Sneakers was sitting on Bunter’s snout, leaning over, probing Bunter’s nostrils with the tip of her beak. Bunter stood there, tail down, head bowed, looking cosmically guilty as if examining her conscience, trying to think what mortal sin she’d committed that had consigned her to this hell. It never in a million years would have occurred to her to blame the real guilty party—me. Bunter didn’t hold it against the birds, either. When she saw a hungry little Blue Jay, she’d run and get me, as anxious as Lassie if Timmy fell down the well.

Every afternoon, we’d gather in the living room for story time, which was nap time for the jays. Three of them always snuggled together when resting—they usually stayed in a tight group when outside, too.

The fourth always stuck to the humans. When we didn’t feel like having paper towels on our laps, that one would snuggle up to our shoes, so we called her Sneakers.

I always wondered if she hadn’t looked at our house, safe from rain, wind, and predators, compared it to the nest that had crashed in the storm, and shifted her loyalty.

Outdoors, the little birds were wonderful to watch—when one preened, one or two others watched every little movement. When one sampled a new insect or berry, the others would pay attention. Blue Jays don’t only learn by experience—they apparently also learn by the experiences of others.

Little by little, they grew more independent and came less often for feedings. Soon after they started staying outside at night, they stopped coming around altogether. Several months later, the one I’d called Jake showed up at our window feeder one morning and tapped, so I let him in the house. He flew instantly to the spot where I’d always kept a dish of food items for the babies, so I put some food there for him. He also got a drink out of Bunter’s water bowl.

After pigging out, Jake flew to the high shelf in the living room where the babies had often napped, tucked his beak in his back feathers, and fell sound asleep. And slept and slept! I don’t remember exactly how long he was conked out, but it was at least a couple of hours. I was scared that he was sick, but suddenly he woke up, flew back to his food dish and ate a bit more, got another drink, and was ready to face the world again. He flew to the dining room windowsill and waited; when I cranked it open, off he flew, never to return.

I’ve often wondered what led Jake to come home just that one time. He was obviously thriving out there—his feathers were gorgeous, and when he alighted on my hand, his weight seemed perfect. To survive in the natural world, Blue Jays must be ever vigilant, especially in a neighborhood with nesting Merlins and several cats. (That was before Duluth enacted a cat-leash ordinance.) Jake had obviously dealt successfully with the dangers so far—maybe he just needed a little break. Whatever the reason, I was thrilled to see him again, as were my kids.

Baby birds of every species have high mortality—that’s why pairs of Blue Jays virtually always produce 4 or 5 eggs each year while their population stays stable. It’s as scary sending a baby bird off on its own as it is watching your 16-year-old drive off with their brand-new drivers license. I think my children were a little more understanding of Russ and me when we were over-protective because they knew what it was like to want to give a sweet dependent creature its freedom even as you want to protect it from everything bad that could possibly happen.

I’ve birded in Cuba twice, in October 2016 and February 2025, and I presented a program to the Minnesota River Valley Audubon Club last month about the splendid birds there and my experiences. Now, as a thank you to my Substack subscribers (free or paid—my paying subscribers really do make much of my work possible, but all my Substack and podcast content is available for free), I’ll be providing pretty much the same program via Zoom on July 23 at 7 pm CDT. (That’s CENTRAL Daylight Time—I’m in Minnesota.) The link to the Zoom “meeting room” for the program is here. My Zoom account doesn’t allow more than 100 participants, but I’ve never gotten close to the limit yet.

Twelve score and ten years ago this Fourth of July, a group of immigrants whose parents, grandparents, or they themselves had come to America from England officially adopted the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration said, “all men are created equal” and are endowed by their Creator with the inalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

The first time in my life that I heard the word ironic was in seventh grade Catholic school history class, in the context of those very words: our teacher said it was ironic that the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence and many of the men who signed it led lives of luxury thanks to the enforced slavery of human beings who had been endowed by that exact same Creator with those exact same inalienable rights.

Every single day during the eight years I attended Catholic school, and on many of the days I attended public high school, we recited the Pledge of Allegiance, which ends with the lovely words, “with liberty and justice for all. As Pope Leo said on the eve of this milestone Independence Day, “As every American knows, the path to building a society that would embody those high ideals of liberty and justice for all was not always easy and, in many respects, is still a work in progress.”

Our Founding Fathers guaranteed those rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and that nebulous concept of liberty and justice for all in the form of the Bill of Rights. The First Amendment was the one I was most keenly aware of. Of course, even as a small child, I knew there was no such thing as free speech in school, church, or at home, not if you didn’t want to get into big trouble. But I figured out when we were preparing for the Sacrament of Penance before our First Communion that there were sins of commission and sins of omission. Stealing from and hurting people were sins of commission—you did something bad. You didn’t have to do anything at all to commit a sin of omission—skipping Mass on a Sunday or Holy Day of Obligation was a mortal sin that would land you in the exact same hell as murderers and thieves, at least if you didn’t get to Confession in time.

The sin I obsessed about—the mortal sin blackening my soul before I even started first grade and the very first sin I confessed when we received our First Penance in second grade—was both a sin of omission and an issue of free speech. I’ve written before about the time my father spewed a horrifyingly hateful racial epithet at a kind stranger in a grocery store. (You can read that story here.) I was mortified as the poor man fled with his little daughter—ashamed of my father, but somehow even more ashamed of myself for not doing anything to stop him or to help them. I don’t remember when I learned the word complicit, but that experience gave me a visceral understanding of its meaning. After my first Confession, I vowed never, ever to stay silent when I could speak out about someone being injured. Ida B. Wells wrote, “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”

In fifth grade, my class listened repeatedly to the original Broadway soundtrack of The Sound of Music. The song “No Way to Stop It” became my favorite after Mr. Borkowski explained that the Captain, unlike his fiancée Elsa and his friend Max, refused to go along with, or quietly submit to, Nazi occupation of his beloved country. In that original version of the musical, the Captain ends his relationship with Elsa not because he was in love with Maria but specifically because of Elsa’s complicity with evildoers.

Even though it directly affected my family, I didn’t learn about priests abusing children until I was an adult. That was obviously disturbing; what felt even uglier was that the Catholic Church protected those abusive priests and pressured victims and their families to be silent even as those priests continued their abuse in parish after parish.1 So I left the very institution that had taught me that complicity is a sin. Again, the word ironic comes to mind.

When he was a college freshman2, Russ hung up a poster in his dorm room reading, “To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.” That resonated deeply with me, calling complicit silence not simply cowardice but an outright sin. I’ve spent pretty much my entire adult life speaking out against things that hurt children, birds, and the environment we all need. It’s why I’ve spent the past 40 years producing, as a volunteer, my radio program, and why I’ve deeply appreciated the radio stations that have given me this wonderful forum to speak out.

My own willingness to speak up obviously does not obligate anyone to agree with me—that First Amendment protecting our rights to freedom of speech and religion suggests an even more profound freedom—the freedom to think. Exercising free speech should come with the responsibility of fairness; that’s why when listeners or readers notice an error or disagree with something I’ve said or written, I’ve always taken them seriously and tried to present their arguments fairly. In matters of fact, when I learn that I’m wrong about something, I tell my listeners and readers as quickly as possible. When it’s an issue of opinion or judgment, I try to explain, as fairly as I can, our differing viewpoints even as I may reiterate my own reasoning or point out factual errors in their arguments.

I’m under no obligation other than my own sense of fairness and honesty to air the opinions of people who disagree with me, and the media is under no obligation to air my opinions in the first place. When the only feedback I get from someone is derisive or trollish with no reasoned argument that I can discern, I do my best to ignore it, but it’s irresponsible for community and public radio stations to ignore feedback from their listeners, whether they’re regular listeners, people chancing on a program while driving through town, or powerful individual or corporate donors and sponsors or political figures.

Recently, at least one radio station did not air my program about selling a treasured Duluth park 3 nor segments of my four-part series about hunters and anglers using lead ammo and tackle. These particular programs were quite specifically advocating for birds—bluebirds, owls, and other Duluth species in the first case, and all manner of species, especially but not only eagles, condors, and loons, in the second.

I’m lucky that any stations air any of my radio segments, and I do understand the pressures on public media, both subtle and overt, especially in this political climate. But our right to free speech comes with an obligation to exercise it to protect others, and my agenda is to advocate for birds. I know I don’t have a right to speak out on the radio, but regular listeners should have the right to know when and why I’ve been censored.

A Brief History of Lead

When I started producing “For the Birds” in 1986, there were no restrictions whatsoever on lead in ammunition and tackle for hunting and fishing, even though lead had been known for a long time to be a dangerous neurotoxin. Lead can be smelted from galena—its widely distributed ore—in an ordinary wood fire, so people in ancient cultures were quick to discover many uses for it in tools, cookware, and even such things as kohl, an eye cosmetic we now realize is toxic. Ancient Egyptians applied kohl around their eyes to reduce the glare of the desert sun and to repel flies who, unlike the ostensibly most intelligent species on the planet, were smart enough to avoid contact with it.

Both the chemical symbol for lead, Pb, and the word plumbing are derived from the Latin plumbeum, because lead was used to make early Roman water pipes. It’s cheap, malleable and easy to work with, durable, and doesn’t rust. Virtually all plumbing in American cities and towns, from water mains to the pipes inside houses, was made with lead well into the twentieth century.

My house was built around 1910 or so. The inside pipes had been upgraded before we moved here in 1981, but after we’d been here a few years, Russ suddenly realized that the line from the city’s water main to our house was lead.

At the time, I was pregnant with Tommy, Katie was a toddler, and Joey was little, so we immediately pressured the city to replace it, mostly at our expense. It probably didn’t cause any harm, but why risk it? It wasn’t until the horrifying situation in Flint, Michigan, that municipalities started getting serious about lead water mains and pipes. Duluth is still in the process of replacing the old system, little by little.

It’s not as if people in the mid-1900s were unaware of the danger of lead pipes—Australia banned lead service lines carrying water to households in 1930. But despite the known dangers, new service lines could legally be made of lead in the U.S. until a provision of the Clean Water Act finally banned it in 1987. Before that, some localities actually mandated the use of lead in service lines, primarily due to lobbying by lead manufacturers and plumbing unions. Small wonder that several nuns at my Catholic school called money “filthy lucre.”

As bad as lead plumbing was, even more dangerous for ancient Romans was pewter tableware. Polished pewter was almost as beautiful as silver but much cheaper, so it was very popular with the middle class in Rome, and lead was a standard component. Wine is acidic, readily leaching lead from pewter goblets or jugs. Vintage pewter is usually about 15 percent lead but can be as much as 40 percent, and it wasn’t until the 1970s that the U.S. started phasing out the use of lead in pewter, so it’s dangerous to serve food or drink in pewter unless you are certain it was made after 1974.

Even worse than pewter tableware was leaden cookware. Ancient Romans boiled down grapes to make a sweetener called sapa, inadvertently concentrating lead acetate in their food and wine. Lead is especially dangerous for babies, children, and pregnant women, and we’ve known for a long time that exposure to it contributes to cognitive decline, infertility, and erratic behavior in people of all ages; many historians consider lead toxicity to be one of several contributing factors leading to the fall of the Roman Empire. I can’t help but wonder if lead toxicity is a contributing factor in the cognitive decline and erratic behavior of many Americans. In researching this, I read comments by antique collectors who insist they eat and drink from old pewter all the time and have never felt ill effects. Few of us notice a very gradual cognitive decline, temporary or permanent, due to aging, dehydration, illness, drug use, brain worms, or the slow bioaccumulation of lead, even when it starts impairing our judgement about serious matters.

Lead was used in paints in residential housing in the U.S. until 1978. The purpose was primarily to speed up drying times, increase durability, and improve resistance to moisture and weathering. Also, some lead compounds such as white lead served as a premium pigment, providing brilliant color, high opacity, and a smooth finish. The dry weight of indoor paints was at least 10 percent lead, and outdoor paints as much as 50 percent.

In the 1950s, my little brother often swallowed paint chips from our dining room windowsill. My mother thought it was no problem because the windowsill was clean. That poor child was functionally illiterate and suffered cognitive problems his whole life, but there were many compounding factors—he was premature, weighing less than 4 pounds when he was born in 1955; despite already being developmentally delayed, he was shunted off to first grade when he was three months shy of 6 years old, long before he was ready; and he was introduced to drugs at a young age (quite likely by a parish priest)—but those leaden paint chips certainly didn’t help.

As it ages, lead paint doesn’t only chip and crack—it also “chalks,” releasing toxic dust, so anyone exposed to the air around old paint is likely to be breathing in some lead. Houses built after 1978 are extremely unlikely to have any lead paint, but a great many houses built before then still have exposed lead paint in areas that aren’t often redecorated, such as closets, attics, and basements. In most very old houses like mine, virtually all the old lead paint was painted over and/or wallpapered multiple times, so all the lead has been trapped, at least until remodeling or sanding, when it can be released into the air.

Gasoline used to be leaded; as it combusted, the lead was released into the air, most eventually working its way into surface water, soil, and groundwater. One of my vivid childhood memories was how quickly fresh snow along roadsides turned black and crusty due to the lead and other particulates in car exhaust. Lots of moneyed interests, including Standard Oil, General Motors, and the Ethyl Corporation (a lead-additive manufacturer), fought against regulating leaded fuel, but with the national focus on pollution after the first Earth Day, there was enough political pressure for Congress to start requiring catalytic converters on cars to meet new emissions standards. Leaded gasoline permanently damages catalytic converters, so all cars built after 1975 were required to have a smaller filler neck to the gas tank, which accommodates only the narrower lead-free gas pump nozzles.

Leaded gasoline was entirely banned for on-road vehicles in 1996, though it is still available for some highly restricted uses, and lead is still a component of car batteries, x-ray shielding, many electronics, solder, and plenty of other things. Without strenuous regulations and enforcement, it readily leaches into ground and surface water at landfills.

How Lead in Ammunition Harms Humans

Imagine spewing thousands of tons of mercury, cyanide, or other known toxins into the environment every year in the name of sport. In the United States alone, an estimated 80,000 tons of toxic lead are deposited annually at shooting ranges alone. This concentrated lead slowly but surely seeps into lakes, rivers, streams, and groundwater. Lead contamination from one California shooting range made its way to a nearby stream, leading to a documented decline in fish populations. We can guess how lead contamination affects humans near shooting ranges, but it’s extremely difficult to track, there is political opposition to studying it, and very few problems with regard to the health of individuals or populations can be attributed to any single cause. For example, my older brother routinely followed the DDT truck as a kid and then was exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam. A few years after he came home from the war, he developed weird subcutaneous lumps all over his body that remained for life, and he developed cancer in his 50s, but the VA did not help him, insisting Agent Orange was not the one cause of his problems. In our system, if one harmful entity can prove a second harmful entity may also be to blame, neither is held responsible. In a world filled with pesticides and other toxins, habitat degradation and loss, and all kinds of issues that harm wildlife, it’s easy for people to deflect blame for any problem on all manner of things.

The government makes some recommendations for shooting range operators with regard to adding lime or other alkaline materials to the soil to reduce acidity, providing erosion control, and occasionally sifting the soil and recycling lead particles, but these are all strictly voluntary. Without regulations and enforcement, tens of thousands more tons of lead will keep raining down on shooting ranges every year.

In the 1980s, when I talked about hunters using non-toxic ammunition, I got ridiculed because, “like DUH, Laura, the whole point of ammo is to be lethal!” Few of them considered how vulnerable humans are to ingesting lead directly from game meat. It’s hard to find and cut out all the lead shot in a duck, quail, dove, or other small animal. A tiny amount may leach into the meat as it cooks, and some pellets may end up in someone’s mouth. Older children and adults usually spit them out, but younger children—the ones most vulnerable to the worst, most long-lasting effects of lead poisoning—are more likely to swallow them. Pellets work their way through our digestive system and out, but the acidic juices in our stomach dissolve some of it, sending it into the bloodstream.

Small animals taken with shotguns aren’t nearly as big an issue for human health as the larger animals that are usually hunted with bullets. On impact, bullets and some buckshot fragment into smaller pieces; when shot from a high-powered rifle, bullets explode in a “lead snowstorm”—the X-ray pattern formed when a bullet shatters into hundreds of tiny, dust-like metal fragments, many scattering several inches from the primary wound channel. This effect is most commonly produced by high-velocity hunting ammunition or unjacketed lead rounds striking tissue or bone. Now that we know this, many food shelves no longer accept game from hunters. The children of many deer hunters get no such protection.

The Minnesota and Wisconsin DNRs, and probably many others, have worked hard to educate hunters about how dangerous lead is for people eating game meat, but a great many hunters ignore these warnings. It can be hard to give up the rifle or shotgun handed down from a beloved father or grandpa for one that can handle non-lead ammo, or to accept that a family tradition going back many generations has a dark side. Right now, our country is so divided, with so much anger and suspicion towards anyone with different opinions about a variety of issues, that many people sincerely believe that anything environmentalists say must be wrong. To this day, against their own self-interest as well as the health of their families and friends, many hunters and hunting organizations as well as the NRA fight vigorously against restrictions on lead ammo.

How Lead in Ammunition and Tackle Harms Wildlife

Eliminating lead from ammunition is clearly in the best interest of humans, but it is even more vital for wildlife, including the game species hunters claim to do such a great job of conserving. The vast bulk of the lead shot used for hunting each year in the United States doesn’t touch the target—even in successful hits, there’s always some literal scattershot that falls to the land or water below. Many upland game birds, including doves, pheasants, turkeys, quail, and prairie chickens, as well as non-game songbirds, pick up grit, including lead pellets, from the soil, to help their gizzards grind up food. Bottom-feeding and predatory fish such as largemouth bass, trout, and carp, as well as waterfowl, do the same thing, picking up and swallowing tiny stones, lead pellets, and grit in the muck at the bottom of lakes, rivers, and streams. And any fish who swallow lead tackle but get away are also subject to lead toxicity. In all these cases, the lead bioaccumulates in their bodies.

Experts learned in the 1950s that about two million waterfowl were dying every year from lead poisoning due to picking up spent shot, yet the NRA and many hunters fought vigorously against prohibiting lead shot, even specifically for waterfowl hunting. Fortunately, at least some duck hunters understood that protecting ducks from lead was essential if they wanted to maintain sustainable numbers for the survival of their sport. This changed the political calculus, so starting in 1987, a federal ban on lead for waterfowl hunting was phased in, and by 1991, all waterfowl hunting nationwide was finally limited to non-lead shot. Despite this, lead shot continues to rain down on many wetlands because in most places, hunters are still allowed to use it for hunting upland game, even when the small mammals and so-called “upland” birds are in a wetland.

The harm to fish, birds, and mammals swallowing lead pellets and sinkers outright is only a fraction of the problem. Predators and scavengers eating them also ingest lead. Fortunately for people who eat game fish, lead tends to settle in fish bones, scales, and internal organs rather than the meat; it’s the animals who swallow fish whole, such as loons and herons, and those who eat big chunks of the fish, such as Bald Eagles and Osprey, who ingest significant quantities of lead from contaminated fish.

Bald and Golden Eagles and ravens scavenge on deer and other large game that were hit by gunshot but eluded the hunter before dying, and on the gut piles of those that didn’t get away. Every year, the Raptor Center, REGI, and other rehab facilities nationwide treat distressing numbers of Bald Eagles, the number spiking during deer hunting season, and most of the eagles admitted suffer from severe lead poisoning. In a ground-breaking study conducted between 2010 and 2018 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Geological Survey and published in 2022, researchers collected blood samples from over 600 live Bald and Golden Eagles, and liver, femur, and feather samples from almost 600 dead Bald and Golden Eagles, over all four seasons in 38 states representing all four flyways; almost 50 percent of the eagles they sampled showed evidence of repeated exposure to lead.

In 1986, the year I started producing “For the Birds,” every California Condor in existence was brought into captivity, and every single one of them was suffering from very high blood levels of lead. Conservationists started reintroducing condors back to the wild in 1992, working tirelessly to keep them from ingesting lead again, partnering with farmers and ranchers to place safe carcasses in condor gathering and feeding areas. But in California, in addition to game hunting, there’s a robust “varmint hunting” tradition, too. California hunters can legally shoot such “varmints” as coyotes, ground squirrels, and jackrabbits without limit and without collecting the carcasses, which condors were finding and eating.

Moving Forward, and Now Backward

In 2007, while he was governor of California, Arnold Schwartzenegger signed into law a regulation prohibiting lead ammo in the 8 counties (out of 58) where California Condors were most common, but the poor birds cross county lines all the time, so their lead problems continued. In 2013, Governor Jerry Brown signed a law that phased out lead ammo for all hunting everywhere in the state. As of July 1, 2019, all firearm hunting with lead ammunition is prohibited in California. The NRA absolutely opposes this law, brazenly claiming despite an abundance of data that “Traditional ammunition does not and has not negatively impacted wildlife populations in North America and is far more effective and affordable for American hunters.”

Starting in 2009, the Obama administration started working on a rule prohibiting the use of lead ammo and fishing tackle on all 573 national wildlife refuges. It took until January 17, 2017 for the rule to take effect, and then, less than two months later, on March 2, 2017, the Trump administration rescinded it.

In 2023, the Biden administration finalized a rule mandating the use of non-lead ammunition for hunting on just 8 of the nation’s national wildlife refuges. This rule was to take effect on September 1, 2026, but now the Trump administration is reversing it, with the full support of the NRA, a great many hunters, and even Ducks Unlimited, an organization revered by many for its focus on conservation. The organization claims that it’s too complicated and unfair to have different rules at different refuges even as they say a nationwide rule can’t be justified because we need scientific studies to prove the harm on such a wide scale, apparently ignoring that ground-breaking study that showed that almost half of a large sample of eagles, from 38 states representing all four flyways, were carrying unacceptable loads of lead.

Ignoring research for political gain is one thing—now a new proposal by the Trump administration will prevent a lot of important research from happening in the first place. They want to add political appointees to every committee that approves government research and grants. This will ensure that politics and big money interests will always trump scientific truth, whether the environment or human health is at stake.

I know a few hunters who have switched to non-toxic ammo to protect themselves and their families yet insist that using or not using lead should be a personal decision, not a dictate from “the nanny state.” They say it’s emotional, not rational, to consider the suffering that eagles and other victims of lead poisoning endure, even as their own arguments defending lead ammo and tackle are emotional, revolving around nostalgia, tradition, “owning the liberals,” and fears of the “nanny state.”

Hunters and anglers who oppose restrictions on lead ammo and tackle are exactly like those who opposed hunting licenses, bag limits, open and closed seasons, and the other restrictions that have, since the time of Theodore Roosevelt, ensured that the game species hunters and anglers enjoy can thrive long into the future. As long as any hunters or anglers claim a right to spew toxic lead into our environment, they’ve squandered the right to call themselves conservationists.

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If you’d asked me at any point between 1975, when I started birding, and, say, late 2004 what my two favorite birds were, I’d have instantly answered Black-capped Chickadees and Blue Jays. For several of those years, Blue Jays were Number One. What put them on top for me, even above my beloved chickadees?

When I was four or five years old, my Grandpa gave me the “Little Golden Activity Book,” Bird Stamps. I of course wanted to see every one of the 18 birds in it, but the only ones I’d seen in real life were the Robin, Cardinal, and House Sparrow. Of the remaining 15, I was most obsessed with the Blue Jay. It was the first one on the cover, had a jaunty crest, and was beautifully patterned with black, white, and a few different shades of blue. Mystifyingly, the first sentence about it said that it “can be easily seen and heard.” I sure wasn’t seeing or hearing any!

Then when I was six or seven, my family went to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, for a week-long vacation, and one morning, voilà! There was a Blue Jay in all its splendor, even prettier than the book showed! I was thrilled. For many years, I was certain that Lake Geneva must be True Wilderness—Blue Jays lived there!

This belief was reinforced by the fact that I never saw another Blue Jay during my childhood. I didn’t see another until March 23, 1975, when one showed up in Lansing, Michigan, in a stand of trees and then at a backyard feeder not far from our apartment. It was #14 on my life list.

It’s funny how utterly oblivious we can be to our surroundings—after I started birding, the first time we went to Russ’s parents’ house, just a few blocks from the house where I grew up, there were Blue Jays right there! They obviously had to have been in my part of the neighborhood, too, and the same with chickadees, but I never once noticed them growing up. Russ’s parents lived in the neighborhood for just a few years more before they retired up to Port Wing, Wisconsin, but yep—Blue Jays, chickadees, and lots of other birds I’d never noticed as a kid had been there all along! But I digress.

Now that Blue Jays were suddenly part of my everyday life, I grew increasingly fond of them, but, as is often the case with me, it took an intimate acquaintance with one individual Blue Jay to permanently embed the species in my heart.

In 1979, I was birding with my friend Ken Wood in a Madison park when we came upon a newly fledged Blue Jay quite literally playing on the playground slide. He’d hop up to the bottom and then flutter as hard as he could to work his way up the smooth, slippery slope. He never got even halfway up before gravity took over; he’d make a quick about-face and flap his little wings as hard as he could, sliding down to the bottom; he’d stay aloft for a second or two before dropping to the dirt below. Then he’d start up the slide all over again. It was both charming and hilarious. We came close so Ken could take a few photos before we left.

At home, I started feeling uneasy. Ken and I had both seen adult Blue Jays flying over carrying food—they clearly had a nest nearby. And this little fledgling was very conspicuous, but the adults never squawked at us or took any other defensive actions even when Ken was photographing the little one at close range.

So Russ and I went back to the park just in time to discover the tiny bird in the mouth of a golden retriever. Fortunately, this must have been a well-trained hunting dog because it held the little bird gently, and when I reached out to take it, the dog handed it right over! There were one or two drops of blood and a good supply of dog saliva on the little guy, but otherwise he seemed fine.

Meanwhile, those two adult jays flew over a few times, completely ignoring the situation, and the baby still didn’t make a sound. I wondered if his parents had abandoned him because he was so quiet. Most parent birds find and recognize their chicks in part by voice. One that didn’t make a peep when playing in a playground, or especially when trapped in the mouth of a dog, may have seemed defective from an adult Blue Jay’s perspective. But I’ll never know.

The moment that little bird’s eyes met mine, an electric spark surged through me. As captivating as baby Blue Jays are to my eyes, it turns out they’re even better at capturing my heart.

Riding home, the adorable little bird snuggled into my hands and looked at me with bright, trusting eyes. I was scared to death of screwing up, so the first thing I did when I got home was call a dear friend of mine, Malcolm McDonald, who worked at the National Wildlife Health Laboratory in Madison. I knew he’d raised a baby magpie many years before, and he turned out to be a treasure trove of valuable information about diet and care. He told me that taking care of a protected species was illegal, but the laws weren’t very well enforced back then (unlike nowadays!), and that he’d use his many connections with the DNR and USF&WS if anyone questioned me.

The little Blue Jay never made a sound during the first three or four weeks I had him. I thought he must be deaf, so I named him Ludwig. (This is why I’ve always used male pronouns referring to him.)

I was a teacher, and still had two or three weeks of school before summer vacation. The first week, I brought Ludwig with me every day, carrying him in a shoebox on the bus. Noel Johnson, my wonderful bus driver, peeked in the shoe box every morning to say hi to the little bird, and several other passengers took an interest in him, too.

At first, I fed him every 15 minutes during daylight hours whether I was home, on the bus, or in the middle of a lesson. My fourth, fifth, and sixth graders were as charmed as I, meaning sixty more people were invested in Ludwig’s survival and well-being.

When Ludwig got more rambunctious and started flying, I had to leave him at home. Fortunately, by then he could feed himself.

On the last day of school, Ludwig proved beyond a doubt that, unlike Beethoven, he could hear perfectly well. I brought my desk stuff home, including my trusty orange bell from Russ’s and my Parker Brothers “Pit” game. During the school year I rang the bell whenever I wanted the kids to settle down.

When I set it on the dining room table, Ludwig looked curiously at it, so I pressed the button. It rang out loud and clear! Lugwig instantly cocked his head and then pushed the button with his beak, but his breast was touching the metal dome, dampening the sound. When he stepped back, I rang the bell again. His crest popped up and he hopped up to press the button again, but again the sound was dull. I showed him how it worked a few more times, but then Russ and I went to another room to watch TV.

Maybe 20 minutes or a half hour later, we heard a clear “Ding!” A few seconds later, we heard another “Ding!” and then a “Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding!” I went running in to see Ludwig hitting the button over and over as he hovered, wings beating furiously, above it, which was the only way the little guy could hit the push button without touching the dome. He seemed very pleased with himself.

Now that he’d achieved his goal, he was ready to move on. I kept the bell on the table that summer, and he rang it once or twice more, but in the same way that my grandson Walter has outgrown his Fisher-Price little people toys, Ludwig outgrew that bell.

There are no evolutionary advantages whatsoever conferred on a bird for mastering bell ringing, but curiosity, keen observational skills, figuring out cause and effect, and tenaciousness are excellent qualities for an opportunistic omnivore, be it a Blue Jay or a human being. The longer and more closely I observed Ludwig, the more I grew to understand that Blue Jays exemplify the very best of what an intelligent, sociable species can be.

Ludwig thrived. But being raised by a human instead of within a Blue Jay family meant his education was different from that of a normal Blue Jay. The first time he took a bath in the kitchen sink, he soaked himself so thoroughly that each flight feather became a sodden, stringy, heavy mess. He hopped up to the edge of the sink with no problem, but when he tried to fly across the room to the table, he dropped to the floor like a rock. I picked him up on my finger and he stayed put while preening to dry off. Even with me patting him with paper towels, it took half an hour to restore his feathers to flying condition.

I learned that there was no way I’d qualify for state and federal permits to keep Ludwig permanently, so as soon as he started to take short flights, I started taking him outdoors to help him learn some of the skills he’d need to become independent. I was terrified the first time I set him in the branches of a bush—what if he flew off and I never saw him again? How would he survive? I realized that parent birds easily keep track of their fledglings and can reach them even in the highest trees, but I was a mere human. Fortunately, fledglings also keep track of their parents; the first week or so, Ludwig never strayed far from me.

For the first few days, when I couldn’t stay out with him, he’d happily come inside with me. As he got more independent, especially after he discovered mulberries in the back of the yard and delectable fruits further afield in the neighborhood, he’d spend minutes, and then hours, on his own.

A family of Blue Jays lived somewhere near us, and whenever Ludwig found himself on their territory, the adults would chase him off, sometimes following him a ways. He quickly discovered that they were afraid of me. Now when I was outside, he’d occasionally taunt them, getting them to chase him into our yard; he’d alight on my head and turn to face them as if saying, “My mom’s bigger than your mom!” As their own babies grew more independent, the adults grew tolerant of Ludwig.

In the evening or when rain was imminent, I’d call for him from the yard. Once I noticed my neighbor staring at me, making me feel like Samantha on the show “Bewitched,” when she’d call, “Mother! Mother!” into the bushes with Gladys Kravitz staring at her. Calling “Ludwig! Ludwig!” seemed even more bizarre.

Sometimes I couldn’t wait for him and went inside. When he was ready to come in, he’d look through our basement apartment windows until he saw us; then he’d peck at the glass to catch our attention.

By this time, he also was also starting, at long last, to make Blue Jay vocalizations. Now when he wanted my attention, he’d make a squawk that sounded like “Ma! Ma!” which I of course found both hilarious and endearing.

Late one afternoon, a huge storm blew in while Ludwig was outside. As ominously dark clouds built up, I searched for him and called, but he didn’t come. This was the kind of rainstorm that starts out with a huge cloudburst, so I gave up and went inside. Every lightning bolt and blast of thunder made me more anxious.

When the rain finally stopped, I ran out and called for Ludwig. I couldn’t find him in my own yard or nearby, so I hopped on my bike and started riding through the neighborhood, calling his name. Finally, a few blocks away, I found him sitting on a telephone line directly above a bus stop, feathers so plastered against his body that he didn’t look anything like a Blue Jay—just a gray, sodden mass squawking “Ma! Ma!” A dozen or so people were waiting for the bus as I pulled my bike to a stop. That was back when I still clung to a shred of a sense of dignity, and I felt my face grow hot as I called, “C’mon down, Ludwig!” He dropped like a rock, fortunately onto the slim strip of grass between the sidewalk and the curb. He hopped up to me yelling, “Ma! Ma!” as the people stared and laughed.

Thanks to this spunky little Blue Jay, what was left of my sense of dignity was fading away. That internal radar system so desperately focused on any sign of disapproval or ridicule makes it hard for many people to follow their own lights; we can get so wrapped up in self-consciousness that we forget that absurdities are part of everybody’s life. We need to outgrow that to become our genuine selves which, intriguingly, means to become more like Blue Jays. That was one of the important lessons I took from those magical days with Ludwig.

One morning when pouring out my Rice Krispies, out of the box came a little “prize”—a bright red rubber-band-powered propeller. I wound it up and the propeller glided off through the dining room. For a few seconds, Ludwig was spellbound as it floated through the air; suddenly he took off and grabbed it in midair. I called, and he brought it to me.

That’s how we learned to play a fun game of fetch. It was even more fun in the backyard without walls or ceiling to get in the way. Over and over I’d shoot it up and he’d race after it and bring it back. One time it landed on our apartment building’s roof. He flew up to retrieve it, but the moment he landed on the hot roof tiles, he keeled over on his side. His crest went up, one wing and his tail spread out, his beak opened, and he froze. I thought he was having a seizure.

I called but he didn’t move. In a panic, I rushed to the basement where our landlord kept a ladder, lugged it out, and climbed up to the roof, not even thinking about how scared I am of heights as I rushed toward him. But as my hand reached out to grasp him, he shook his head, stood up, grabbed the propeller, and flew onto my shoulder as if nothing had happened.

I called Malcolm about that, and he laughed, explaining about how birds sunbathe, especially on hot, sunny days. This innate behavior raises the temperature of a bird’s skin and feathers, probably helping to banish some parasites. I’d read about that in my ornithology text books, but was still shocked to see it in real life. I really thought Ludwig was dying.

Ludwig kept his collection of toys—some shiny buttons, a rubber band, that Rice Krispies propeller, and an old ring—in a ceramic cup. Now and then he’d take out his treasures one by one, arranging them in a line, and then put them all back into the cup. Once in a while, he’d fly off with one and hide it somewhere. Once he wedged a button in the crevice between the dining room window frame and the sash, and we had to work the button out with a knife before we could open the window.

One day I gave Ludwig a few sunflower seeds. He tucked them away with his other toys, not realizing they were food. A day or two later, I bit one open and ate the seed in front of him, then cracked open another and gave him the seed. He was thrilled! Years later, when we gave our toddler Joey his first Starburst candy, he especially loved the colorful wrapper, calling it “present candy.” That reminded me of how Ludwig loved sunflower seeds as much for the packaging as for the seed within.

Ludwig was very curious about insects, and became adept at catching flies. He put a couple in his cup until he figured out that they were edible--then he just swallowed them as he caught them.

But the instant he first grabbed an ant in his beak, his crest popped up and he spit it out, violently shaking his head with what looked like revulsion, apparently reacting to the formic acid taste. But within half a minute or so, he picked up the ant again, ran his tongue back and forth on it, spit it out again, and cocked his head. Then he grabbed the ant, leaned over to one side and spread the opposite wing, and rubbed the ant on the feathers. The taste of the ant seemed to release this behavior. By the time he switched sides, the ant body was pretty mangled. He didn’t eat it—he just left it on the table for me to clean up.

Of course, I immediately called Malcolm, wondering if this was the “anting” behavior I’d read about in ornithology. Yep. Malcolm said that this was “active anting,” and that Blue Jays also engage in “passive anting,” sitting on an ant hill in the same position they do when sunning, allowing the ants to crawl all over their skin and feathers. Either way, some of the formic acid coating the ants’ bodies ends up on the Blue Jay’s feathers and skin, probably acting as an insect repellent.

By summer’s end, Ludwig was spending most nights outside somewhere—I’d see him just once or twice a day and he no longer wanted to come indoors. The last day I saw him was the last day of summer vacation. Through that fall and winter, whenever I saw a Blue Jay, I wondered if it could be Ludwig.

The next year, when Russ and I were in Chicago during spring vacation, a warm breeze floated into Madison. Our next-door neighbor was out sunning herself when she spotted a Blue Jay alight on each of our apartment windows, peeking in and tapping on the glass. He landed on her lawn chair and studied her a bit, and then tried our windows once more, and finally flew off.

I felt so sad when she told me I’d missed him, but so joyful to learn that he’d survived the winter. Ludwig had a whole rich life ahead of him. Five decades later, I still feel a quiet joy knowing that even as he was leading his life as a proper Blue Jay should, he’d kept in his mind a little memory of me.

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