There is small dove with delicately scaled feathers that can be found around farms, courtyards, and mesquite woods from the southern US to northern Costa Rica, but is most common in central Mexico, across the historic footprint of the Aztec Empire. It is called the Inca Dove.

That’s not a joke; it’s a mistake. And now, not for the first time, there is an opportunity to fix it.

The Inca Empire, overlapping the Aztecs only in time, was exclusively in South America. I shouldn’t need to write that, but apparently, back in 1847 when French naturalist René Lesson named the dove, it would have been helpful.

The first proposal

In 2012, Van Remsen saw the ridiculousness of this mistake. As a longtime member of the North American Checklist Committee (NACC), which oversees English bird names, he made a proposal to his own committee: “Change English name of Columbina inca from Inca Dove to Aztec Dove.”

It was an unusual proposal because it only concerned the English name, which the committee normally reserves as their final task after a lump or a split. Their main focus is taxonomy and scientific names. The committee also regularly adjusts scientific names if new research shows the species belongs in a different genus, or if the name does not conform to their grammar and spelling rules. This proposal was just about the English name; the dove’s scientific name would remain Columbina inca.

Remson, having served on this committee for decades, was well aware of their conservative approach to English name changes. Thus, he began his proposal rather cautiously, “I’m serious. At least I want us to think about this one. As you know, I’m strongly opposed to meddling with English names, and I regard stability as paramount.”

When it comes to English names, the NACC usually leaves mistakes and problems alone, sometimes to fester. Spelling mistake? Leave it. Named after a slaver? Trifling compared to their contributions to ornithology. Thus, we have Sora instead of Soree, birds named after John James Audubon, and hundreds of species in the wrong family, at least in English. And Inca Dove instead of Aztec Dove.

The mistake in the dove’s name was pointed out over fifty years ago, and probably before that. In Choate’s 1973 Dictionary of American Bird Names, he comments, “It appears he confused the land of the Aztecs with the land of the Incas in Peru.”

Deeper into his proposal, Remsen found his voice: “And as far as I know, this species has been called Inca Dove forever. But in this case, it‘s not just a bad name, but also a completely misleading, nonsensical, embarrassing name that should not be perpetuated – I think it reflects badly on us as a committee. In fact, I wonder how the planet manages to continue to rotate on its axis.” Remsen, who works with many South American ornithologists, went on, “We can stop blindly perpetuating a meaningless and misleading name as if we did not realize how dumb it is. Its perpetuation only confirms to Latin Americans how ignorant most Americans are of anything beyond our borders.”

He did not convince his colleagues – all white non-Hispanics from north of the Mexico border, even though the majority of the bird species under their purview occur south of it. The proposal failed by a vote of 5 to 4. The naysayers adopted the committee’s historical “so what” approach. One put the blame on the past, “The name doesn’t reflect our ignorance, but Lesson’s.” They explicitly avoid that logic when it comes to taxonomy. The whole point of the committee is to fix problems when new information comes to light. But they limit this to scientific issues, avoiding social issues.

Another committee member conducted an informal survey. “I was a reluctant yes on this,” they explained, “but then canvassed some respected birders and was met with complete non enthusiasm. English name changes always invite acrimony and I fear that result here.” If you are wondering about the demographics of these “respected birders,” I’m guessing they reflected the committee. If any of the committee members talked to birders or ornithologists from Mexico, they didn’t mention it. While the committee members are not social scientists or environmental educators, a little diversity would have probably helped them here.

The new recommendations

Eleven years later, in 2023, the American Ornithological Society (AOS), which oversees the checklist committee, created the Ad Hoc English Bird Names Committee to make recommendations on how to approach issues such as these. I was one of the eleven members of that committee. In the end, we made three recommendations. The first was that the English names of all birds named after people should be changed, as well as three other problematic names, one of which was the Inca Dove.

The AOS has yet to implement this. However, they have created a new committee to oversee a pilot project, focusing on six species. (I am not part of the new pilot project committee.) Those six are generally considered low-hanging fruit. One of them is the Inca Dove.

Names and places

Is naming birds after a place – a place defined by a human society or a country or a state or a tribe – the same as naming a bird after an individual person (such as Audubon’s Oriole)?

I don’t think so. When a bird is named after a person, it is to honor them. The birds named after countries and societies are clearly geographic references, informing us about where the bird lives. Such geographic names are common.

There are many species named after present-day countries.

Others are named after states, provinces, or regions within nations. Some of these are political designations; others are regions defined by ethnic groups.

There are also many birds named after their island homes – places such as Hainan, Hispaniola, Rarotonga, Kerguelen, Mauritius, and Inaccessible Island.

Others are named after regions that span multiple nations. Some of these are derived from geographic features, ethnic groups, and even religions.

Finally, some names are based on historic societies, kingdoms, and place-names.

Those first two – Aztec Rail and Aztec Thrush – have ranges where you would expect.

The stereotype

Most of the members of the NACC opposed the Ad Hoc Committee’s recommendations. With Aztec Dove the obvious top contender to replace the name of Inca Dove, some of their members publicly cast aspersions on it. It would be inappropriate, they argued, to honor a society that practiced human sacrifice. It seemed they were reaching for any cards they could play and, in this case, they reached for the Native savage card.

The stereotype of barbaric Aztecs has been perpetuated by European colonizers since Cortés’s bloody destruction of Tenochtitlán (Mexico City) in 1521. It continued in Europe for centuries, and apparently, still finds traction today.

Yes, the Aztecs killed people – mostly captured soldiers – in ritualized executions. They were far from unique in this regard. One could go through the list of bird names above and find objectionable policies associated with many of the governments of those places. In his 1973 book, Pyramids of Sacrifice, which featured an Aztec pyramid on its cover, Peter Berger argued that modern nation-states, including the US with its imperialist policies, sacrifice people in far greater numbers.

And let’s not forget what happened to the Aztec Empire. Native historian points out, “Colonizers often inflate the intra-group violence of the people they conquer to obscure their own crimes…. The Spanish genocide of Mesoamerican peoples was so thorough that it killed millions and, according to some experts, even contributed to a global climate shift known as the Little Ice Age. European war and disease killed off up to 90 percent of many Indigenous peoples, including the Aztecs.”

Because of this selective history, when white Americans think of Aztecs, they don’t immediately think of the wonders of Tenochtitlán, the city of 200,000 people with advanced astronomy and agriculture, built out of a lake, complete with floating gardens. And they don’t know that the Spaniards boiled the fat of Native captives to caulk their boats, or that Cortés sorted the captive young women, separating those he desired and branding them with a “g” for guerra (war).

Today, white America honors Cortés, De Soto, and many others, regardless of – or because of – the terror and destruction they caused across Native America.

The name

And there’s the obvious: If we are talking about naming a bird after a place, an ethnic group, or historic entity, our primary concern should be what the people of that place think about the use of the name.

When it comes to Aztec, we have our answer: there are many today, in Mexico and in the US, who embrace the term.

A little etymology is necessary here. The word Aztec is rooted more in legend than history. “Aztec” is derived from the Nahuatl word Aztecatl, meaning people from Aztlán, a mythical ancestral homeland of the Nahua people. The people of the so-called Aztec Empire actually called themselves Mexica.

Aztec was first coined outside of Mexico by Humboldt in 1810, referring to the Mexica empire that existed in central Mexico from 1300s to 1500s. Over time, especially after Mexican independence in 1821, the word took on larger meanings. Aztec is now often used to symbolize all of Mexico, though Aztec descendants also use the terms Nahua and Mexica, and most Mexicans identify as Mestizo.

In the recent World Cup, the Mexico team jerseys featured a giant embossed image of Piedra del Sol, the Aztec Sun Stone. The tournament’s first match was at La Azteca, the legendary stadium in Mexico City. The Aztec calendar can be found on blankets, jewelry, and even beach towels across Mexico.

In the US, the term is often used by Chicano rights advocates as an affirmation of Mexican identity. In 2018, when San Diego State University revisited the iconography around their mascot, the Aztecs, Latino students had mixed opinions about how to represent Aztecs, but generally agreed that it represented them, and that it was not an appropriation of another people. An academic journal published at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center is called Aztlán. Aztec was the name of a Los Angeles soccer team in the 1970s.

During the 2020 Census, more Native respondents said they were Aztec than any other tribe. Native pow-wows and other Indigenous cultural events regularly feature Aztec dancers in traditional regalia. As I write this, in Pacific Northwest, they are dancing at Protocol before the Nisqually hosts of the Canoe Journey.

Like that member of the checklist committee, I did my own informal survey. I asked several Mexican friends their thoughts on the name “Aztec” and their impressions of what it means in Mexico. This comment was typical of the responses: “Anything of Aztec symbolism is seen with pride.”

Yes, members of the taxonomy committee were casting aspersions on a symbol of Mexican pride. This gets us to the second and third recommendations of our Ad Hoc committee: 2) that all future English names should be overseen by a separate committee whose members are representative of all bird name users and have training in environmental education or similar fields; and 3) that the process for developing new English bird names include opportunities for public input. Because we can all learn something new all the time.

My vote

The task before the new pilot project committee, and potentially before all of us if they seek public input, is to suggest a new name for Inca Dove. It doesn’t have to be Aztec Dove. Mexican Dove or Nahua Dove would work. But if we get to vote, I’m voting for Aztec Dove.

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He Sapa: The Valley of the Greasy Grass

Little Bighorn River, Montana, June 25, 1876

Undulating hills, turning yellow, define the valley of the Greasy Grass River, which lies flat and green beneath its shoulders. Along the east side winds the stream, running northbound quick and clear with snowmelt from the distant mountains. With such a shallow gradient, the stream circles, bends, and loops back on itself as it meanders through the grass, cutting short banks against the outside edge of each curve. It is attended by scattered groves of cottonwoods, reaching to the sky, rustling in the breeze, providing shade to the understory and parkland about it. Orioles, flashing neon orange, hold court among the uppermost branches and fill the air with their sweet whistles and scolding chatter. Lark buntings, bold black-and-white sentinels, trill and sing atop sagebrush on the hillsides.

On the morning of June 25, 1876, the sky is deep blue and the day looks to be a hot one. The green floor of the valley is dotted with the white triangular forms of a thousand tipis. They are loosely arranged in six large circles. The Hunkpapa Lakota are at the upstream head of the valley. Next come the Oglalas, then the Minneconjous, the San Arcs and the Blackfoot Lakota together, the Cheyenne, and finally the Santee and Yanktonai Dakota together at the downstream end. Sitting Bull, Gall, and Crazy Horse of the Lakota, and Dull Knife of the Cheyenne are all there.

They have rejected calls to report to their assigned “agencies.” Why should they? After all, did not the treaty signed just eight years prior give them all this forever? Black Elk, now twelve, remembers, We were in our own country and we were doing no harm. We only wanted to be let alone.

Most of the men sleep late this morning. Many women are off gathering wild turnips. The teenagers have taken the ponies, of which there are thousands, to the west to pasture for the day. Younger children play among the tipis or among their mothers at the turnips. As the day warms, boys like Black Elk take to the stream under the cottonwoods.

At the Cheyenne camp, White Cow Bull attempts to court Monahsetah, the girl from Washita River. She is now a woman and has a boy with blond streaks in his hair. But she won’t let White Cow Bull inside, so he sits outside and talks to her through the tipi door flap.

Sometime in the hot afternoon a cry echoes down the valley from circle to circle, The chargers are coming! They are charging! The chargers are coming! Looking up, they see a dust cloud on the horizon as the 7th Cavalry of the US Army charges in full attack down the hillsides, led by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer.

He Sapa: Manifest Destiny Shaken

New York City, New York, July 5, 1876

The news takes ten days to reach the world of the whites. It arrives on July 5, the day after the United States celebrated its Centennial. The New York Times:

LATEST ACCOUNTS OF THE CHARGE. FORCE OF FOUR THOUSAND INDIANS IN POSITION ATTACKED BY LESS THAN FOUR HUNDRED TROOPS…

Chicago, July 6. - On June 25 Gen. Custer’s command came upon the main camp of Sitting Bull, and at once attacked it, charging the thickest part of it with five companies, Major Reno, with seven companies attacking on the other side. The soldiers were repulsed and a wholesale slaughter ensued. Gen. Custer, his brother, his nephew, and his brother-in-law were killed, and not one of his detachment escaped. … The number of killed is stated at 300 and the wounded at 31. Two hundred and seven men are said to have been buried in one place. The list of killed includes seventeen commissioned officers. It is the opinion of Army officers in Chicago, Washington, and Philadelphia, including Gens. Sherman and Sheridan, that Gen. Custer was rashly imprudent to attack such a large number of Indians… no doubt, Custer dropped squarely into the midst of no less than ten thousand red devils and was literally torn to pieces.

FRUITS OF THE ILL-ADVISED BLACK HILLS EXPEDITION OF TWO YEARS AGO…

Washington, July 6. - … The remote cause was undoubtedly the expedition into the Black Hills two years ago in violation of laws and treaties, authorized by Secretary Belknap and led by Gen Custer. … The Sioux are a distinct race of men from the so-called Indians of the Southwest, among whom the army found such easy work two and three years ago. The Sioux live by the chase and feed chiefly upon flesh… like the brave and warlike red men represented by The Last of the Mohicans as ever existed outside the covers of fiction and romance.

For a more complete history – and how it drives US military aggression today – check out ’ recent post: The Indian Wars Continue: 150 Years After Victory at Greasy Grass: What the Indian Wars Teach Us about Today’s Forever Wars.

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The fans

In Lawrence, Kansas, the university marching band arrives at the athletic fields, the US base camp for the Algerian team, and serenades them with the Algerian anthem. The rest of the town adopts the team. Restaurants decorate their windows with the Algerian flag and play Algerian music.

In Arlington, Texas, Dutch fans dance with their Japanese rivals. All of them are clothed and painted in their national colors. The street party spans several blocks.

In Boston, Scottish and German fans overflow a bar and sing “American Pie” together in drunken unison.

In Tijuana, a mariachi band welcomes the Iranian players as they walk down the aircraft stairs.

These are the moments that go viral, that make the World Cup special. The “beautiful game” is just a part of it; it’s also an opportunity to have an international party.

The players

The players are even more integrated than the fans. Because the athletes are allowed to play for the country in which they live, where they were born, or where their parents or grandparents were born, it honors the decisions of their families who left their homelands due to war or economic colonization, and doesn’t hold that against them. It’s been called the Diaspora World Cup, but it could also be the Cup of Ancestors.

Most of Europe’s stars are the children of immigrants. When Senegal played France, ten members of the Senegal team grew up in France, while several on the French team were eligible to play for Senegal. Most of them grew up in Paris’ immigrant suburbs together.

Though committed to play for France now (where he was born), Mbappe could have played for Algeria or Cameroon. Lamine Yamal was eligible to play for Morocco and Equatorial Guinea, as well as Spain. Jude Bellingham for England, Ireland, and Kenya. Ousmane Dembélé for France, Mali, Mauritania, and Senegal. (Yes, players tend to play for the highest seed nation where they can make the team, which tends to continue colonization on the pitch, though the field is leveling. Morocco knocked out Spain four years ago. This year, Cape Verde and Curaçao have stunned higher ranked teams.)

When France won the World Cup in 2018, all but two of their squad members were the children of immigrants, mostly from Africa. To give an idea of just how good France’s youth development program is, an astonishing 98 players in this year’s World Cup were born in France.

Even the US, where competitive soccer is largely a boutique sport for wealthier families, is fortunate with one particular international player. Folarin Balogun, their leading scorer, only qualifies to play for the team because, one day in 2001, a Nigerian woman was deemed too advanced in her pregnancy to board her flight home to London from New York City. She returned to her sister’s apartment in Brooklyn, had the baby, and, after waiting a month, flew home to England. Balogun isn’t even an immigrant to the US; he still lives in Europe. He gains his eligibility through birthright. That’s the only reason he’s now scoring goals for the US.

We eat these stories up because they make a mockery of borders and divisions. The people, in all our complexity, triumph over artificial constructs meant to divide us.

The players, of course, know each other through their professional club teams. And it’s not just the stars of Barcelona, PSG, Liverpool, and Bayern Munich I’m talking about. Mid-level Sunderland has twelve players in the World Cup, representing nine countries: Switzerland, Netherlands, Morocco, Cote d’Voire, Senegal, DR Congo, Paraguay, Ecuador, and Haiti.

Going in the reverse direction, the US starting eleven features nine who play in Europe (for club teams in Germany, Italy, France, England, and Spain). Christian Pulisic, who plays for AC Milan, may run into teammates playing for Belgium, Croatia, France, Switzerland, Portugal, Mexico, or Ecuador.

The World Cup, in the stands, on the streets, and in the locker rooms, is an international party, a giant mix zone.

The powers that be

That said, the vultures hover. The World Cup has always been a target for dictators to sportwash their images. In 1934, Mussolini rolled out the red carpet for foreign fans, trying to showcase fascism in Italy. In 2018, Putin did the same.

Trump isn’t there yet. Instead of using the tournament to show how good the US is, he’s trying to use it to show how strong he is. (This is a sign of weakness.) His treatment of the Iranian team has appalled the sports world. They were denied visas until the last minute, and then forced to move their training camp from Arizona to Tijuana. Outrage grew when the US denied a visa to Africa’s top referee, who is from Somalia.

But the greatest party-killing move by Trump has been the restriction of fans, largely based on skin color. While Brazil created a special World Cup visa to facilitate traveling fans, the US has stuck to its new Trump-era restrictions based on race. The host nation has opened its arms to the white world, but most Africans face a de facto travel ban, forced to pay a $15,000 cash bond just to get a visa. That’s why the mother of Vozinha, the Cape Verde goalkeeper, had “visa problems.”

Morocco, semifinalists four years ago (and looking just as strong now), have seen a large number of fans turned around, many after buying airline and game tickets. World Cup 2026, at least the part in the US, is essentially an international party hosted by a racist pig.

At this party, Trump might be the host, but Gianno Infantino, the president-cum-dictator of FIFA, is the party planner. He coddles to such pigs. He says he has to. He fashions himself as a kind of Robin Hood, taking from the rich and giving to the poor. He explained that FIFA’s “dynamic ticket pricing,” where they serve as their own scalper to drive the cheap seats to over $1,000, enables FIFA to give generously to less-developed nations’ soccer programs. Which they do. Yet FIFA is a non-profit with $4 billion in cash reserves and a record for corruption and bribery that rivals the worst nation-states (e.g. a current host nation).

It was Infantino who made up a fictious award – the FIFA Peace Prize – to give to Trump, a ludicrous gift basket to cultivate his favor. And it was Infantino who remarkably appeared in Iran’s locker room after their first match to inform them that permission to spend the night in Los Angeles had been revoked, and that the team must immediately return to Tijuana. “Show the world what good sports you are,” he cajoled. An equally ludicrous effort.

Subversion of the powers

The fans revolt. Twice every match, loud boos, directed at Infantino and FIFA, overwhelm the arena. They are booing the hydration breaks (even in matches in air-conditioned arenas), obviously created to allow advertising. While BBC keeps live commentary, Fox Sports cuts to commercials, reportedly bringing in $1.2 million per break.

This week, UEFA (the European soccer affiliate) announced it will not continue the new hydration breaks during league play this fall. A few years ago, it was fan outrage that killed a proposed “Super League” in Europe, which would have relegated most teams to an inferior status.

But it’s not just corruption that angers the people; it’s hypocrisy and racism. While FIFA proudly roles out its “NO RACISM” at matches worldwide, it strongly reduced the use of the slogan at the Club World Cup in the US last summer. Because, you know, the pig must be coddled.

While it’s common for teams to have uniforms and logos that commemorate their nation’s history or independence, Haiti’s logo, showing proud people (unarmed) raising a flag, was deemed “too political” and ordered the image removed from their jerseys. Haiti’s independence, making them the only nation in the world founded by a slave revolt, came in 1803. The US did not recognize them until after the Civil War. FIFA, apparently, isn’t there yet. Nevertheless, the company that made the banned jerseys can’t keep them in stock. FIFA’s ban has made them go viral among their fans.

Another small victory was achieved when Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who has Cape Verde ancestry, heard about the visa problems of Vozinha’s mother. He reached out to the State Department. His efforts, combined with the public uproar, made a difference. A few days later, Vozinha’s mother was in Miami for Cape Verde’s historic 2-2 tie with Uruguay. Accessibility of foreign fans will no doubt be a major topic in future World Cup and Olympic hosting decisions.

These are small victories, weapons of the weak. They may not be a substitute for every league and federation simply withdrawing from FIFA and re-starting from scratch, but they lay a foundation. And soccer is just a microcosm of life. There are things bigger than FIFA that face similar struggles.

Who do I think will win? I love Spain for their style of play, but France looks top to me. This is, after all, a tournament of immigrants.

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“Rockin’ and a rollin’, splishin’ and a splashin’, over the horizon, what can it be – a free country.” This was the little tune I learned from Schoolhouse Rock when I was a kid watching Saturday morning TV. Embedded in that three-minute cartoon was an expression that gave the reason for the colonists’ revolt: “taxation without representation.”

Thus, it was a revelation when I read Ned Blackhawk’s The Rediscovery of America, winner of the 2023 National Book Award. Blackhawk (Western Shoshone) asserts that one of the most significant drivers of the American Revolution had nothing to do with taxes – which only the wealthiest paid – but was about the desire for Native land. According to Blackhawk, “interior land concerns as well as the crown’s conciliatory relations with Indians upset settlers just as much if not more than policies of taxation.”

Academic historians largely support this notion. Yet, it’s certainly not what I was taught in school, nor ever heard anywhere.

As a Native, I’m well aware that the Declaration of Independence includes the expression “merciless Indian savages.” Many Indigenous people proudly wear t-shirts reappropriating the phrase. But I never realized that the full context of the expression reveals a darker side of the American Revolution.

The entire sentence is part of a list of 26 grievances against the king of England, explaining the reasons for the colonists’ anger. The final item is this: “[The King] has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” The list also accuses the king of “raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands,” meaning that American pioneers were prohibited from colonizing new lands without permission.

There is some backstory. Just thirteen years earlier, England – with American colonists – defeated the French in the Midwest and Canada. (This was part of the French and Indian War, or the Seven Years’ War.) This gave the English exclusive access to trade with Natives in the Ohio River Valley. To appease the tribes after the war, the king established the Proclamation Line of 1763; no trader or settler could cross the Alleghenies or the Appalachians without royal permission.

The American colonists became infuriated. They wanted land and were ready to take it by force. The “freedom” they wanted - the “250 years of freedom” people talk about now - was the ability to ethnically cleanse the land without a permit. University of Minnesota historian (Lower Brule) points out the obvious irony, that the so-called “free country” in Schoolhouse Rock was “intrinsically tied to the dispossession of Indigenous people.”

Within a year, in late 1764, the Paxton Boys, a white militia led by a pastor, emerged near Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Hundreds of miles from the actual frontier, they found soft targets nearby. They slaughtered the people of Conestoga Town, a Susquehannock community who had lived in peace for generations. The militia then coalesced into a political movement and marched on Philadelphia.

Benjamin Franklin challenged their terrorism in the press, calling the militia (in all caps) “CHRISTIAN WHITE SAVAGES.” Other leaders called the pioneers “lawless banditti,” “already almost out of the Reach of Law and Government,” and “by far more vicious & wicked” than the Natives they sought to displace.

Efforts to bring the Paxton Boys to justice came to nothing. No one would testify against them. Within months, another private militia, a mix of Scotch-Irish and German settlers self-described as “White People,” overcame differences in language and culture to rally around their fear of Indians. Because they painted their faces black and red and wore Native attire, they were called the Black Boys.

Their target was not Natives, however, but their own government. They intercepted a British army pack train of 81 horses from Philadelphia. It was bound for Fort Pitt, filled with trade goods and diplomatic gifts for Native nations. The Black Boys burnt it all.

Franklin linked the attack to the earlier massacre, saying, “Impunity for former Riots has emboldened them.” An election in Pennsylvania drew record turnout, costing Franklin his position. The newly elected government embraced the use of vigilante violence, offering bounties for Native scalps. Two months later, the Black Boys were shooting at British forts. A pioneer uprising was underway, eventually gaining expression in the Declaration of Independence.

They found common ground with wealthy planters (a euphemism for slave plantation owners), such as George Washington, who wanted more land to expand operations or simply for real estate speculation.

We all know the ending. Their revolt against England was successful and the United States was founded as a white male ethnostate. Racial and gender criteria were explicit in the Constitution as well as in the Declaration of Independence. By 1790, the US Congress passed the Naturalization Act, limiting citizenship to white male landowners. Racial criteria for immigrants were not fully removed until 1952.

Modern parallels to the Revolution period are obvious – the normalization of racism, vigilante white terrorism (legally sanctioned), a business class allied with angry rural settlers, calls for restrictions on immigrants from “shithole countries,” and courts that have no problem with racial exclusion – unless it’s whites who are being excluded. As for white vigilante violence, what was Conestoga Town is now a church in Charleston, a synagogue in Pittsburgh, a restaurant in Nashville, a shopping mall in El Paso, a grocery store in Buffalo, and the streets of Minneapolis.

As I write this, the US is welcoming the white world to the World Cup, while fans from Africa are denied visas or made to post a $15,000 cash bond just to get one.

One thing is clear: the so-called 250 years of freedom has actually been 250 years of discrimination, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.

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It was easy to carve the 59,000-acre refuge out of the 3 million-acre Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache Reservation, because Congress was dismantling the entire reservation. Never mind the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867. Congress wanted the land for white homesteaders. This, of course, was the end-game of US invasions and ethnic cleansing of Native lands: creating a welfare state for white pioneers.

Today, it’s still just as easy to carve up Native land. According to the Supreme Court, tribes are “domestic dependent nations,” and our reservations are always at the whim of Congress. Such is the nature of Native sovereignty in the US. (My 3x great grandfather was involved in that case: Worcester v Georgia).

Saving the buffalo

The whole point of the new refuge, the Wichita Forest Reserve (today, the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge), was to save the buffalo. Some of the last survivors were then confined to their own reservation at the Bronx Zoo. President Theodore Roosevelt – the same man who said “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” – had developed a friendship with legendary Comanche chief Quanah Parker. Together, they hatched a plan to ship those buffaloes in box cars back to the Comanche homeland.

The plan was popular, and no one was afraid the Comanches would eat them.

In 1907, Quanah Parker sat at the train depot in Cache, Oklahoma, to welcome six bulls and nine cows of the buffalo nation. As the train slowed to a halt, Comanche children got their first glimpse of the enormous animals through the boards of cattle cars, no doubt astonished at their wild wet eyes and black nostrils, glistening as they got a sniff of the grasslands around them. Those children had never before seen a buffalo. By that time, they’d been gone from the Plains for 30 years.

Native-led restoration today

Those 15 buffaloes played a foundational role in saving the American Bison from extinction. Today, that herd has grown to 600 animals, with hundreds farmed out to other tribes, which in turn have been farmed out to yet more tribes. In 2014, my own tribe, Cherokee Nation, received bison for our own restoration program.

Since 1907, across Turtle Island, Native tribes have been restoring wildlife and habitat at the same rate the US has been invading other nations. Maybe even more. The desire – urgency – to restore buffalo and salmon are obvious. They were always linked to our culture and lifeways. Tribes are also spearheading restoration efforts for other species:

· Condors (Yurok Tribe)

· Lynx (Confederated Tribes of the Colville Restoration)

· Bighorn (Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, Colville, Nez Perce Tribe, Navajo Nation, Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, and Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians)

· Elk (Shokomish, Puyallup, Tule River Indian Tribe, Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, Nez Perce)

· Moose (Grand Portage Band of Ojibwe, Fond du Lac and Bois Forte Bands of Chippewa)

· Wolves (Nez Perce, Southern Ute Indian Tribe, Colville)

· Mountain Lions (Lower Elwha, Jamestown S’Klallam, Port Gamble S’Klallam, Makah, Quinault, Skokomish, Washoe Tribe, Southern Ute, Kalispel Tribe, Gabrielino, Chumash, Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians)

· Sage Grouse (Burns Paiute, Shoshone-Bannock, Yakama Nation, Colville, Ute Mountain, Eastern Shoshone)

· Frogs (Samish Indian Nation, Yakama, Kalispel, Snoqualmie)

· Butterflies (Muscogee, Potawatomi, Osage, Chickasaw, Seminole, Miami, Eastern Shawnee).

I’ll stop there, but the stories can fill volumes. The headlines – in Native news online sources – are weekly, if not daily.

Seeing these animals as part of a symbiotic relationship, tribes have also played critical roles in larger ecosystem restoration efforts, such as the removals of the Elwha River dams (Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe) and the Klamath River dams (Yurok, Karuk, Hoopa Valley, and Klamath Tribes).

A long list of tribes is involved in other restoration efforts: removal of invasive vegetation and fish, suppression of lead ammunition, eelgrass recovery. Much of this is done off-reservation, in co-management arrangements with state and federal governments.

This is what we do. Shepherding the land has always been at the root of tribal government policies. Before the white man, tribal councils – men and women – discussed when and where to burn the prairie or understory, where to fish and hunt, when to move to winter camp, when to come back and plant.

With ethnic cleansing, the land and animals suffered the same as we did. Sometimes, the two were inextricably linked. In 1873, before a joint session of Congress, General Sheridan called for the total extermination of the buffaloes in order to clear the land of its Indigenous peoples. Today, white America still honors Sheridan, but is scarcely aware of Native restoration efforts, which largely began when those 15 buffaloes were shipped backed to the Comanches.

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Generations before Columbus, the ivorybill symbolized a supernatural connection to the sky, the world above. Its image was restricted to temples and halls of the powerful. It appeared on religious items at the funerals of the oligarchs.

Large city-states – Spiro, Cahokia, and Moundville – were at their peak. In size, they exceeded London or Paris. With enormous temple mounds, wide boulevards, and dwellings laid out in straight lines or perfect curves, they were governed by an elaborate state apparatus. Like the districts in Hunger Games, outlying areas produced corn and nuts and other “tribute goods” – taxes for the Capitol.

The “crested bird” symbol, as archeologists call it, was most common at Moundville, located just inside the southern curl of the Black Belt. That evolved into Choctaw country, the home of my ancestors through my father’s mother’s father’s line. My middle name – Carr – comes from them.

The revolutions

Between 1250 and 1400, social and political revolutions spread across eastern North America. In her recent book, Native Nations, Kathleen DuVal describes “the fall of cities and the rise of a more egalitarian order.” Ruins, artifacts, and burial sites suggest it wasn’t a single event. These revolutions were gradual at times, spanning decades, even a century or more, rippling across the land.

Cities were abandoned, though the people remained. Across the South, the ivorybill icon, once reserved for the ruling class, began to appear outside the walls of the capitols, among the masses, in their homes, on their bowls, at their burial sites – evidence of a more egalitarian society.

I like to think that the use of the ivorybill emblem spread just before the uprisings, signifying popular unrest and a revolution of ideas. Thus the ivorybill became a rebellious symbol, like a red bandana or the 3-fingered salute.

Across a thousand miles of the Eastern Woodlands, there was a decentralization of power to small farming communities. In the northeast, the Haudenosaunee tore down their walls and formed a democracy with sophisticated checks and balances. Imagine a nation where each ethnic group had veto power. Or where only men could be leaders, but only women could vote and could remove wayward leaders at any time.

Among the Cherokee lines in my family, we have a story about when we rose up – perhaps in the 1500s, we aren’t sure exactly – and deposed our priestly class. They had used their power and privilege to sexually assault young women with impunity. We drove them out. To this day, the Cherokee have no royalty and no priestly class. As with the rest of the descendants of the city-states, we formed communities around our matrilineal clans and kinship groups. We were decentralized, yet we still maintained the One Fire that unified us. And still do today.

The old world

When the Europeans of the Old World arrived in the New World, they encountered the future, but thought it was the past. We had already rejected the oligarchs; they still had them. They labelled us “savages” and called their monarchies “civilization.” Yet so many accounts suggests the opposite was closer to the truth.

A 1695 conversation between Chingouabe, an Ojibwe leader, and the French governor in Montreal illustrates the different conceptions of social order. Across Europe, tens of thousands were dying in wars between nations. In North America, the French wanted the Ojibwe to join them in a war against the Haudenosaunee. “It is not the same with us as with you,” Chingouabe replied, “When you command, all the French obey you and go to war. But I shall not be heeded and obeyed by my nation in like manner.”

That was because Native peoples enjoyed a remarkable level of freedom and equality, essentially denying leaders the right of violence to maintain order. In many Eastern tribes, a decision to go to war required approval of the Women’s Council. In much of Native America, leadership was only by persuasion, not by force. It was a land of great orators but few police. The greatest leaders, from Tecumseh to Quannah Parker, were known for their excessive generosity to the needy among them. When Native leaders visited London and Paris, they were shocked not just by the poor in the streets, but that no one was helping them.

The authors of The Dawn of Everything posit that much of human history has seen cycles of authoritarian control and decentralized communities. The former are characterized by pyramids, monuments, and enormous walls that are tourist sites today. The latter left fewer landmarks, but their bones show that people were healthier when they weren’t subjugated.

United States of America, 1776-2026

Considering this grand sweep of history, the United States – and much of the modern era – falls at the authoritarian end of the spectrum. There’s a national myth, of course, that the US represents a kind of Ivorybill Revolution of its own, revolting against a king and establishing a democracy with a “bill of rights.” It was a new kind of country, I was taught as a child. Never mind that it was created as a white male ethnostate.

The US’s founding documents are explicit: women could not vote, “merciless Indian savages” had no right to their own lands, and Blacks were enslaved. They cleared my Cherokee and Choctaw ancestors away from Moundville’s fertile soils to create some of the world’s cruelest plantations. And they cleared the forests, too, resulting in the extinction of the Lord God Bird.

I was a poli-sci major in undergrad. I remember a class where the professor was defining terminology. The American Revolution was not a true revolution, she said. It did not meet that standard because it did not really re-order society. It was merely a “colonial revolt.” They changed the flag but, for the subjugated classes, there was no real change.

At the same time, the French, calling for “liberté, égalité, fraternité,” were attempting a real revolution. French conservatives blamed Jesuit missionary journals for spreading seditious ideas. The Jesuit Relations, which were widely read, described conversations like the one above.

Two-hundred fifty years later, the US stumbles on. It has never offered “freedom and justice for all.” In a democracy, voters chose the leaders. In the US, it is now the reverse. Judges allow rulers to draw lines on maps while the media reports how many seats have been won or lost months before anyone goes to the polls, before the candidates are even selected. The rulers extract taxes straight from paychecks and spend the funds exporting their violence across the world.

A third of the public clings to the US caste system. Another third embraces the principles of the “Ivorybill Revolutions,” trying to hold the US to its supposed ideals, to the notions described in those Jesuit journals. Others, mostly young people, have lost faith. When they think about graduate school now, they look overseas.

I’m with them. It’s been 250 years. The US as we want to know it, as we hope to know it, seems done. Certainly its constitution has proven to be worthless at protecting people from the oligarchs. It needs so many amendments that storming the castle actually seems easier.

In her new book, The Beginning Comes After the End, Rebecca Solnit highlights the cultural revolution since the 1960s – the profound changes in values as reflected in the media, in politics, and in each new generation of young people, as if the ideas of the Ivorybill Revolutions are oozing back out of the swamps. She suggests the current right-wing fascism is like an exploding supernova of a dying star, the final outburst of a declining demographic clinging to power. We can hope so.

Even with a continuing revolution of ideas, our Indigenous history suggests the fall of authoritarian rule can take a while – decades, even centuries. The ivory-billed woodpecker may be gone, but the idea remains that the people deserve basic rights and ultimately have the power. We don’t know what it will look like, but a true Ivorybill Revolution may come eventually. It has before.

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Ironically, the megafires of climate change may help return the Great Plains to the ecological balance it once knew when it was managed by Native peoples.

The first part of this story – that the trees are the biggest threat to the grasslands – is widely reported. The issue has been covered in articles targeting bird lovers, the wider public, and local ranchers.

Living Bird (2022): Battling a Green Glacier: How a Native Tree Became a Threat to Nebraska’s Grasslands: Is there such a thing as too many trees? In Nebraska ranchers are battling the inexorable march of redcedar trees across Sandhills grasslands that sustain both livestock and birdlife.

Audubon Magazine (2022): In Nebraska’s Loess Canyons, Setting Trees Ablaze Gives Prairie Birds a Boost: For generations Great Plains ranchers saw fire as a foe. Now they’re banding together and embracing it as a tool to restore grassland habitat.

National Geographic (2021): The Great Plains prairie needs fire to survive. These ranchers are bringing it back: Regular fires are essential for protecting what remains of the grasslands from a stealthy invader: trees.

New York Times (2023): A ‘Green Glacier’ Is Dismantling the Great Plains.

Sandhills Task Force (2025): Using Prescribed Fire to Control Eastern Red Cedar.

Nebraskaland (2024): Melting the Green Glacier – Eastern Red Cedar Management.

That last article, aimed at a local audience, sums up the issue nicely:

“When settlers arrived and fire was removed from the equation, [Eastern redcedars] began to creep out of its refuges and into the surrounding grasslands. Each year, cedars consumed more valuable grazing land and wildlife habitat. The front line advanced so slowly it has been dubbed the green glacier.

Now, after more than a century without these periodic fires, the prairies are one of the most imperiled and least conserved ecosystems in North America. Across the Great Plains, from Texas to the Dakotas, woody plants including cedars are expanding at a rate of 10 percent per year. Where the problem is at its worst, grasslands are now dense woodlands. Nebraska has lost 500,000 acres, or 781 square miles, of grassland since 2000 alone.”

Fire, he concludes, is the best way to “melt the glacier.”

Among academic ecologists and ornithologists, research about the Green Glacier goes back 50 years. Some examples:

Bragg and Hulbert. 1976. Woody plant invasion of unburned Kansas bluestem prairie.

Coppedge et al. 2001. Avian response to landscape change in fragmented southern Great Plains grasslands.

Engle et al. 2008. From the dust bowl to the green glacier: human activity and environmental change in Great Plains grasslands.

Frost and Powell. 2011. Cedar infestation impacts avian communities along the Niobrara River Valley, Nebraska.

Here is a widely-reprinted diagram. This version is from the New York Times.

The people

These articles offer hints of a relevant past, even if quickly passed over:

“During the first half of the 19th century, the socioeconomic land-use situation began to change.”

“Changes in fire regimes and land use have allowed woody communities to become dominant on the landscape.”

“The extent, frequency, and intensity of fires is thought to be less now than before settlement.”

Changes in the “land-use situation” and “settlement” refer, of course, to ethnic cleansing and settler colonization.

For thousands of years, until as recently as 150 years ago, the Great Plains were not just a vast prairie; the grasslands were actively managed and maintained by the Blackfoot, Crow, Mandan, Arikara, Hidatsa, Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Ponca, Omaha, Pawnee, Kiowa, Comanche, Osage, Kickapoo, Apache, and others. They allowed natural fires to burn and, more importantly, intentionally set fires every fall (and sometimes in early spring). These stimulated the seasonal regrowth of grasses and flowers, and prevented colonization of the Plains by trees. Lewis and Clark observed them on several occasions, sometimes on both sides of the Missouri River.

Recent research into the history of the buffalo (Bison bison) and its evolution from Bison antiquus largely concludes that Native societies, the buffalo, and the Great Plains ecosystem evolved together over the last ten thousand years. Fire was a big part of that.

(Further east, across parts of the Midwest, tallgrass prairie would not have existed without Native burning. That’s a sea of corn, soybeans, and pesticides now, which I write about in this post.)

On the Great Plains, this fire regime ended abruptly in the 1870s with the imprisonment of Indigenous people and the slaughter of the buffalo (who also provided ecosystem services via their hooves and appetites). In 1890, with a new generation growing up in concentration camps, Indigenous elders embraced the Ghost Dance, a spiritual revival that called for a return to traditional ways. If we do this, the elders said, the buffalo will return and the white man will disappear.

But the white men gunned down the dancers at Wounded Knee. The government divided up the land and gave it away to pioneers, who fought fire as fiercely as they fought the Natives and worked the land like their comrades worked enslaved people in the South.

Then came the Dust Bowl. The settlers responded by planting trees as windbreaks and around homesteads. Arbor Day was created in Nebraska. The easiest tree to plant was the Eastern redcedar (Juniperus virginiana). It’s not really a cedar; it’s a juniper that occurred naturally on the dry upper edges of river bluffs and arroyos. Unlike the prairie grasses, which are fire-adapted and rejuvenate after burns, fire simply kills junipers, which go up like torches. Thus the Native burning regime kept the Great Plains a grassland.

Under European colonization, the junipers infested the grasslands. In recent decades, through the Conservation Reserve Program and other efforts to avoid another Dust Bowl, many cropped lands have reverted to pasture. For the birds, that’s a good thing. But it’s also given the juniper an opportunity to spread. It is only in recent decades that ranchers, faced with declining rangeland for their cattle, have joined ecologists in the call for prescribed burns. One recently described his discovery of prescribed burns as an “epiphany,” which I guess is what you need if you erase history and ignore the science.

Tribes today are actively seeking to restore ecosystems through fire and other forms of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). Prof. Melinda Adams (N’dee San Carlos Apache) at the University of Kansas is at the forefront of research into prescribed burns.

The birds

I stumbled into this story after looking at eBird trend maps. I was preparing for a talk on birds and climate change, and looking for examples of eastern species shifting north. There are plenty of examples (e.g. Northern Cardinal, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Carolina Wren, and Fish Crow). When I wrote this piece about Northern Cardinals, I noticed they were also expanding west, quite dramatically. This was clearly not a northward range shift associated with climate change.

I then noticed a similar pattern with other species. These are mostly woodland birds, or at least birds who depend on trees to some extent. They are all expanding west onto the Great Plains. The area where these species are increasing is often starkly delineated along a curved line bending from Houston and Dallas north, ultimately to Iowa and Illinois.

At the same time, report after report is telling us that grasslands birds are faring the worst. It’s clear why that is happening in the Corn Belt – neonic pesticides. But out on the prairie, even in rangelands and pastures where neonics are not used, eBird trend maps concur that every grassland bird is declining across the Great Plains, often dramatically.

As some of those papers listed above explain, the spread of the junipers across the Plains has created habitat for woodland species, but devasted grassland birds. Study after study has concluded that the only way to slow or stop this “infestation” is through fire.

I am remembering our famous “longspur winter” when I lived in Yolo County, California, west of Sacramento. Any longspur is a rarity there. One winter, we found several Laplands, Thick-bills, and a flock of 50 Chestnut-collareds. They spent the winter on a vast field that had burned the previous fall.

The fires of March 2026

Up to this point, this entire story had little to do with climate change. Then, March 2026 brought us the Morill Fire. No one knows how it started. It doesn’t matter. What matters is why it became so big, and what it bodes for the future.

At 642,000 acres, it was the largest fire in Nebraska state history by a wide margin. It’s officially a “megafire,” a term that has become part of the lexicon of climate change. Combined with several other fires at the same time, the area burned in western Nebraska this winter was larger than the state of Rhode Island.

The Morill Fire started on March 12, 2026 in the Sandhills of Nebraska (still unceded lands of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868). It became so big for reasons that will be immediately familiar to those who witnessed the megafires of Pacific Palisades, Altadena, Jasper, Lahaina, Talent, Lytton, Fort McMurray, Paradise, or Santa Rosa: months of drought, low humidity, unusually warm weather, record low vegetation moisture, and 50 mph winds – a perfect storm that climate change regularly throws at the American West, and increasingly elsewhere. While the Morill Fire largely burned open rangeland, it did result in one fatality and the loss of homes and barns.

The fires weren’t limited to the Sandhills. There were several other significant fires from South Dakota to Texas, all in the Great Plains.

Re-wilding = re-Indigenizing

In the aftermath of the Morill Fire, some climate activists bemoaned the destruction as “an absolute apocalypse…. This is the ‘intact prairie’—land that hasn’t been touched by a plow in centuries—now scarred so deeply it may take a human lifetime to recover.” What they were misunderstanding, of course, is that it was the lack of fire (and buffaloes) that was degrading the prairie, and that fire will promote its recovery.

The same post also said, “We aren’t just looking at ‘fires’—we are witnessing the methodical incineration of a state’s history.” In that, I agree. It is the settler colonial history of fire suppression and land mismanagement that needs to be reversed.

In short, the Green Glacier and decline in grassland birds is one of the cascading results of ethnic cleansing and settler colonization by naïve – and rapacious – occupants. The solution, it is now apparent, is to return to the old ways, just as the Lakota elders counseled their people in 1890. On the Great Plains, re-wilding means re-Indigenizing. It means bringing fire back.

That, however, faces enormous hurdles. Only in recent years have the current landowners come to see fire as a beneficial tool. Implementation has always been complicated. Indigenous people no doubt debated exactly when and where to start fires, and under what weather conditions. Now, with a society entirely built on private land ownership, with a landscape dotted with homes and highways and train tracks, those debates are far more challenging.

But the megafires of climate change don’t care. They are a blunt instrument, and they are coming. In so doing, they may, in some fashion, provide prairie restoration. While the megafires in Western forests are truly destructive and habitat-changing, fires on the Plains may play a regenerating role.

Time will tell. There will be follow-up studies in the Sandhills. Maybe the fires will chase the settlers away. And the buffalo will come back. Maybe the next iteration of eBird trend maps will show blue dots across the footprints of the fires. And the longspurs and meadowlarks will return.

Turn up the volume for this scene, which I was fortunate to capture at dawn at Badlands National Park, just north of Pine Ridge.

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Here I dig deeper – why it is happening and to which species.

Here is the lede: If you look at the maps in that paper, the most dramatic declines are in the Corn Belt. eBird maps support that as well. From Nebraska to Ohio, the world is losing the bubbling songs of meadowlarks and Bobolinks, and the metallic buzzes of Red-winged Blackbirds and Grasshopper Sparrows.

~~~ Tallgrass ~~~

Before it was the Corn Belt, much of the region was tallgrass prairie, home to Greater Prairie-chickens, Upland Sandpipers, Grasshopper Sparrows, Henslow’s Sparrows, Eastern Meadowlarks, Bobolinks, and others. This was a unique habitat created by Indigenous peoples who used fire to expand the Great Plains into the western fringe of the Eastern Woodlands. Tallgrass prairie would not have existed without them.

This ecosystem lasted millennia. The American Revolution was the beginning of the end for it. George Washington promised Native land to his soldiers, land beyond the Proclamation Line of 1763. With the American victory, the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee and others were no longer able to play the French, British, and Spanish off each other. Settlers began pouring down the Ohio River in large numbers, heading straight for the tallgrass prairie.

In 1830, Congress passed Andrew Jackson’s signature legislation, the Indian Removal Act. His plan was to ethnically cleanse all lands east of the Mississippi River.

The biggest stake in the heart of Native sovereignty in the tallgrass region was probably the fall of Saukenuk two years later. Called the “Jewel of the Mississippi,” the town was larger than Chicago at the time, with over 800 acres of corn, beans, and squash in cultivation. It was the center of the Sauk world, where their ceremonies and festivals were held and where their dead were buried, even if they had died far away.

American officials claimed the town based on a technicality. The treaty, they asserted, said it was to be transferred to the pioneers when, at such time, they desired it. When Black Hawk fought back, Indian Superintendent William Clark (of Lewis and Clark) called for the “extermination” of the Sauk.

The Black Hawk War likely marked the end of Indigenous land management through fire in Illinois. The Sauk and tallgrass remain today, as do the birds, albeit diminished. Prescribed burns have return, limited to certain natural landscapes.

~~~ Corn ~~~

The former tallgrass prairie of the Midwest now grows most of the nation’s corn.

In US agriculture, corn is king. It is the largest crop by acreage, fertilizer use, and government support. Since 1970, the acreage planted in corn has increased about 40%. This came at the expense of wheat, oats, sorghum, barley, alfalfa, and sunflowers – all crops that offer some habitat for birds – as well as pastures, grasslands, and prairie. Also since 1970, grassland birds have declined 53%, the most of any habitat guild in North America.

This is not the corn that feeds America, at least not most of it. About 40% goes to livestock feed. A whopping 35% goes to make ethanol; 15% is exported; and less than 10% goes to food products, mostly high fructose corn syrup and other corn derivatives (glucose, dextrose, starch, and others). Sweet corn – corn on the cob – is essentially a boutique crop that hardly registers in the statistics.

(Soybeans, which are grown in rotation with corn because they add nitrogen, maps similarly. They aren’t much different – 56% are exported and 30% goes to animal feed.)

Like most major crops, corn is propped up with considerable government subsidies and policies (e.g. crop insurance, price support programs, etc.). Most dramatically, in 2006 the US required refineries to mix ethanol into gasoline during the refining process, creating an immense new demand for corn. Corn acreage immediately jumped 25%. It is still growing. 2025’s 95 million acres represented a 5% increase over 2024.

A warming climate might squeeze it. Corn production is spreading north with longer summers and the development of shorter-season varieties, and diminishing in the south, as heat reduces yields. The main Corn Belt, though, is still in a comfort zone.

Marketed as a green solution, ethanol’s actual reduction in carbon emissions is debated. The corn industry and the US Department of Energy say that, compared to gasoline, ethanol reduces carbon emissions 40%. Considering all the inputs of corn production, as well as ethanol’s negative impact on fuel efficiency, another study, also funded by the Department of Energy, estimated that ethanol’s carbon footprint is 24% higher than gasoline. That’s a lot of acreage dedicated to an ambiguous green solution. It has become a support program that farmers and politicians won’t give up. The market for ethanol would not exist without the federal program. It is welfare or socialism in the service of capitalism.

It is not difficult to find critiques. Jonathan Foley, the director of the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment, wrote, “the corn system, as we currently know it, is an agricultural juggernaut, consuming more land, more natural resources and more taxpayer dollars than any other farming system in modern U.S. history.” He called for government policies to incentivize a “reimagined agricultural system” that would create “a more diverse landscape, weaving corn together with many kinds of grains, oil crops, fruits, vegetables, grazing lands and prairies.”

~~~ Neonicotinoids ~~~

He wrote that in 2013. Since then, his reimagined system has morphed into something out of Black Mirror. Enter Neonicotinoid pesticides (neonics). Thought to be kinder and gentler to birds and mammals, they were developed to replace organophosphates, which had started showing up in human breast milk. Organophosphates were developed to replace DDT, which thinned the eggshells of eagles, falcons, and pelicans. Neonics, it turns out, are the most lethal of them all. In their primary application, corn kernels and other seeds are coated before planting. The plant then grows into an acutely toxic deathtrap, killing nearly every insect that touches it, including its pollen.

Introduced in 2004, the use of neonics skyrocketed. By 2014, they were used on most crops: corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, hay, and various fruits and vegetables. King corn accounted for half of all use, soybeans for another quarter. Thus, the Corn Belt represents over 75% of all neonic use.

I refer to 2014 data because, after then, the government stopped collecting data, thanks to lobbying by pesticide manufacturers. “Lobbying” is a euphemism; here I mean bribery through unlimited campaign contributions. In 2024, the ever-malleable judicial system went along with it, ruling that pesticide coatings of seeds are designed to protect the seed, and therefore don’t need to be tracked as a pesticide. It was a ludicrous word game, but it allowed industry to stay off the radar.

Financial data suggest that neonic use in the US has only increased, with nearly all corn acreage treated annually. In an excellent overview, Scott Weidensaul (2022) explained that, because the largest pesticide manufacturers now own most of the seed distributors, a farmer would have a hard time finding corn to plant that was not coated with neonics. At the same time, a growing body of agricultural economic research (which is what my PhD is in) is showing negligible economic benefits from their use. Like ethanol, neonics appear to be a cog in the wheel that makes no sense, but stays there, held in place by money and little else.

In 2018, most neonic use was banned in the European Union because of impacts to bees and other pollinators. There are also limited bans in some states and provinces in the US and Canada, but these are often limited to home garden use. The strongest bans – in New York and Vermont, well outside the Corn Belt – don’t even come into effect until 2029. The public outcry has been about as successful as the opposition to the Indian Removal Act – overwhelming but ineffective. And the tallgrass prairie and its birds suffer.

~~~ Birds ~~~

Over 50 scientific studies have examined the impacts of neonics on birds. Weidensaul notes, “the worst bird declines have been in farmland and grassland habitats where they are used most heavily.” They show annual declines of about 3% per year.

Both in the wild and in captivity, small birds have experienced direct toxicity and death at relatively low doses. Others have demonstrated that direct exposure to the pesticides in water, as well as a decline in the local insect population, also play a role.

Check out the titles of a small selection of the papers:

Hallmann et al. 2014. Declines in insectivorous birds are associated with high neonicotinoid concentrations. Nature.

Hladik et al. 2014. Widespread occurrence of neonicotinoid insecticides in streams in a high corn and soybean producing region, USA. Environmental Pollution.

Li et al. 2020. Neonicotinoids and decline in bird biodiversity in the United States. Nature Sustainability.

Fuentes et al. 2023. Neonicotinoids: still present in farmland birds despite their ban [in Europe]. Chemosphere.

Molenaar et al. 2024. Neonicotinoids impact all aspects of bird life: a meta‐analysis. Ecology Letters.

A recent study in France showed recovery (about 1% per year) of insectivorous birds after neonics were banned.

The recent Science paper asserting that birds were declining at an accelerating rate included a map with red zones illustrating where this was happening. The largest red zone was the Corn Belt. The Maryland/Delaware region, where corn is also the top crop, was lit up, too. The other red zone was the Salinas Valley of California, where up to 70% of the nation’s lettuce is grown. A recent study described heavy neonic use there, along with significant pesticide runoff into adjacent streams.

The Science paper, which analyzed Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) data between 1987 and 2021, showed that the five species declining the fastest were (in order of rate of decline) Common Grackle, European Starling, Red-winged Blackbird, American Crow, and Mourning Dove.

eBird’s trend maps, which track changes in bird abundance between 2012 and 2022, include an estimate of overall population change over the 11-year period, as well as estimates for each state. These maps align well with the BBS data of the Science paper, showing every one of these species declining across the Corn Belt.

The Science paper, which spanned a longer period, estimated annual declines of 2-3% for these species. Compounded over the 11-year period covered by eBird maps, this would imply declines of 18-26%, in line with the figures above.

The Science paper did not show details regarding all species. Here I add eBird trend maps for some traditional tallgrass species.

Northern Harrier, American Kestrel, and LeConte’s Sparrow have similar maps.

Researchers are especially concerned about impacts on avian insectivores, such as swallows and flycatchers, who can be directly poisoned by eating contaminated insects. The declines in Barn Swallow are shown above. Tree Swallow and Eastern Phoebe have similar maps.

Interestingly, Great-crested Flycatchers and Eastern Wood-Pewees are both increasing across much of their range, including the Corn Belt. These are more tree-top and woodland flycatchers and may be benefitting from the slow recovery of the Eastern Woodlands. Apparently, they do not eat the same bugs that are in the corn fields.

~~~ The Silences ~~~

There are a number of silences associated with these increasingly silent springs.

Industry is silent on their use of neonics; they don’t have to report them. When Weidensaul reached out to them, they did not respond. Their campaign contributions, no doubt funneled through political action committees protected by Citizens United, can be hidden.

Even the Science paper stayed in its lane; it did not mention corn, ethanol, nor government subsidies. It called out “intensive agriculture” without details, even though their maps mirrored corn production and neonic use. They mentioned neonicotinoids once, in passing, without explaining them. The New York Times followed suit and didn’t do any further investigative journalism.

~~~ Solutions ~~~

We have enough evidence. Europe did eight years ago. Obviously, neonics should be banned, but that’s a tough hurdle in a moneyocracy. We have shade-grown coffee; what about neonic-free beef? Even neonic-free ethanol? Neonic-free salad? Neonic-free fructose corn syrup? At the very least, neonic-free cracked corn in birdseed. For a bird lover, the case to buy organic has never been more compelling, but “neonic-free” labeling would help call attention to the issue.

We probably have more opportunities for change at state and local levels. Illinois and California, very blue states, have some of the highest neonic use. Rather than incentivizing the demise the America’s birds based on whomever bribes the government the most, we should incentivize alternative land management, focusing on restoration of grasslands and prairie managed using Indigenous practices.

To begin with, we must end the silences.

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Sinners and One Battle After Another will be in the spotlight at the Academy Awards on March 15. Both feature the struggles of marginalized peoples against white supremacy. Both explore temptations to compromise, to take the money, to become a traitor, to make a deal with the devil. Natives make limited but noteworthy appearances in both. And, in both, they are a bit exceptional, standing aside from the protagonists, playing independent roles as free agents or prophets.

One Battle After Another is set in the present, at the sharp point of America’s 500-year debate over exactly what kind of colony those European settlers want, and who belongs in it. The film pits two extremist groups against each other. The French 75, an underground paramilitary group of mixed races – with Black women most prominent in leadership – open the film by attacking an immigration checkpoint to free detainees. They shout “viva la revolucion!” and refer to America as stolen land.

Our heroine at the beginning of the film, Perfidia Beverly Hills, ultimately takes the money, or at least a plea bargain, and rats out her comrades. Her daughter, Willa, our heroine at the end, echoes the best of her mother. In the film’s final scene, set to Tom Petty’s “American Girl,” she jumps in her car to drive three and a half hours to protest - or obstruct - an ICE raid.

The other group, the Christmas Adventurer’s Club, are exclusively older, white men of wealth and power. They talk of a “pure” society. While they consider sleeping with women of color to be “dirty,” they affirm their right to “eat from the floor” - and to cover their tracks by murder if need be. These are men who would be quite comfortable on Epstein’s island.

The only Native character, described by the white supremacists as either “part Comanche or Eskimo,” works as a hit man for them. They describe him as “not a native son” and thus ineligible for official membership in their society. In the end, his Native morals prevail. He refuses to harm a child, betraying the men of Epstein’s island. (I wish the same could be said for Markwayne Mullin, a citizen of Cherokee Nation, who now heads ICE.)

While Battles recalls The Big Lebowski at times, Sinners serves up a rich tableau of symbolism, making it a far more profound film. (Though Battles has plenty of symbolism as well - check out this analysis of the cars used in the final chase scene.)

Set in 1930s Mississippi, Sinners builds its plot from the little we know of legendary Black blues guitarist Robert Johnson – the one who made the deal with the devil at the crossroads. In Sinners, he is personified by the character Sammie Moore. In a remarkable single-shot scene from the juke joint, we see that Sammie’s music represents the essence of Black identity and culture going back to Africa. The first devil who tempts Sammie is his father, a preacher. “Give up your guitar,” his father asks.

Then Sammie and his friends and relatives are tempted to join with white liberals, represented by vampires, to create a free society of love and fellowship. Failure to join the vampires, to assimilate, to share Sammie’s music, will be considered defiance. And vampires don’t take no for an answer.

Even after the climactic battle, the temptations don’t end. At the end, when the clan leader begs Smoke for mercy - “I have money” - Smoke responds with automatic machinegun fire at close range. And at the very end, partway through the credits, the vampires offer Sammie eternal life, but only in darkness, because vampires can’t survive when the sun is out. Sammie resists.

(Both films also have key mixed-race characters. In Sinners, the Black community considers Mary to be “kin,” though she proves uniquely vulnerable to the white vampires, ultimately leading to her demise - and weaponization. In Battles, Perfidia’s daughter represents the freedom fighter of the next generation.)

The juke in Sinners – and Robert Johnson’s crossroads – are on Choctaw land. The Choctaw have a short cameo near the beginning of the film, in which the Choctaw language is spoken. They warn some nice white folks about some bad white men. The nice whites ignore the Choctaws and take in the bad men, who turn them into vampires. That’s the end of nice white folks in the film - and probably a scenario with which the Choctaws are all too familiar. Most interestingly, the scene also reveals that the Choctaws know who the vampires are. They won’t be tempted. Right from the start, they’ve already passed the test that Sammie and his people are about to face, to figure out who the real devils at the crossroads are.

Stay true. Don’t betray the cause. No compromise.

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On February 26, the New York Times splashed this headline:

Did they mean all birds? Everywhere? No, just some. The opening sentences read:

“Birds in the United States are not only declining, but they are declining faster, especially in areas with intensive agriculture, according to new research. Overall drops in bird population, measured from 1987 to 2021, were sharpest in warm and warming areas, suggesting that climate change may play a role.

The study, published on Thursday in the journal Science, shows only correlation with intensive agriculture and temperature, not causation.”

The actual paper

I pulled up the actual paper behind the story, which is available online: Leroy, F., M.A. Jarzyna, and P. Kei. 2026. Hotspots of acceleration and demographic processes behind decline

of North American birds. Science. They analyzed data from 1,033 Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) routes in the US and Canada over a 35-year period, 1987-2021, and highlighted certain regions where a disproportionate share of birds were in trouble.

The Times took some liberties with their framing. Right there in its abstract, the Science paper says that, of the 261 birds species evaluated, 122 (47%) are declining. Of those, 63 are declining faster than previously. That’s 24% of the total. If you look at Figure 4A in the paper (below), you’ll see that most of the red dots (the species declining faster) are hugging the zero axis. In truth, only about 30 species (11% of the total) are declining faster in an alarming way. (These include European Starling and American Crow, both subsidized predators of other birds’ eggs and chicks, so that’s actually a win for other birds.)

One would never know this from the Times article. This is common with environmental news – the media provides what the public expects and makes little effort to educate them or even themselves. When it comes to birds, the public expects doom. Recently, I presented data from our local Christmas Bird Count (CBC) to our local Rainshadow Bird Alliance. Some were taken aback that the majority of species were stable or even increasing. They wanted to know what was wrong with our data.

I’m grateful they partially labeled the species in Figure 4A. Unfortunately, this paper doesn’t provide the full results by species, even in the supplemental materials, so there’s no way to learn what all those other dots are. Frustratingly, this is all too common. Each species has a typical uniqueness. I want to know where Eastern Towhee is; this bird is an outlier in most climate change analyses, contracting in the south but not expanding in the north. What about Oak Titmouse? It seemingly can’t move north with other species. Are they in the red zone here?

In reality, very few birds are only increasing or only decreasing. Most birds are increasing in parts of their range and decreasing in other parts. Here are the eBird trend maps for three of the declining birds from Figure 4A.

Say what you want about eBird, I have found their trend maps to match local survey results pretty well. (The trend maps only use data from reliable observers, and the computer knows who you are.)

In Figure 4A, the blackbird and sparrow are decreasing at an increasing rate, and the kingbird is decreasing but leveling out. Note that the eBird trend maps span only the last third of the years covered in the Science paper. The overall trend is a 6.2% decline for Red-winged Blackbird, a 2.4% decline for Song Sparrow, and 4.9% increase for Eastern Kingbird. Given the different time frames, all of these are consistent with the paper. But the real story here is not whether or not these species are increasing or decreasing, it’s where they are increasing or decreasing. This could apply to the gray dots as well. There are stories to be told here.

The causes

The Times states rather weakly, “climate change may play a role.” That is remarkably misleading. There are literally hundreds of papers that have shown climate-related impacts to birds. Hundreds of species just in North America are shifting their ranges north or up in elevation. There are consistent and similar results across the world. Some of these birds will be winners with climate change; some will be losers. I could go on, but suffice it to say, there is a vast literature on the impacts of climate change on birds.

The Times also mentions impacts from “intensive agriculture,” but offers no details. And then it echoes that lame refrain again: The study “shows only correlation with intensive agriculture and temperature, not causation.” To be fair, the Times is just echoing the paper here.

The Science paper offers few details. It is common scientific practice to downplay obvious correlations with caveats about how correlation does not mean causation, more study is needed, etc. etc. Nevertheless, I wish they would posit some explanation of what might be happening, given that we have plenty of examples of exactly how warming temperatures and certain agricultural practices have impacted birds in the past.

The paper does seek to explore why birds are declining. They don’t do this at a species level, though, just at a regional level, after conducting a spatial smoothing operation on the BBS circles. Thus, they essentially run regressions on the averaged data, using regional average data as explanatory variables.

It’s only a regional analysis – not at the species level – but it does pay some dividends. Here are their main results summarized (Figure 3 in the paper).

These graphs show the relative contributions of certain explanatory variables. The left graph is abundance change, meaning the change in the total number of birds detected over the 35 years. The right graph is the change in the rate of change (a second-order derivative; speeding up vs slowing down).

The potential factors causing the changes are listed along the y-axis. Their impacts are shown as colored bars. The first three bars are the driving factors.

· Red is temperature – comparing warm regions with cool regions. (Remember the bird data is from BBSs, so we’re focusing on temperatures in May-June.) This is commonly observed on eBird trend maps as well.

· Dark blue is temperature change (aka climate change) – how much warmer it has gotten over the 35 years.

· Light blue is nitrogen fertilizer use (areas of agricultural intensity, particularly “the Mid-Atlantic, Midwest, and California.”).

What is going on in those ag intensity areas? Is there some change in agricultural practices in the Salinas Valley (from Figure 2)? The map seems to show two hotspots in the Midwest. The eBird trend maps suggest birds might like whatever is happening in the Dakotas, but not in Illinois, Michigan, or Wisconsin. Is it neonicotinoids or simply the conversion of pasture to beets? And what kind of intensive agriculture is going on in Maryland? If you know, put it in the comments.

Given the specific locations – and very specific if one looked back at the individual BBS routes – it should not be that hard figure out which crops and agricultural practices are the likely culprits. What species are we even talking about here? Unfortunately, the paper doesn’t tell us which species are declining the most in these intensive ag hotspot areas.

To protect the environment, we need to be educated. This paper provides no actionable intelligence when it comes to conservation. It just lays groundwork for future, more detailed, investigations.

We need detailed studies

But here’s the thing, I wonder if we are likely to see those follow-up studies. Academia seems to favor big models. To use an example from Yolo County, California, would it be intellectually interesting to show causation between orchardification of grasslands and declines in meadowlarks, shrikes, and kestrels? It’s a no-brainer, so perhaps it offers nothing for an academic resume. I ran into this kind of obstacle when I worked for California Fish & Wildlife. Recently, ornithologists in Latin America complained that basic biological surveys, the staple of early ornithology in the US, are no longer in vogue for academic publications, though parts of South America could sure use them.

It’s also possible that academics avoid deep pocket stakeholders out of political fear. The few recent papers on the impacts of logging on birds in the Pacific Northwest use euphemisms such as “intensive forestry and suppression of early seral habitat.” I had no idea what they were talking about until I dug deeper. They meant spraying glyphosate (e.g., Round-up) from helicopters. That said, the industry’s euphemism for the same practice, “conifer release,” is positively dystopian. At least these papers told me exactly how Rufous Hummingbirds and Wilson’s Warblers were being impacted, which matched the eBird trend maps very well. (See my summary of the decline of the Rufous Hummingbird here.)

I want more. I’m seeking environmental news with an investigative journalism component, and academic papers that apply scientific inquiry aggressively to find specific answers to specific questions regarding specific species. Would the New York Times cover that, even if they weren’t listed as endangered? Would Science publish a straight-forward no-brainer paper that doesn’t rely on a novel model application? These stories must be out there. Let me know in the comments.

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The comedian, posing as some sort of official, took the calls and recorded his conversations. The most striking – the one that went viral – was a call from a kindergarten teacher. She was reporting the parents of a kindergarten student at her school whom she suspected may be undocumented. The child, she knew for sure, was a US citizen, born in New York.

The conversation was brief and stark.

“I don’t know if they’re here illegally. I just think it’s odd, you know? It’s very odd.”

“What did you say was odd?”

“It’s just odd for them to even be here. Like, I, I’m a teacher at a school, okay? I know schools. I know the whole law about schools. I mean, they seem like nice people or whatever, but I looked them up in our files and I was like ‘Oh, she was born in Honduras and he’s born in El Salvador.’ So right there, it’s like, okay, maybe I’m on the right path. You know, they drop off their kid every day.”

“So is their kid a student at your school?”

“Yes, yes. Kindergarten.”

“So now you want to get his parents deported?”

“Well, I’m just saying if they’re taking up resources from our county, I’m not into illegal people being here.”

The conversation continues a little more (you can find it here).

This is how children like Anne Frank were reported.

When it comes to stereotypes that epitomize kindness, kindergarten teachers must rank near the top. Which is exactly why this conversation is so horrifying. Even when taking action to rip a family apart, her voice is not raised. She comes across as nothing more than concerned neighbor, a nosy Karen, pointing out that you can’t keep all those cute puppies because, you know, it’s city code. But she is, of course, far more dangerous.

She makes plenty of assumptions that are probably wrong. Given that the parents have a kindergartener born here, and come from two different countries themselves, it’s likely that they’ve been in the US a long time, met after they arrived, and are both working – probably low-wage jobs for which there is currently a labor shortage. If they are undocumented – and that’s a big question – they’re probably working with falsified I-9 forms, a convenient American paper-laundering trick that lets their employers off the hook, but enables Social Security deductions from their paychecks even though they’ll never collect it. When it comes to resources, this child’s parents are probably net contributors. Most working people are. Most undocumented people are.

The chilling part of the teacher’s report is that she provides her rationale – that they are using her scarce resources. Implicit behind this is a worldview that assumes a race-based zero-sum world. This is not about “the worst of the worst;” this is about ethnic cleansing.

She doesn’t come across as a deep-thinking political theorist. Nowhere is the acknowledgement that she is living in a wealthy country, eating fruits and vegetables daily that are grown and harvested by undocumented hands, or that a disproportionate share of asylum seekers come from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala precisely because of past US policies that promoted right-wing fascist dictatorships, death squads, and genocide. (The US has openly acknowledged and apologized for its role in the genocide of Indigenous peoples in Guatemala, all to support Dole Pineapple in the late 20^th century.) No, I bet she was parroting voices around her – possibly from her friends, her family, or even her church. She is merely a reflection of the morals of her social circle.

I’m recalling a Sunday morning many years ago, back when I attended a church. A member of the congregation, a Black man from Jamaica, was leading the youth group lesson. Amidst the discussion, one of the youth - this would have been junior high or high school - scoffed at how crazy it was that Christians in the past used the Bible to justify racism and slavery. Our Jamaican leader smiled and gently admonished the kids, “Let us not be so quick,” he said, “to cast judgements upon those of the past and think that something similar might not apply to us today. Perhaps in the future, other Christians will look back upon us and be horrified at something we do that we accept as normal today.”

Like that youth, the kindergarten teacher was assured of her morality in the present.

What kind of society produces Nazi informant kindergarten teachers? It’s an easy question to answer. The US was built with enslaved labor on stolen land. Its founding documents prescribe a white male ethnostate, where women can’t vote, Blacks can be enslaved, and Native Americans are “merciless Indian savages.” Some of its first laws encoded “whiteness” as a legal construct. Racial discrimination against immigrant applicants was legal through 1965. The current administration campaigns on, and governs by, white nationalism – the idea that the US was created by and for whites only and should remain that way. And the Supreme Court, with a 250-year history of race-based jurisprudence, has recently approved race-based detainments by federal law enforcement. These are now called “Kavanaugh stops.” As I’ve said before, the arc of settler colonialism bends toward fascism.

It’s no wonder that, while clearly violating FERPA when she went through the school files, the kindergarten teacher considered herself immune to legal challenge. She was, after all, just doing a kind of “Kavanaugh stop.”

I often hear the argument that we should not hold people in the past accountable to present-day morals, as if the mores of their era excuse them. Usually, this argument is made during a discussion of historic slave owners or Indian killers – as if those two things were not extremely controversial in their own time (among white people), and as if Black and Native morals from that era don’t count. But I’m not willing to let her off the hook. There are also other morals to choose from. Her report went viral precisely because millions of people were horrified by it.

After our Jamaican teacher admonished the church youth group, he went on to teach from the Old Testament a story of how God wanted to include some people – Ninevites or Arameans maybe, I forget which story – there are several – but the Israelites first reaction was along the lines of “Can anything good come from there?” reflecting the prejudice of the time. Later, one of Jesus’ disciples will ask this about him, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?”

It’s not clear if the student was her own, or from a neighboring classroom. I can’t help but think how her thoughts may be different if she visited her students’ homes, met their parents, and heard their stories.

[Note: A follow-up phone call between the comedian and the teacher reveals that the parents are indeed legal. The teacher responds that people like them should be in the cities, not out in the country.]

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Entitled “Drums of our Forefathers,” this particular cultural dinner and show is considered unique among the other similar programs offered to tourists on Rarotonga. It’s not at a White Lotus hotel along the beachfront. Instead, it mimics a traditional feast in one of the mountain valleys, and is set next to an ancient marae that has only recently been excavated by removing the overgrown vegetation. The brainchild of a local Māori, the dinner and dance program includes a short walk to the ancient stone place of worship, along with a considerable amount of teaching about its history. It also serves to connect local youth to their culture by employing them and raising funds for their continuing efforts. It is billed as an “authentic cultural experience.”

While my family cringed at the idea of attending one of these exploitive performances, as a Native American, I really wanted to go to this one. Locals had previously asked me if I had been and had recommended it specifically as particularly representative of their history. When I responded that I had not been, they voiced disappointment, as if I was just a tourist taking in the scenery while ignoring the people. You should go, they said. This was their tribe’s story, a kind of an indigenous Red Lotus. Though it was pricey, at least the money stayed with them and not with some hotel investment company.

I had to convince my family. They obliged me, and we went.

Soon, we were all cringing.

I’ll start with the positives. The host, who emceed the entire evening like a pastor in a church, told us about Māori history, going back to AD 900 when Kupe conducted the first circumnavigation of Aotearoa (New Zealand). Rarotonga is a kind of mother ship in the South Pacific; it was from here that the Māori migrated to Tahiti and Aotearoa. The host listed his own ancestors back about seven generations to one of the wives of a celebrated leader who converted to Christianity when the missionaries arrived in 1823. He was legit.

Familiar with Cherokee and other Native American presentations, I was expecting next a saga of resilience and determination in the face of oppression and cultural genocide. Despite hardships, the Māori remain, and now they’re telling their story.

But the evening started bending like a hall of mirrors. When he opened with a prayer in the name of Jesus, I wasn’t too surprise. The Cherokees in Oklahoma do this. And, like Oklahoma, the Cooks have been heavily missionized. But then he repeatedly told us that they, the Māori of Rarotonga, were cannibalistic savages constantly at war with each other until the missionaries showed them a better way. Suddenly the Red Lotus was becoming a different kind of White Lotus. I waited and waited, but nuance nor counter-narrative never arrived. Just the straight-up JD Vance narrative – white saviors and Native savages – stuff I would never hear at a Native presentation in the US.

I’m not saying there’s no truth to his story. He did use the term “ritual cannibalism,” though he never explained it. This means that sometimes they ate an enemy as a way to send a message. The Shawnee did this, and probably the Cherokees too. It was rare, but it did happen. And it did happen on Rarotonga in one particularly well-known incident, during the first landing of Europeans on the island in 1814. British Captain Philip Goodenough survived, but his mistress and three of his men paid for this ritual message. But here’s the thing, at least in America, the whites ate the Natives too. When the Donner Party of pioneers were starving in the snow, the only people murdered specifically so that they could be eaten were their two Native guides. There are other examples.

And it’s certainly not the first time I’ve heard Natives echo a self-deprecating pro-missionary party line, how we need the white man to save us from ourselves. In 1807, my three-times great-grandmother, Susannah Taylor, wrote this letter to President Thomas Jefferson:

“Father, your red children are pleased that you continue father of the United States -- you have sent a beloved man the Reved. Gideon Blackburn who has taught us to read the Gospel and gived us to understand the method the white people do their business… We Join in onne request that our father the President will give our beloved man that Necessary aid that will Enable him to cary on our Education. I am a Cherokee girl.”

Susannah was a nine-year-old student at the new mission school. The letter was a class assignment; all the children wrote similar fundraising appeals. Her letter sits in the National Archives today because white people really like shit like this.

But I – and all her ancestors – know full well what happened when Susannah was forty and had twelve kids. The youngest was two. On May 26, 1838, the US Army went door to door, farm to farm, cabin to cabin, like ICE agents, rounding everyone up, taking their livestock and possessions, putting them in stockades, and deporting them to Indian Territory. That’s the main story we tell. I saw it when I was a kid, the Trail of Tears Historic Drama. You can still see it today in Tahlequah.

If there were any similar conflicts between the people of Rarotonga and their colonizers, our host didn’t mention it.

Layered on top of this was a steady stream of misogynist jokes, warning the men in the audience not to give their wives too much power. That Māori leaders were always men - warriors. That women existed to do laundry and to look beautiful.

I could have seen this coming. The Cook Islands still have blue laws, outlawing alcohol sales on Sundays. In fact, most businesses shut down. The churches are packed. The only local radio station plays ukulele renditions of Christian praise songs pretty much all the time, no matter what day it is.

I have no idea if the emcee’s portrayal was representative of most people on the island, or of just some hyper-Christian sect, or if those locals who encouraged me to attend this Island Night were connected to it.

But there are clues that other “authentic” stories exist.

At a Native history museum on the island, one can read that, for two generations, the missionaries created “a virtual religious police state,” meting out harsh punishments for minor infractions. Traditional practices were prohibited, and the roles of women were restricted. At the authentic cultural dinner, we didn’t hear about these things. If there queens here once, as there were in Hawaii, we didn’t hear about them either.

There is also evidence of defiance. It’s a remarkable testament of Indigenous resilience that, even today, the Natives control the island. The land, divided into pie slices from the mountaintop to the beaches, remains communally owned by historic clans. Foreigners cannot own land in the Cook Islands; they can only lease it for a maximum of 65 years. There are no Sheratons or Hiltons. The emcee explained that even he must get the permission of three hundred clan members to develop a plot of land. In the schools, Māori is the language of instruction through third grade, preserving the language. And, as we witnessed at the cultural night, the traditional dances - including the sensual hula complete with coconut shell bras - outlasted the missionaries. Like the Cherokee stomp dances of my ancestors, they were probably preserved by being practiced in secret for generations.

At the end of the evening, the emcee solicited applause by noting that now, thanks to the missionaries, his people had invited us to a feast, but in the past, we would have been the feast. I wondered how the other tourists reacted to his Native savage trope. I turned to TripAdvisor’s 448 reviews for answers. These would have been predominantly white tourists from New Zealand and Australia. Mostly four and five stars – average 4.4 – the reviewers generally lauded the authenticity of the cultural night. They believed every word. Their reviews said things like, “very informative on local history.” I could find no one questioning the presentation as sanitized or white-washed. Many even said they enjoyed his jokes, nearly all of which were patriarchal, at the expense of women.

I skipped down to the one- and two-star ratings. Perhaps these reviewers cast a more critical eye. At the very least, some women would be pretty pissed. But, again, there was nothing of substance. In fact, the reviews were vacuous – just complaints about mosquitos, ants on the table, that the bus was late, or that the cocktails were watered down. I read them all. Not one person commented on or questioned the pro-missionary/Native savage trope. One reviewer specifically didn’t want any history, regardless of content: “We don’t need more history and talking.”

I was left wondering what was more depressing: the fact this was called “authentic,” or that is really was authentic — that this level of colonization, and its normalization as evidenced by the general public’s unquestioning reception of it, is actually an authentic portrayal of reality.

I gave it one star, but I do wonder if, in ten or twenty years, those kids we saw on stage will be telling the story differently.

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She had been picked up after following ICE and honking her horn, standing operating procedure across the city now. ICE told her to stop impeding them. She pulled over and parked. ICE pulled over, got out of their vehicle, came over to her Prius, bashed in the windows, threw her phone and car keys in the snow, and hauled her and her partner off to their gulag under the federal building downtown.

There, a young Border Patrol agent interrogated her, asking her why she was opposing ICE. They ended up in a long conversation. “This is why we care,” O’Keefe told him, “We’re concerned about our neighbors. We are scared for our community. That’s why we’re showing up.” Her actions, she told him, came from a “deep place of love and empathy.”

The Border Patrol agent looked at her and said, “Man, I just though all you guys were crazy.”

Watch O’Keefe describe this conversation for KARE 11 News in Minnesota (from the 8:00 mark to about 9:00)

Seemingly, ICE and Border Patrol agents cannot comprehend that the citizens of Minneapolis care about their neighbors. For them, apparently, love and empathy are “crazy.”

Last summer, Trump issued an executive order titled, “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets.” It ordered the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to take steps to move the homeless and those with “serious mental illness” into “long-term institutional settings.” He wants to bring back the psychiatric asylums of the past.

At the same time, he characterized immigrants seeking asylum in the US as escaping from asylums in their own countries. He appeared to think that “asylum” has only one definition. He still does. But he doesn’t want asylums for immigrants; he wants them for Americans.

That idea settled to the bottom of the administration’s pile of alarming ideas until yesterday, when, during a rambling speech to mark the one-year anniversary of his term, Trump recalled a memory from his childhood. He looked up at a building looming over his little league field and saw “all this steel, vicious steel, tiny windows, bars all over the place. Nobody was getting out. It’s called the mental institution. That was an insane asylum.” He seemed to relish the idea.

This administration is not shy about signaling. But why would they want to fast track asylums? The same day, ICE leader Bovino acknowledged that the “excellent communications” of the “anarchists” on the streets of Minneapolis were creating a “difficult operating environment” for ICE. Why would he make that information public?

We already know that ICE’s mission creep has included homeless sweeps. Three Native Americans, scooped up from an encampment near Little Earth, a well-known Native community in Minneapolis, remain “missing” somewhere in ICE custody.

The use of “insane asylums” as prisons for the homeless or political dissidents did not begin with the Soviet Union or even with the Nazis. As often points out regarding Trump’s tactics, the US has already done it before, right here. There is a model for this.

The Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians in Canton, South Dakota, opened in 1902. On paper, it was the nation’s second federally operated psychiatric hospital. In practice, it was an extra-judicial prison, meaning it operated essentially in the healthcare realm.

While there were no official intake criteria, patients generally exhibited any of these problems: epilepsy, depression, dementia, drunkenness, thievery, rebelliousness, or leaving their reservation without permission.

Sedatives, housework, and yardwork were the primary treatment methods. Staff were advised to employ kicking, striking, shaking, choking, or throwing patients to the floor as necessary. Its rooms reeked with the smell of urine and shit. Children were straight jacketed to their beds, lying in their excrement. The doors to the rooms were padlocked.

An investigation in 1927 concluded that a large number of the patients showed no signs of mental illness.

In its 31 years in operation, the asylum “treated” over 350 inmates. A third of them died there, an average of one every three months.

A federal investigation in 1932 noted that life at the asylum was like a “living burial.” Nevertheless, the report concluded, it was “a necessary evil.”

Today its cemetery is a golf course. The graves are unmarked. That’s the model.

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Safely ensconced in their fortress home, their city in the sky, the people of Acoma Pueblo have time to plot. Oñate climbs the narrow stairs, but the opportune moment to kill him slips away. His nephew and his entourage are not so lucky. When they ascend the stairway in the cleft, they are captured and thrown from the cliffs.

The Spanish plan a reprisal. Acoma must be made an example of, or all the pueblos may be emboldened. A priest explains: peace was the principal end for which war was ordained.

The battle takes three days. In the end the mesa is breached. Viewed from afar, Acoma is a lit city on a hill, burning for all to see. For the only time in history, invaders rise from below, take the stairs, burn the town, and kill or capture everyone.

The captives are put on trial in Pueblo Santo Domingo. That also takes three days. All of Acoma is deemed guilty.

- Children under twelve will be given to the priests and nuns.

- All between the ages of 12 and 25 will serve 20 years in servitude.

- The elderly are sent to the Great Plains.

Oñate adds a final touch.

- The males who are over twenty-five years of age, I sentence to have one foot cut off and to twenty years of personal servitude.

The sentence is applied to at least 24 men.

References

Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, M.E. 1610. Historia de la Nueva México.

Lummis, C.F. 1929. The Spanish Pioneers and the California Missions. A.C. McClurg & Co.

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Two Spanish vessels enter the bay. Their intel says some of their own are living as captives in the area. In fact, nearly 200 shipwrecked Spanish men and women have ended up in Calusa hands over the years. While most of the men were killed, some of the women married into the tribe and now have children of their own.

The vessels anchor just offshore. Caalus, king of the Calusa, lord from Cape Canaveral to Key West, responds. He sends one of the captives, fluent in both languages, to give instructions for parley. But the Spanish leader, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, whose presumptuous title is Adelantado of Florida, is wary. This interpreter speaks Spanish but he dresses like an Indian; it is not clear where his loyalties lie.

Menéndez devises a plan and manages to invite Caalus on board. The two do a diplomatic dance. Menéndez quietly lifts anchor, drifts out into the bay, and threatens to kill him. Menéndez’s men suggest the De Soto method: hold the king captive until the Calusa deliver all the gold and silver and captives they have. Menéndez is no stranger to bloodshed; he is fresh from his massacre of over a hundred French Protestants on the other side of Florida. Their bones are still there on the sand.

But Menéndez is a fervent man, a devotee of the Catholic Church. He wants to establish an alliance with the Calusa for the benefit of future missions. He offers Caalus an alternative: return the captives in exchange for many gifts from the Spanish and be his great friend and brother. King Caalus chooses this option.

The Royal Wedding

The Calusa are men of their word. The next evening they host a state dinner at their temple, an enormous thatched structure on a raised mound where, according to one of Menéndez’s men, 2,000 men might gather therein without being very crowded. Carved painted masks adorn the walls. The evening begins with pomp and circumstance. Calusa men sing songs and girls dance, the usual diplomatic welcome. The Spanish provide trumpeters and a dancing little person. Menéndez charms the hosts with kind words in the native tongue that he has written on paper.

He greets a woman he assumes to be the First Lady. King Caalus leans over from his royal seat on the dais and informs Menéndez, using one of the captive Spaniards as interpreter, that that woman was not his wife, but his sister; the one whom he had given the Adelantado for a wife. This is the traditional way to cement an alliance. It does not matter if Menéndez is already married. Caalus himself has many wives, the sisters of other caciques across the land.

Menéndez in unfazed. In fine diplomatic etiquette, he rose and took her by the hand, and seated her next to him, between him and the cacique, and through what he carried written, he said many things to her in her language, reading from the paper; whereat they rejoiced, and all the Indian men and women who were there.

But Caalus has the upper hand. His sister, given in marriage to the Spaniard, is described as 35 years old, not at all beautiful. Now his principal wife, the real First Lady, arrives and takes her place on the dais. She is wearing a pearl choker, a gold necklace, and a short skirt covering in the front. That is all. She is described as 20 years old, very comely and beautiful, with very good features: she had very fine hands and eyes, and looked from one side to another with much gravity and all modesty: she had a very good figure, for even among the many Indian women who were seen to be handsome, not one was as handsome as that one.

Menéndez needs to counter. He has his men bring in gifts for both women: green gowns, beads, scissors, knives, bells, and the biggest hit of all: mirrors. The hosts are delighted.

The royal entourage, Caalus with his beautiful wife, Menéndez with his new wife, with hundreds in attendance, dine in elegance, feasting on fish and oysters provided by the hosts, and biscuits, wine, and honey from the guests, complete with a table and tablecloths. At this point, Menéndez claims the upper hand, thinking they well understood that our food was better than theirs.

The Honeymoon

The meal over, Menéndez suggests it is time for him to retire for the evening. Caalus leans over and suggests he should go and rest in a room which was there, with his sister, since he had given him to her as his wife. Menéndez is now a bit fazed. Caalus makes his point clearer, that if he did not do this the cacique’s Indians would be scandalized, saying that the Adelantado was laughing at them and at her and held her to be of little account; and there were in the pueblo more than 4,000 Indian men and women. It is a military threat.

Menéndez comes up with a quick excuse, that Christian men could not sleep with women who were not Christians.

No problem, says Caalus, he and his people were Christians already since he had taken him for his elder brother.

At this point, their conversation devolves into a theological debate, the conclusion being that Menéndez will take his new bride back to his own tent for the night. Here the adelantado and his captain discuss the issue in the dark. If he does not sleep with his new bride, a serious fracture in the alliance may erupt. They conclude that they should baptize her and give her a name; and the Adelantado should sleep with her, for this would be a great beginning to their trusting him and the other Christians; that all those Indians and the caciques, their neighbors, would then become Christians. It is all for the sake of the missionary endeavor.

The next morning, King Caalus comes to visit. He is pleased. The Spanish vessels prepare to depart. They have on board nine freed captives and a peace treaty with the Calusa, personified in Caalus’ sister, who has been renamed Antonia. She now heads for Havana, to be taught in the ways of the church. At the last minute, two Spanish women, captives and now wives to Calusa men, escape the vessel. They disappear back into the woods, unwilling to forsake their Calusa children.

Father Rogel’s Catechism Lessons

Eventually, the Calusa permit the establishment of a permanent Spanish embassy in their capitol. As the months go by, the people of Mound Key and the Jesuit priests work out a kind of dance. Proselytizing in town is not allowed, but the priests are permitted to offer classes on religious instruction at the mission compound.

Father Juan Rogel writes a letter home, expressing his frustration with the progress:

A short time after they had begun to come, when I began to undeceive them of their errors and idolatries and evil customs and wicked laws that they have, such as killing their children or permitting sodomies, killing innocent persons, etc., they soon began to abandon coming to the catechism lessons.

They said to me that their forebears had lived under [their] law from the beginning of time and that they also wanted to live under it, that I should let them be, that they did not want to listen to me. However, by treating them with gentleness and with love and bringing them a little bit of maize at times, while we had it, with that bait they were frequenting the catechism lessons. Although the king had already left off coming because of being too busy with and involved in his idolatry, they learned the prayers well while the handouts lasted and they were already beginning to believe the things that I was telling them. But when the handouts ended, they all took off.

Intrigue at the Embassy

The students of Father Rogel’s classes are not the only visitors to the mission. Young Calusa women also visit the Spanish security staff. They become loyal to their boyfriends, serving as their eyes and ears in the community. King Caalus wearies of the embassy – the romantic alliances, Father Rogel’s proselytism, and the meddling in Calusa affairs.

He makes up his mind to annihilate them. The embassy must go.

The priests have also been deliberating. They have also made up their minds: regime change. Caalus must go. They have a ready puppet in Felipe, the head of the Calusa military, and he has a hereditary claim to the throne. When conditions are ripe, the green light is given. Caalus pays a visit to the embassy, but he does not return. The Spanish send a message to Havana and Madrid: they were compelled out of self-defense.

Felipe assumes the Calusa throne. Spanish lives have been protected. Freedom has been restored.

Felipe has the support of the Spanish, but not the people. To quell the inevitable coup attempts, he embarks on a reign of terror with targeted political killings. As the weeks go by, the Spaniards at the embassy are taken aback to see Felipe and his followers dancing around severed heads. Spanish intelligence provides this evaluation: The reign and life of that cacique [Felipe] depends on the Christians not withdrawing their support from him because he is so disliked by so many caciques and captains among his vassals that, were it not for the favor and support that he enjoys among the Christians, they would have killed him quite a while ago. The Spanish embassy becomes the de facto capitol, propping up the puppet.

Last Dance

But Felipe is a wayward puppet, too loose in his strings. One day, the Calusa rise up, kill him, and drive the Spanish out. The nationalist fervor spreads. Up in Tocobaga, in Tampa Bay, the cacique hears the stories and acts quickly. They storm the embassy there and kill all the Spanish. At Tequesta, on Biscayne Bay, they kill four Spaniards. The survivors close their fort and flee.

The Spanish are driven from Florida.

References

Hann, J.H. 1991. Missions to the Calusa. Univ. Press of Florida.

Solís de Merás, G. Translated by D. Arbesu. 2020. Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and the Conquest of Florida: A New Manuscript. Univ. Press of Florida.

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Sometimes I play little games as personal challenges. Can I see 40 species on my morning walk? Can I see 200 species in my county in a year? Can I get my total list of species seen within a one-mile radius of my house – my “1MR” – up to 200? These are intended as enticements to get me outside, to explore new areas, and to find new birds in different places.

The hawk and the chicken

On December 31, 2025, my local birding friends thought I’d probably be out looking for a certain Red-shouldered Hawk again, the one out by the Hwy 101/20 interchange, where 18-wheelers come screaming past at 50 mph. Sure, there is a nice riparian corridor, a saltmarsh estuary, and surrounding forests and fields – but only a small fraction of it is publicly accessible. Two busy highways converge there, with an intersection that allows cars and trucks to curve from one to the other at high speed. It’s not a kind place for pedestrians, let alone birders. There is a burger joint on the inside bend of the curve. It has two prominent signs in the window: “CASH ONLY” and “MAGA FOREVER.” I’m guessing they don’t like taxes, rules, and people like me. It’s not a place where I want the proprietors to cook raw meat for me.

I’d been going back there repeatedly for several weeks because my county year list stood at 225. It had been there, stuck at a glass ceiling, since November 12. That’s the county all time big year record, which I set the previous year when I was really trying. In 2025, I had no intention of doing a big year, but there I was, in mid-November, one bird away from a new record.

Aside from an unexpected rarity, the only regularly occurring species I still hadn’t tallied for the year was Ruffed Grouse. In winter, this means driving pot-holed dirt Forest Service roads or walking cold, dark trails, hoping to kick one up. On these endeavors, I could expect to see almost nothing else – maybe a robin or a Varied Thrush, but that’s it. It was a lonely, fruitless, and soul-sucking endeavor, which pissed me off because I’d much rather be birding at Pt. Wilson or Short Farm, where I could expect to see 40+ species and, what’s more, enjoy gorgeous natural beauty that replenishes my soul.

Yes, I was pissed off at myself for spending so much time looking for a Ruffed Grouse in December. So I stopped.

Then there was that goddam Red-shouldered Hawk. One bird. It’s a rare species here, but there’s been one at that highway interchange for the last ten winters or so. Birders pretty much only see it when they are not looking for it – when they’re driving through that intersection and it flies over the road. If you are looking for it, I can assure you your odds are low. I will not reveal how many hours I put in, but it was just about as soul-sucking as looking for the Ruffed Grouse. Plus, it’s a “California bird,” a species that was common at my old home in California, and I told myself when I came up here that I wouldn’t chase California birds just to add them to my local list. But here I was. The game was playing me.

December 31 dawned clear and bright, sunny and calm. It was a perfect day for winter birding. I had no excuses not to go out. But, in a flash of clarity, I forsook that damned hawk, got on my bike, and went out to my favorite local place, the point, where the Strait of Juan de Fuca meets Puget Sound. From the end of the rocks, where the water glides past in different directions four times a day, depending on the tides, I took my place.

This was so much more invigorating than the highway interchange. Kulshan, Mt. Baker, was gleaming across the water. Ancient Murrelets, down for the winter from Haida Gwaii, shuttled back and forth, flying in bundles of four to eight birds. The usual half dozen Harlequin Ducks floated off to my left. The regular subadult male Steller’s Sea Lion surfaced and snorted to my right. In front of me, several pairs of Marbled Murrelets pointed their bills to the sky and called in courtship to each other. A Red-throated Loon circled and glided into a long sliding belly landing. The birding was good, the scenery spectacular, and the entire outing restored my soul. Full eBird list with some nice pics here.

I finished the year still at 225 for the county year thing, completely content. No Ruffed Grouse. No Red-shouldered Hawk.

Good games

Gamification can take many forms. We can create games to challenge ourselves to achieve certain goals, such as to explore local areas (e.g., county listing). We can use them to create opportunities for those who are less mobile (e.g. a Big Sit). I once led a field trip focused on sparrow identification. Yes, that’s a hard sell. To promote it, I called the trip “Sparrow Bingo” and created Bingo cards with sparrow species for each person. That outing was such as success that it continues today as an annual event.

Keeping year lists, county lists, and life lists is a major part of the gamification of birding. In the YouTube documentary, Listers, two brothers explore the world of “extreme birdwatching” as they embark on a Lower 48 Big Year. They modify an old Kia Sedona minivan and drive around the country seeing how many different types of birds they can find. Interviewing birders in the course of their travels, they make a brilliant self-deprecating documentary/mockumentary that probes the good and bad of listing. I recommend it.

For most, bird listing is a personal game. I’ve been keeping my bird life list since I was seven-years-old and discovered those check boxes in the back of my field guide.

In my experience, it would be an overstatement to characterize it as competitive. Birding culture is cooperative – we share information. If I find the county’s first-ever Northern Waterthrush, I don’t sequester the information, even if I’m in a neck-and-neck battle for the County Big Year. No, I immediately text the whole WhatsApp group with detailed descriptions about where the bird is – even down to the lat-long, the actual bush, and suggested approach to the said bush. Because a sharing culture benefits everyone in the long run; we all get to see more cool birds.

Underneath this, there is still some level of good-natured competition. When eBird added the Top 100 feature, where you can see how you are doing compared to others in various listing categories, eBird use took off. That produced tons of data, which is a good thing.

Today, eBird’s abundance and trends maps (at the Science tab) are the equivalent of a million research stations across the world reporting the results of bird surveys every day of the year. The data is astounding – and accessible to anyone. The data have been used in hundreds of scientific publications about bird range shifts due to climate and habitat changes.

County listing, which has taken off nationwide thanks to eBird’s maps, has dramatically improved our knowledge of local habitats, bird distribution, and even local conservation issues. Before that, most of us just went to the same park or wildlife refuge over and over.

There can be significant personal benefits to even manic listing. I have many friends who have done statewide big years. One told me, “If I find out about a bird by noon, anywhere in the state, I can be on it by sunset.” While that kind of chasing is not for me, to his credit, he now knows more about bird distribution, seasonality, and the probabilities of finding any species at any specific time and place than nearly anyone in the state. It’s a level of expertise that likely exceeds that of any biologist or wildlife model at the state and federal wildlife agencies. And he was only 17 at the time.

(For an extraordinary example of how gamification can develop one’s knowledge, check out this GeoGuessr competition, where competitors view a randomly-selected Google Street View image from anywhere in the world and have seconds to figure out where.)

Bad games

Listing rarely induces cheating. Sure, I’ve heard stories, but they are decidedly the exception. And birders are some of the best detectives in the world at investigating fraud. Listers covers one such case.

The worst element of listing is a toxic snobbery that can evolve between more experienced birders and newcomers, as if there were only one right way to enjoy birds. Such elitism doesn’t require listing, just knowledge and experience. This is often overlaid with age, gender, and even race. That’s a whole different conversation, which I’ve written about previously.

This old Doonesbury cartoon illustrates how listing can affect one’s relationships and other commitments.

My struggles with listing are personal. It can become the tail that wags the dog. And that dog is me.

Thomas Gannon, in his book, Birding While Indian, confesses that he has become obsessed with listing, which he describes as “another Western colonial act of epistemic violence,” objectifying birds like the way natural resources are exploited. He compares eBird to “ticking off the beads of a rosary.” At one point, he just wants “to give up on the whole list-making enterprise. But not just yet.”

I want the game to help me enjoy birds and life, not to become a neurotic overlord, a little yellow man inside my head, causing me to make soul-sucking decisions like driving back roads endlessly or standing next to a “MAGA FOREVER” sign while 18-wheelers blow past me.

My game

I call it bird-life balance. The tipping point will be different for everyone.

Usually, when I’m out, I’ve got my binoculars, often my camera, and I’m tallying birds on eBird. Sometimes – probably not often enough – I just take the bins. No camera. No eBird. I call this “freebirding.”

I do enjoy chasing rarities, not just to add to my list, but to experience something new. And it gets me out. I recently chased a Pine Warbler in Victoria, BC. The bird was a half-hour bike-ride from our hotel, where I was with my family. The dawn was cold, clear, calm, and glorious. I biked on dedicated lanes and over a long wooden bridge. The sunrise reminded me of Tortuguero, Costa Rica, except that it was one degree above freezing. I only saw the bird for a few seconds, and enjoyed the bike ride as much as the bird. But had it not been for the bird, I probably would have stayed in bed that morning.

I’ve always had a rule: I never chase a rarity if the round-trip driving time would exceed the birding time. For example, if the Common Crane is two hours away, that’s a four-hour round trip. So, for me to justify the trip, I must spend at least four hours enjoying birds and life at the far end of that trip before returning home. This usually means two hours away is my limit. In 50+ years of birding, I’ve very rarely broken that rule. When I did, I was in the car with old friends.

I have some personal birding goals for 2026, though they don’t involve numbers or lists – yet. I want to audio-record a singing Sagebrush Sparrow on the eastern steppes of the Cascades. I want to canvas my county – on the Olympic Peninsula – for more Red-eyed Vireos. And I want to get out on the waters of the Salish Sea more.

Most days, no matter where I am, I’ll find a way to “go to bird.”

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A red bird in a white tree, with snowflakes gently falling, sings, piercing a snow-globe world with a cheery song. It seems bold and happy. Among the brown twigs in the background, its crimson-annotated mate watches, her red bill glowing like an ornament. There she is.

The Northern Cardinal is certainly the most iconic backyard bird in the East. For me, just a visitor from the West, it is always a thrilling sight. It is thrilling for locals, too, my relatives assure me.

Echoing a concept from Lakota writer Thomas Gannon, I imagine that my ancestors knew the ancestors of today’s cardinals. I know they did. The “redbird” is iconic in Cherokee tradition - Totsuwa carries our souls to the Creator. Somehow, this bird transcends us.

My nine-times great-grandmother, Nanyehi (aka Nancy Ward) grew up along the Little Tennessee River in Chota, the center of the Overhill towns, in the 1700s. This would have been near the center of the cardinal’s range at the time. They were a bird of the vast Eastern Woodlands, mostly the southern parts. They occurred up into the Ohio River Valley, but no further north. Traditional Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) stories do not mention them. Even in the early 1900s, the white man called them “Kentucky Cardinals.”

Let’s go back a little further. Sometime around the year 1400, the world’s climate cooled. Just a little, only 0.5 degrees Celsius. It has since made that up and then some, increasing 1.5C in just the past few decades. That cool period lasted to about 1800. Today we call it the “Little Ice Age.” It was not a true ice age; there were no glaciers covering vast expanses of land. It was just a tad cooler.

There are plenty of stories from Europe detailing cool summers and cold winters, like frequent snowstorms in Lisbon, the Seine frozen over, and Greenland and Iceland surrounded by sea ice. In what is now the US, the men of the 1529 Narváez Expedition experienced freezing temperatures on the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico. In 1609, when Huron and Algonquin men shuttled Samuel de Champlain into a battle with the Mohawk, there was still snow on the Green Mountains of Vermont. It was late July.

There were also crop failures and famines across Europe. But somehow, Homo sapiens seemed to thrive. Europe had the Reformation and the Renaissance, overthrowing the established order, at least some of it. The same thing happened in Native America, only we were more successful. We overthrew authoritarian regimes at Cahokia and other Mound Builder civilizations and moved into small-scale egalitarian and even matriarchal communities, built on high levels of personal freedoms and rights. The Cherokees overthrew an abusive priestly caste, permanently.

The winters during those centuries probably kept many birds – Northern Cardinals, Carolina Wrens, Red-bellied Woodpeckers, and others – further south.

Cardinals no-doubt thrived in Native-managed habitats. We had always burned the forest undergrowth, creating an open understory and edges where deer, turkeys, and other game would come to feast on early-stage regrowth – grasses, legumes, and berries. In 1777, William Bartram, traveling through pine forests of the Southeast, noted, “This plain is mostly a forest of the great long-leaved pine the earth covered with grass, interspersed with an infinite variety of herbaceous plants, and embellished with extensive savannas, always green.”

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All this changed with the arrival of Europeans, which brought not just ethnic cleansing, but a wholesale transformation of the land. The first paragraph of the Birds of North America species account for Northern Cardinal hints at this history. “This year-round resident has been expanding its range northward since at least the mid-1800s, taking advantage of moderate temperatures, human habitation, and provisioning at bird feeders” (Halkin et al. 2021).

“Moderate temperatures” refers to the end of the “Little Ice Age.” “Human habitation” refers to white humans and the land that was cleared for pioneer homesteads. (The land, of course, was previously inhabited by humans.) Some ornithological summaries use other euphemisms, such as “changing landscapes.”

The transformation began with extensive logging and massive deforestation. The pioneers worked hard. In the 1600s, a New England settlement of 200 homes required 75 acres of forest each year just for firewood. By the time of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, logging and clearing land for farms had spread across the Appalachians to the Mississippi River. The Northeast, the Midwest, the Ohio River Valley, the Black Belt, and the Mississippi Delta were all under the axe.

In Vermont, the Green Mountain State, a stunning 80% of its forests were converted to pasture by the late 1800s. Few trees remained below 2,000’ elevation. In eastern Massachusetts, that figure was 90%.

The Eastern white pine was the most prized, used for building cabins and creating masts for ships. The tree needed legal protection as early as 1659 around Plymouth. By 1691, white pines were rare along the New England coast, and those over 24 inches in diameter were reserved for the British navy. But New England at the time was the Wild West, and regulations were ignored. The cutting continued. There were violent conflicts and several “Pine Tree Riots.” When the American Revolution began, many colonists used the Eastern white pine, not the tea bag, as their symbol of freedom, meaning the freedom to cut them down whenever they wanted. It remains today on the flags of Maine and Vermont.

The Eastern white pine is also the “Tree of Peace” in Haudenosaunee history, when the five nations – the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk – came together to form the Iroquois Confederacy. The white pine is also on their flag. It thus serves as a symbol of peace for America’s oldest democracy and, later, in the American Revolution, as a symbol of the freedom to harvest them.

For Puritan minister John Cotton, these differences in land management provided the justification the steal the land. The Natives, he preached, had not fulfilled the first commandment in the Bible, to subdue the earth and have dominion over it. “In a vacant soyle,” Cotton argued, “hee that taketh possession of it, and bestoweth culture and husbandry upon it, his Right it is.” Indigenous burning did not count. Seasonal moves from a settled town to a summer fish camp or a winter hunting camp outright disqualified us.

The photo above – the bleak one with the barren hill in the back – comes from 1910 near Chattanooga. Ross’s Landing was the first point of departure, the Gate of No Return, for the Cherokee Trail of Tears in 1838. Sketches from that period are similar – the land appears completely denuded. Today, the hills around Chattanooga are rather thickly forested. For the Cherokees at the time, it must have seemed as if our Shire had been scoured, turned into a kind of Mordor. It would certainly have been that for birds of forest habitats.

Pioneer logging in the 1800s must have devastated forest birds of the Eastern Woodlands. Wood Thrushes, Ovenbirds, and Scarlet Tanagers would have suffered. John James Audubon, like many of the white men of his time, viewed the loss of nature and Indigenous peoples similarly – tragic, but an inevitable price to pay for the so-called “improvements of civilization.”

In 1831, he recalled the Ohio River Country he had known in his younger days, and lamented, “When I think of these times, and call back to mind the grandeur and beauty… unmolested by the axe of the settler… when I see that no longer any Aborigines are to be found there, and that the vast herds of elks, deer and buffaloes which once pastured on these hills and in these valleys… when I see the surplus population of Europe coming to assist in the destruction of the forest, and transplanting civilization… a country that has been so rapidly forced to change her form and attire…”

He wasn’t the only one lamenting. In 1887, Mack-e-te-be-nessy, also known as Andrew J. Blackbird, published History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan. He concluded with a poem entitled, “The Lamentation of the Overflowing Heart of the Red Man of the Forest.” It includes these lines:

O my destiny, my destiny!

How sinks my heart, as I behold my inheritance all in ruins and desolation.

Yes, desolation; the land the Great Spirit has given us in which to live, to roam, to hunt, and build our council fires, is no more to behold.

Where once so many brave Algonquins and the daughters of the forest danced with joy, danced with gratitude to the Great Spirit for their homes, they are no more seen.

Our forests are gone, and our game is destroyed.

Hills, groves and dales once clad in rich mantle of verdure are stripped.

Where is this promised land which the Great Spirit had given to his red children as the perpetual inheritance of their posterity from generation to generation?

This image of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker comes from the giant mounds in the Mississippi region. The image was limited to the upper castes until the authoritarian society was decentralized into today’s Choctaw and other tribes. Then it became more widespread.

In southern forests, the longleaf pine was the equivalent of the Eastern white pine. Its logging is associated with the demise of the Ivory-billed and Red-cockaded Woodpeckers. On the Great Plains, the extensive riparian forests of the river corridors disappeared to fuel the campfires of pioneer wagon trains. With no protection from blizzards, winter buffalo mortality soared, even when they weren’t being massacred. A century later in the Pacific Northwest, large-scale commercial logging followed the wave of colonization, ultimately decimating Marbled Murrelets and Spotted Owls.

During all this, the US government claimed the land, put us in concentration camps, and regulated us like wildlife under the Department of the Interior.

In the East, Johnny Appleseed’s farms followed Paul Bunyan’s axe. Among birds, there were some winners. As Eastern Woodlands were converted to homesteads and hayfields, Bobolinks, Eastern Meadowlarks, and Henslow’s Sparrows benefitted. And Northern Cardinals.

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In the early 1900s, the land began to change again. Agriculture moved west, and many of the homesteads and pastures of the East were abandoned. The Eastern Woodlands reclaimed territory. In Vermont, that 80/20 ratio was reversed. Where it was once 80% logged, it is now 80% forested.

But the returning Eastern Woodlands are not the same as they once were. As with most logged forests, the composition of the second growth is not the same. Gone is the American chestnut, lost to an accidentally imported pathogen. They were once the most dominant trees of these forests, and one of the most important for birds and other wildlife.

Most importantly, the Eastern Woodlands returned only in patches, fragmented by parking spaces and shopping malls, from Seneca to Cuyahoga Falls, to quote Chrissie Hynde and The Pretenders. When I was a child, Chota, the historic Cherokee town, was submerged by the waters of a lake created by the Tellico Dam.

As farms and hayfields were converted to modern development, grassland birds lost habitat. They are all declining now. And the birds that require large forest tracts - Wood Thrushes, Ovenbirds, and Scarlet Tanagers – didn’t get it all back. Today’s patchwork of woodlands don’t always suffice for them.

But still, the cardinals also moved north with the limited recovery of Eastern Woodlands. Albeit fragmented, there were still plenty of mixed edges and suburban areas for them to thrive. While they do not tolerate a barren clearcut, they do appreciate early-stage regrowth, with shrubs and thickets, as well as the mixed edge habitat provided by rural homesteads and residential development. Paul Bunyan, no, but Johnny Appleseed, okay.

It was in this historical context that Northern Cardinals found opportunity. Their expansion north, in time and space, overlays closely with the end of the “Little Ice Age” and with settler expansion. When farm plots were cleared, edge habitats were created, and cardinals moved in. As seedeaters, they appreciate bird feeders, especially in winter.

They began expanding from southern to northern Ohio in the 1830s, coincident with the Indian Removal Act. They were considered rare in Pennsylvania through most of the 1800s. The redbird did not reach Michigan until 1884. The first nest in Canada came was at Point Pelee in 1901. They were resident in the Twin Cities by 1930. On the eastern seaboard, from 1900 to 1960, cardinals advanced north at about two to three miles per year. Their range did not cover all of Massachusetts until 1970.

The map for the cardinal’s range in the 1966 Golden Field Guide – the olive beige one with the three buntings on the cover – shows them from Boston west across the southern half of the Midwest, up to the Great Lakes but not north of them.

At some point, of course, there must be limits. It simply gets too cold in winter. Range expansion for any species should slow, even with bird feeders helping them get through tough winters. And it did slow. They arrived in Duluth in about 1990. Calculating from Minneapolis in 1930, that works out to a mere 2.2 miles per year. They did not colonize the Upper Peninsula until 1994.

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But the world changed again and cardinals began telling us another story. Their push north began to pick up speed, moving well into Canada and northeast up the St. Lawrence River corridor. From 1980 to 2020, they advanced northeast 500 miles, a rate of 12.5 miles per year. At the same time, species in the West – Anna’s Hummingbirds, Black Phoebes, California Scrub-Jays, and Lesser Goldfinches – began accelerating north as well.

In 2021, a cardinal was just 16 miles from Labrador.

The redbird is on the move. Its range expansion now seems as inexorable as carbon emissions, still increasing annually. After four decades of trying, Homo sapiens has only managed to slow the rate of emission increases in the last few years. And the biggest gains were due to Covid. The most hopeful sign is that, sometime around 2075, there will begin to be less of us; the world’s population of Homo sapiens will begin to decline.

Until then, and even after then, “Every one of us,” to quote Jonathan Franzen, “is now in the position of the indigenous Americans when the Europeans arrived with guns and smallpox: our world is poised to change vastly, unpredictably, and mostly for the worse.”

The cardinals, I believe, will survive, and carry our souls to heaven.

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On a long arc of white sand washed by the fringe of a blue-green sea, several hundred black and brown men stand facing east, looking out beyond the breakers, watching the ships of Francis Drake disappear over the horizon. Eventually, the only movement is a shimmering sea and terns crisscrossing the surf in front of them. The men are Drake’s haul of slaves, picked up in Hispaniola and Florida in his victories over the Spanish, and now abandoned on the beach.

This, at last, is freedom, which the men have not tasted since they left their homeland in Turkey, West Africa, or South America. It is a freedom with a vast horizon, with wind blowing in their hair, but without food or water. They communicate with each other in Spanish. In recent months, since the ransacking of Santo Domingo and the razing of St. Augustine, they have been learning English.

In the heat of the late morning, they move across the dunes, over the grass, and fade into the shade of the loblolly pine forest.

Two days later in the middle of the Atlantic, two ships pass in the night: Drake heading east for England, Richard Grenville heading west for Roanoke. Two days after that, Grenville arrives in North Carolina with supplies for the young colony. He finds it abandoned, the colonists having just departed with Drake. He searches and finds no one, not even the hundreds of enslaved men left behind.

References

Milton, G., 2001. Big Chief Elizabeth: The Adventures and Fate of the First English Colonists in America. Macmillan.

DuVal, Kathleen. 2024. Native Nations: A Millenium in North America. Random House. Ch.3.

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At considerable personal expense, the conquistador Tristán de Luna y Arellano has organized an expedition of 13 ships, 500 soldiers, one thousand civilians (including Catholic clergy, women, children, and servants), 240 horses, a year’s supply of food, and the lumber and blueprints for two planned communities. One will be on the Gulf Coast; the other will be at Santa Elena, that ephemeral outpost on the South Carolina coast. They will develop an overland route to connect the two, and another route back to Mexico.

Upon arrival at Ochuse, Pensacola Bay, Luna is greeted by the gentle swaying of palms and the raucous calls of terns over the water. He records: In the bay and its vicinity are many fish and shellfish; there are many pine trees suitable for making masts and yards; there are oaks, live oaks, nut trees, cedars, junipers, laurels, and certain small trees which bear a fruit like chestnuts. There are many birds, such as eagles, geese, ducks, partridges, doves, and many others. There are deer in great numbers. On that bay were seen Indians and large canoes which they bring for their service; there are also fish-traps. Corn, beans, and pumpkins were found in their villages.

But five days later the sky darkens, the palm fronds quiver, the air is sucked southward, the ocean rises, the clouds open, the winds rip, and sea and sky collide. When he opens his eyes, most of his ships are half sunken in the bay. One sits upright atop of the shrubs above the beach. Only three vessels remain seaworthy. Their food, lumber, and supplies are all lost.

It takes over a month for the news to reach their home port of Vera Cruz. The cry for assistance reaches La Havana and Spain, but help for 1,500 stranded colonists half a world away will be slow in coming. They are alone at the mercy of the Americans.

It has scarcely been a generation since De Soto, and everyone, everywhere, remembers him. The people of Nanipacana harvest their crops and flee, leaving Luna’s company in an empty village of 80 homes surrounded by nothing but bare cornstalks, beanstalks, and melon vines. They eat blackberries, acorns, and the leather from their shoes.

References

Priestley, H.I. 1971. The Luna Papers: Documents Relating to the Expedition of Don Tristán de Luna y Arellano for the Conquest of La Florida in 1559-1561. Books for Libraries Press.

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When birders say this is a busy time of year, we’re probably thinking about Christmas Bird Counts (CBCs).

A CBC is a big circle, 15-miles across, in which volunteers spend a single day, sometime between December 14 and January 5, counting every bird within that circle. Or as many as we can.

There are lots of CBCs. The counts began on Christmas Day, 1900, as an environmental alternative to the tradition of shooting birds – and I mean shooting birds like robins and cardinals. Using just snail mail, they organized 25 count circles from California to Toronto to New England. In 2024 there were nearly 2,700 CBCs, covering much of Canada and the United States, and also stretching across Central America and the Caribbean south to Brazil.

The counts are a big deal for two big reasons:

1) The people - Many trace their introduction to birding to participation in a CBC.

2) The data – As one of the largest and oldest citizen science data collection efforts, many counts now have a database approaching 50 years. In a world of rapid climate change, where thousands of bird species are shifting their ranges poleward, CBC data are now being used extensively in academic research. While they are subject to variability due to weather, effort, and inaccuracies, over the long run, they are pretty good at tracking common species.

The person in charge of a CBC circle is called the Compiler. I’ve been a compiler for 25 years – 20 with the Putah Creek CBC near Winters, California, and now five with the Port Townsend CBC.

I was once asked, “Is our priority outreach or data collection?” “Both,” I immediately replied, “We can do both.”

Each count circle is typically divided into areas covered by different teams. Each area has a count leader who ensures that an experienced birder is with each field team. They ensure the data collection.

Here I want to focus on outreach.

First, the context. Some simple demographics. In the US, age and race are highly correlated. The age group 70+ is about 78% white. That is their world. The age group 40 and younger is 52% white, 48% people of color. And people only get older, so the entire population will shift toward people of color.

Second, birders have historically been older and whiter than the overall population. As in many group contexts, they have developed social practices which suit themselves, but which may be off-putting to others who aren’t part of their demographic. That’s called gate-keeping. Sometimes they don’t even know it. I regularly encounter dated language on old CBC materials. They say things like, “Data with improperly calculated team hours will not be accepted.” That tone is not cool. And, trust me, even veterans struggle to add up party hours correctly.

The good thing about the correlation of age and race is that including one often includes the other. If a group can successfully include both young and old people, they’re probably including people of all races too.

Third, we need everybody! Birding – and the entire environmental movement – needs allies for the future. We need to save the world from the old white fucks standing around the Resolute Desk who are selling the planet for corporate profits. We can do it. Just check out ’s Earth Hope Substack for examples.

And young people and people of color want opportunities to be involved in birding and enjoying the environment. That’s why they’re creating so many alternative groups: BIPOC birders, LGBTQ+ birders, Young birders, etc. I wrote a lot more about this topic a couple years ago here: How Birding Can Save the World.

CBCs offer a unique opportunity to bring beginners, veterans, old, young – everybody - together to enjoy birds and to collect meaningful data.

Here are my tips, my lessons-learned, for how CBCs can be inclusive.

1) No closed CBCs. Believe it or not, there are some CBCs that are still run as private clubs, by invitation only. National Audubon, who oversees CBCs and who supposedly committed millions to “diversity efforts” after deciding to keep their white supremacist slaver name, has done nothing to prohibit or discourage this. But we can. No country club CBCs. Figure it out.

2) This applies to areas within CBCs too. Ouch. No little fiefdoms. Make an effort. Save room on the team, in the car, whatever, for some new birders. Remember, CBCs can be life-changing events for people. Of all the birds you count on a CBC, none are more meaningful than someone’s spark bird.

3) Don’t give the youth team the dregs. This is all too common. In Kingbird Highway, Kenn Kaufmann tells how a CBC sent him to the local city park – pigeons, House Sparrows, and starlings. He found a rarity, of course. But look here what they do on the Ladner CBC in British Columbia. The youth get the offshore route in the Salish Sea, in a zodiac with theatre seating, all expenses donated by the orca watching company. See Melissa Hafting’s blogpost here for more on that. CBCs can be life-changing.

4) Have some variability – walking/hiking options for the outdoorsy and mobile, a bike team, routes suitable for those less mobile, and especially, opportunities for short-duration participation – 1 hour or 2 hour opportunities. My goal is to have enough leaders for lots of half-day routes to increase participation and to give us more flexibility to dodge bad weather.

5) Consider a Big Sit component, perhaps at a lake or a sea watch, where people can come and go like an open house. No RSVP necessary! (RSVPs can be killers for Gen-Z participation for regular field trips, too.)

6) Have birdability – opportunities for those less mobile. In my community, many don’t want to be out more than a few hours. Last year I heavily promoted feeder watchers, where you count out your window for 30 minutes or so. We went from 6 to 22 feeder watchers in one year. Many were participating for the first time. Our only Hairy Woodpecker and White-throated Sparrow came from them. And do you know how many rarities in the Pacific Northwest are first reported from feeders? Trust me, you want to cultivate friendships with bird feeder peeps.

7) Have flexibility in data reporting. Birding is in the crosshairs of generational change regarding technology. We’re transitioning from pencil and paper on clipboards to eBird-only counts with results that come in faster than an election night. It’s a big shift. This causes a lot of conflict and consternation across age groups. When I took over as compiler here, most of the leaders had never used eBird, some had never used Excel, and one didn’t want to share their email address with participants. In 2019, leaders were still putting hand-scrawled notes from their count in snail mail to the compiler. Did that drive me crazy? Of course. Have I changed it? Yes, little by little, with grace and patience. Do I eventually want all data submitted to a dedicated CBC account? Sure. We’ll get there someday.

A CBC is a big circle. They can be a big inclusive circle. If you forget all these tips, just remember one thing: Be kind.

And please, share your ideas and suggestions in the comments!

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