ENHS Nature Trails October 2004 Article 3

Sparrows
by Reida Kimmel

Summer is not my favorite season, and I am happy to see it progress towards fall early this year. The rains in late August turned the pastures green and put early color into the leaves of the vine maples. In the woods the mosses softened with the welcome moisture and the air freshened as the summer's dust was washed back to the earth. Summer is beautiful, but it can be so hurtful. Living as we do at the edge of commercial timberlands,we have plenty of room to roam, but we pay a terrible price.

Each May, just as the nesting season is well under way, the trucks rumble in behind our house, and the trees start to fall. For years, most of the logging was far away. We shook our heads, were sad, but accepted it. After all, these were not precious old growth eco-systems being degraded, but commercial forests. Still they were our familiar haunts, whose flowers and occasional mushrooms we enjoyed year after year. This summer it finally happened. The saws came right up to our property line. Our neighbor was kind enough to spare us a fringe of trees for privacy's sake, but beyond that, the woods are gone--ferns, tellima, mitella, flowering currant and vine maple seedlings already choked by the rampant new growth of blackberries and thistles. We despair of seeing violets, trillium and calypso orchids there next spring or perhaps ever again in our lifetimes.

I can't describe how it feels to have sixty year old trees felled within 100 feet of where you are standing. It is a sensation felt as well as heard, the way one feels the sound of a huge drum. We have watched the forest grow for thirty-five years and now it is gone, and in our lifetimes we will not see a forest half as mature there again.

For weeks I mourned the fate of the nestling birds whose trees were felled. Of course the parents could start new clutches of eggs, but where could they go to nest? I watched our feeder and trees carefully. This year for the first time in years we did not have families of evening grosbeaks coming to the feeder, but the black-headed grosbeak population seemed normal. There were lots of rufous hummingbirds, assorted species of sparrows, mysterious flycatchers and warblers, (we're pretty poor birders!) and our pair of western tanagers. We had robins' nests everywhere, often so close to the ground I could have reached in to touch the eggs. Perhaps we could attribute the unusually huge population of juncos that moved into our yard in mid summer to logging. Normally juncos stay in the woods till late summer, but this year their forest was sadly diminished. We missed the sight of the piliated woodpecker that often foraged along the formerly forested driveway behind out house, but we did hear it calling in the old trees on the cliff across the road. The pair of talkative ravens did not desert us, and we have had eight turkey vultures circling over the valley on most summer days. They have yet to make their southward migration. Unaffected by logging, of course, were our barn swallows. This year we had three successful nests, two in horse stalls and one in the barn alley. Oddly, none of these pairs raised a second clutch this year, and all the swallows departed when the heavy rains came in late August.

Our neighbors, Maeve Sowles and Dick Lamster had their most successful year ever for their forty birdhouses. Thirty-seven nest boxes produced one hundred eighty-one fledged birds with eleven pairs producing two successful broods! There were ninety-three violet green swallow babies and seventy tree swallow young fledged. The western bluebirds were not so successful. Of three nesting attempts by two pairs of birds, only one nest succeeded, fledging five bluebirds. Sadly, a predator killed the six baby bluebirds in one of the other nests.

Today the loggers are pulling out the last of this year's "harvest." Soon the rains will make the steep dirt roads impassible and we will have some peace and a time to heal. This year has proved that there is still sufficient and rich habitat in the valley to support a strong and diverse population of birds. But it may not always be that way. We need neighbors like Maeve and Dick to provide housing. We need to reforest and control invasive weeds without resorting to chemicals. Logging does not need to equal devastation. It can be done both sensitively and profitably. Landowners must be forced to recognize that trees are not just commodities but are part of the web of life that belongs to the entire community. That's going to be the hard part.

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