NoNewsFromHere: THE BOBOLINK

The Bobolink!

The (male) bobolink. Not the one I saw, but a likeness.

I had never given much thought to bobolinks, ground-nesting birds, never having seen or heard one that I was aware of. The bird sounds I have missed are those of the whippoorwills saying their name, hauntingly, in the early evenings, whip-poor-WILL. I hear they’re still around somewhere, but I haven’t heard one in years. It wasn’t until this spring that I became aware of bobolinks. I began to see them frequently, singing atop a maple at the edge of the meadow just off the rear patio. Bird and song identified by my Merlin app (thank you, Cornel Lab of Ornithology) made me realize they had to be nesting nearby. Their existence is precarious, like that of all ground nesting birds, in danger from just about everything including the usual natural suspects: the mesopredators (raccoons, coyotes, weasels, and what-have-you) on the ground, and in the air the hawks, plus our human contribution: domestic cats, habitat loss, and, during nesting time, mowing, mowing, mowing.

I like the look of the new bales, arrayed across a trimmed field. Neat is the word. Nearly every large meadow around here has been mowed, several more than once. When my field is freshly mown and I take Skyler for a walk out back––we can walk anywhere right then, not just on the paths I made––his nose is alert to many bits of mouse remains and the hawks above are scouring the same ground to see if they missed anything. You could hardly be surprised that bobolinks and ground-nesting birds in general are in decline when you see what’s happened to the small rodents and who know what else. There is an effort, modestly funded unsurprisingly, to pay farmers who apply to the program and agree to postpone mowing until mid-July at the earliest. There’s a trade-off: mowing for horse or cattle fodder is all about getting the most nutrients per bale, and it so happens that the most nutritious hay is what you miss out on when you give up mowing early.

My field has seldom been mowed in June. I’m not even sure what the date depends upon besides a few obvious markers like the weather. Usually the farmer who mows doesn’t get to it until well into July, occasionally even after the first of August. Hay by that time is probably only suitable for bedding. Maybe he doesn’t care one way or the other. Maybe he doesn’t really need it. He has plenty of other acreage to mow. He never responded to my call about a delayed mowing. Maybe it’s too trivial to discuss. Combined with a section of my neighbor’s meadow it’s barely 15 acres.

So, how much does this matter, anyway? Bobolinks, whether they survive or not, are just a tiny metaphorical drop in the planetary bucket. The entire bird population of North American has declined by 30% since 1970. That’s some three billion birds.* Three billion.

I am not a birder. I want coyotes to survive too. And bears, and frogs, and snakes (of which I have an abundance this summer, incidentally), and insects and, honestly, every being in the innocent natural world. Vermont, lovely as it is in photographs, is not exactly ahead of the curve in this respect. It is, in fact, well behind the curve, still permitting leghold traps for one thing, hunting with hounds for another, and has a Fish and Wildlife Board consisting mostly of good old boy hunters. (The qualifications of three new appointees are nowhere to be found.) It is only recently, thanks to a growing unease among the public and the Protect Our Wildlife organization that there has been effective pushback that eliminated coyote killing contests and only recently put an end legislatively to “wanton waste,” the killing and dumping of animals the shooter had no interest in making use of.

So why dwell on this while the whole country seems to be breaking in two? All this stuff about wild creatures in Vermont is a mere ripple in an ocean of complaint, isn’t it? Or maybe the people who care and even think about the bobolink are on one side or another, just like those of us who care ( i.e., worry) about the environment, abortion rights, voting rights, human rights.

It’s hard to feel much besides despair. I recently emptied a box of old campaign buttons from the 1960’s and the 1970’s, mostly. Ancient history. I believed at the time that once political changes happened we would never unlearn what we had learned and could never go back to the way things were. Clearly, I was wrong.