Bluebird Seasons Witnessing Climate Change in My Piece of the Wild

“This wonderful book is faithful both in its witness to the world’s beauty and to our need to act now to preserve something of that wonder and grace. It brings the bracing air of the Rockies to us all.” —Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature 


In this A Sand County Almanac for the twenty-first century, nature writer and zoologist Mary Taylor Young tells the story of the growing effects of climate change on her land in the pine-covered foothills of southern Colorado.
 
Climate change wasn’t yet on the public radar when Young and her husband bought their piece of the wild in 1995. They built a cabin, set up a trail of bluebird nest boxes, and began a nature journal of observations, delighting in the ceaseless dramas, joys, and tragedies that are the fabric of life in the wild.
 
But changes greater than the seasonal cycles of nature became evident over time: increasing drought, wildfires, bears delaying hibernation, and the decline of familiar birds and appearance of new species.
 
Their journal of sightings over twenty-five bluebird seasons, she realized, was a record of climate change happening, not in an Indonesian rainforest or on an Antarctic ice sheet but in their own natural neighborhood. Using the journal as a chronicle of change, Young tells a story echoed in everyone’s lives and backyards. But it’s not time to despair, she writes. It’s time to act.
 
Young sees hope in the human ability to overcome great obstacles, in the energy and determination of young people, and in nature’s resilience, which the bluebirds show season after season.

Naturalist and zoologist Mary Taylor Young has been writing on landscape, wildlife, and environmental conservation in the West for more than thirty years. Her twenty-two books include Land of Grass and Sky, The Guide to Colorado Birds, and Rocky Mountain National Park: The First 100 Years. Young was the 2018 Frank Waters Award honoree for a canon of writing revealing a deep understanding of the American West. In 2019 she was inducted into the Colorado Authors Hall of Fame, and in 2020 Young garnered the Colorado Authors’ League’s Lifetime Achievement Award. She lives in Castle Rock, Colorado.

Foreword
Preface: Call Me by My Name
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Bluebirds in the Meadow
2. Nest Boxes
3. Pinkies
4. The Summer of the Bear
5. An Autumn for Elk
6. Feather Chase
7. Summer’s Hummers
8. The Sustainer of Life
9. Cavity Nesters
10. Potsherds and Piñon Nuts
11. Wildfire!
12. In a Fossil Fuel Field
13. Snowbound
14. A Mouse in the House
15. Mark of an Ancient Cataclysm
16. Bluebird Lessons