An Unexpected Boost to the Life List

When I decided to go birding yesterday, I had no idea I'd be adding two species to my life list.

The plan for the birding outing was just to go for a walk and maybe pick up a few species for my 2025 list. I figured I might see some familiar species that had recently arrived in the early days of spring migration.

Very early on though, the day indicated it would yield much more than I expected. Less than 30 minutes in, I had seen a mountain bluebird, my first ever sighting of that species. As the day continued, I saw more mountain bluebirds and several species that I could add to my 2025 list.

After three hours of birding, I was feeling very happy about the day's results. To be honest, I wasn't expecting anything else on the way back to my car. Then, another life-list addition presented itself. It was a northern shrike. What a day indeed!

I don't add new birds to my life list every day, so I was quite surprised to end up with two new ones in a single outing.

A Soaring Creation

Acts of creation represent an important part of life, and that's especially true when they create habitat for other species.

Now, you may be thinking that creating habitat sounds like a big undertaking. However, when it comes to creating songbird habitat, you might be able to do it right at home.

To make the process for creating songbird habitat easy, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife offers a webpage full of tips and resources. One very simple idea is just to set up a birdbath. If you're looking for something more elaborate, you might try reading through WDFW's list of native plants and adding some of them to your landscape.

Using resources like WDFW's webpage as a starting point, you can then expand the possibilities for songbird habitat through your creativity.

When it comes to creating songbird habitat, the sky's the limit.

Changing our Parameters

As I followed the news of the terrible wildfires in Los Angeles, I thought back to reading How Nature Speaks: The Dynamics of the Human Ecological Condition and its definition of nature.

According to Yrjö Haila and Chuck Dyke, the editors of the book, nature is the parameters of what is possible. The Los Angeles fires and their devastation suggested to me new parameters for what is possible and what is not possible.

It is pretty clear that we can and have changed what is possible in terms of wildfires, droughts, and storms. By releasing tons of greenhouse gases, we have warmed the planet, expanding the parameters and therefore the power and impacts of such phenomena.

In return, our expansion of these parameters has received a response from the phenomena. As Haila and Dyke would argue, our actions sent a message to the climate, and the climate engaged with that communication through its parameters. Specifically, the climate is now putting tighter limits on where and how we can live. The increased likelihood and strength of climate-related disasters means that humans will have to adjust to these new parameters. Some areas will likely no longer support the population sizes they once did; others may prove entirely incapable of fostering human life.

We've changed the parameters for nature, and that includes ourselves.