The Birds of Yellowstone
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Yellowstone’s Birds: Diversity and Abundance in the World’s First National Park
By Douglas W. Smith, Lauren E. Walker, and Katharine E. Duffy, editors
Princeton University Press 2023
The high, fluting notes of the true dorky enthusiast are sounded early in this big, beautifully illustrated treasure of a book, Yellowstone’s Birds: Diversity and Abundance in the World’s First National Park, and the whole passage is so endearing it’s worth quoting in full:
Why watch birds? They can fly! They are adorned in a rainbow of colors! They sing recognizable songs that can be beautifully melodic or strange. Many are active during the day, as we are. Birds you find in Yellowstone could also be found in other places you travel or even in your own neighborhood. Watching birds is an easy way to connect with nature; do it daily, and you’re likely to feel better and view the world differently. [They say solitude is the key to a fulfilled and calm life. Throw in a morning alone with the birds, and you’ll feel even better. Actually, some mornings, nothing feels better.]
This is entirely true: birds are good for the soul, and they flock to Yellowstone National Park and the broader Yellowstone ecosystem in their many thousands, everything from eagles to owls, from tiny chickadees to the trumpeter swan, America’s heaviest water fowl. But despite this array and the many crowds of birders who’ve enjoyed it over the last century, amazingly Yellowstone’s Birds is virtually the first thing of its kind. Throughout the book, by way of explanation, there’s a comically insistent tone of low-key resentment toward the Park’s “charismatic megafauna,” with all those limelight-hungry bears and elk hogging all the attention and only little scraps going to the bald eagles, but hardly any of Yellowstone’s over 150 nesting bird species.
Yellowstone is 2.2 million acres, 80% of which is forested thick with lodgepole pine, cottonwoods, and Douglas-fir, host great populations of permanent and seasonal bird species, everything from the snow goose to the red-breasted merganser to at least seven types of owls and, despite only 5% of the region consisting of aquatic habitats, dozens of geese, ducks, swans, sandpipers, pelicans, and herons. And yet, according to authors Douglas Smith, Lauren Walker, and Katharine Duffy, comparatively little has been written about the birds of Yellowstone, and certainly there’s been no other book like the one they’ve produced here, full of beautiful photographs, tables, and graphs to break down the lives and populations of the region’s birds. The book is lavish and oversized; it should fly off the shelves at Yellowstone’s various gift shops.
Delightfully, there’s more going on here than the already-impressive comprehensive study of the bird life of Yellowstone. Several of the book’s chapters are thoroughly enjoyable digressions of a more specific or personal nature. Kira Cassidy, for instance, turns in a chapter called “The Year I Lost My Birding Mind,” and what a pleasant surprise to find John Taliaferro contributing a chapter about early Yellowstone enthusiast George Bird Grinnell (Taliaferro’s 2019 full-length biography of Grinnell is very much worth reading – here’s hoping this chapter will send more readers its way).
These chapters balance the bulk of the book’s chapters detailing the various behaviors of the area’s birds, and the tone of the whole project is one of guarded wonder. Despite the fact that Yellowstone is a protected and cherished natural preserve, various authors cite the decline of certain species alongside the flourishing of others. Direct depredation by humans is ruled out, but habitats still change over time as climate changes. Many of Yellowstone’s birds are extremely linked to particular environmental niches of specific kinds of trees, and although some of the park’s species are doing well, all vividly documented here in text and images, the book contains many important reminders against complacency (there are also warnings against idiotic intrusive behavior, because roughly 3.9 out of the park’s 4 million annual visitors are so cluelessly dumb that they’ve inspired the term “touron”).
The Birds of Yellowstone is too bid and ornate to lug into the field, of course. But for rainy winter nights when even the hardiest souls aren’t quite feeling like trekking the steppes and canyons, nothing could be better.
Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News