Bluebird Seasons

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 their observations, delighting in the ceaseless dramas, joys, and tragedies that are the fabric of life in the wild.

But greater changes than the seasonal cycles of nature became evident over time: increasing drought, trees killed by plagues of beetles, wildfires, catastrophic weather, bears entering hibernation later, the decline of some familiar birds, and the 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 Antarctic ice sheet, but in their piece of the wild. Using the journal as a chronicle of change, Young tells a story echoed in the lives and backyards of everyone. 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.