The voices of the wild are everywhere, including inside ourselves.
Bluebird Seasons: Witnessing Climate Change In My Piece of the Wild
A secret chronicle...
Climate change wasn’t on the public’s radar in 1995, when Mary Taylor Young and her husband bought their piece of the wild in the Colorado Rockies. 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. Her twenty-five year journal, she realized, held a secret, a record of climate change happening not on an Antarctic ice sheet but in their own natural neighborhood and echoed in everyone’s backyard.
In this A Sand County Almanac for the twenty-first century, Young sees hope in the human ability to overcome great obstacles, in the energy and determination of youth, and in nature’s resilience.
In spite of fire and drought and so many questions about the future, the bluebirds still return every spring to begin the next bluebird season.
What They're Saying
“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.”
—BILL McKIBBEN, author of The End of Nature and co-founder 350.org
“Young has long engaged readers to support wildlife conservation. With this book she turns her writer’s eye to a critical personal story about climate change.”
—WAYNE LEWIS, Editor, Colorado Outdoors
“Beautifully written, Bluebird Seasons . . . is as much a love letter to the land as it is a sober analysis of climate change.”
—JERRY MITCHELL, Chief of Biology, National Park Service (retired)
“Young gives voice and humanity to the complex scientific issue of climate change. . . . Young leaves us with hope, a call to action, and optimism we can and will do the right thing.”
—JANICE L. NERGER, Dean of the College of Natural Sciences and
Interim Provost, Colorado State University
Bluebird Seasons: The Cabin, The Landscape, The Birds... And Us
