Bluebird seasons: witnessing climate change in my piece of the wild - mary taylor young

This wonderful book is faithful both in its witness to the worlds 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 wasnt yet on the public radar when Young and her husband bought their piece of the wild in 1995.

They built a cabin and set up a trail of bluebird nest boxes, and Mary began a nature journal of her 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, trees killed by plagues of beetles, wildfires, catastrophic weather, bears entering hibernation later and thinner, 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 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 everyones lives and backyards.

But its not time to despair, she writes.

Its time to act.

Young sees hope in the human ability to overcome great obstacles, in the energy and determination of young people, and in natures resilience, which the bluebirds show season after season.