All posts on FatherSonBirding are written and photographed by REAL PEOPLE.
I love living in Montana, but it has one huge drawback: no ocean. This has a particular impact on me and Braden because while we do get a fair number of shorebirds breeding in and passing through the Treasure State, we almost never have the opportunity to observe, study, and enjoy seabirds. You can therefore understand my particular interest in reading Eric Wagner’s new book, Seabirds As Sentinels: Auklets, Puffins, Shearwaters, and the View from Destruction Island (University of Washington Press, 2026).
Seabirds as Sentinels by Eric Wagner, University of Washington Press. Click on image or here to order.
For me and many other birders, seabirds—also referred to as pelagic birds—are almost magical. Not only do they have incredible adaptations to live in what is arguably the world’s harshest environment, they are difficult, if not impossible, for most of us to watch. Loyal FSB readers will recall Braden’s and my account of our pelagic bird cruise during the San Diego Birding Festival (see post San Diego Seabirds). These and a precious few other puke-filled outings gave us rare opportunities to view shearwaters, murres, guillemots, and even albatrosses. Unfortunately, our time with these birds has been altogether too brief—a situation not likely to change anytime soon.
Part of a group of approximately 8,000 Black-vented Shearwaters off the coast of San Diego in 2019.
One of the real delights of Eric Wagner’s book is that he gives readers the chance to hang out with nesting Pacific Northwest seabirds, especially the Rhinoceros Auklet. Before reading Seabirds As Sentinels, I had seen Rhinoceros Auklets a couple of times, but had no idea where they bred. One answer, it turns out, is on certain islands off the coast of Washington and British Columbia. Wagner devotes a good portion of the book documenting scientists’ efforts to tag and learn about these birds as they nest on Destruction Island, only about three miles off the coast of the Olympic Peninsula.
Photos from Seabirds as Sentinels including a Rhinoceros Auklet, bill filled with fish, in the upper right.
His accounts of the birds range from their comical “crash landings” as they return to the island each night to feed their chicks to the birds’ remarkable ability to locate shoals of fish and dive deep underwater to catch them. Similar discussions revolve around Sooty Shearwaters and Tufted Puffins. What makes these accounts so captivating is seeing the birds’ activities “in person” through the author’s eyes, an experience most of us will never have.
A Tufted Puffin from Braden’s and my first pelagic birding cruise off Monterey, California.
Wagner, though, also wants to educate us, and provides discussions of how the world’s primary ocean currents are generated and how these currents impact marine life. He traces the human history of the region from around the time of first European contact to modern day, including recent tribal efforts to protect an environment increasingly at risk from climate change’s many ramifications.
Black-footed Albatrosses are one of the birds most impacted by human activities. According to Wagner, tens of thousands have died in Hawai’i’s longline tuna fishery alone. (Photo taken off the coast of Monterey, California in 2016.)
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to talk about seabirds without pointing out the cataclysmic declines in many species, and the author doesn’t shy away from the topic. As the title suggests, the decline of seabirds mirrors the dramatic impacts human activities are having on our planet. Perhaps most alarming has been the appearance of “blobs,” persistent and unprecedented areas of warm water that either kill or drive away the prey seabirds and a host of other species depend on. Estimates of how many seabirds have died during recent blobs are mind-boggling. As many as four million Common Murres alone may have starved to death as a result of the blob of 2015 and 2016—about half of Alaska’s Common Murre population.
Common Murres have already been severely impacted by warmer ocean temperatures (Monterey, California, 2016).
The author doesn’t provide us with any false solutions about this and other environmental problems. After all, we all know what we have to do. We have to stop burning fossil fuels. We have to stop using our ocean as a dumping ground for plastics and other waste. We have to quit overfishing the prey species thousands of other species also depend on. What the book does do, though, is raise our awareness of why these things matter—and perhaps provide each of us with the resolve to keep working toward a solution in whatever ways we can.
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With single-digit temperatures in Montana this week, it is still very much book reading season, a time when all birders can—and should—beef up our birding resumés by tapping into the vast wealth of research and experience of the global birding and scientific communities. This past week, I delved into a topic that intrigues most birders by picking up Joan E. Strassmann’s The Social Lives of Birds: Flocks, Communes, and Families (Tarcher, 2025).
Joan Strassmann’s The Social Lives of Birds is packed with delightful revelations for beginning and experienced birders alike. (Click on the cover for ordering info.)
A well-regarded professor and scientist, Strassmann has created a comprehensive resource that introduces readers to almost every aspect of bird society. She begins by answering the simple question “Are Birds Social?” (You can probably guess the answer to that!) Then, chapter by chapter, she explores topics that fascinate beginning birders as much as they do veteran scientists. These include flocking behavior, mixed-species flocks, the predilection of many birds to roost and/or nest in colonies, the pros and cons of nesting and/or roosting together, lekking behavior, and more.
The author devotes an entire chapter to the fascinating and intriguing world of seabird colonies, such as those of one of the world’s most popular birds, the Blue-footed Booby.
I learned something fascinating with each chapter. For instance, I was first drawn to the book because the cover showed a line of six Long-tailed Tits packed tightly together on a branch. I had had the pleasure of observing these birds in the Netherlands (see our post Layover Birding in Amsterdam), Japan (see our post Birding Japan: Kyoto), and Spain (see our post Birding Barcelona, Part 1: The Urban Core), but had no idea that they lived and foraged in stable flocks that are often built around a main breeding pair and its offspring. In her book, Strassmann recounts a study that showed that on chilly nights, the tits nestle tightly together to stay warm, and that often it is the lowest birds on the “tit totem pole” that have to endure the chillier end positions. This is no trivial matter since the birds lose about 9 percent of their total body mass in a single, chilly night.
After observing Long-tailed Tits in Europe and Asia, I was fascinated to learn more details of their highly social behavior in The Social Lives of Birds.
Similar revelations emerge with every chapter, examining birds from a wide variety of terrestrial and aquatic habitats. My favorite chapter was the last, “Supersocial Groups: Birds That Are Always Together.” That’s probably because it featured one of my favorite birds, the Acorn Woodpecker (see our post College Search Birding in California), and three other species I was fascinated to learn more about: White-winged Choughs, Sociable Weavers, and a bird Braden and I are always delighted to see, Pinyon Jays. Regarding the latter, Braden and I have seen Pinyon Jays only a handful of times here in Montana, and I had wondered why they aren’t more common. Strassmann explains that the birds need extremely large territories to guarantee a dependable food supply. Unfortunately, their main food source, the pinyon pine, has suffered extreme losses from clearing for agriculture and other reasons. Warmer temperatures driven by climate change have also impacted the production of pinyon pine seeds, leading to large-scale die-offs of these beautiful, dynamic, gregarious birds.
Strassmann devotes much of the final chapter on one of Braden’s and my favorite birds, Pinyon Jays, shown here in a cemetery in Helena, Montana.
The Social Lives of Birds struggles a bit over whether it wants to be a comprehensive resource or an engaging narrative in the vein of the recently reviewed The Great Aukor A World on the Wing. The author mentions her personal connections to many of the topics, but I found these more distracting than engaging. Still, that will not prevent readers from enjoying the book and harvesting a wealth of information—knowledge that will help you look at birds with greater understanding and appreciation each time you head out to bird.
Holiday Joy! Back in August, we alerted FSB readers to Houston Audubon’s effort to buy a critical piece of land for their globally-important Bolivar Flats refuge. (See this post!) This is a refuge Braden and I have visited and is a vital habitat and staging area for hundreds of thousands of birds annually. When a developer planned to build a housing development smack in the middle of it, Houston Audubon negotiated an option to buy and protect the property. The problem? A $3 million price tag! We were skeptical that it could be done, but guess what? GUESS WHAT??? Thanks to donations by 1,127 donors from 47 states and 8 different countries, Houston Audubon achieved its goal! Donations included a huge check from Roku CEO/Founder Anthony Wood and his wife Susan. (I knew I loved Roku for a reason!) Everyone who donated—and those who didn’t—should be immensely pleased, because this is not only a crucial win for birds, it is a win for all of us. It also is the perfect lead into today’s blog topic—End-of-the-Year giving for birds!
Especially near the end of the year, when tax deadlines are looming, we know that a lot of you are asking yourselves, “What can I do to help birds?” We all know that birds are in big trouble, but it can feel overwhelming to figure out just how to spend our donation dollars most effectively. Today, in order to make your lives a bit easier, we are pleased to present a short list of Braden’s and my favorite groups that are helping birds, and yes, we have donated to every one of them. To find out more, just click on the underlined names below. Then, please, please break out that credit or debit card! We truly are at a global crossroads in the fight to save birds, and we guarantee that every dollar you spend will make you feel just a little bit better. While you’re at it, you might want to join your local Audubon chapter and/or the American Birding Association to help connect you to other birds, share information, and expand the love of birds!
Groups Working Internationally
Cornell Lab of Ornithology—the maker of eBird and Merlin makes huge investments in science and education to raise awareness of birds and promote conservation.
Bird Life International—Braden’s favorite group works on the entire international spectrum of bird threats, and also works with local communities to help protect birds and habitats. (Andean Cock-of-the-rock photo courtesy of Roger Kohn!)
Union of Concerned Scientists—one of Sneed’s favorite groups, we make monthly contributions to this group working to fight rampant disinformation and promote rational, scientific solutions to a host of environmental problems facing us.
Groups Focused Mainly on North America
Audubon—still the biggest name in birding, Audubon promotes bird conservation and education, and works on legislation to protect birds. (Note: the national, state, and local chapters are all independent entities. Donations to national do not trickle down, so consider donating to all three.)
Owl Research Institute—one of the few groups focused on one of the world’s most charismatic groups of birds, ORI has been collecting data on owls for more than thirty years, sharing it with many different entities to shape science and conservation priorities. They especially work to decipher the causes behind the decline of many owl populations—including those of this Short-eared Owl.
American Bird Conservancy—also works on a wide range of bird-related issues including the urgent problem of outdoor cats.
State and Local Groups
Montana Audubon—besides putting on the wonderful Wings Across the Big Sky birding festival every year (and yes, Braden and I plan to be there in 2026!), Montana Audubon works to educate birders, identify the Treasure State’s bird conservation priorities, conduct research on endangered species, and carry out many, many other activities that benefit birds and birders.
Houston Audubon Society—a regional bird powerhouse, promoting bird education and conservation, and protection of vital habitats, especially for migrating birds. Think High Island from the movie The Big Year! (Roseate Spoonbill shown.)
Bird Conservancy of the Rockies—another regional powerhouse with widespread activities including vital research into wintering grounds of grassland birds in the Southwest and Mexico.
Montana Bird Advocacy—a grassroots research organization started by well-known Montana birding legends Jeff Marks and Paul Hendricks, MBA conducts research on little-known Montana birds such as the Gray Flycatcher. (See our post Gray Flycatcher Science.)
An unbanded adult Gray Flycatcher implores: “Donate Now!”
All photos and text on FatherSonBirding.com are strictly protected under copyright law. To request permission for use, contact Sneed at sbcollardiii@gmail.com. You DO NOT have permission to use these posts to train Artificial Intelligence models or do anything else with them without permission.
Richard L. Hutto’s new book A Beautifully Burned Forest: Learning to Celebrate Severe Forest Fire(Springer, 2025—click here to order) offers both timely insights into the roles of wildfire in our modern, over-heating world and an engaging memoir of a scientist’s journey. Before I met Hutto—Dick to his friends and colleagues—I had no idea of the vital ecological processes and multitude of species that depend on severe forest fires in the West. Although I had met Dick casually several times through a mutual acquaintance, it wasn’t until I needed someone to teach me about woodpeckers for a proposed children’s book that I reached out to him directly. I asked if he could take me out to show me some woodpeckers and explain a bit about them, and he graciously agreed.
Richard L. Hutto’s A Beautifully Burned Forest is not only a must-read for anyone interested in the health and future of our forests, it makes an, ahem, red-hot Christmas gift idea. Click on the above image to order.
Dick took me to the Blue Mountain burn area just south of Missoula and he did indeed start showing me woodpeckers and telling me about them. What he was really teaching me, I began to realize, is the beauty of a burned forest and how many plants and animals depend on it. I would still eventually write a children’s book about woodpeckers, but first I decided to write Fire Birds: Valuing Natural Wildfires and Burned Forests.
Both of our books focus on Hutto’s groundbreaking research into the many organisms—especially birds—that depend on standing, severely burned forests. The Black-backed Woodpecker is the poster child for burned forests. This bird is highly adapted to blend in with charred tree trunks and excavate wood-boring beetle larvae from the rock-hard wood. In the West, in fact, this bird is found almost exclusively in severely burned forests that have a high density of larger diameter standing trees.
In the West, the Black-backed Woodpecker relies on severely burned forests perhaps more than any other bird species. By excavating holes, these birds and other woodpeckers, also open up the forest for a host of other birds, mammals, and other vertebrates.
Once they move into a fresh burn the Black-backed—along with American Three-toed and Hairy Woodpeckers—open up the forest to many other cavity-nesting birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians. They do this by excavating holes in the trees, often many more than they will ever use themselves.
The problem, Hutto points out, is that our society has been conditioned to view all forest fires as bad. As soon as a severe fire roars through an area, the clarion call rings out to somehow “save” the burn by “salvage” logging it. Which trees do loggers take? The best and the biggest—the exact trees that Black-backed Woodpeckers need to hunt and nest in. Hutto also points out that as soon as these large trees are removed, their cones can no longer reseed the forest naturally, necessitating hiring battalions of workers to replant the forest by hand—at taxpayer expense.
Dick Hutto (left) leads a local birding group through a newly burned forest near Seeley Lake, Montana, explaining the vital ecological role the burned forest plays.
In A Beautifully Burned Forest, Hutto dives deeply into our society’s entire approach to managing forests and fires, tracing the beginnings of fire suppression to the widely spread notion that our forests are somehow “out of whack” and need to be overly managed with thinning and prescribed burns.
Climate change, of course, is a wildcard in the future of forests and wildfires, but Hutto makes a strong plea to focus on solving the underlying problem of reducing greenhouse gas emissions instead of making our forests ecologically less viable through extensive, often poorly planned micromanagement.
Mountain Bluebirds are just one of dozens of bird species that prefer nesting in burned forests to other habitats. Here they find plenty to eat along with safety from small predators, whose populations are reduced by forest fires.
Anyone with an interest in our forests and wildfires—in other words, every single person living in the American West—should read A Beautifully Burned Forest. It’s a fairly quick read that will change the way you view and understand our spectacularly diverse region. Especially in this day where misinformation rules, Hutto’s book is a valuable step in creating an educated public that insists on smarter management of the lands that sustain us.
Note: If you are interested in Sneed’s children’s book, Fire Birds, supplies are down to a couple of dozen in the warehouse so order soon by clicking here or calling your local indy bookstore. Both Fire Birds and Woodpeckers: Drilling Holes and Bagging Bugs make ideal Christmas presents for grades 3-8 readers.
FatherSonBirding is a labor of love and Braden and I keep it advertising-free. If you’d like to support our efforts at independent journalism, please consider sharing our posts with others and purchasing one or more new copies of Sneed’s books by clicking on the book jackets to the right. Thanks for reading and keep working for birds. We will!
Not quite two years ago, I posted “Birding Glacier National Park in the Long Hot Winter of 2024.” The blog resulted from an invitation I received to speak to school kids in Browning, Montana, and I took the opportunity for some rare winter birding at my favorite park. The post has received a lot of views, either because people love Glacier or they are interested in the impacts of climate change or both. A couple of weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to be invited back to Browning. This time, I came a day early and my hosts were gracious enough to provide me with a place to stay for the extra night. My last post narrated my drive up, especially the devastating state of the drought along the Rocky Mountain Front. With my extra day to bird, though, I planned to return to Glacier and I wondered, “Would the park be as hot and dry as before?”
My destination for the day was the road (not THIS one, fortunately) leading past iconic Chief Mountain to the US-Canada border.
I woke in my East Glacier lodging well before dawn and about seven a.m. set off for my first destination, the Chief Mountain road that leads up to Waterton Lakes in Canada. As I drove toward Browning before turning north, a spectacular orange fireball rose on the eastern horizon. I’ve seen lots of sunrises in my life, but nothing matches a sunrise over the northern Great Plains. As a bonus, a red fox and young bull moose greeted me from the side of the road!
My route took me to Saint Mary and up past the one-bar town of Babb before I turned left toward Canada at about 8:30. I sadly didn’t plan to visit our northern neighbor. Today, much as I had on my last visit here, I had a particular quarry in mind: Boreal Chickadees.
As their name implies, Boreal Chickadees live mainly in northern spruce & fir forests and as such, their range barely dips into the US in a few places along our northern border. Lucky for Braden and me, Montana happens to be one of those places. We had found our first BOCHs almost by accident during covid, when Glacier had been closed and we decided to try our luck along the Chief Mountain road. To our delight, we found the little birds. Stunningly cute, their brown heads and other features closely ally them with both the Chestnut-backed and Gray-headed Chickadees, the latter now thought to be extinct in Alaska, their only known home in the US. In any case, on my visit to Browning two years ago, I had relocated BOCHs on the Chief Mountain Road, and it was my aim to do so again today.
For my first try, I stopped at the pull-out right next to the Glacier National Park sign. I walked the road for a few minutes and managed to grab the attention of three Red-breasted Nuthatches while Sound ID picked up the calls of Golden-crowned Kinglets (which due to my ears, I have never been able to hear), but no chickadees.
I repeated this routine five more times along the road between the Glacier NP sign and the Canadian border. I got really excited at one point when I saw a flurry of bird activity from my car. I leaped out, binoculars and camera in hand, and saw robins, more nuthatches, and a Hairy Woodpecker. A foursome of Canada Jays, perhaps the most refined members of the corvid family, swung by to check me out. No chickadees.
As my prospects for finding Boreal Chickadees dimmed, I focused on enjoying another of my favorite birds, Canada Jays—though why Canada gets to claim these gorgeous critters remains a mystery!
As I searched, I especially looked for densely-packed spruce trees along the road, but I realized that lodgepole pine actually dominated many areas. “Hm. Maybe this isn’t a preferred location after all,” I thought. “Maybe we just got lucky the past couple of visits.”
I had started to get that “I guess I’m not going to find them” feeling when I noticed a little area that seemed to have more spruce. There was no pull-out here so I just parked as far off the road as I could and walked back to where a brushy meadow pushed westward into the forest. The meadow was lined with more spruce than anything else, and as if to lure me in, two more Canada Jays landed to be admired. “Might as well give this a try,” I thought.
This meadow intrusion into the woods seemed like my last best chance to find Boreal Chickadees on this unseasonably warm fall day.
I followed what appeared to be an overgrown path through waist-high shrubs. It occured to me that if berries grew nearby this would be an ideal place to get ambushed by a grizzly bear, but I cautiously pressed forward. My hopes shot up when two small birds rose out of the brush and landed in a tree. I got only a brief glimpse and still have no idea what they were, though I’m guessing some kind of sparrow.
I was approaching the end of the meadow when I saw more birds flitting around up ahead. I spotted another Red-breasted Nuthatch and Sound ID picked up White-crowned Sparrows, Golden-crowned Kinglets, and Dark-eyed Juncos. Then, suddenly, I heard chickadees—and they definitely were not Black-cappeds!
Within moments several tiny birds landed in the trees before me. It took a few tries to get eyes on one and to my joy, it was a Boreal! There were four of them altogether and wow, did they have a lot of energy! Not only were they checking me out, they were checking out every other bird, too—including a Ruby-crowned Kinglet keeping company. I managed a couple of good photos. Then, within minutes, all the birds departed—even the White-crowned Sparrows with their loud contact calls. Smiling, I traipsed back to the car. The sun had a special warmth to it and Chief Mountain rising above the forest added magic to the moment. Little did I know, however, that this wouldn’t be my last “moment” of the day.
While most visitors to Glacier focus on seeing grizzlies and mountain goats, nothing says wilderness to me more than Boreal Chickadees.
The glow of seeing Boreal Chickadees still with me, I made my way back to Babb and turned right, up the road to the Many Glacier Valley. A large flashing sign warned that there was no general admission parking there, but I love this drive and decided to go as far as I could. I passed through groves of aspen glowing gold with fall foliage and relished the views of Mt. Wilbur and other familiar peaks ahead.
At the Lake Sherburne dam, I stopped and got out for a look at the reservoir. In keeping with my observations from my last post, it was as low as I’d ever seen it, a giant “bathtub ring” leading from the forest edge down to what water remained. I’d also noticed that Swiftcurrent Creek was incredibly low—mere rivulets flowing between a pavement of exposed rocks.
Lake Sherburne—a reservoir, actually—stood as low as I’d ever seen it, additional evidence of the long-term drought impacting this part of the world.
I still had plenty of time and wanted to do some kind of hike in the park, so I returned to St. Mary and found myself on a little trail for the Beaver Pond Loop. In all my visits to Glacier, I’d never before done any hiking or walking near St. Mary so I set out on this path with some excitement. It wasn’t the most dramatic hike, hugging the south side of St. Mary Lake, but it offered terrific views up the valley and the blue sky and warm (too warm) conditions made for pleasant hiking.
I’d walked maybe a quarter mile when I rounded a bend to see a dark object ahead next to the trail. At first I thought it might be a hare or other mammal. When I raised my binoculars, I realized with astonishment that it was a grouse. Not only that, I felt pretty sure it was a Spruce Grouse!
My accidental Spruce Grouse sighting was evidence that I had put in enough time searching for these guys to break my “grouse curse.”Notably, the grouse brought my year species total to 527 birds—exactly tied with my previous record. Which bird will put me over the top? Stay tuned to FSB to find out!
If you’ve followed FatherSonBirding, you’ll know that I’ve seen SPGR only twice (see posts “Gambling on a Grouse-fecta” and “August: It’s Just Weird”), and had gone to great effort to do so. To have one just show up unexpectedly, well, that pretty much blew my mind. Still, I didn’t feel 100% sure on the ID, so I snapped some quick photos to send to Braden. Then, the grouse started walking toward me. “Whaaaaat?” I wondered.
That’s when I realized that another hiker stood on the other side of the bird and had herded it my way. Finally, the grouse wandered off into the forest, leaving me both astonished and gratified. I guess I had put in enough grouse effort to finally be rewarded by such encounters!
I continued onto a nice rocky beach on St. Mary Lake and found a perfect rock for sitting. Two pairs of Horned Grebes played and fished out on the water—my best look at this species all year—and I relished a few moments in one of earth’s most spectacular places.
Two pairs of Horned Grebes kept me company as I took a few moments to soak up the beauty of Glacier National Park before heading to my week of work in Browning.
Glacier, though, doesn’t exist by accident. It’s here because forward-thinking people planned for the future long ago. As the epically dry conditions of this part of the world attest, we need to keep thinking forward if we want our children and their descendants to have such places to cherish. As I said in my last post, all of us need to fight the disinformation and greed of climate deniers however we can. Whether that’s by making a donation to an environmental or legal group battling the horrible policies of the current administration or making changes to lower your own carbon footprints, every effort matters. Now, more than ever, is the time.
