Saving Tarboo Creek: One Family's Quest to Heal the Land - Hardcover

Scott Freeman teaches biology courses at the University of Washington, where he received a Distinguished Teaching Award. He worked in environmental education and international conservation before completing a PhD in evolutionary biology at the University of Washington and conducting post-doctoral work at Princeton University as Sloan Fellow.

Susan Leopold Freeman grew up outside West Lafayette, Indiana, and attended DePauw University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received a BFA.

In 2004, the Freemans bought 18 acres along Tarboo Creek, on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula, and began reforestation and salmon stream restoration work in conjunction with the Northwest Watershed Institute and Jefferson Land Trust. His family now owns and manages over 240 acres of forestland in Jefferson County, all protected by conservation easements held by Jefferson Land Trust.

Scott Freeman teaches biology courses at the University of Washington, where he received a Distinguished Teaching Award. He worked in environmental education and international conservation before completing a PhD in evolutionary biology at the University of Washington and conducting post-doctoral work at Princeton University as Sloan Fellow.

Susan Leopold Freeman grew up outside West Lafayette, Indiana, and attended DePauw University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received a BFA.

In 2004, the Freemans bought 18 acres along Tarboo Creek, on Washington State's Olympic Peninsula, and began reforestation and salmon stream restoration work in conjunction with the Northwest Watershed Institute and Jefferson Land Trust. His family now owns and manages over 240 acres of forestland in Jefferson County, all protected by conservation easements held by Jefferson Land Trust.

Introduction
My uncle Carl Holtz farmed in southeast Wisconsin for forty years. But before he started farming, he went to the University of Wisconsin to row on the crew team. While he was a student there he took a course on wildlife biology'then called game management'from a professor named Aldo Leopold.

During the semester, each student was required to have a brief one-on-one conversation about the course with Leopold in his office. More than twenty-five years later, my uncle told me about that meeting: 'I sat there like the dumb jock I was back then, you know. Professor Leopold was asking me about this and that, and I had absolutely no idea what he was driving at. But then something caught his eye out the window, behind his desk. He looked at it for a moment, then turned to me and asked, 'Carl, what bird is that?'"

'I had no clue, of course," he laughed. "But years later I realized it was a palm warbler, migrating through.' My uncle was a big man, with hands the size of salad plates. He held them up. "Leopold knew I wasn't going to go on to graduate school or become a wildlife biologist. He just wanted me to look up and notice things.' Uncle Carl put his hands down and nodded at me. "And so I have'ever since."

Outside my window in Seattle right now, a flock of bushtits is feeding in the bare branches of a birch tree. Some are upside down; some are right-side up. They are flitting, fluttering, jumping. Then they disappear all at once'diving into the cover of a nearby Douglas-fir tree. Now they're back. A moment later, they're gone'until tomorrow.

These birds are adults and juveniles. They are neighbors from the previous year and new immigrants to the neighborhood, and by now are well acquainted. The members of a winter flock like this one find each other in late summer and stay together until the following breeding season. Although bushtits dominate this particular group, there are also some golden-crowned kinglets and at least one chestnut-backed chickadee. Around here, it's common to find northern juncos, black-capped chickadees, and hairy woodpeckers in the mix, and sometimes even ruby-crowned kinglets.

You can find these types of mixed flocks almost anywhere you go in the world. In Japan, there would be marsh tits and great tits and goldcrests'close relatives and look-alikes of North America's chickadees and kinglets. The Eurasian treecreeper and Eurasian nuthatch would take the place of our brown creeper and red-breasted nuthatch; Japanese pygmy and great-spotted woodpeckers would stand in for our downy and hairy woodpeckers.

In the lowland rainforests of southern Ecuador, all Hades breaks loose. There may be twenty-five species and forty or more individuals in a mixed foraging flock like this. In addition to woodpeckers and woodcreepers, there will be several types of antwrens, a handful of flycatcher species, and a bouquet of tanagers: yellow-throated, blue-winged, orange-eared, blue-browed, and bay-headed, among others. The colors streak from branch to branch. They are dazzling, brilliant, sublime.

Typically, each species in a mixed flock will be eating something slightly different, in a different part of the vegetation. Out my window, the bushtits glean from the tiniest twigs; chickadees pick at branches; brown creepers probe the trunk's furrowed bark; hairy woodpeckers rap at spongy, rotting spots in the wood.

When these little gangs appear, moving slowly but steadily through the trees, the woods look like Central Park on a summer Sunday. You'll find every size, shape, color, and linguistic group imaginable among birds'all moving and jostling, going about their day. For a mixed flock like this, there is knowledge in numbers. Large flocks can draw on the collective wisdom of fifteen or twenty memories, finding food in obscure locations when ice and snow coat the branches and ground.

There is safety in numbers, too. If a sharp-shinned hawk dove into this birch tree and surprised the group, the little birds would scatter like shot'making it hard for the predator to draw a bead and snatch one from the air. And to avoid surprise, many eyes are better than two. In black-capped chickadee flocks, individuals that notice flying predators give a high-pitched 'seet' call; in response, the others dive for cover. But if the predator is sitting, the spotter gives the 'chick-a-dee' call and adds 'dee's' to indicate the degree of danger. Biologist Chris Templeton and co-workers figured this out by bringing live predators into a large outdoor aviary where a chickadee flock was living. Chickadees are little'almost as tiny as bushtits'and it is the small, agile killers like saw-whet owls and northern pygmy owls that worry them the most. In the experiments, small predators could elicit a string of five 'dee's' or more. But big, lunking hunters like great gray owls, which strike fear in the hearts of snowshoe rabbits and grouse, got only a 'dee' or two'barely more than the response to a harmless, seed-eating bobwhite quail. Follow-up work by other biologists showed that Carolina chickadees do the same thing.