What do you think?
Rate this book
Bluebird Seasons: Witnessing Climate Change in My Piece of the Wild
"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. 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 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 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 increasing drought, wildfires, bears delaying hibernation, and the decline of familiar birds and 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 everyone's lives and backyards. 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.
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 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 increasing drought, wildfires, bears delaying hibernation, and the decline of familiar birds and 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 everyone's lives and backyards. 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.
221 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 2, 2023
8 people are currently reading
745 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
July 28, 2023
It is really tempting to give this just one star considering how breathlessly the audiobook narrator read it. It was hard to parse out whether the author was also so breathless but either way I wanted to chuck my phone across the room. But maybe overly exuberant breathless readings are your thing? (P.S. More climate change and less "I get to go to a cabin every weekend" to make the title more meaningful, eh?)
May 8, 2023
This book takes a personal look at nature and how it's shifting while also shedding some much needed light on climate change and what it looks like in real life and real time. It reminds us all that we can and should find our own stories related to the climate and how important doing so is to our future. I would especially recommend this book to those who live in Colorado and the western United States, as well as those seeking to humanize climate change in a way that is optimistic and hopeful, not apocalyptic. It's very much worth the read.
September 30, 2023
“Imagine all the frogs getting the memo except the last poor schlub who is still croaking away, dreaming of romance. Until someone hisses, “Sheldon, shut it!” Sheldon looks around—“Whut? Oh!”—and finally shuts it.
What would it have been like to be those babies, trapped in the nest while a monster gnawed, pawed, and swatted at your home, trying to get you? Like feathered three little pigs, they huddled indoors as the big bad bear huffed and puffed and blew the roof off.
The bear has been here again and this time succeeded in tearing the roofless nest box from the tree, ripping it open like a bag of potato chips. But it got no snack. The potato chips fledged this morning.”
I started the audiobook but could not tolerate the awful narrator, the voice was shrill and childish. But the book itself is like that, so I was really disappointed. There was so much possibility here, and I give 2 stars for effort, and for the possibility someone else might find her sense of humor delightful enough to want to conserve and protect our natural spaces. We are too serious sometimes in our climate grief, so humor can be an effective tool. There is no introspection here, no depth, no wonder, nothing to inspire. Rachel Carson wrote that if there was poetry in her accounts of the sea, it was because they were inherently in the ocean’s magic. That is what inspires. The landscape of the plains and meadows and mountains have it too, but this book missed it all.
What would it have been like to be those babies, trapped in the nest while a monster gnawed, pawed, and swatted at your home, trying to get you? Like feathered three little pigs, they huddled indoors as the big bad bear huffed and puffed and blew the roof off.
The bear has been here again and this time succeeded in tearing the roofless nest box from the tree, ripping it open like a bag of potato chips. But it got no snack. The potato chips fledged this morning.”
I started the audiobook but could not tolerate the awful narrator, the voice was shrill and childish. But the book itself is like that, so I was really disappointed. There was so much possibility here, and I give 2 stars for effort, and for the possibility someone else might find her sense of humor delightful enough to want to conserve and protect our natural spaces. We are too serious sometimes in our climate grief, so humor can be an effective tool. There is no introspection here, no depth, no wonder, nothing to inspire. Rachel Carson wrote that if there was poetry in her accounts of the sea, it was because they were inherently in the ocean’s magic. That is what inspires. The landscape of the plains and meadows and mountains have it too, but this book missed it all.
January 24, 2024
Erosion in Long Canyon southwest of Trinidad, Colorado, has exposed a chalky deposit of iridium-rich lithified ash, glassy microtektites, and shattered quartz: the K-Pg (or K-T) Boundary. The inch-thick layer marks the great global extinction caused by the impact of a six-mile-wide asteroid 66 million years ago off Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. Within a very short period—months to years—75% of all species on earth disappeared. Many organisms succumbed to the impact’s immediate effects: firestorms, earthquakes, and tsunamis. Those that survived, however, faced an “impact winter” caused by the dust clouds that obscured the sun and severely limited photosynthesis. Ecosystems collapsed in the wake of this global cataclysm.
For 25 years, author Mary Taylor Young has owned a property with a cabin three miles from the Long Canyon K-Pg Boundary site. While the changes in the natural world Young has observed on her land over the last two and a half decades are nowhere near as catastrophic or rapid as those wrought by the Chicxulub asteroid strike, global climate change is becoming increasingly apparent in alterations in the numbers, ranges, and behavior of plants and animals that share Young’s 37-acre retreat.
When Young and her husband Rick bought their property at 6,500 feet in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in 1995, they intended it as a getaway from Colorado’s hectic and crowded Front Range where they live. Their land provides a panoramic view eastward toward the Raton Mesa straddling northeastern New Mexico and southeastern Colorado. The landscape is mostly piñon-juniper woodland interspersed with meadows, ponderosa pine groves, steep rocky ridges, a flashy runoff canyon, and a pond that provides intermittent aquatic habitat for amphibians. Young is a zoologist and professional nature writer; Rick is a high school teacher with considerable mountaineering experience. Upon acquiring the property, the couple immediately began keeping a journal, both to document the natural history of their new home as well as to record their observations as inspiration for Young’s writing projects.
Young began working on a version of this book a decade before it was published in its current form. She originally intended to write a lyrical nature memoir about her family’s years at the property. Over time, though, her simple story grew more serious as she and Rick observed shifts underway in the natural world because of climate change. Bluebird Seasons is still very much a personal account of the family’s time at their isolated, rural second home with their daughter Olivia, but it also examines the legacy of fossil fuel extraction in south-central Colorado as well as the unfolding effects of generalized global warming. This is probably a more interesting book for Young’s having chosen this approach to telling her story.
When Young organized the book, she built the first nine chapters largely around experiences with animals that they encountered: bluebirds, bears, elk, hummingbirds, cavity-nesting birds, and other avifauna. She admits that her journaling was somewhat haphazard; she and Rick usually made notes when an incident or observation was special or memorable. The chapters contain citations extracted from the “cabin journal,” which Young uses as springboards to develop her narrative. As a result, the first part of the book is not a chronological account of the Youngs’ time on the property. Instead, it is an examination of the natural histories of charismatic animals and the alterations in their life histories related to climate change and habitat modification that the couple has observed.
Beginning in Chapter 10, “Potsherds and Piñon Nuts” (perhaps the most interesting and compelling chapter in the book), Young takes another tack. Rather than concentrating on climate change’s effects on individual species, she shifts to focus on the region’s long human history and the direct impacts of global warming on people. When Young discovers a decorated potsherd discarded centuries ago by an Indigenous cook, she ruminates on the people who depended on this ecosystem for thousands of years, and especially on the nuts produced by the piñon pines. The sustainable harvest of nuts contrasts dramatically with the coal mining and coking industries that dominated the regional economy during the first half of the 20th century. Coal mining and processing exploited and disrupted the landscape, and in the process released significant quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Then, following a quiescent half-century, fossil fuel extraction again disturbed and fragmented the landscape when a natural gas company bulldozed a network of roads along the ridges to drill wells.
With her realignment on human history, Young examines the impacts of climate change on her family. For example, in 2011, a particularly dry year, the property and the cabin were threatened by wildfire. In 2006, the family was trapped for days by a major winter storm, allowing Young to ponder weather extremes spawned by a warming climate. And, during the year following the snowstorm, the cabin was overrun by deer mice, spurring thoughts on the connections between climate and human diseases, including hantavirus and Lyme disease.
Young concludes the book with two upbeat chapters. The first reflects on the resilience of life in the face of repeated global extinctions. The final chapter offers reasons to remain hopeful in the face of our contemporary climate dilemma, including humanity’s ability to respond to great challenges as well as young peoples’ energy and determination.
The text of each chapter is supplemented with one or two of Rick Young’s black-and-white drawings. A hand-drawn map of the Youngs’ property in the third chapter serves to orient readers to locations referenced throughout.
Bluebird Seasons is written for general audiences. It is first and foremost a family memoir with strong natural history overtones. Readers unfamiliar with the piñon-juniper community in the arid American southwest will find considerable information of interest. Most natural area professionals and wildlife biologists, however, likely will already be well versed in the book’s ecological fundamentals. Nevertheless, Young’s account of the effects of global warming on the natural world in the southern Rocky Mountains feels personal and immediate; change is occurring literally in her own backyard, not in an abstract locale thousands of miles away. Most readers will be able to identify with Young’s growing trepidation and concern.
For 25 years, author Mary Taylor Young has owned a property with a cabin three miles from the Long Canyon K-Pg Boundary site. While the changes in the natural world Young has observed on her land over the last two and a half decades are nowhere near as catastrophic or rapid as those wrought by the Chicxulub asteroid strike, global climate change is becoming increasingly apparent in alterations in the numbers, ranges, and behavior of plants and animals that share Young’s 37-acre retreat.
When Young and her husband Rick bought their property at 6,500 feet in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in 1995, they intended it as a getaway from Colorado’s hectic and crowded Front Range where they live. Their land provides a panoramic view eastward toward the Raton Mesa straddling northeastern New Mexico and southeastern Colorado. The landscape is mostly piñon-juniper woodland interspersed with meadows, ponderosa pine groves, steep rocky ridges, a flashy runoff canyon, and a pond that provides intermittent aquatic habitat for amphibians. Young is a zoologist and professional nature writer; Rick is a high school teacher with considerable mountaineering experience. Upon acquiring the property, the couple immediately began keeping a journal, both to document the natural history of their new home as well as to record their observations as inspiration for Young’s writing projects.
Young began working on a version of this book a decade before it was published in its current form. She originally intended to write a lyrical nature memoir about her family’s years at the property. Over time, though, her simple story grew more serious as she and Rick observed shifts underway in the natural world because of climate change. Bluebird Seasons is still very much a personal account of the family’s time at their isolated, rural second home with their daughter Olivia, but it also examines the legacy of fossil fuel extraction in south-central Colorado as well as the unfolding effects of generalized global warming. This is probably a more interesting book for Young’s having chosen this approach to telling her story.
When Young organized the book, she built the first nine chapters largely around experiences with animals that they encountered: bluebirds, bears, elk, hummingbirds, cavity-nesting birds, and other avifauna. She admits that her journaling was somewhat haphazard; she and Rick usually made notes when an incident or observation was special or memorable. The chapters contain citations extracted from the “cabin journal,” which Young uses as springboards to develop her narrative. As a result, the first part of the book is not a chronological account of the Youngs’ time on the property. Instead, it is an examination of the natural histories of charismatic animals and the alterations in their life histories related to climate change and habitat modification that the couple has observed.
Beginning in Chapter 10, “Potsherds and Piñon Nuts” (perhaps the most interesting and compelling chapter in the book), Young takes another tack. Rather than concentrating on climate change’s effects on individual species, she shifts to focus on the region’s long human history and the direct impacts of global warming on people. When Young discovers a decorated potsherd discarded centuries ago by an Indigenous cook, she ruminates on the people who depended on this ecosystem for thousands of years, and especially on the nuts produced by the piñon pines. The sustainable harvest of nuts contrasts dramatically with the coal mining and coking industries that dominated the regional economy during the first half of the 20th century. Coal mining and processing exploited and disrupted the landscape, and in the process released significant quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Then, following a quiescent half-century, fossil fuel extraction again disturbed and fragmented the landscape when a natural gas company bulldozed a network of roads along the ridges to drill wells.
With her realignment on human history, Young examines the impacts of climate change on her family. For example, in 2011, a particularly dry year, the property and the cabin were threatened by wildfire. In 2006, the family was trapped for days by a major winter storm, allowing Young to ponder weather extremes spawned by a warming climate. And, during the year following the snowstorm, the cabin was overrun by deer mice, spurring thoughts on the connections between climate and human diseases, including hantavirus and Lyme disease.
Young concludes the book with two upbeat chapters. The first reflects on the resilience of life in the face of repeated global extinctions. The final chapter offers reasons to remain hopeful in the face of our contemporary climate dilemma, including humanity’s ability to respond to great challenges as well as young peoples’ energy and determination.
The text of each chapter is supplemented with one or two of Rick Young’s black-and-white drawings. A hand-drawn map of the Youngs’ property in the third chapter serves to orient readers to locations referenced throughout.
Bluebird Seasons is written for general audiences. It is first and foremost a family memoir with strong natural history overtones. Readers unfamiliar with the piñon-juniper community in the arid American southwest will find considerable information of interest. Most natural area professionals and wildlife biologists, however, likely will already be well versed in the book’s ecological fundamentals. Nevertheless, Young’s account of the effects of global warming on the natural world in the southern Rocky Mountains feels personal and immediate; change is occurring literally in her own backyard, not in an abstract locale thousands of miles away. Most readers will be able to identify with Young’s growing trepidation and concern.
September 15, 2023
For a book about climate change, this book is remarkably uncritical of climate change. The author commits a lot of the classic clichés (to put it lightly) of the early environmentalist movement. Some of the greatest hits include: not-in-my-backyard environmentalism (should’ve guessed this one based on the title), cultural appropriation/indigenous erasure, and praising capitalism/counting on the economy to “save us all from climate change.” I was really disappointed because I live in this part of the country and thought I’d connect with the micro-signs of climate change around us all the time in the places where many people flock to connect with flora and fauna in the region. I would have been more compelled if the author had written about changes to the birds in her backyard in Castle Rock. Instead, she seems to miss the fact that buying a large piece of land in the southern Rockies might not be relatable to a large audience, and that the idea of this being “all for her” (repeated multiple times in the book) might come across as cringy. There were a number of points in the book at which I thought she might be joking, only to realize that she’d entirely missed the irony. At best, it feels naïve and clearly ripping off of Aldo Leopold’s writing from his cabin in Wisconsin. At worst, it regurgitates old, problematic ideas from the environmentalist movement and is painfully uncritical of itself.
March 11, 2024
This book is a personal account of the effects of climate change on the author's land situated West of Trinidad, Colorado. Although the area is often considered a semi-desert area, it can still get a massive amount of snow so there are four distinct seasons. The author and her husband kept a journal of their days at their cabin, the foliage found and the birds and animals they saw during their time there. During her years, they witnessed a change in the number and types of birds, the foliage, and the weather. With climate change everything is intensified - the rains come harder, the snow is deeper, the summers are hotter, the droughts are more prolonged.
The writer is gifted in her descriptions of the land and its inhabitants. Her prose is concise and beautiful. She speaks lovingly of the birds, their nestlings, the deer and elk, the bears that visit their land, and of her own family witnessing these miracles. Her writing brings home that so many of us go through our days and don't see half of what is happening around us.
There is hopefulness as well as dismay at the state of our natural world. Her descriptions of the East Troublesome and Marshall fires in Colorado were a gut punch as I remembered the horror of what was happening at the time.
This is an excellent book to read to acquaint yourself with the natural world and with climate change without getting to scientific.
The writer is gifted in her descriptions of the land and its inhabitants. Her prose is concise and beautiful. She speaks lovingly of the birds, their nestlings, the deer and elk, the bears that visit their land, and of her own family witnessing these miracles. Her writing brings home that so many of us go through our days and don't see half of what is happening around us.
There is hopefulness as well as dismay at the state of our natural world. Her descriptions of the East Troublesome and Marshall fires in Colorado were a gut punch as I remembered the horror of what was happening at the time.
This is an excellent book to read to acquaint yourself with the natural world and with climate change without getting to scientific.
May 23, 2023
Mary Taylor Young's Bluebird Seasons provides an intimate view of how she has seen and recognized climate change on 37 acres of rural land in southern Colorado that her family owns and has visited for well over two decades. Young kept a nature journal during those years, recording the comings and goings of animals and birds as well as the blooming, leafing out, and dying of the flora on her piece of the wild. Bluebird Seasons is both beautiful and scary, beautiful in the detail she offers as evidence of climate change and scary because of how it depicts the dangers of climate change in the future. Young's prose is elegant and to the point. The drawings her husband, Rick, contributed add visual elegance to Bluebird Seasons.
Art Elser, author of To See a World in a Grain of Sand and It Begins in Silence, Ends in Grace.
Art Elser, author of To See a World in a Grain of Sand and It Begins in Silence, Ends in Grace.
July 9, 2023
Received a Kindle copy as a GoodReads giveaway. Well written, engaging and thought-provoking, the author shares her personal journey of living in the Colorado mountains. Excerpts from her journal of over 20 years are included with discussions of the wildlife, history and geology of the area. Climate change is theme throughout the book. It's often terrifying, but the author offers some hope, too - if we're willing to make the necessary changes.
October 2, 2023
This book hit a trifecta for me - Colorado setting; environment science focus and an enjoyable read. It personally resonated because of a parallel experience of my family building a cabin in beautiful woods and family members who have the patience and love of birding. I appreciated Young's approach to inspiring action on climate change by engaging in the storytelling behind the journal observations she wrote over decades at her cabin.
August 28, 2023
Accidentally got this from the library thinking it was another book, but decided to read it anyway, and wow! I learned so much and gave me a lot to think about how we impact the environment and what steps we can take to make it better now.
September 4, 2023
I thoroughly enjoyed this multi year account of a Colorado zoologist/writer's experience observing the impacts of climate change from their small cabin in southern colorado near my home in Colorado springs. Well written and organized, funny, poignant, and hopeful.
July 19, 2023
A great personal perspective of climate change.
January 4, 2024
Mary is a beautiful writer...very eloquent. I very much enjoyed this book. I met Mary years ago and live in Castle Rock, Colorado so was quite interested in reading her new book. There is so much great information in it as well as just a good fun read. I looked forward reading the differences from the notes she took over the years. I have been feeding hummingbirds in Douglas County for sixteen years and have watched the change in numbers and species. Now I know why. Thanks, Mary!
September 10, 2024
This book is a memoir of a zoologist and her family living in South-Central Colorado. She discusses climate change in the modern world and observes the wild populations of birds, deer, rodents, and black bear near their home. She also teaches readers how life works. Even though there is difficult reality to be recognized, there is still hope in what we can do.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews