The Bobolinks

The rumble of the mower was slow to reach the house. The man at the wheel had begun by cutting the far end of the field and looping toward the back, mostly out of earshot. This wasn’t nefarious, just a sensible path for carving through the tall grasses across the road from us— in a field that was harboring bobolinks, a flashy, noisy, black-and-white-and-tan bird that nests on the ground. 
             He had made one pass around the front field and was completing a second when the rumble of the machinery caught my attention. I glanced at the calendar: June 28th. The bobolinks would be at the peak of their nesting cycle.
             Those fields, part of a state Wildlife Management Area, usually weren’t mowed before August.
            I slipped on my shoes and went out to investigate. Maybe it was something else. Maybe I was mistaken. But no: There he was, finishing a second circle around the field’s perimeter with a tractor towing a bush hog. 
             He had passed the end of our driveway half a minute earlier. I bolted down the road, running as fast as I could, barely gaining on him but gaining. He couldn’t hear my shouts. I got close enough for him to see me and waved my arms. “Hey! Please stop.”
            He halted, looked at me, surprised, and turned off the tractor.
            I held up a finger in the classic sign for just a second. “Thanks for stopping,” I said when I had caught my breath. I explained about the bobolinks, and how for years these fields had been cut by neighborhood volunteers, and not until August.
            “Well,” he said, “the state told me to cut ‘em.” He got down from the tractor, a working man in jeans and boots, muscular but a little thick around the middle. “The state told me to come do it,” he repeated.
            “They’re paying you?”
            He looked annoyed but nodded.
            “Could you wait until August?”
            He took out his phone and dialed a number, punching the buttons roughly. He hung up—the call must have gone to voicemail.
            I knew who he was trying to reach: the wildlife biologist in charge of the region. I had called him too, a few weeks earlier, volunteering Jeff and myself as the new neighborhood mowers. The man who’d done it for many years was hanging up his spurs. The wildlife biologist hadn’t called me back.
            “Could you please wait to cut it?” I didn’t want to take the job away from this man.
            He made a face. “I don’t want to get all political about this,” he said. He turned, climbed back on the tractor, started it, and put it roughly in gear. He drove briskly off, bush hog lifted, down the field to the trailer that had delivered the cutting machine to our road. 

A bobolink female or immature bird? It’s very hard to tell. Photo by Jonathan Irons, All About Birds, The Cornell Lab

When we moved to Maine, the most forested of states, I had expected to find a home nestled in trees. We ended up in an old farm field that we’ve come to love, and that’s become a beautiful meadow. Trees run down two sides and sneak partway along the back of the house. The rest is open field—bobolink country.

            Surveys in Maine show bobolink numbers to have dropped 3 percent each year from 1966 to 2017, a trend that will lead inevitably to extinction. During that half-century, the species suffered an 88 percent decline in their numbers continent wide. The authoritative Birds of Maine reports that they are “listed as a Species of Greatest Conservation Need because of concern about cutting hay and silage during the nesting season.” More recently, real estate developers have targeted the open fields.

All good reasons to care for these quirky little birds. But besides that, we love having them around.

            They chortle. They squawk. They perch on the wavering tips of grasses, the males gabbling like old men. The sight and sound of them lift our spirits. And so, on July 8th when I once again heard the mower across the road, my heart sank to somewhere around my kneecaps.

            I didn’t dare again confront the man mowing. So I called the wildlife biologist who had hired him.

            He answered this time, in a thick Southern accent that made me feel right at home. But this was Maine, not the North Carolina Outer Banks. Before we hung up, I asked him where he was from.

            “Georgia,” he said.

            I told him we’d lived down south and that I loved hearing his accent.

            “I sure have taken some hell about it all my years up here,” he said good naturedly.

            “It’s music to my ears,” I said. And it was.

            The verdict he imparted was not music, however. He’d told the mower to recommence. He’d checked and had read that the birds would be mostly done nesting by the end of the first week of July.

            That wasn’t at all what we had observed. I swallowed my protests, thanked him for researching the matter, and hung up. Across the road, the cutting was halfway done.

            Bobolink males are mostly black but have a butterscotch swatch on the back of the head that to me looks like a toupee. Their shoulders and rumps are flashily patched with white. They look ready for a night out on the Jersey shore. Females and young birds are drab by comparison, easily confused with sparrows but for the shape of their bodies and beaks. In autumn bobolinks migrate through the Caribbean and spend five or six weeks in Venezuela before continuing on to grasslands scattered through Bolivia, Paraguay, and Argentina. They come north again each spring, settling in open fields, which are fewer with each passing year.

            The day before the mower showed up for the second time, I’d glimpsed a dozen birds—three males and nine drab females or young—on the electrical wires along our road. An encouraging sight. But that was before.

            Might the chicks in the mown fields have all fledged? It was impossible to know. In the silence after the second mowing we caught no glimpses of bobolinks anywhere, for weeks. I scanned the fields each morning, my heart numb. A flyer put out by the nonprofit Vermont Center for Ecostudies cautions against mowing in northern New England until July 20th, before which, it says, “Nests are fledging young that are incapable of flight for 10 days.” A delay to August 1 would be best. A wildlife specialist at Ag Allies, a Maine grassland birds program, echoed the need to wait until at least July 15th.

            How many young birds might have been killed by the mowing? What should we do about it—if anything? We’re new to Maine (though we’ve been here six years). This isn’t a culture where pushiness is appreciated. Then again, I’ve never been one to shirk a fight.

            One morning in mid-July, a week after the second cutting, I glimpsed two males and a couple of drab birds—females or new chicks—in the undisturbed grasses in back of our house. The males sat up tall, as if daring anyone to mess with them. Their companions were more cautious. The birds didn’t show themselves the next morning, or the next week. It isn’t unusual for bobolinks to appear and disappear. But things seemed quieter this year. Emptier.

            The following morning we left on a sailing trip. When we returned after a week, the power lines along the road to our house were empty. The fields were distressingly silent.

            Two mornings later, though, our front field exploded with birds: four splashy males and another 16 or 18 females and young. It was a party, a grass-top mashup. The birds made no attempt to conceal themselves, calling to each other, chattering away, all the while bobbing on their shaky perches. We watched; we counted; we rejoiced. When I ducked quickly inside for my tea and came back, they were gone, another of nature’s disappearing acts.

            And—that was all. I envision them now in the wild rice fields around Merrymeeting Bay, fattening up for the trip to South America.

I know I can’t protect everything I love in this world, whether people or animals or places. Even so, doing nothing is never an option.

I don’t want to get all political. Neither did I. This wasn’t a political matter but simply an exchange between people with differing fears, overlaid on the needs of a small, quirky bird.

I wrote to the wildlife biologist with the information I’d gathered: the local bobolink census figures, with dates when the birds generally leave the fields; the graph from the Center for Ecostudies recommending that mowing be delayed. That was all I could do. He wrote back within minutes to say that we can probably work something out for mowing later next year.

The seasons will turn; the election will come and go. Regardless of its results, our nation will be living with these rough edges for the foreseeable future. May I do nothing to sharpen them. May I instead find ways to soften them until—however long it takes—the concept of “getting political” over small but important matters, like caring for bobolinks, no longer holds sway over the American psyche.