In Search of Meadowlarks: Birds, Farms, and Food in Harmony with the Land

Professor Marzluff sets the scene for his exploration by camping in a cornfield in Illinois to survey birds. After an early morning walk he reports: “It takes me an hour and a half before I hear my first meadowlark—an eastern—belting forth a high-pitched, if simple tingaling from an abandoned grassy field.” After 3 hours he counts only 6 meadowlarks, the lowest count ever on that stretch of road. In North America, in fact, “the estimated population [of meadowlarks] has decreased by 71 percent since 1966.” Yikes! The reasons for the decline are complex, from habitat loss to decrease of prey insects due to pesticides. In Search of Meadowlarks: Birds, Farms, and Food in Harmony with the Land covers case studies and field trips to farms, vineyards and ranches from Montana to Costa Rica and Washington to California in order to discover which agricultural practices sustain birds.

What more can farmers do to help the environment than just avoiding pesticides? I’ve never thought about how farms could provide habitat to wildlife and support birds. I assumed wildlife conservation was something that happened in wilderness areas or abandoned fields. Marzluff points out that creatures also inhabit farms and ranches, albeit in declining numbers. Pasture and fallow fields can resemble natural grasslands while hedges resemble forest edges. Regenerative agriculture is a new buzzword to describe practices on farms and ranches that might build soil health, sequester carbon, prevent storm water pollution or support wildlife. The regenerative practices must also produce food and be economically sustainable. That last part is tricky, but the example farms that Marzluff visits have managed to make it work.

One simple example employed by California vineyard Tres Sabores involved installing bird boxes to house nesting owls. Research shows an owl family consumes more than a thousand rodents over a summer. This saves vineyard managers considerable time and money controlling grape-damaging voles, rats and gophers. Another example that surprised me was how tightly-controlled cattle grazing in Montana improved river ecosystems. Cows eat invasive grasses and compact the ground to allow vernal pools to last longer into early summer, providing habitat to amphibians.

Marzluff explores how some farmers spare land on the margins to support wildlife while others embrace sharing the land, by delaying pasture mowing, for example, to allow birds to fledge their young. The book concludes with a hopeful chapter on actions consumers and policy makers should take to assist the farmers who provide for birds.

In an ideal world, farms and ranches practicing sharing and sparing methods would form networked corridors to wild lands to boost biodiversity and reduce the risk of localized extinction. Readers wanting to dig deeper into the scholarly background of themes revealed in this book should also read Nature’s Matrix: Linking Agriculture, Conservation and Food Sovereignty by Ivette Perfecto, John Vandermeer and Angus Wright (2009). In Search of Meadowlarks is enjoyable reading for anyone interested in wildlife conservation or regenerative agriculture.

Published in the Leaflet for Scholars, August 2020, Vol. 7, Issue 8.