Parrots, fire, questions
Introducing "treethinking"
The story of thick-billed parrots in the US is a tragedy in three acts.
The first act is mostly informed conjecture. With no apparent close relatives other than the extremely similar maroon-fronted parrot, Rhynchopsitta pachyrhyncha spent a few million years as an evolutionary loner. Its home range is closely tied to a handful of conifer species restricted to the Sierra Madre Occidental and its satellites, and it’s likely that as the climate fluctuated in thrall to the cyclical advance and recession of the vast ice sheets of high latitudes, the birds did as well, ultimately pushing north of our imagined national border into southern Arizona and New Mexico some 10,000 years ago. They fed on cones of Chihuahua and Apache pine, on acorns, on nectar from the flowers of century plants. They formed huge noisy flocks that soared over hoodoos in the particular golden light of piney Southwestern mountains.
The second act is brutish and short. Anglo settlers pushed west in a seismic wave of genocide and displacement. Prospectors took up residence in the Chiricahuas and Animas mountains of New Mexico. And then—in very short time—they shot thousands and thousands of birds. The job didn’t take long: while the last flocks of thick-billed parrots were seen in 1938 in Arizona and 1964 in New Mexico, these records were more likely the final incursions of birds resident to Mexico than local breeders. For most of the 20th century, they were already gone.
The third act is one of a chance at redemption followed by dashed hopes. On September 20th, 1984, 13 wild-caught thick-billed parrots were released in the Chiricahuas in a joint effort by the Arizona Game and Fish Department, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the US Forest Service. Over the course of the next seven years they were joined by 55 others in an ambitious reintroduction program. It was doomed: the last reintroduced bird was seen in 1995, its compatriots felled by goshawks, red-tailed hawks, ring-tailed cats, and ecological ineptitude. The United States had again lost its last parrots, and we are poorer for it.
Last week, struggling with writer’s block and mulling over starting this newsletter, I hopped in my truck and drove 6 hours from my home in Santa Fe to the Chiricahuas to meet a colleague and talk science. In the Southwest, the first week of March is a liminal season, with daytime temperatures in the 60s hinting at imminent spring but mountain snow clinging to shaded, north-facing slopes. Though it’s been a desperately dry, warm winter, migrant bird species from the south had yet to arrive, and so rather than dedicating all our energy to focused birding we spent our free day on a long hike up over Chiricahua Peak.
Leaving the lush enclaves of Cave Creek Canyon, we quickly came upon the burn scar from 2011’s Horseshoe Two Fire, which torched 223,000 acres. Though its intensity varied across the landscape, many of these acres burned hot, destroying huge stands of ancient forest. Unfortunately, the scale and severity of the fire was not an outlier. 2011 was a paradigm-shifting year for Western wildfire: a year when a decade of drought and a century of fire suppression and anomalously cool and wet conditions caught up with us. It was the year the Las Conchas fire burned the eastern flank of the Jemez mountains hot enough to destroy most of the soil’s coniferous seedbank, only a little more than a decade after the infamous Cerro Grande Fire burned the same region and destroyed a nontrivial chunk of Los Alamos.
It is one thing to grasp the ecological importance of fire, but another entirely to not find it upsetting, and so it was with some relief that we rounded a corner and dropped into Cima Park, a well-watered canyon with a Forest Service cabin that had either been diligently protected or otherwise escaped the worst ravages of Horseshoe Two. The psychological comfort of tall green trees aside, I was immediately struck by how similar the drainage felt to forests I had visited in the mountains of central and northern Mexico. It was, in other words, excellent thick-billed parrot habitat, and it was hard not to feel a fresh pang of loss at the impossibility of rounding a corner and coming upon a raucous flock raining cone scales upon the duff and dirty snow.
Yet at the same time, I was left wondering how much this sense of loss was a sort of manufactured nostalgia for a world I had never known. The Chiricahuas had always been a northern outpost for thick-billed parrots, a relatively small island of habitat isolated from larger mountain strongholds by the baking Chihuahuan desert. There’s at least some possibility that the birds never bred here at all, at least regularly—that the huge flocks reported at the turn of the century were no more than regular visitors. How much of my desire to someday again see these mountains ring with parrot calls was mere aesthetics, as opposed to righting a lasting ecological wrong?
I was also conscious of the fact that the thick-billed parrot has a long history as a symbol of wildness, of self-determined and “intact” nature. First in an article in The Condor and later again in A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold called the species the “numenon” of the Sierra Madre, meaning, more or less, the intangible essence of a landscape that granted it life. It’s hard to imagine the science of ecology without Leopold’s formidable talents, but it’s also hard to imagine he would boast the same level of fame today if he had not been such a gifted lyrical writer, and had not expressed some deeply romantic tendencies. Rational and the emotional ways of knowing the nonhuman world are both uncomfortable bedfellows and closer together than we’d like to admit.
As we hurdle into a new, unpredictable climate regime, one where the Horseshoe Two Fire may seem quaint in retrospect, asking ourselves how our experiences merge with science, politics, and identity to shape views on conservation and environmentalism is urgent. What species—what natures, what ecologies—do we value, and why? Do we conserve relationships between plants and animals and people and landscapes as static entities, or do we conserve the raw potential for ecological and evolutionary processes, or both? What happens when these priorities conflict?
To get even more thorny: when science comes with huge error bars, or when questions no longer have scientific answers at all, who gets to decide how we proceed?
I’m starting treethinking because this is what keeps me up at night. You can read a bit more about my background and goals for the newsletter here—I hope you’ll consider subscribing.