Traverse City Record-Eagle

Life

November 4, 2007

Bobolink is melodic 'rowdy of the meadow'

By Kay Charter

In the middle of the 19th century, Emily Dickinson paid homage to bobolinks in her poems. She equated the bird's melodic morning song with the dawning of the day -- and when the birds migrated in fall, she declared that the "rowdy of the meadow" was gone.

This beautiful member of the blackbird family is particularly close to my own heart, and was the species I most hoped would come to nest when my husband and I bought the property that is now Charter Sanctuary.

That hope was fulfilled when the first bobolinks arrived in mid-May the year after our purchase. For the next several years, the population grew. Then spotted knapweed claimed our meadow and degraded its habitat. Sadly, our bobolink population plummeted, along with grasshopper sparrows, eastern meadowlarks and other upland nesters.

In 2004, DNR prairie specialist Vern Stephens brought his program to Saving Birds Thru Habitat's nature center. After his presentation, Vern stood with me outside the building and looked out over Charter Sanctuary, which abuts SBTH property. He said that if we did nothing, the ultimate course for our meadow was for the knapweed to take over, rendering those nesting areas virtually sterile. Since then, with Vern's guidance we have worked to reverse the trend by constructing a North American prairie habitat. In the process, I have fallen in love with prairie plants of all sizes, shapes and colors. But my favorite, like the bobolink in the bird world, is the little bluestem.

Some have suggested that this effort isn't natural, maintaining that prairie didn't exist in pre-European northern Michigan. But research has revealed that eastern forests were not as monolithic as once believed. Forest fires, beavers and certain soil conditions were important factors in creating scrublands, wet meadows and prairie-like grasslands.

During a trip to New England earlier this fall, I spotted stands of little bluestem along the roadways. The discovery of "little blue," as it is known to prairie folk, led me to question my earlier belief that, because prairies didn't exist in the east, neither did upland nesting birds (except for the now-extinct heath hen, which I thought was confined to New England coastal plains.) On a trip up the Connecticut River with naturalist Bill Yule, I asked about prairie in his part of the country, and he spoke of "beaver meadows" and other pockets of prairie throughout the region. In fact, New England had many areas where blazing star occurred with little bluestem, and butterfly weed grew with asters, goldenrods, coneflowers, Niagara big bluestem and a host of other prairie plants. In many of those prairie-like areas, bobolinks and other upland species nested. So my earlier view that they arrived in the Northeast only after land was cleared for agriculture was clearly mistaken. This bird was already nesting there when the first settlers arrived.

As to the question of whether bobolinks ever nested in the Grand Traverse area, Marlin Bussey, a passionate birder and dedicated conservationist, says the answer is irrelevant. It is his belief that because the birds have been in northern Michigan for decades, and they are now in serious trouble, we should offer them all the help we can.

My sentiments exactly, although I think it entirely possible that they were here in small pockets all along.

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