Seeking refuge : birds and landscapes of the Pacific flyway

281 Pages·2010·2.278 MB·English

by  Robert Wilson, William Cronon

weyerhaeuser environmental books
william cronon, editor
Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books explore human relationships
with natural environments in all their variety and complexity. They
seek to cast new light on the ways that natural systems affect human
communities, the ways that people affect the environments of which
they are a part, and the ways that different cultural conceptions of
nature profoundly shape our sense of the world around us.
A complete list of the books in the series appears at the end of this
book.

seeking
refuge
birds and landscapes
of the pacific flyway
robert m. wilson
foreword by william cronon
university of washington press
seattle and london
Seeking Refuge: Birds and Landscapes of the Pacific Flyway is published
with the assistance of a grant from the Weyerhaeuser Environmental
Books Endowment, established by the Weyerhaeuser Company Foundation,
members of the Weyerhaeuser family, and Janet and Jack Creighton.
© 2010 by the University of Washington Press
Printed in United States of America
15 14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
University of Washington Press
PO Box 50096, Seattle, WA 98145, USA
www.washington.edu/uwpress
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wilson, Robert M., 1971–
Seeking refuge : birds and landscapes of the Pacific flyway /
Robert M. Wilson.
p. cm. —  (Weyerhaeuser environmental books)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-295-99002-6 (hardback : alk. paper)
1.  Bird refuges—West (U.S.)
2.  Migratory birds—Effect of habitat modification on.
3.  Wetland conservation—West (U.S.)
4.  Wetland management—West (U.S.) 
I. Title.
ql676.56.w3w55 2010 598.156’80979—dc22 2010004332
The paper used in this publication is acid-free and 90 percent recycled from
at least 50 percent post-consumer waste. It meets the minimum requirements
of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48–1984.
contents
Foreword: A Wilderness on Wings by William Cronon vii
Acknowledgements xiii
introduction 3
1 The Wetland Archipelago 16
2 Elusive Sanctuaries 34
3 Places in the Grid 65
4 Duck Farms 99
5 Refuges in Conflict 132
epilogue 165
Citation Abbreviations 173
Notes 175
Bibliography 215
Index 237

foreword: a wilderness on wings
william cronon
one of the deepest convictions that geographers bring to every
subject they study has to do with scale, a concept they understand with
far greater rigor and subtlety than those who have never had to grapple
with the befuddling complexities of mapmaking. The rest of us more
often than not rely on spatial common sense as we navigate our daily
life. We typically imagine that the places we visit exist pretty unam-
biguously at a singular location that can easily be visited if only we are
able to find our way to the fixed position on a map where that place
resides. Unless we’re trying to estimate distances, we don’t think very
much about those little rulers that declare how many inches on the
map correspond with how many miles in the real world. And unless
we’re lost or find ourselves wondering whether a map on which we’ve
relied might somehow have led us astray, we don’t much worry about
the accuracy with which maps represent places we take for granted as
“real.”
Yet even a moment’s reflection will suggest that the relationship
between place and scale is far from straightforward, so much so that
places can appear sharp or fuzzy or disappear altogether depending
vii
on the ways maps represent them. To demonstrate this phenomenon
for yourself, try the following experiment. Visit a website like Google
Maps or Mapquest to search for California’s Sacramento National
Wildlife Refuge, a place about which the historical geographer Rob-
ert Wilson has much to say in this thought-provoking book. You will
initially see on your screen a drab polygon containing a few curving
blue lines representing watercourses, a few gray lines representing
roads, and not much else. It isn’t quite a blank spot on the map, but
almost. If you press the button to request a satellite view, however, the
image suddenly morphs into an astonishingly complex maze of curv-
ing greens and browns and blues. Even more strikingly, you can now
see the surrounding grid of rectilinear roads and fields that explain
why the place is called a refuge. It is an island in a vast landscape of
agricultural fields. At first glance, the refuge has an organic look and
feel, though on closer examination its lines and shapes display consid-
erable evidence of human engineering. The scale of the map, and the
choices you make about what it represents, radically alter what you do
and do not see within the boundaries of this place.
But the geographer’s essential insight is not that we see more details
when the scale of a map is large than when it is small. It is rather that
we see different details—and therefore different places. When your
view of this wildlife refuge is zoomed in close enough to see its inte-
rior watercourses, you cannot see the state of California, even though
the one exists within the other. This is because places are inherently
nested inside each other, and their nested identities wax and wane
depending on the scale of the map that represents them. If you zoom
back far enough to see all of Colusa County, in which the Sacramento
National Wildlife Refuge is located, the refuge becomes little more
than a brown blotch on your computer screen. If you pull back farther
still to see the entire Sacramento River watershed, of which this place
is such an important component, you can barely make out the refuge
at all. Zoom back farther so you can progressively make out the places
called “California” or the “Pacific Coast” or the “American West” or
the “United States” or “North America” or the “Western Hemisphere,”
and the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge disappears altogether.
Different places, in other words, exist on different scales, and the
consequences of this truth are far from trivial. Although there is a
viii Foreword
long tradition in the history of conservation of seeking to protect
nature by creating parks and wilderness areas in relatively isolated,
self-contained units, in fact natural systems themselves are almost
never coterminous with the boundaries we draw around them. Yel-
lowstone National Park, for instance, is among the largest, most
intact, and best-loved wild places legally protected in the Lower 48
United States, yet it measures less than 3,500 square miles—roughly
sixty miles on a side. Especially the animals who live there—bison,
elk, grizzlies, wolves, trumpeter swans, and others—have no concep-
tion of the park’s boundaries, regularly crossing them to create a host
of ecological, managerial, and political problems for human beings
who care about these creatures. How to “protect nature” when nature
perennially ignores the places we’ve set aside for it is the profound
question that makes Robert Wilson’s Seeking Refuge: Birds and Land-
scapes of the Pacific Flyway such a suggestive and important book.
No organisms demonstrate the geographical paradoxes of scale
and place better than migratory birds. In one of the most remarkable
evolutionary strategies in the history of life on earth, these species
take advantage of their wings to move among far-flung ecosystems
depending on the seasons of the year. During the warm summer
months, they raise their young in the high latitudes of the planet, tak-
ing advantage of the intense productivity of northern and southern
ecosystems at the time when all living things in subpolar regions race
to complete their annual cycles before the return of winter. Migratory
birds take advantage of abundant seasonal food supplies in territo-
ries with relatively low populations of native predators when vulner-
able nestlings are least able to defend themselves. Once fledglings are
older, they live with their parents in regions nearer the equator, where
food is abundant even in winter—and when there is at least a fight-
ing chance that young birds will be able to defend themselves against
predators that are far more numerous here than near the poles. In
between, during the spring and fall, these amazing creatures take to
the air and travel many thousands of miles back and forth between
their seasonal homes.
Most Americans, no matter where we live, think of ducks and geese
as sharing the ecosystems in which we make our own homes. They
certainly do this—but not all the time. Only at particular moments
Foreword ix