Bluebird Seasons

by Mary Young

“This wonderful book is faithful both in its witness to the world’s beauty and to our need to act now to preserve something of that wonder and grace. It brings the bracing air of the Rockies to us all.” —Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

In this A Sand County Almanac for the twenty-first century, nature writer and zoologist Mary Taylor Young tells the story of the growing effects of climate change on her land in the pine-covered foothills of southern Colorado.

Climate change wasn’t yet on the public radar when Young and her husband bought their piece of the wild in 1995. They built a cabin, set up a trail of bluebird nest boxes, and began a nature journal of observations, delighting in the ceaseless dramas, joys, and tragedies that are the fabric of life in the wild.

But changes greater than the seasonal cycles of nature became evident over time: increasing drought, wildfires, bears delaying hibernation, and the decline of familiar birds and appearance of new species.

Their journal of sightings over twenty-five bluebird seasons, she realized, was a record of climate change happening, not in an Indonesian rainforest or on an Antarctic ice sheet but in their own natural neighborhood. Using the journal as a chronicle of change, Young tells a story echoed in everyone’s lives and backyards. But it’s not time to despair, she writes. It’s time to act.

Young sees hope in the human ability to overcome great obstacles, in the energy and determination of young people, and in nature’s resilience, which the bluebirds show season after season.

Paperback | 240 pages | Independent Publishers Group | 2023

Mary Young has been writing on nature and wildlife in Colorado and the American West for over 35 years, sharing her love of nature and her joy and wonder in wildlife and the natural world. She’s published 21 books and hundreds of articles, written dozens of projects for US Fish and Wildlife, Colorado Parks and Wildlife, US Forest Service and others, and “My Words on Birds” birdwatching column ran in the Rocky Mountain News for 16 years. She’s won many awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from Colorado Authors League; induction into the Colorado Authors Hall of Fame and the Frank Waters Award for a canon of writing that communicates a deep understanding of the West. Her writing offers an intersection between the heart and the mind–the joy of nature built upon a solid biological foundation.