Marbled Murrelet: The Cookie

Have you gotten your new issue of Mountaineers magazine yet? This image (above), along with my recipe for these chocolate-cinnamon cookies shaped like marbled murrelets, appears in the magazine. 

I made the cookies. I took the photo. I sent it to my publicist at Mountaineers Books in Seattle. Let me explain....lest you think I am sitting around baking and decorating cookies when I should be out promoting conservation of the forests where these imperiled seabirds nest.

I was invited by my local Audubon chapter, Black Hills Audubon Society, in Olympia, to give a presentation in October on the marbled murrelet in conjunction with the reissue in paperback of my book Rare Bird: Pursuing the Mystery of the Marbled Murrelet. A few weeks before the presentation, the president of the chapter told me she was expecting a good turnout. I offered to bake something to help out with the hospitality effort that night. Jokingly, I said I'd make some cookies if I could find a cookie cutter in the shape of a marbled murrelet.  Ha ha.

  A few days later, what should arrive in the mail but a cookie cutter from the president of my Audubon chapter. It was, alas, not a murrelet, but a murrelet cousin, the puffin.

Now, for those of you who know birds, you know the puffin doesn't look much like an alcid. And, well, for those of you who know me, you know I am not much of a cookie baker. But, what the heck, I'd make a go of it.

What was I thinking?
 

The Thursday afternoon of my presentation, I was tweaking my slides, fiddling with the audio files of the murrelet's calls to play, trying to remember what I was going to say (45+ minutes of content with no notes). I took a much-needed break and dashed off the to the store for cookie fixin's. But I didn't go to the organic Co-op where I normally shop because they didn't carry pre-made cookie dough and I didn't have time to make the rolled cookies from scratch. So I went to the Safeway where I scooped up packages of chocolate cookie dough that, judging by the list of ingredients, was one molecule away from toxic waste. Not that I was trying to poison my fellow Auduboners...I do eat non-organic food all the time. I do eat cookies made from chemicals not found in nature. Just not that often.

I get back home with my dough and being pounding it out with a wooden rolling pin. I performed rhinoplasty on the beak, thinned the neck, and changed the posture of the body.  I baked a batch or two, arrange them on a platter, took a photograph, went off to my presentation (the cookies went fast!), and then e-mailed the photograph of the cookies to amuse a few the Mountaineers Books staff I was working with.

That was Friday morning. Saturday I biked downtown with my husband to rally to support Initiative 522 (labeling of GMO foods). Then we went to the Farmer's Market and bought organic veggies and fruit.

Monday I decided to take public transportation to a meeting with a staff member of our local land trust to explore the idea of a program on forest conservation.

After the meeting, was I was waiting to catch the bus home (scowling at all the single-driver cars going by, of course), I got the call.

It was from the publicist at Mountaineers Books. She wanted my murrelet cookie recipe.

It was worse than that, actually. She didn't want the recipe--the editor at Mountaineers magazine wanted it (and photos) to accompany an article they were running about the murrelet and Rare Bird.

Busted. My hypocrisy outed. 

So, instead of saying what I should have said (the truth), I told the publicists that I'd send her the recipe that afternoon. So I scurried off to the Olympia Food Co-op with a recipe for chocolate rolled cookies, filled my cart with organic cocoa powder, whole wheat flour, unbleached and organic turbinado sugar, organic chocolate nibs (for the murrelet's eyes), etc. etc. I spent the afternoon pounding out the cookie dough my wooden rolling pin, performed rhinoplasty on the beak, thinned the neck, and changed the posture of the body.  I baked a batch or two, arrange them on a platter, took a photograph, and voila! Organic cinnamon-chocolate marbled murrelet cookies.

Perhaps someone can make a cookie cutter to look like this marbled murrelet chick, made famous in 1974 by being the first of this species to be discovered on its nest. 
 

It's not what I had in mind to draw attention to the plight of the marbled murrelet, but it does serve to expose the root of the problem of natural resource conservation: us. While we are energetically, passionately, dutifully working to save this, protect that, restore what we have destroyed, we are in the same gesture wasting, destroying, depleting, exploiting. We are a complex species and often work against what is in our own best interest. Perhaps unwittingly, perhaps by inattention, perhaps because we are too lazy, too cheap, too much in  rush to take good care of our resources--our wildlife, our trees, our air, our water.

We need to slow down, pay attention, and think twice about what we are consuming and what kind of environment we are producing. As author Derrick Jensen writes, "no successful species exploits its resources to the point of extinction." Yet this is precisely what we are doing.  We have the choice to wake up, face our hypocrisy, make some little and some bigger changes that will go far to help move toward keeping the marbled murrelets, keeping the forests, keeping the planet functioning.

Murrelet cookies, of course, are not the answer to recovery of the marbled murrelet, but if I can make the marbled murrelet a household word--and keep bringing the lessons they offer us in their struggle to survive-- I'll keep baking them!

For the Mountaineers magazine article and recipe, click here and go to page 12.

Marbled Murrelet & Rare Bird Talks

My upcoming presentations feature not only book sales and signing of Rare Bird, but also a virtual experience of a marbled murrelet in the old-growth forest, how and why I wrote Rare Bird despite m ignorance, the life history of this forest-nesting seabird, my very short story of the 185-year-long search to find this bird's nest, some inconvenient truths, exposure of my personal hypocrisy, some hard questions, and some shockingly easy things you can do to help save this imperiled bird.  

Here is the rundown of November's presentations in Greater Puget Sound:

November 8 at 7 p.m. at Orca Books, Olympia

November 12 at 7 p.m. at the Cotton Building, Port Townsend

November 14 at the Mountaineers Seattle Program Center, Seattle

November 17 at 4 p.m. at Village Books, Bellingham (Fairhaven)

November 22 at 5:30 p.m. at Trimble Hall, University of Puget Sound, Tacoma

For more detail, go to my events page here.

Science, Math, and Marbled Murrelets

I am trying to understand a scientific report on the population trend of the marbled murrelet. The report I am reading is the Marbled Murrelet Effectiveness Monitoring, Northwest Forest Plan: 2011 and 2012 summary report. This is the ungainly title of a 27- page report by the Northwest Forest Plan Interagency Regional Monitoring Program. Within in the confines of this blog, I am going to call this report the "Report" and its author, "Falxa et al." Gary Falxa is the Marbled Murrelet Module Lead and the "et al" are the ten other scientist-authors of this report. 

Though I have shortened its name, I imagine you are not interested in the Report by Falxa et al.  I was told it contains some good news for the marbled murrelet--that population numbers for 2011 and 2012 showed a slight increase. I would like to stop telling people that the murrelet populations in California, Oregon, and Washington have declined 29% between 2001 and 2010 (which, in fact, they did) and that the trend is continuing downward. But I have a problem: the meat of the Report by Falxa et al goes like this (ellipses indicate where parenthetical citations and references to tables occur):

"Population demographic models predicted population declines of 3 to 7 percent per year for the listed range, which includes Zone 6...Miller et al. (2012) reported a statistically significant decline of 3.7 percent per year for the combined population of Conservation Zones 1 through 5 for the 2001-2010 period. For the new analysis based on 2001-2012 data, no trend was detected at the 5 percent leve... While the trend line slope for this period is slightly negative...the 95 percent confidence interval for the trend slope includes zero... which also indicates no statistically significant trend. The reason for finding no significant trend through 2012, when Miller et al (2012) found a declining trend through 2010, is the increased estimate of murrelet abundance for both 2011 and 2012. In 2011, estimates of murrelet population size increased in all conservation zones except Zone 2, compared to estimates from recent years. In 2012, population estimates remained higher in some zones, most notably Stratum 1 of Zone 1 (Strait of Juan de Fuca, Washington), and the 2012 population estimate for all conservation zones combined (Washington south to San Francisco Bay) also remained above that of recent years, in large part an effect of the increase in Zone 1...."

"The sampling error associated with population estimates for such a mobile and patchily distributed species could have contributed to the increased estimates, as could other factors. Results of murrelet population monitoring in 2013 and beyond will help further clarify populations status and trend, as will explorations underway."

I am including this photo of a murrelet chick for the sole purpose of keeping your attention.  

I thought by typing out the meaty paragraph above while reading it aloud to myself would increase my comprehension and have me rushing off to the store for a bottle of celebrator champagne. It did not.

I was frustrated and, after multiple readings, set the report aside and picked up the latest issue of Orion magazine. I  quickly flipped to Derrick Jensen's "Upping the Stakes" column which, I think Jensen may have written after reading the Report by Falxa et al. It's about simple math and our planet-destroying unwillingness to embrace it. Here is some of what he writes: 

"I know if there are 6 billion passenger pigeons and you subtract 1 billion, and then another billion, and keep subtracting them fast than the can add to their own population, then eventually there will be none. I know if there are uncountable salmon and you reduce their numbers to where you can count them, and they you keep subtracting, eventually there will be none....I know the same is true for native forests reduced from 100 percent to 2 percent, and for native grasslands and wetlands reduced to the same extent. 

"I also know that if you take the number 315 (as in parts per million) and keeping adding to it, eventually you will get to 350. And if you keep adding to that, you'll bet to 400. And if you keep adding to that you'll get some approximation of hell."

"I don't understand why so many of us don't seem capable of subtracting and adding. Oh, sure, I understand that people come up with lots of rationalizations for avoiding simple math and they come up with lots of fancy names and algorithms to attempt to convince themselves that 100 minus 90 doesn't equal 10, or that 315 plus 85 doesn't equal 400, but whether you call it "managing forests," "generating hydroelectric power," "developing natural resources," "sustainable development," or any of a thousand other names, the subtraction and the addition continue." 

It would be folly, given what we've done to our forests and oceans in the past few hundred years to think that the marbled murrelet was on the road to recovery. The scientists themselves cannot quite explain the murrelets'  2011 and 2012 population bump (and a "bump" is what some are calling it). The trend analysis at the end of the Report is full of questions. Were the population estimates the result of sampling error? Has the distribution (not the population) of the birds changed? Did functions of the model change between years? Did survey effort vary? Were more murrelets on the water in 2011 and 2012 because they were not in the forest on nests?

Nowhere is this question: Are we finally managing our forests to improve breeding success of marbled murrelets? Have our paltry restrictions on gillnetting somehow saved enough  murrelets to increase the population? Have our aquatic reserves and shoreline management plans actually worked to protect the fish murrelet eat? Have more and more chicks successfully fledged because our spotty predator-control measures are paying off? 

Let's not fool ourselves. Let's not pat ourselves on the back for an enigmatic "bump. " We have reduced our original old-growth coastal forests by 80 to 95% in the Pacific Northwest. Scientists who documented the 29% decline in murrelet populations between 2001 and 2010 noted that "[t]hese declines coincide with the reductions in the amount of nesting habitat." So...are we not looking at a corresponding and eventual 80-95% reduction in murrelets? Unfortunately, we cannot know how many murrelets there were "originally," so the question becomes 80 to 95 % of what?  

Given that we are logging and losing more murrelet nesting habitat every year--and failing spectacularly at growing any new forests for future murrelets...well, it's simple math and, sadly, we seem all too willing to accept zero as the answer. But the sooner we embrace the possibility of zero, the sooner we can begin changing the equation.

Wild Thyme Farm & The River of Words

This is Wild Thyme Farm in Oakville, Washington, where I spent two beautiful days last week presenting a workshop on writing and nature to teachers and students in the Chehalis River Basin. On this well-kept and thoughtfully managed farm, it was tempting to just let nature speak for itself, to let the stories flow directly from the woods and ponds and trees and vistas.

Which it did all day long. Which it did while farm owner John Erikson (above) took us on a tour of Wild Thyme which he and his two brothers have managed and restored  with an eye to optimizing--not maximizing--productivity of the land. What this farm produces is food, timber, habitat, open space, eco-tourism, watershed protection, community, connectivity, and inspiration for visitors. The students here listened intently as John talked about permaculture, sustainability, eco-tourism, and forest management, and the rough-skinned newt he held in his hands.

 After our walk, I retreated to this cozy former chicken-coop (below) to offer some ideas on writing about nature to teachers and students. The goal, though not the sole purpose of my workshop, was to encourage the students from schools within the Chehalis River Basin to participate in the River of Words International Poetry and Art Competition. 

One of my favorite ways to engage people in the natural world is to get them to slow down and focus. I have two simple tools that seem to work 99.9% of the time to accomplish this. Getting students to focus on something small, something they can fully describe, something that will not overwhelm them requires an old-fashioned 35-mm slide mount.  

If you are of the pre-digital-camera era, you will no doubt have a store of these in a spare-bedroom closet or in a shoebox in your attic. I have plenty to go around and am delighted to hand them out to kids who seem eager to use them to find some one thing to look at. For five minutes.

 Five whole minutes. And for that major challenge, I use a timer. Any stopwatch or timer will do.

And then you lead your future poet laureates out to sit or perch in a tree or nest to a pond and, when they have found their small thing to focus on and have stopped wiggling, you set the timer and start. And then forever begins. The students have been told to look at their one thing, to think about that thing, to think about how they feel being still and staring, to think about what is happening to them and to the object of their attention over the five minutes. When the timer beeps, everyone gathers to talk about what  happened.  

I have been using this technique successfully for a few years but am always amazed at how well it works. The stories pour forth.

One student took the assignment quite literally and had wedged a hazelnut that had fallen on the ground into his slide mount. As he contemplated this small scene for five minutes, the student said he starting thinking about the cycle of the nut: on the ground it would take root, produce a shoot, then a tree that would eventually be large enough to bear nuts which would then fall to the ground to begin the cycle again.  

Another student had started by focusing on a spider crawling on the bark of a tree. She looked away for just a few second, she said, and the spider wasn't within the frame of the slidemount. "I didn't realize how fast spiders could move," she said. 

Several students noticed how, when they were still and focused, they noticed how everything was moving.

One teacher had focused on a beautiful walnut tree (below) whose top few leaves were waving in the gentle breeze. During the five minutes, she said, her eyes would wander but the waving golden leaves would draw her back. Like grandparents, she said. Like grandparents who are so beautiful, aware that they are in the autumn of their lives, and have so much to offer--if only they could get our attention. There they stand--waiting, offering, waving.

Follow these links to Wild Thyme Farm and to the River of Words.