Thoughts on the “New Nature”: Are Collared-Doves dangerous invaders or just birds?

When Tara and I moved to Reno in 2007, I started keeping a “yard list”—a list of all bird species seen in or from our yard—and made a reflexive division in my mind between the “good” birds and the “bad,” meaning native species vs introduced ones. The invasive European Starlings, House Sparrows, and Rock Pigeons were bad and everything else was good. (The California Quails that occasionally visit our yard might not be native to Reno either, but they’re handsome birds that I grew up seeing in Los Angeles, so I gave them the benefit of the doubt and put them on the “good” list.)

In 2010, some new birds showed up, the 60^th “yard species” overall, but only the fourth clear non-native. At first, I just heard them, a low “wooo Hooo hoo,” off in the distance. Then they started appearing in our backyard, perched on the wires or high in the scraggly Siberian elm.

They were Eurasian Collared-Doves (Streptopelia decaocto), part of one of the great bird invasions in history. In the late 1800s, these birds were only found in central and southern Asia, but in the 20^th century they made a great expansion north in Asia and west through nearly all of Europe and parts of north Africa, perhaps “released” from old geographic constraints by urbanization and climate change. And in the early 1980s, Collared-Doves from the Bahamas (descended from birds released by a pet dealer) flew over to Florida and from there rapidly spread west and north.

Eurasian Collared-Dove. (Photo from Iruka via Wikimedia Commons)

The pace of the Collared-Dove’s North American colonization made the earlier, impressively fast invasions of Starlings and House Sparrows seem leisurely: My old National Geographic Field Guide, published in 1987, mentions the occurrence of Collared-Doves in Florida but doesn’t even include a picture of the species or a map of its range; my new Sibley Guide shows that the species now occurs over virtually the entire contiguous United States outside of the northeast.

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Some people—a lot of people—would say that Eurasian Collared-Doves don’t belong here and are bad news. They’re alien invaders, in the same nasty class as the awful and ubiquitous House Sparrows and Starlings. Birders suspect them of pushing out the native Mourning Doves. There must now be millions of Eurasian Collared-Doves in North America—how could they not be doing harm?

Somehow, though, despite the fact that I was raised to think any introduced species is bad, and the most common ones are the worst, I haven’t been able to work up much venom toward the Collared-Doves. Maybe my lack of animosity or concern comes partly from the fact that they’re pretty birds, colored in pearly gray pastels, and with a light, airy way of flying, often with wing and tail feathers fanned out. Also, although they often make a harsh “aaaagh” call, their frequent song is the mellow, soothing “wooo Hooo hoo.” Basically, they look and sound soft, friendly, and peaceful, the epitome of a dove.

But there may be something else at work on my brain too, making me accept the Collared-Doves in a way that I couldn’t accept the Eastern Fox Squirrels that invaded our semi-wild neighborhood in Los Angeles decades ago, or the introduced tamarisk that lined desert rivercourses near where I lived in Tucson in the mid-1990s, or any number of other invasive species I’ve encountered over the years.

I think this “something else” is the recognition of what the naturalist and writer Lyanda Lynn Haupt has called “the new nature, where the romantic vision of nature as separate from human activity must be replaced by the realistic sense that all of nature, no matter how remote, is affected by what we do and how we live.” Part of this new view entails giving up an obsession with the pristine, with wild places supposedly untouched by human influence. For instance, Haupt is a great advocate of getting to know and appreciate animals such as crows, pigeons, and squirrels, species that most of us urbanites encounter constantly in our everyday lives on streets, in city parks, and in backyards.

Or, to take a more controversial example, another naturalist/writer, Emma Marris, argues that environmentalists have been too focused on conserving wilderness. Instead, Marris says, we should turn much of the planet into a “rambunctious garden,” crafting and tending healthy half-wild ecosystems that, among other things, mix native and non-native species. She thinks we should “work with nature as it changes and adapts to what we humans have done to planet Earth.” This doesn’t mean ignoring wilderness entirely, but it does represent a radical shift in priorities.

And, to get back specifically to the Eurasian Collared-Dove and other common introduced species, ecologist Ken Thompson claims that conservation biologists have unjustly vilified non-native species, promoting the misleading view that these “invaders” routinely destroy natural environments and drive native species to extinction. Thompson and others note that, for the great majority of introduced species, evidence for such negative impacts is inconclusive or non-existent. (Even European Starlings apparently aren’t nearly as bad as they’ve been made out to be.) Meanwhile, positive effects of introduced species—such as increases in native bird diversity linked to the presence of introduced honeysuckles in eastern North America—are underplayed or ignored. Thompson thinks that scientists have made far too much of the distinction between native and non-native. Management of species should be dictated by what they do to ecosystems, he argues, not where they came from.

Predictably, there has been backlash to these new perspectives. For instance, the “live and let live” attitude toward introduced species has been criticized as naïve and dangerous. And E. O. Wilson, in a debate with Emma Marris, accused her of giving up on real conservation. “Where do you plant the white flag you’re carrying?,” he asked.

I see where Wilson and other old school types are coming from. My sense of nature was formed to a great extent by backpacking trips in the Sierra Nevada, in high country where the native biota was largely intact, from western junipers and shooting stars to pikas and mountain kingsnakes. I don’t want to see those kinds of places disappear. I don’t want my and my kids’ experiences of nature to contract to watching crows chase each other over rooftops or identifying the bugs in our own rambunctious, half-native backyard garden (as much as I like doing those things).

Wasp-mimicking beetle (Xestoleptura crassipes) on a planted native buckwheat (Eriogonum ovalifolium) in our backyard. It’s kind of cool, but I hope this isn’t the whole future of nature. (Thanks to Merrill Peterson for identifying the beetle.)

Still, the “new nature” perspectives of people like Haupt, Marris, and Thompson strike me as realistic and, in some ways, optimistic reactions to our times. Sure, it would be nice if there were only, say, a billion people on the planet, and zero population growth, and everyone agreed that sustainability is more critical than economic expansion. But that’s not the way it is, and, in this often frightening real world we inhabit, maybe we need to change our assumptions and expectations.

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When I take walks or runs on Peavine Mountain, on the outskirts of Reno, I’m still bothered by the signs of human disturbance, all the crisscrossing roads and tracks, the broken glass and dog crap, the cheatgrass covering the slopes, and the corollary of the cheatgrass, the absence in many places of sagebrush that ought to be there. But I’m not as bothered as I used to be.

And when I see Collared-Doves around town, which is now pretty much every day, I have few if any bad thoughts about them. As far as I know, there is no clear evidence that they’re displacing Mourning Doves here or anywhere else. And, no matter what the Collared-Doves are doing to the natives, I have a hard time putting any blame on the birds themselves, since their rapid spread was probably almost entirely caused by changes wrought by humans, not by some inherent noxiousness in these doves.

Mostly I just see the Collared-Doves as an interesting new addition to the city’s bird fauna. I try to quickly pick them out from the Mourning Doves or Rock Pigeons just by the way they fly. I wonder about their calls and songs—What does the “aaaagh” call mean? Why do they sometimes cut off the “wooo Hooo hoo” song after the “wooo Hooo”? Above all, I’m amazed that these birds, which I’d never even heard of twenty years ago, were able to expand across the whole breadth of North America in just a few decades, becoming a common part of my world.

Maybe my warm feeling toward the Collared-Doves is something I should be worried about. Maybe it’s a sign that I’ve already planted the white flag, surrendering hope.

Or maybe it’s just part of recognizing that we should accept, even cherish, many things—but not all things—that don’t fit our vision of a perfect world.

On John Fowles’s “The Tree”: It’s OK to see the tree and not see the tree

My brother Sean recently gave me a book, really an extended essay, called The Tree, written by John Fowles (who, more famously, wrote The Collector, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and other novels). Different people no doubt find different main messages in this book, but what I took from it is that seeing nature as something to be used has diminished our deep, primal feeling for the natural world. And, in Fowles’s eyes, “something to be used” means everything from chopping down forests for lumber to adding species to a bird life list to making our lives feel more meaningful through nature meditation.

Yes, it’s a pretty broad critical swath, and I won’t try to defend or finely dissect what Fowles says. But the book is beautifully dense and thought-provoking, and ideas and images from it have been rattling around in my head since reading it a few weeks ago.

Here, as one illustration of the kind of thing Fowles finds undesirable, is a wonderful passage about his first sighting of an unusual plant:

I came on my first Soldier Orchid, a species I had long wanted to encounter, but hitherto never seen outside a book. I fell on my knees before it in a way that all botanists will know. I identified, to be quite certain, with Professors Clapham, Tutin and Warburg in hand (the standard British Flora), I measured, I photographed, I worked out where I was on the map, for future reference. I was excited, very happy, one always remembers one’s ‘firsts’ of the rarer species. Yet five minutes after my wife had finally (other women are not the only form of adultery) torn me away, I suffered a strange feeling. I realized I had not actually seen the three plants in the little colony we had found. Despite all the identifying, measuring, photographing, I had managed to set the experience in a kind of present past, a having-looked, even as I was temporally and physically still looking.

Reading that passage, bells rang loudly in my head. I’ve often experienced something very similar, especially when seeing rare birds. First comes the almost reflexive, thought-free recognition of the bird, and then a hyper-consciousness and intellect take over—the dissection of the creature into its critical field marks (primary tips white, bill sharply bi-colored), an assessment of its rarity (when was the last time someone saw a Glaucous Gull in Reno?), even an imagining of the soon-to-be-written post on the Nevada Birds listserv. As with Fowles’s orchid encounter, these sightings take on a feeling of having already happened (and been reported) while the bird is still in front of me. At times, I’ve taken Fowles’ experience one step further—I’ve recognized that the cacophony inside my mind prevented me from really seeing the bird, and I’ve gone back and looked again, only to find that it’s not so easy to pull myself out of the trough of confirmation and cataloguing. (Or, when I’ve turned to look again, the bird has already flown off!)

Long-tailed Duck in Reno. I noted the long tail plumes, got photo documentation, and posted the sighting on NVBIRDS, but did I actually SEE the bird?

On the other hand, I don’t see this kind of thing in the black-and-white terms that Fowles presents, where “using” (viewed broadly as above) is bad, and the primal, functionless, and indescribable is good. I find myself perceiving and interacting with nature in different ways, some of which are surely intellectualized, exploitative (again, in Fowles’s broad sense), and easily described—and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

In walks I take up a canyon just outside of Reno, I almost invariably keep track of all the species of birds I see, and I usually register what plants are blooming too. Sometimes, I’ll sit and listen to the Black-throated Sparrows, trying to hear if a particular male comes up with different versions of his song, or I’ll veer off the trail to examine each blooming paintbrush, to see what plants the paintbrushes (which draw water and nutrients from the roots of other species) are parasitizing. Or I’ll see a Prairie Falcon perched on a distant outcrop, and ponder the fact (I guess I should say “apparent fact”) that falcons are not closely related to hawks and eagles, and have independently “converged” on the form and habits of a bird of prey.

These sorts of thoughts aren’t constant—at times I am “present” in the sense that Fowles describes—but I definitely never make it through an entire walk without some sort of cataloguing or other intellectualizing of nature entering my brain. Maybe these thinking habits reflect an obsessive personality, but it also seems to me that they resonate because of ancient human ways. As my friend Carol Yoon eloquently describes in her book Naming Nature, all human cultures share a powerful and adaptive urge to identify and put names on living things, and not just a few species, but many, many of them. We are certainly also wired to, at times, flip into a narrow search mode, when we’re looking for particular objects, living or otherwise—after all, before we were even human, we were hunters and gatherers. And we are surely also designed to report, to tell others about what we’ve found.

A desert parsley, Lomatium austiniae. I identified the plant, took a photo, and, you know, I think I SAW it too!

Maybe, now that I think of it, what I really take from Fowles’s book is not that one should always be striving to experience nature in a “present” and fundamentally indescribable way, but that one should not forget, in the welter of purposeful thought, that this other way is possible and sometimes desirable. I admit that, as I’ve learned more and more about the natural world from a scientific perspective, I’ve also found it harder to flip off the thinking switch. But, even if I could, I wouldn’t choose to leave that switch off most of the time.

One other thing occurs to me: Fowles’s description of his unsatisfying first cncounter with the Soldier Orchid made me smile with recognition. It seemed pathetic, silly, even idiotic. It also seemed very human.