“Hope is the thing with feathers,” Emily Dickinson wrote in a poem often quoted by bird lovers. The lesser-known line in her second stanza has always resonated with me because of the link between birdsong and hopefulness: “And sweetest in the gale is heard.”

Ted Williams’s Incite in this issue puts you in the thick of a gale swirling around the poisoning of prairie dogs in western Kansas (“Doggone!”). “Here, as in most of their range, black-tailed prairie dogs are reviled because they are thought (often wrongly) to compete with cattle for grass,” Ted writes. The use of Rozol, an anticoagulant that causes uncontrolled bleeding, is doing more than exterminating prairie dogs, already gone from more than 95 percent of their grassland habitat. It’s also killing black-footed ferrets—numbering just 500, they’re one of the nation’s most endangered mammals—and ferruginous hawks, golden eagles, bald eagles, owls, magpies, turkey vultures, badgers, swift foxes, coyotes, raccoons, and grain eaters like wild turkeys and red-winged blackbirds. Fortunately Ted holds out hope that the Environmental Protection Agency will ban Rozol because there are safer alternatives.

If this story embitters you in the least, sweetest in the gale can be all the issue’s uplifting news and images of birds. Features Editor Rene Ebersole’s trip to Israel brings you to “the heart of one of the world’s most important and heavily traveled migratory flyways. Each spring and fall a caravan of 500 million birds funnels between three continents—Europe, Asia, and Africa—straight through this country about the size of New Jersey.” Rene stood in absolute awe of an incessant stream of pelicans, storks, ibises, and common cranes, and many of the other 540 bird species recorded in Israel so far—a blessed oasis in the desert and in a region roiled by military conflict. In “End of the Road”, Senior Editor Julie Leibach tells the inspiring story a determined group of activists who took on California’s most powerful interests, including the governor and several state and federal agencies, to thwart a toll road that would have imperiled at least seven endangered or threatened species, perhaps none more than the embattled coastal California gnatcatcher, “a small, gray songbird with a call like a kitten’s mew.” Finally, behold photographer Andrew Zuckerman’s latest avian masterpieces, beginning with the Spix’s macaws on our cover, whose feathers glitter like iridescent pearls, and continuing inside with “Beauty Contests.”

In the end I keep coming back to the hopeful chords struck by Audubon’s answer to Emily Dickinson, Rene Ebersole, as she marveled at white-headed ducks in Israel “under the watchful eye of people who believe that when peace does return to their corner of the world, it will soar on the wings of birds.”

Back to Top