About Books: Now For Some Good News

Mark Lynch

August 1, 2026 9 MIN READ Book and Video Reviews

Weidensaul kicks off his grand conservation tour by looking at the dramatic ups and downs of North America’s waterfowl populations. The horrific market gunning era of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seriously reduced almost all waterfowl numbers. Hunters were taking hundreds of ducks at a single location on a daily basis, and hunting seasons were often whenever you had the time to shoot ducks. Through efforts by many people and organizations, as well as local and federal governments, hunting seasons and daily bag limits were implemented. After legislation was passed in Congress, the market gunners were curtailed and waterfowl numbers began to slowly increase, only to decline again in the second half of the twentieth century. Why?

Weidensaul begins his conservation history by looking at where large numbers of waterfowl breed in North America.

The beating heart of North America’s waterfowl world is the prairie pothole region, the area of the northern Great Plains stretching from Alberta, southern Saskatchewan, and Manitoba to northern Montana, much of the Dakotas, and parts of Minnesota, Nebraska, and Iowa. Covering more than 240,000 square miles, this expanse of once-native grassland, much now converted to agriculture, is studded with tens of millions of shallow, glacially dug depression marshes and ponds known as potholes. (p. 11)

This habitat needed to be saved, but farmers owned much of the land on which these potholes were found. There was an impasse between the people who used the land and the people who wanted to preserve waterfowl breeding habitat. Consequently, duck numbers started to decrease again through the 1980s. Two of the major reasons were loss of prairie pothole habitat and changing farming practices.

Duck numbers cratered; in 1985 the USFWS reported the lowest continental population estimate in thirty-one years of record-keeping, with all but one out of ten major species in decline. But 1985 was also the turning point, thanks to a revolutionary piece of legislation: the 1985 Food Security Act, better known as the Farm Bill. (p. 12)

Again, Congress passed legislation that helped to conserve the breeding habitat of the waterfowl, but it took getting the diverse interests involved to work together. Weidensaul does a great job here to concisely detail all the programs involved. The reader understands that sometimes our government is needed to pass laws to ultimately solve some large-scale conservation problems.

But this was not the end of problems for waterfowl in America. Believe it or not, burgeoning populations of waterfowl can lead to other, unforeseen, problems. Take the case of Canada Geese versus Snow Geese.

While Canada geese are strictly grazers, nipping off vegetation, snow geese are also grubbers, using their short, serrated bills, to dig below the surface and yank up roots and tubers. In pre-colonial days, it seems likely that snow goose numbers were kept in check by a lack of nutritious food on their coastal wintering grounds, where largely indigestible cordgrass provided much of their diet and where high overwinter mortality may have been a serious constraint on population size. That is no longer the case, however, thanks to agriculture. By one calculation, only 25 percent of a cordgrass rhizome is digestible to a goose, while 87 percent of a grain corn is. As farming, especially large-scale industrial farming, spread in the middle of the 20th century, the table was set and snow geese chowed down, moving away from the coasts in winter and into endless ag-land buffet. (p. 21)

Too many snow geese led to harmful changes in habitat.

As the mass of snow geese continent-wide has risen, so too has their impact on the environment. Along the St. Lawrence River, where the eastern birds pause to rest and feed on their spring migration north, native bulrush marshes have suffered, and damage to hay fields in the surrounding farmland has become severe. Similarly, along the Atlantic coast snow geese—which feed, as they do all other things in life, in tightly packed flocks—have entirely grubbed away whole sections of once-healthy cordgrass, one root at a time, creating what are known as eat-outs, converting hundreds of acres of marsh into open water and further exacerbating the consequences of sea-level rise. (p. 23)

At times, trying to conserve species of birds is like playing whack-a-mole with problems. You solve one problem and a different problem pops up, sometimes one you weren’t expecting. To make matters worse, although the government can certainly help conservation efforts by passing important legislation, when a different administration comes to power, the government can also create more serious problems.

Finally, there is politics. In May 2023, the US Supreme Court dealt an indirect blow to waterfowl, and all other species that depend on wetlands, in a ruling, Sackett v. EPA, that drastically curtailed the US Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to enforce long-standing regulations under the Clean Water Act protecting wetlands from pollution and destruction. (p. 29)

The chapters that follow in The Return of the Oystercatcher focus on conservation efforts in different parts of North America and Hawaii, as well as several spots in Europe. Each of these locations has the usual list of challenges, including loss of critical habitat, over hunting, pollution, and the effects of climate change. In the section on the recovery of North American raptors, the banning of DDT, and the creation of Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, Weidensaul includes some wonderful memories of what he was like as a young nature nerd.

Thus, I had a front-row seat to the renaissance of raptors that was occurring in the 1980s and ‘90s. The combination of slowly falling DDT levels in the environment, coupled with active reintroduction and translocation programs for species like bald eagles, peregrine falcons, and ospreys, began to pay off increasingly hefty dividends on almost year-to-year basis. (p. 41)

Some recovery efforts have challenges that are unique to that place and its cultural history. Take Britain. Weidensaul first looks at the successful efforts to return breeding raptor species, including the Osprey. But other species have more intractable issues to overcome. Hen Harriers are an increasingly rare breeder in Britain. One of the problems is the harrier’s breeding habitat. Hen Harriers prefer to nest in a habitat that is also used as traditional grouse hunting moors. These moors are managed by game keepers who see the harrier as a problem for maintaining high numbers of grouse. So they shoot the harriers.

And the grouse moors have a very long history of ruthless predator control. Weasels, stoats, foxes, and crows can be legally killed on grouse moors, but birds of prey may not. Yet as the RSPB’s investigations show, that clearly does not stop those who see raptors as vermin to exterminate. Almost two-thirds of all the confirmed raptor deaths in the United Kingdom in 2022 occurred on land managed for shooting, a proportion that has remained constant for years. (p. 68)

There are certainly laws prohibiting the killing of raptors in Britain, but they seem to be only loosely enforced. Grouse hunting on managed moors is a deeply entrenched culture going back hundreds of years, so changing attitudes is going to be a long process.

Arrests are rare. The 2024 Birdcrime report, summarizing 15 years of RSPB investigations, found that of 1,529 “confirmed” incidents, just 62 resulted in prosecutions and only 57 in a conviction: five of those ended with a suspended sentence. Exactly one person in the United Kingdom has been jailed in recent years for killing a raptor. But even that is the tip of the iceberg, because there is evidence that those shooting raptors intentionally target hawks without “boxes,” that is, transmitters, knowing they can’t be tracked. (p. 71–2)

Some conservation problems involve changes in the culture of the humans that live in the area. In the southern Carpathian Mountains in rural Romania there is the wonderful Domogled-Valea Cermic National Park, home to many of the woodlot species disappearing from Britain’s and western Europe’s contemporary farmlands. Here in this remote corner of Romania are found the highest densities of species such as the Red-backed Shrike. But even this preserved area is facing new challenges.

The reason rural Romania had retained such a wealth and diversity of farmland and woodlot birds, Anghel and Seba explained, was the centuries-old tradition of small-scale farming and grazing, which maintained a complex mosaic of habitats and successional stages, and which carried on through the Communist era long after farmers in the West had industrialized. The Southern Carpathians aren’t wilderness and haven’t really been since the Neolithic. It is a landscape that has been shaped and modified by people for thousands of years, and one with which its birds have evolved.

The problem, Anghel said, is that rural Romanians are fleeing the land for the cities or abroad. (p. 119)

The farms using older methods that benefited a group of particular bird species are being abandoned. This land will now either revert to forest or be bought up for mega-farming or development.

An area of land may be saved, but the composition of this land is critical too. In the state of Idaho, you find the huge—1.6 million acres—Bruneau-Owyhee Sage-Grouse Habitat. Sage-Grouse numbers throughout their range are crashing, so saving some space for this large dramatic lekking grouse species is critical. But as it ends up, the grouse don’t just need space, they need large areas of sagebrush with very few trees.

Trees crowd out not just the sagebrush, but also the native bunch grasses and forbs that provide food for grouse and other sagebrush biome species. They also pull so much water from the soil that what had been perennial streams eventually run dry. But junipers ruin the land for sage-grouse long before such levels are reached: biologists have found that when the tree cover within a kilometer or so of a lek reaches just 4 percent—as little as one juniper per acre—the grouse will move out and abandon that site. (p. 282)

In this case, the immediate management plans must focus on removing conifers from a core of 617,000 acres. Removing these conifers may affect other species that breed in the area, but that is just one of the complex issues and tough choices that challenge large-scale conservation plans.

Some of the most frightening challenges that conservation programs face are political. Made of parts of Romania, Moldova, and Ukraine, “the Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve is one of Rewilding Europe’s focal landscapes.” (p. 129) This reserve is a birding wonderland, with notable populations of waterfowl, rails, pelicans, cormorants, and other birds of wetlands. For now, a few tour operators take groups of photographers on excursions into this vast wetland. These tours operate from the Romanian side of the Danube, and Weidensaul travels out into these wetlands with guides from this group. Weidensaul finds it a birding paradise. But he also experiences one of the serious problems with managing this huge area that stretches across several political borders.

It was a peaceful morning after a disquieting night. Sometime after midnight, I wasn’t sure when, I was awakened by a huge, keening sound. The air conditioning unit that kept the room somewhat cool was noisy, but when I turned it off, I could hear more clearly sirens, many of them, off in the distance. Sleep-blurred, it took me a few moments for the significance to sink in, but they were air-raid sirens sounding in Vylkove, less than a mile across the Danube in Ukraine. (p. 140–41)

Imagine this situation. Three countries get together to preserve a large area of important habitat only to find it threatened by an unprovoked war.

The places mentioned above are just a few of those that Weidensaul visits and reports on in The Return of the Oystercatcher. He writes about puffins in Maine, Laysan Albatrosses in Hawaii, vultures in the Rhodope mountains, and Piping Plovers in Massachusetts. He also looks at several of the plans, in North America and Europe, for rewilding habitat. These are fascinating schemes, some more practical than others, and Weidensaul’s writing about these rewilding efforts could make up an entire other book. Rewilding is an idea that has really caught on in Europe, but not so much in North America. Throughout The Return of the Oystercatcher, Weidensaul’s boots-on-the ground experiences allow him to convey to the reader a real sense of the place and the special people who are trying to do something positive for birds and their habitats.

The final chapters in The Return of the Oystercatcher are focused on the large swath of boreal forest found in Canada. This forest is the critical breeding habitat of many species we search for during spring and fall migration.

More than 300 species, which by the end of summer breeding season number an estimated 3 billion to 5 billion individuals, call the boreal zone home. For one third of those species, the boreal forest’s mix of conifers and hardwoods, tundra, bog, and millions of glacier-dug lakes and ponds is their primary habitat—birds like Tennessee and Connecticut warblers, 97 percent and 91 percent of whose global population, respectively, nest in the boreal. So do 93 percent of all red-necked grebes, 84 percent of black scoters, 94 percent of lesser yellowlegs, 86 percent of Philadelphia vireos, 73 percent of Swainson’s thrushes, and 85 percent of North America’s white-winged crossbills. (p. 312)

This is the “Land of the Ancestors,” a place inhabited by Indigenous nations. Until recently, these original people of North America have been loathe to work with outside conservationists for a variety of reasons. But in The Return of the Oystercatcher we learn that this attitude is slowly changing.

You cannot separate the land in the Americas—or Australia, or Southeast Asia, or Africa, or Europe—from the people who have inhabited it, shaped it, and stewarded it for eons. To a great degree bird conservation comes down to land conservation, and what Indigenous nations in Canada are achieving at places like Thaidene Nëné and Seal River represents one of the greatest victories in the history of conservation victories. It is a victory for human dignity as well. (p. 333)

It is here, in the boreal forests of North America, that Weidensaul has an epiphany about the necessity of involving local and Indigenous peoples from the beginning in designing any conservation effort.

Now, I had a somewhat clearer sense, at least to the extent that an outsider like me can have it, of the Land of the Ancestors not just (from my selfish perspective) peerless wildlife habitat on which billions of birds depend, but as a tapestry through which tens of millennia of human history—human relationships—were also woven, and whose care would increasingly be in the hands of those to whom it ultimately means the most. (p. 334)

The Return of the Oystercatcher is an important book, but also an entertaining one. Weidensaul has done a fine job getting the reader to care about the success of every preservation or rewilding program. It is heartening to read that large-scale conservation efforts to preserve bird habitats are underway. These programs are staffed by a small population of dedicated professionals who hope to create something worthwhile and permanent. Problems and challenges to these grand schemes always come up as is to be expected. Some of these issues can be solved with changes in plans, attitudes, or by partnering with others. But other issues, such as wars or the destruction of environmental laws, will be much more difficult to overcome. I confess, I still am not too optimistic about those situations.

To listen to Mark Lynch’s interview with Scott Weidensaul about The Return of the Oystercatcher for WICN (90.5 FM), go to: https://wicn.org/podcast/scott-weidensaul-2/