A year in one place
Helena, Montana is Golden Eagle country. Thousands glide past each fall from the rugged lands of Canada and Alaska. Many follow the ridge updraft highways, but at least a few spill out over the valleys on thermals. From an eagle’s view a thousand feet up, Sevenmile Creek in October looks like countless other grassland streams here on the dry side of the Continental Divide. It’s a ribbon of burgundy stems and orange leaves in a sea of tinder-dry grasses. This is arid country, the mountains cloaked with hardy Douglas-firs and ponderosa pines, the valleys a tattered mosaic of grasslands and sagebrush among irrigated hay farms and housing sprawl.
What’s different about Sevenmile Creek is that I and other local Audubon members have watched it, in collaboration with the land trust that is restoring the degraded stream. The parcel is a long 350 acres, and the bird-survey route extends almost a mile and a half upstream. Even in the land’s degraded state, close observation through the seasons has revealed a rich and changing web of life. Here I present a whirlwind tour: a year of birds in one place, starting in October. As you’ll see, a hemisphere of birds can be found in this one spot.
IN SEARCH OF FOOD
The Rough-legged Hawk seemed to hang in the west breeze, neck craned — two pounds of crisply feathered, sharp-eyed hunter. The first had shown
