~ Anne Kilgannon
Hold on, don’t look down, keep reading and you’ll experience—not “heart stopping” but a “heart opening” long moment of being aloft—175 feet aloft—at the top of a Douglas fir tree sharing with Marina a glimpse of Red Crossbills dining on cone seeds. An exhilarating and unexpected introduction and the beginning of many forays to places replete with old-growth trees and the birds that depend on their sheltering boughs. As a guide Marina is deeply immersed and well versed in the intricate play between the forest and plant world and the birds and other wildlife, from tiny insects, mice and bats, bears and deer that share and contribute to the complex food webs and exchange of nutrients, shelters, seed dispersion and all the players and pieces that support life for all. Her wide-ranging knowledge creates links that trace the interdependency of all she sees and can touch and much that is there but hidden.
This book is a memoir of a dedicated life. Marina has had a long and varied career working to understand all the pieces of this intricate puzzle of old growth forests and bird life. From her childhood and continued through years of education and work opportunities, she has added layer upon layer of experience and reflection about the natural world, helped by mentors and teachers and forest advocates, with the variety that comes from a peripatetic lifestyle guided by curiosity and conviction.
Here, she invites us to travel with her from place to place, exploring and explaining how each bush with its fruit and flowers, each tree with nest and perch-welcoming branches, crevices for bats, and mice who both spread seeds and are themselves consumed by owls and others, all make a world. Everything is needed, nothing is wasted or superfluous. Even fire. Some seeds will not germinate without fire’s heat. Some woodpeckers specialize in foraging through burnt-over forests. New grasses and other plants will spring up in areas where light now reaches the ground. Floods too can rejuvenate streams and restore drained areas; beavers are everyone’s best engineers here. There is joy and wonder but also destruction and sorrow: a lightening strike can splinter and blacken a beloved tree, one owl species may displace and exterminate another, a hawk might snatch a small songbird. These events are part of life.
What Marina and we cannot accept or shrug away is human short-sightedness and endless and heedless greed as more and more forests are lost, cut down, and replaced by monoculture “farms” where same-age trees are grown like wheat to be harvested again and again. Where there is no room for bird life, no life-enhancing variety and stability, where pesticides and herbicides rule out everything but the chosen crop. Or roads cutting through pristine forests that open them to mechanized traffic, litter, and carelessness with fire, as well as predators now given advantages that decimate lives and the reproduction chances of more reclusive creatures. Another apostasy involves the destruction of water courses, whether the damming of large rivers or the despoiling of creeks, wetlands, and sloughs. When we rob forests of the life-supporting cycle of salmon bringing nutrients home from the sea we break a pact made eons ago that worked for the benefit of all, even ourselves.
As Marina lays out how all is connected, how much has been done to understand this matrix of complexity and evolution, she also insists on the beauty that fills our hearts and minds. The singular beauty of a wildflower, the complex beauty of how everything fits together to create our world. She inspires us to see, to listen; even if we can’t climb to the top of that magnificent tree, we can know it is there, touching a passing rain cloud, and sheltering myriad lives. A light chitter of birdlife floats down to us, like a feather, a sign of life, a call to stand with it.
