Roger Lederer, Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences at CSU, Chico, has birdwatched in more than 90 countries. In addition to The Birds of Bidwell Park, his books include Amazing Birds, Pacific Coast Bird Finder, and Birds of New England. His website Ornithology.com—an excellent aid for all birders and nature lovers—has been used and acknowledged as a resource by the BBC, National Geographic, National Public Radio, National Canadian Television, and many other organizations and individuals.

Dr. Lederer served as Dean of the College of Natural Sciences for 10 years, and was the University’s first endowed Professor of Environmental Literacy. He also served as a founding member of Up the Road’s Board of Directors.

A much smaller proportion of park users recognize the flora and fauna—the trees, wildflowers, vines, and shrubs, some native and some not. Squirrels, deer, raccoons, opossums, lizards, snakes, nets, salamanders, and a variety of fish inhabit the park, often unnoticed.

People are more aware of birds because they are lively, colorful, talkative and active during the day. But without effort on the part of the observer, all birds seem alike. This is an attempt to give personalties to the varied but most common birds of Bidwell Park. Most of these birds are also at home throughout the Sacramento Valley, usually found in similar habitats and at similar times of the year.

BIRDWATCHING BASICS

They say the best birdwatcher is another bird. What you look for may not be what another bird looks for, however. Strolling by yourself, you notice only the occasional jay or robin, but after you go on a casual jaunt with an avid birdwatcher, an entire new world opens to you. Jays, sparrows, warblers, sparrows, woodpeckers, hawks, and vultures are now everywhere. They were always there, but you focused on other things.

When you try to identify birds, you have to look at them in a new way. There is typically no one characteristic that distinguishes one bird from another; it’s a set of characteristics. Just as there is no single way to tell a make and a model of one automobile from another, there is no single characteristic to tell birds apart. All autos have headlights, tires, bumpers, windshields, and other parts in common. All birds have feathers, beaks, scaled legs, tails, and wings. But the variation in those parts plus the coloration and patterning of the feathers, makes each species unique and most are easy to identify.

Obtain a decent pair of binoculars. The magnification, lens size, and features of a binocular are personal choice, but a 7×35 or 8×42 pair seems to be most birdwatchers’ preference.

Always locate a bird with your naked eye first. Binoculars give you a narrow field of View and it is hard to find a bird by scanning with them. And scan from right to left; we read from left to right and scanning in the opposite direction slows down the scan.

A song or call can be a very clue or even the clue to identifying a bird, but it takes some experience to learn these.

Finally, my best recommendation for the beginning birdwatcher: go out in the field with those folks who know the birds. If you don’t have a friend who does, contact the local Audubon Society near Chico or Redding, or, for Bidwell Park birding, theChico Creek Nature Center.

There is no one way to identify birds, but there are major clues. By following these clues, you can eliminate possibilities and narrow your choices. The clues are:

Size—Sparrows and thrushes are distinctly smaller than hawks and bigger than kinglets, for example.

Shape—Is it tall and thin or short and round? Does it have wide or narrow wings or tail? The silhouette of the bird can tell you a lot.

Bill—Both size and shape are important. Is it long, hooked, upcurved, stout?

Pattern—Does it have patches, stripes, splotches or bars on the background color, wing, or tail of the bird?

Habitat—Is it in a marsh, a forest, grassland, or lake?

Behavior—Is it pecking on a tree, probing in the grass, swimming, or soaring?

Color—Although looking for color seems obvious, color can be missing or the bird may be in dark shade, making it appear dark or even black, or it might be in bright direct light, making it look different than it would in a moderate light. But in good light, color is very helpful.

Dr. Roger Lederer, Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences at CSU, Chico, has birdwatched in more than 90 countries. In addition to The Birds of Bidwell Park, his books include Amazing Birds, Pacific Coast Bird Finder, and Birds of New England. His websiteOrnithology.com—an excellent aid for all birders and nature lovers—has been used and acknowledged as a resource by the BBC, National Geographic, National Public Radio, National Canadian Television, and many other organizations and individuals. He served as Dean of the College of Natural Sciences for 10 years, and was the University’s first endowed Professor of Environmental Literacy. He also served as a founding member of Up the Road’s Board of Directors.

Photo by Taylor Davis/ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

This Fall, out at my ranch on Rock Creek, I had a beautiful crop of apples on my heritage apple trees.

These old trees have been growing since the 1800s. I had dreams of applesauce and visions of apple jelly, until one morning when I found my apple trees stripped bare. Their limbs were pulled down and broken off, and there was bear scat on the ground.

A few mornings later, I saw the culprit galloping across my top field, heading north to the hills. Bears have such a funny, lolloping gait that I almost forgave him for his depredation. Plus, he looked an awful lot like Teddy Roosevelt’s Teddy Bear. I have a herd of cattle on my ranch, but I thought, with all the other food sources, he wouldn’t go after them.

The next morning about 7 a.m., just before daylight, I was feeding the cows from my hay truck. Mr. (or Mrs.) Bear loped up from my bottom pasture onto my top field and right into the feed ground. He must not have heard me, or smelled the cows. The cows, the bear, and I were all equally surprised!

However, the cows reacted first. On some unspoken signal, they all left their hay and chased the bear across the field toward the hills. The only thing that stopped them was the line fence. The bear squeezed under the bottom fence wire and made his getaway.

“I am out of here!” Photo by Aaron Warren/ CC BY-ND 2.0.

I would have thought that my cows’ first instinct would have been either to turn and run away from the bear, or make a circle around the baby calves to protect them. I have never heard of cattle chasing a bear, or any other predator.

The funny thing is that all my cattle, at exactly the same time, started on the chase. Even the baby calves ran after the bear. And my neighbor’s goat, who was eating with my cows, was right in the middle of the herd!

“Did we really do that?” Photo by Michael Brace/ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Other ranchers I’ve talked to have never heard of bear-chasing cows. Since that October morning I have seen the bear a time or two, but he stays far away from the cows. I guess he knows the score: Cows 1, Bear 0.

Rock wall, Sutter Buttes. Photo by Christian Ostrosky/ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Any place is more than just material objects, landscapes, and homescapes. Things carry names as part of the history of a region. Names give meaning to the raw data of dirt, streams, weeds, and animals in a particular place, and especially to the integration of things. Layers of namescapes cover any landscape.

Common names like “blackbird” or “poison oak,” “sparrow“ or “weed” may suit a population of adults and children who participate in everyday interactions with nature more or less absentmindedly, uncritically. Similarly, “proper common names” for birds, like Brewer’s blackbird, Anna’s hummingbird, white-crowned sparrow, turkey vulture, and yellow-billed magpie, realize a web of names approved by the American Ornithological Union (AOU) that articulate a specialized taxonomy of place.

Impressive Vulture. Photo by Tom Talbott/ CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

But names are not the things and cannot substitute for real birds or plants.

Even so, getting the names right may accomplish part of the mission of an immigrant making a home in the Valley.

Of course, common names taken for granted in one climate may also mislead nature lovers in a new setting. Our blue birds and blue jays, for example, do not look or act or sound much like blue birds and blue jays east of the Sierra. Our so-called scrub jay’s name is not meant to demean the species but to refer to its habitat.

Nevertheless, anyone trying to become at home in this valley might well adopt a bird species or plant species and then learn everything about it from books, from Google, from monographs and images, from poems and from folklore and even from extravagant yarns: consider the wonderfully funny “Baker’s Buejay Yarn” by Mark Twain:

Baker said that after long and careful observation, he had come to the conclusion that the bluejays were the best talker he had found among birds and beasts. Said he: “There’s more to a bluejay than any other creature. He has got more moods, and more different kinds of feelings than other creatures; and, mind you, whatever a bluejay feels he can put into language. And no mere commonplace language, either, but rattling, out-and-out book talk—and bristling with metaphor, too—just bristling.”

Scrub jays commentary bristles with metaphor, according to Mark Twain. Photo by Amit Kotwal/ CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

West of the Sierra Nevada scrub jays are more raucous and pushy than jays back east, and not handsome in the way that eastern blue jays native to the Midwest are. Scrub jays speak Central Valley. Hear Storer and Usinger (Sierra Nevada Natural History) on the talk and posturing of our jays:

This avian busybody of the foothill oaks is easy to see and hear. Often it perches alertly with feet spread, head up, and tail level or tilted upward; again it will sit motionless for minutes with the tail hanging vertically. Being bold and curious, it watches all local events and is quick to dash off in noisy flight and investigate. If an owl or other predator is sighted, the bird’s excited calls promptly bring others of the species. The varied “vocabulary” evidently is meaningful to others of the species.

The wit and poetry packed into the names of things draw me on as an explorer myself. Who discovered and named the animals and plants for us and how does all that fit into the story of flora and fauna in the Valley?

I ponder this question, again, as I head again into the Sutter Buttes. Occasionally I lead hikers intrigued by the flora and fauna and geology of the Sutter Buttes, “Smallest Mountain Range in the World,” as a guide for the Middle Mountain Foundation, a nonprofit assembly of citizens, ranchers, neighbors, and naturalists whose aim is to appreciate and cherish this unique remnant of nature and earlier ranching ways now surrounded by the modern agricultural and urban development of northern California.

The importance of the Buttes to me and to my discernment of the special iconic quality of the place began in 1983 as I traveled north to Chico from Davis. At first the hyperbolic epithet, “smallest mountain range in the world,” struck me as typical American hype. But as I drove by on the west side one day the Buttes became a background for the nearer farming scenes of drained rice “paddies” and standing farming machinery in the foreground. When I drove by on the east, the Buttes served as background for the dome of the Sikh Gudwara, and I caught a glimpse of the special spiritual centering the Buttes exemplify.

When one Saturday I at last entered Peace Valley in the Buttes, I felt embraced by the landscape between the Buttes’ “castellated core” and “ramparts,” descriptive tropes applied to features of the Buttes by Howell Williams, whose pioneering geological monograph first described the Buttes for fellow geologists. He saw the Buttes as an arrangement of core, moat, and ramparts resulting from the uplift of valley floor by intrusive volcanic events a million and a half years ago. Seen from the outside, the Buttes display profiles of a lumpy landscape with several peaks. Seen from above, as we today may see from an airplane and as Williams imagined them, we are startled to find them an almost perfect, ten-mile-in-diameter, circular landscape feature, a mandala, as it were.

The Sutter Buttes as seen from Gray Lodge. Photo by Miguel Vieira/ CC BY 2.0.

Modern students of this valley island have learned that our predecessors here had regarded the Buttes as sacred and as shared territory long before Spanish, Mexican, and American invaders “swarmed into the Sacramento Valley,” as Walt Anderson puts it in his Inland Island: The Sutter Buttes:

With respect to our modern Sutter Buttes, the Maidu Indians called the circular ring of stoneEsto-Busin-Yamani, Middle-Mountain-Lodge. The translation is more accurately rendered as Mountain Dance Lodge in the Center, important as the name clearly identifies the Buttes as the primal prototype of the most sacred center of religious life, the dance lodge.

These natives did not live in the Buttes, but in the lands around, coming into the Buttes for sacred ceremonies and to harvest acorns, as testified to by the numerous bedrock mortars where acorns were pounded into flour.  We later arrivals who love the Buttes similarly go into the center for nourishment and refreshment, perspective, and reverence of creation.

The Buttes mean different things to different folks. They are grazing land for sheep ranchers, ranchland for cattle ranchers, and icons of place for citizens who embrace The Buttes on signs, murals, placemats, and mastheads for local newspapers. They even offer a useful response to urban insult. When more than two decades ago Rand-McNally ranked nearby Marysville/Yuba City dead last in a long list of congenial communities in which to live, they galvanized local pride in the form of bumper stickers, T-shirts and tractor caps announcing Rand McNally, Kiss My Buttes and Up Your Atlas, Rand McNally!

Looking out on valley rice fields from the Sutter Buttes. Photo by Alan Grinberg/ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

To me the Buttes mean a coherence of nature, of land use, of flora and fauna and of the dedicated attempts of locals to take care of and cherish the mandala around which we live. The spirit of the place – its true name – remains unchanged.

Citizens from surrounding farms and foothills often fix on the Buttes as a signpost of familiar territory, as in: “When I see the Sutter Buttes I know I am almost home.” So do I.

Monica Mendez and Nalu visit the library. Photo by Cebolla Mendez.

The Barber Neighborhood little free library stands just over five feet tall, a boxy, wooden cabinet with two plexiglass doors, supported by three posts. The bottom shelf is thirty-five inches off the ground. It sits in a shady spot right next to the sidewalk in my front yard and holds about forty adult and a dozen or so bound children’s books. As the steward of this book exchange, I am still figuring out what kinds of books people want. Many of us have books we’ll never read again (not to mention ones we just haven’t got around to reading) so sharing or trading enriches us all—without spending too much. And it feels good! 

I don’t remember when I first heard about the little free library movement, but an article in the Chico Enterprise-Record in the spring of 2013 made me eager to have one. Readers have long shared books in churches, cafes and community spaces, but this latest idea took hold in 2009 when Todd Bol of Hudson, Wisconsin, built one to honor his mother. She had been a teacher and loved to read. It was a hit with his neighbors. He built another, gave it away, then built several more and gave them away, too.

My daughter and I talked often about them, but neither of us had seen one, except online. When I visited her last fall in Bexley, Ohio, she was working to install two of them there. She approached the Police Chief and he wanted one in the station. The Mayor was excited about it, too.

Emmy and I were driving down a quiet street in a nearby suburb when she spotted one and we jumped out of the car to photograph it. It was lovely, crafted in wood by a person with heart and experience. Right next to it was a child-sized bench. We hoped that someone was home and knocked on the front door. In case the owners didn’t want to talk with out-of-towners, I planned to say: “I’ve come all the way from Chico to see your library!” That’s when we learned that keepers of these little book exchanges love to talk about them. This beauty turned out to be one of the first in the state. He said they’d never had a problem although occasionally there had been “drive-by bookings” when bags and boxes full of donations were left on their porch. His wife is a librarian and very particular about the quality and condition of the books, especially those for children.

What kid doesn’t love a library? Photo by Sarah Bohannon for Up the Road.

Photo by Sarah Bohannon for Up the Road. Click here to see more photos of the Barber Neighborhood Little Free Library and other Little Free Libraries in Chico.

Back in Chico I found that there were at least five Little Free Libraries. I visited them all, meeting their owners, soaking up their enthusiasm and picking up hints on how to proceed. Tom and Mady, on Autumnwood, helped me with ideas for design and hinges and also to have faith in good neighbors. Trish, on Sunset, began with an about-to-be discarded record cabinet and now has one identical to mine, a “sister” library. She showed me how she organizes her book selection and where to find inexpensive children’s books. I loved her artist’s eye for decoration. Larry, on Skylark, built two of them—one just for children, which makes a lot of sense. Rachel and her husband, both teachers, have a heavily-used one on Palmetto. They are very knowledgeable about which authors/genres their neighbors like.

Liz Stewart at first thought her library should resemble the neighborhood’s Oakdale Elementary School, shown here circa 1969. “Enter to Learn” was inscribed over the entrance. Photo courtesy Chico Unified School District.

I live in the Barber Neighborhood that was developed after Diamond Match Company set up business in the early 1900s. Initially, I thought the bookcase/book house could reflect the history of our area, so I toyed with the idea of asking someone to design one that looked liked the old Oakdale Elementary School—a one-story Art Deco building that stood on the corner of 11th & Broadway and was designed by local architects Cole and Brouchoud. “Enter to Learn” was inscribed over the door. More practical, though, turned out to be the one next to the Has Beans coffee shop on Humboldt, sponsored by the County Library. The added height allows for tall children’s books.

It was important to me to have mine built by someone in our neighborhood. Luckily, Bob, who lives down the street, loved the idea; he agreed to help me out. It is his wonderful design and he built two of them. At first I thought that my house was too out-of-the-way, being practically at the end of Broadway, but I decided I wanted it close by.

The Butte County Library Outreach Coordinator, Oliver, encouraged CARD to install several in our parks, and that plan is going forward, but in the meantime, school was out and I was eager to have one up and running before my grandkids arrived this July. After all, my daughter by now had succeeded in having TWO little libraries installed! Bob was very busy but had the know-how to build it. I painted the walls and roof with four shades of leftover latex and a few ounces of automotive paint (as recommended by Henry Petroski in The Book on the Bookshelf) on the actual shelf so books would slide easily in and out. I not-quite dug three postholes, and my neighbor, Bruce, agreed to install it. He sank
the posts, screwed hinges on the doors and hung the “little freel ibrary” sign (made from old barn siding). It was in the ground and open for users with two days to spare!

I leave post-it notes inside and a few borrowers have written messages. One of my favorites so far was written by a six-year-old named Rosalind: “I Lic the Libraare.” Her mother said she feels so grown-up, being allowed to visit it all by herself. Another person wrote: “Does anyone have any manga-Japanese graphic books?” Other comments: “I want a book from the Warrior series”; “Do you have any stories about young spies?”; “How about some books about sailing?”; “Anyone have some by Terry Pratchett?” And the best: “I want to thank you for the little library. I was having a bad morning and this really helped.”

It’s impossible to walk outside without wanting to check out what’s happening, and which books are moving. At least once a week I bring all the adult books inside and replace them with “new” books. I leave children’s books there longer. Donations arrive all the time and I try to stamp all with “Little Free Library-Barber Neighborhood,” just to see how far they travel. One borrower said she and her daughter placed one or two books in Santa Barbara, and they now look for others around the state.

Reflecting on the neighborliness of this project reminds me that others helped and that there will soon be a second little library near here. Hilary, a nearby neighbor, recruited Dan, her next-door neighbor, to get the Chico State Music & Theatre Department involved. They have built one with Walter’s “as-built” plans that will soon be installed at Rotary Park. Its opening-day collection will include copies of Chico State’s Book in Common from this year and several years past.

Liz Stewart (far right) shown enjoying a good reading day with Barber Neighborhood Little Free Library patrons (back row, left to right) Shyama Vohra, Reena Schaller, YaLing Barker and (front row) Mason Barker and Shubhansh Vohra Tandon. Photo by Sarah Bohannon for Up the Road.

I now have a new purpose: get to know more people in my neighborhood, learn a bit about who they are and how long they’ve lived here. One woman told me she had recently moved here from Madison, Wisconsin, where these little free libraries are practically on every block—and she missed them!

I would encourage anyone who wishes they had a little library in front of their own house to go right ahead and build one. There’s room for all and you can be sure that there will be no two collections just alike.

Did you catch this story on NSPR – North State Public Radio? If not, you can still listen here.

To see more photos of the Barber Neighborhood Little Free Library, and other Little Free Libraries in Chico click here.