Saving Tarboo Creek: One Family's Quest to Heal the Land

by Scott Freeman Narrated by Mike Chamberlain

Overview

When the Freeman family decided to restore a damaged creek in Washington's Olympic Peninsula-to transform it from a drainage ditch into a stream that could again nurture salmon-they knew the task would be formidable and the rewards plentiful.



In Saving Tarboo Creek, Scott Freeman artfully blends his family's story with powerful universal lessons about how we can all live more constructive, fulfilling, and natural lives by engaging with the land rather than exploiting it. Equal parts heartfelt and empowering, this book explores how we can all make a difference one choice at a time.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

A moving account of a beautiful project. We need stories of healing in this tough moment; this is a particularly fine one.” —Bill McKibben, author of Radio Free Vermont

“As Aldo Leopold so eloquently expressed, healing the damage done to land can be a family’s labor of love. In keeping with the Leopold legacy, Susan Leopold Freeman and Scott Freeman share with readers their family’s evocative restoration journey. They weave together art and ecology as they reflect deeply on what it means today to live well and ethically on this earth.” —Cristina Eisenberg, chief scientist at Earthwatch Institute, author of The Carnivore Way

“Scott Freeman demonstrates a healer’s touch with his pen, just as his extended family of helpers does with the Tarboo Creek property. But what really stands out here is their willingness to put in the work, over the course of generations, then patiently step back and watch what happens to a planet much in need of special care.” —Jack Nisbet, author of Sources of the River, The Collector, and Ancient Places

“In the spirit of A Sand County Almanac. . . Mr. Freeman alternates between reflections on global ecology and local, lyrical observation. . . . not only an earnest report of reclamation but also a hymn to pleasure.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Freeman explains in clear, nonjudgmental prose what is lost when farmland and forests are cleared for ‘development,’ and the losses are great. . . . Thought-provoking and unsettling, this highly readable book is made lovely by homey drawings sprinkled throughout.” —Booklist

“Saving Tarboo Creek is a call to action that deserves shelf space beside environmental writing from the likes of Bernd Heinrich, Bill McKibben and Edward Abbey.” —Shelf Awareness

“Saving Tarboo Creek is a beautiful mixture of lush description, ecological activism, and lifestyle advice, decorated throughout with watercolors of life at Tarboo Creek. If any book were to woo humanity back to the forest through sheer, earnest charm, it would be this one.” —Foreword

“Readers will find, this story is bigger than a single couple and their pet summer project. . . . Just as Aldo Leopold's book took the hills of Wisconsin as a microcosm of an environment in peril, Freeman casts the effort to revive Tarboo Creek. . . . We all live in particular places and at particular times, this little gem of a book tells its readers, but when we act with family and friends to preserve a local slice of nature, we are, together, saving the planet.” —Natural History Magazine

“These students understand the task that they have been given, at this crossroads in history. And they are determined. This is not despair, or whining or howling. It is the public will, rising.” —The Seattle Times

“Put Saving Tarboo Creek at the top of your summer reading list. In the first place, it’s a gem of a book—comfortably sized and lucidly written. Second, it contains compelling food for thought about the region in which we live. And third, it’s a clarion call for the restoration of habitat, presented in a way that is eloquent, pragmatic and inspirational.” —The Kitsap Sun

“Third and fourth generation Leopolds are putting these invaluable lessons about healthy growth, both personal and environmental, into practice.” —NW Book Lovers

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170184972
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	01/24/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Introduction
My uncle Carl Holtz farmed in southeast Wisconsin for forty years. But before he started farming, he went to the University of Wisconsin to row on the crew team. While he was a student there he took a course on wildlife biology—then called game management—from a professor named Aldo Leopold.

During the semester, each student was required to have a brief one-on-one conversation about the course with Leopold in his office. More than twenty-five years later, my uncle told me about that meeting: “I sat there like the dumb jock I was back then, you know. Professor Leopold was asking me about this and that, and I had absolutely no idea what he was driving at. But then something caught his eye out the window, behind his desk. He looked at it for a moment, then turned to me and asked, ‘Carl, what bird is that?’”

“I had no clue, of course,” he laughed. “But years later I realized it was a palm warbler, migrating through.” My uncle was a big man, with hands the size of salad plates. He held them up. “Leopold knew I wasn’t going to go on to graduate school or become a wildlife biologist. He just wanted me to look up and notice things.” Uncle Carl put his hands down and nodded at me. “And so I have—ever since.”

Outside my window in Seattle right now, a flock of bushtits is feeding in the bare branches of a birch tree. Some are upside down; some are right-side up. They are flitting, fluttering, jumping. Then they disappear all at once—diving into the cover of a nearby Douglas-fir tree. Now they’re back. A moment later, they’re gone—until tomorrow.

These birds are adults and juveniles. They are neighbors from the previous year and new immigrants to the neighborhood, and by now are well acquainted. The members of a winter flock like this one find each other in late summer and stay together until the following breeding season. Although bushtits dominate this particular group, there are also some golden-crowned kinglets and at least one chestnut-backed chickadee. Around here, it’s common to find northern juncos, black-capped chickadees, and hairy woodpeckers in the mix, and sometimes even ruby-crowned kinglets.

You can find these types of mixed flocks almost anywhere you go in the world. In Japan, there would be marsh tits and great tits and goldcrests—close relatives and look-alikes of North America’s chickadees and kinglets. The Eurasian treecreeper and Eurasian nuthatch would take the place of our brown creeper and red-breasted nuthatch; Japanese pygmy and great-spotted woodpeckers would stand in for our downy and hairy woodpeckers.

In the lowland rainforests of southern Ecuador, all Hades breaks loose. There may be twenty-five species and forty or more individuals in a mixed foraging flock like this. In addition to woodpeckers and woodcreepers, there will be several types of antwrens, a handful of flycatcher species, and a bouquet of tanagers: yellow-throated, blue-winged, orange-eared, blue-browed, and bay-headed, among others. The colors streak from branch to branch. They are dazzling, brilliant, sublime.

Typically, each species in a mixed flock will be eating something slightly different, in a different part of the vegetation. Out my window, the bushtits glean from the tiniest twigs; chickadees pick at branches; brown creepers probe the trunk’s furrowed bark; hairy woodpeckers rap at spongy, rotting spots in the wood.

When these little gangs appear, moving slowly but steadily through the trees, the woods look like Central Park on a summer Sunday. You’ll find every size, shape, color, and linguistic group imaginable among birds—all moving and jostling, going about their day. For a mixed flock like this, there is knowledge in numbers. Large flocks can draw on the collective wisdom of fifteen or twenty memories, finding food in obscure locations when ice and snow coat the branches and ground.

There is safety in numbers, too. If a sharp-shinned hawk dove into this birch tree and surprised the group, the little birds would scatter like shot—making it hard for the predator to draw a bead and snatch one from the air. And to avoid surprise, many eyes are better than two. In black-capped chickadee flocks, individuals that notice flying predators give a high-pitched “seet” call; in response, the others dive for cover. But if the predator is sitting, the spotter gives the “chick-a-dee” call and adds “dee’s” to indicate the degree of danger. Biologist Chris Templeton and co-workers figured this out by bringing live predators into a large outdoor aviary where a chickadee flock was living. Chickadees are little—almost as tiny as bushtits—and it is the small, agile killers like saw-whet owls and northern pygmy owls that worry them the most. In the experiments, small predators could elicit a string of five “dee’s” or more. But big, lunking hunters like great gray owls, which strike fear in the hearts of snowshoe rabbits and grouse, got only a “dee” or two—barely more than the response to a harmless, seed-eating bobwhite quail. Follow-up work by other biologists showed that Carolina chickadees do the same thing.

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