My earliest memories are of meadowlarks. Their songs rang through my open bedroom window as the morning sky brightened, and they have become etched in my mind as a coordinate of home. Whereas the hypnotic sounds of crickets and lisping sprinklers were my lullabies as a very young boy, meadowlarks were my alarm clocks, waking me to the warm summer mornings. Their songs are the anthem of the grasslands, as much a part of life in the West as the taste of saskatoon berries, the smell of sagebrush after a thunderstorm, and the color of the evening sky above the black mountains in the summer twilight.

Just before I was born, my parents built a house in a new rural subdivision carved out of wild bunchgrass. Before our family owned the land it was meadowlark country, and for the first five or six years that we lived there the birds came back to the yard each spring, until the young apple orchard turned the prairie into a deciduous woodland and they had to look elsewhere to nest. Western meadowlarks are birds of the grasslands and cannot tolerate forests, though they will happily sing from a ponderosa pine growing high and lonesome amid the grass. But for those few years the meadowlarks were a big part of my backyard, the males singing from the freshly planted apple trees, the young riding on the back of the tractor as it mowed the long grass in midsummer.

My brothers and I spent much of our childhood “across the fence,” playing on the unplowed grasslands of the Penticton Indian Reserve. In winter we would toboggan down the steep slopes of the hills, using the snowdrifts behind each sagebrush as jumps. When spring came we looked for the first buttercup, then, when the ground was yellow with them, tried to find the one with the most petals. I learned which plants were tastiest and was particularly fond of the tangy flavor of a distinctive gray, grass-like leaf that came directly out of the spring soil. Only later did I learn to my embarrassment that I had been desecrating one of the most beautiful plants of the grassland, the mariposa lily. We would push toy trucks around the clumps of prickly pear cactus, hide in the rose thickets, and try—always unsuccessfully—to sneak up on coyotes. Occasionally we would see more uncommon birds—a flock of gray partridge exploding from the shrubs, a burrowing owl standing watchfully next to its subterranean nest, or a long-billed curlew calling mournfully in the distance—but we were always surrounded by meadowlarks. Their songs were the soundtrack of our young lives.

Loud and melodic, meadowlark songs sail through the dry air, advertising the presence of a male with a territory. One might think that meadowlarks and other grassland songbirds are at a disadvantage when compared with forest birds in that they don’t have any high trees from which to broadcast their songs far and wide. But the wide open spaces are an advantage for being both seen and heard—there are no trees to get in the way. To get a high singing site, many grassland birds—the sky lark is a famous example—simply fly up into the air, giving long songs while they are mere specks against the blue sky. Male meadowlarks have a flight song, but it is not as musical (to the human ear) as the song they give while standing on fence posts or other perches.

Their beautiful songs probably gave meadowlarks their name, but they are not related to other larks. The lark family is more or less confined to the Old World—Eurasia and Africa—with only one representative in North America, the horned lark. Meadowlarks are members of the family Icteridae, a large and diverse group of New World birds that includes the blackbirds and orioles. Again, neither is related to their Old World namesakes.

To add visual impact to their songs, many grassland birds have striking plumage patterns that are visible only from below. Most birds (indeed, most animals) have a characteristic dark-above-light-below color pattern that is clearly advantageous when they want to blend in with either the dark ground when seen from above or the pale sky when seen from below. A meadow-dwelling cousin of the meadowlark, the bobolink, has a display plumage that is the complete opposite of this normal pattern: the males are jet black below and mostly white above, making them easily visible while they chatter out the song for which they are named. Meadowlarks are almost invisible from above; their pale brown plumage speckled with black and white is indistinguishable from the dry grass they hide in. But seen from below they are a sight to behold—eye-popping yellow breasts set off with a bold black V necklace and bright white outer tail feathers that flash against the sky.

Not coincidentally, the meadowlark plumage pattern is roughly repeated in the horned lark, which shares many North American grasslands with meadowlarks. There is a group of birds in African grasslands, the longclaws, which look even more like meadowlarks—the color patterns are essentially identical, and only a more slender body form and longer hind claw set the longclaws apart. The longclaws, members of the pipit family, have orange- and red-breasted species as well—a pattern repeated in several meadowlark species found in South American grasslands. The meadowlarks and longclaws are a textbook example of convergent evolution. They are totally unrelated species that have evolved very similar plumages in response to similar evolutionary forces—in this case the need to be seen and recognized while performing courtship flight songs in wide-open spaces.

Most grassland birds nest directly on the ground for obvious reasons—there are few bushes or trees in sight. A meadowlark nest is tucked deep into a hollow beside a clump of grass, hidden completely by dried grass that bends over the nest and its entrance. The female sits so tightly on the nest that few are ever found; I have seen only two in my life despite many days of searching. The nests I have found were discovered accidentally when I literally stepped on the incubating females, causing them to explode away on those short meadowlark wings. Luckily I didn’t damage the nest contents. Because predators such as skunks and coyotes would love to find the nestlings, the adults are very wary of approaching the nest when feeding their young. If you ever try to find a meadowlark nest by watching an adult with a beak full of grasshoppers, you will find yourself in a long waiting game, the bird patiently giving warning calls to its mate, knowing you will soon tire of the game and go away.

A more unfortunate characteristic that almost all grassland species in North America share is declining populations. Once each year I get up very early on a June morning and do a Breeding Bird Survey along a standard 25-mile-long route in the Okanagan Valley. I leave home about 3:45 am and drive through the dark to the starting point, getting my data sheets ready under cold, clear skies while listening to the first birds of the day—robins, bluebirds, juncos. Up on the hill, a poorwill gives one last series of calls before going to sleep for the day. I have to begin the survey at exactly 4:20 am, listen for three minutes at the first stop, noting what I see and hear, then drive a half-mile to the next stop, and repeat the procedure. The survey takes more than four hours to complete, and by the fiftieth and final stop I am certainly ready for either a strong coffee or a nap. It takes a lot of motivation to get out of bed and get the survey done each year, but the results are well worth the effort—a long-term data set that tells biologists more about bird population trends than any other program in North America.

When I began this survey in 1973 I used to count about fifty meadowlarks along my route—they were the commonest species on my list. For the past six years I’ve only heard about twenty each time, and robins have replaced them at the top of the list. Data from almost three hundred similar surveys from across western Canada show the same result—there are only about half the number of western meadowlarks now that there were thirty years ago. Other grassland birds—sharp-tailed and sage grouse, ferruginous hawks, burrowing owls, horned larks, Sprague’s pipits, and longspurs—have declined to equal or greater degrees. In fact, as a group, grassland birds are declining faster than the birds associated with any other habitat in North America. What is it about grasslands?

Perhaps the simplest explanation is that grasslands are easy targets for development. There are no trees to cut down, no swamps to drain—just flatten the land out a bit and build the houses, as my parents did fifty years ago. But it is agriculture, not urban development, that is the biggest threat to grasslands. Across most of the West, all farmers have to do is plow the fertile soil, plant their crops, and pray for rain. Over the last century, water diversions have provided ample irrigation for the development of dry grasslands, saving the need for prayer in many areas. The statistics are clear-cut: 99 percent of the moister grasslands of the West, the tallgrass prairies, are gone forever, and about 70 percent of drier grasslands have disappeared as well. The latter are suffering another onslaught—that of invasive weeds that have taken over much of the bunchgrass hills of the West. When I walk across some of the pockets of grass left in southern British Columbia I’m often hard-pressed to see any native plants other than scattered sagebrush and rabbitbrush—the rest is Dalmatian toadflax, diffuse knapweed, sulfur cinquefoil, and cheatgrass.

Meadowlarks are highly migratory in the northern part of their range; in October I often kick up a small flock in the golden grass as they gather for the flight south. The habitat loss that Canadian meadowlarks suffer may be exacerbated while they are wintering in the southwestern United States or northern Mexico. Those reaching Arizona may find condos where grass grew the previous year, and those headed for Texas and Mexico are often confronted with intensively cultivated crops such as cotton. While the ground is frozen in winter the Canadian grasslands are almost completely empty of birdlife. But as the spring sun melts the snow and the buttercups bloom, western meadowlarks are among the first birds to reclaim the awakening land. With the warmth in the air, the flashes of yellow, and the clear notes of meadowlark song, hope returns to the West.