Birds serve as an especially elegant touch-point for a more general concern about the environment.
That said, this month's column is about trees . . . Recent reports have raised alarms about two significant disturbances to tree communities in our part of the world. These are the Western Oak Bark Beetle, P. pubipennis , and the Oak Ambrosia Beetle, M. scutellare . While these beetles are always present to some degree in local forests, they now appear to be killing off unprecedented numbers of otherwise healthy trees, especially Coast Live Oak and Tanoak. As of last September, the insect outbreak had killed tens of thousands of oaks in Mendocino, Sonoma, Marin, and Santa Cruz counties, and its arrival in the remaining Bay Area counties was expected imminently.