The Birds Are Dying: Or in the National Wildlife Refuge, It Looks Like We Need "The Bird Saviors"

So more depressing news in the climate change/Western drought world. It seems that persistent drought conditions are drying up wildlife refuges in California, reported here. My new novel, due out June 21st, is titled The Bird Saviors, and one of the main characters is a field biologist (or should I say, more particularly, ornithologist) who is studying declining bird populations on the prairies west of Pueblo, Colorado. It’s a stark and haunting landscape, noteworthy for being the first foothills of the Rockies (the Wet Mountains, there) after the wide, flat expanse of the Great Plains stretching roughly from western Missouri all across Kansas and eastern Colorado. It’s my second-home turf, and I love it, though my home is actually another forty miles or so west of the area where most of the novel takes place.  And although I am most certainly a committed naturalist and card-carrying member of the ABA (American Birding Association), don’t assume it’s a book full of soap-box preaching. That would be a bore, and would be more appropriate for an op-ed piece or a blogpost. Instead, most of The Bird Saviors is full of the mischief and mayhem that humans do, including but not limited to: kidnapping ex-fiancees who won’t return engagement rings when they’re demanded back, polygamous pawn shop owners, modern day cattle rustlers, and a teenage mother (and casual bird expert) who is trying to do the right thing for her young daughter. One of my favorite characters is a badass Native American dude who is something of an avenging angel.