The Bird Saviors trivia

It was written in the foothills of Hermit Peak, in the Sangre de Cristo mountains, about sixty miles west of Pueblo, Colorado.

Hiram Page was named after one of the men who testified to had actually seen the gold plates from which Joseph Smith claimed to have composed The Book of Mormon.

John Wesley Cole was named in homage of the outlaw John Wesley Hardin, who supposedly shot a man for snoring in the hotel room next to him.

Jack Brown was named after a character in the Johnny Cash song "Cocaine Blues."

Red Creek Road West is an actual road west of Pueblo, in the prairie that leads up to the foothills of the Wet Mountains.

The cattle rustling via tractor-trailer rigs and ATVs actually happens in the West, and can be a relatively difficult crime to catch and prosecute.

Bird populations in the West have declined in the last few decades, some of them at dramatic rates.

The novel was written mainly in 2007-2011, and envisions a serious drought occurring in the Southwest and Colorado: The last two years have been marked by drought.

The "pink" snowfall that occurs at the novel's outset is an actual phenomenon that occurs when a snowstorm and dust storm overlap, which is rare, but not unheard of. Similar weather conditions happened in the Texas panhandle a few years ago.