Little Brown Birds

This chapter narrates the author's trip to western North Dakota's Bakken region, where he was mapping out habitat fragmentation caused by the recent surge in oil development. The research was really just an excuse to go out birding for a few days. Two birds are confined to the northern mixed-grass prairie: the Baird's sparrow and the Sprague's pipit. Both are small, brown birds, not terribly charismatic — what birders call LBJs or “little brown jobs” — and both are declining in population. The chapter then discusses how oil development occurs with seeming abandon in the Bakken and is only lightly regulated. Despite a history of progressivism and socialism in the American prairies, North Dakota today is essentially a one-party state — an explicitly oil-friendly Republican Party has held the governorship and both houses of the state legislature for years. Unlike resistance in parts of the East Coast, there have been no large-scale protests in North Dakota, save resistance to the pipeline by the Standing Rock reservation.