Chapter Focusing on a Few “Indicator” or “Key” or “Symbolic” Species for Different Environments

Meadowlark to me is a symbolic--of rural idylls, of nostalgia, distant memories of freedom, far horizons, spring in old California. Can anybody have a soul so dead as to be unmoved by that silver song, floating up from the spring grass on some quiet country road?

Meadowlark needs a horizon--a big horizon. Not a bird to be hemmed in by trees or buildings or canyon walls. A bird for freedom, for wide-open spaces, of rolling steppes, lonely fenceposts, of stepping back in time to a cleaner, happier world. 

Can you believe, it once was common about Berkeley?

As a kid, walking home from elementary school in Capitola, I first got to know and love that song; but soon after that time the meadow was no more, and now it requires driving miles for a look at chiiiritmin. 

Like so many of its other, once-abundant conferes of the wide grasslands, it has gone from a commonplace, taken for granted by nearly everyone, to something you have to travel to see at all. Some other dwellers of the same wide-open spaces have now become “rare,” objects of study by specialists and objects of legislation by bureaucrats, e.g. kit fox, barn own, shrike, horned lark, spadefoot, California tiger salamander, ferruginous hawk…