Meet the 96-Year-Old Man Who Turned Southern Idaho Into a Bluebird Haven

Al Larson has spent four decades building hundreds of nest boxes for Western and Mountain Bluebirds. Now these homes and their inhabitants are facing the test of climate change.

By James Crugnale
November 29, 2018

https://cdn.audubon.org/cdn/farfuture/fb_md4EOt61WLIlNEgdmyF-GIttwsII5h7xCDriBB_A/mtime:1543411935/sites/default/files/web_al-checks-box-smal.jpg
Conservation icon and documentary star Alfred Larson examines the contents of a nest box in Prairie, Idaho. Since taking up the initiative in retirement, the nonagenarian has installed hundreds of these structures, allowing scientists to study Mountain Bluebirds as the species recovers from historical declines and grapples with new uncertainties. Photo: Matthew Podolsky

In 1978, Alfred Larson was looking for a hobby that would keep him busy after he retired from his job at a sawmill plant near Boise, Idaho. He remembers reading an article in National Geographic that captured his imagination—about crafting wooden nests for bluebirds to save them from dizzying declines. Around this same time, he and his wife Hilda welcomed a new guest to their backyard: a Western Bluebird.

“We noticed a bluebird going in and out of a cavity of an old, dead snag," Larson says. "I thought, ‘Gee whiz!’ I had heard about bluebird trails out East that Lawrence Zeleny had set up. If I put up boxes on my ranch, I’d have a captive group of birds to take pictures of.”

So he got to work, building nest boxes out of pine scraps and board ends from his old sawmill to install around his property. Soon after, he went on a field trip with the Golden Eagle Audubon Society and put up another 25 boxes in various habitats. And then even more.

Four decades later, at the age of 96, Larson is monitoring almost 350 nest boxes on six different bluebird trails across Southwest Idaho. From the Owyhee Mountains to Lake Cascade, he and his fellow community scientists peek into the rustic abodes every nine days to band any residents and jot down notes on behavior and growth. Larson organizes the data and shares it with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology‘s Nestwatch program.

[...]