Feathered Forest: Aloft with Birds in Ancient Trees with Marina Richie

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Marina Richie returns to Coast to Cascades Bird Alliance to give a preview of her new book, Feathered Forest: Aloft with Birds in Ancient Trees, due out this September, 2026. In it she entwines the lives of birds with a hidden vertical world of wild trees.

Climbing a 200-foot-tall Douglas fir within the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest with Nina Ferrari  opened her eyes to a three-dimensional world filled with complexity and beauty. Her latest book highlights the Cascadia bioregion which rivals the Amazonian rainforest in significance for climate and biodiversity. Her treks to wild and ancient forests, mostly in Oregon, will take us from the coast to the Cascades to the Blue Mountains.

For this armchair journey upwards to dizzying heights, Marina will introduce featured birds of the understory (American Dipper, Pacific Wren, and Varied Thrush); the midstory (Great Gray Owl, Chestnut-backed Chickadee, and a quartet of woodpeckers); and the overstory (Vaux’s Swift, Hermit Warbler, Marbled Murrelet, and Northern Spotted Owl). Then the Townsend’s Solitaire will lead us to the ancient juniper forests of Central Oregon.

Each bird reveals a facet of multilayered, centuries-old groves that are critical refugia in a time of climate crisis. Their songs and flights show us what we must protect for the future of threatened birds, forests, and humankind. They teach us to honor dynamic forests that are messy, tangled, burned, and filled with living, dying, dead, and fallen trees.

Marina Richie is an award-winning nature writer from Bend with a passion for birds and protecting wild places. Her book Halcyon Journey: In Search of the Belted Kingfisher earned the 2024 John Burroughs Medal for distinguished natural history writing and a 2022 National Outdoor Book Award.

Through prose and poetry, she seeks to bridge the divide between people and the natural world. Her essays, blogs, and poems appear in popular and literary magazines. In 2024, she wrote a series of essays for Oregon Wild’s 50^th anniversary called Every Wild Place Has a Story. She serves on the board of the Greater Hells Canyon Council and the leadership team of the Bitterbrush chapter of the Great Old Broads for Wilderness. Marina has a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Montana and an undergraduate degree in biology from the University of Oregon. Her website is marinarichie.com.

The Campbell Center (155 High) will open at 6:30. The program begins promptly at 7:00 and is available via a Zoom link. The program will also be recorded and viewable on our website within a week.