The Spectator Bird

Content Warning: This section contains references to rape, incest, and eugenics.

Stegner, renowned for both his fiction and his efforts to protect the environment, had a profound interest in the ecology of his native California. In his novels, these concerns are never far from the surface. In All the Little Live Things, set shortly after Joe Allston’s move to northern California, Stegner’s misgivings about environmental threats and depredations are front and center: Marian, a neighbor of Joe’s, serves as a mouthpiece for many of his ecological concerns. Among these is that native plants are far superior to imported exotics, because of their complex symbioses with the land. She also persuades Joe to end his campaign of killing the many gophers and other pests on his large property.

In The Spectator Bird, Joe seems to have mostly absorbed her lessons. In the novel’s first pages, he notes that the development and “subdivision” of the hills where he lives have upended the natural balance of the region, driving out the natural predators of the deer, which now overpopulate the area. “One-acre, one-house rigidities” have “ruined” the area (51), leading to erosion and mudslides. Stegner’s love of the natural world also shows itself in Joe’s tender descriptions of the native flora and fauna on his property, including wrens, bush tits, plum trees, birch, eucalyptus, and juniper.