Speaker 1: This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless,
Speaker 1: severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listeningcast.
Speaker 2: You can't predict anything.
Speaker 1: The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light.
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Speaker 1: dot com. F I R S T L I t
Speaker 1: E dot com. Hey guys, it's uh Steve and I
Speaker 1: have such an important message that it's so important to fill.
Speaker 1: The engineer advised me on how to hold my phone
Speaker 1: to get the best quality where it's about six inches
Speaker 1: from my mouth at an angle so it doesn't go
Speaker 1: when you talk. That's how important this messages. The auction
Speaker 1: House of Oddity, our Meat Eater auction House of Oddities
Speaker 1: is up, live and running right now, probably the most
Speaker 1: impressive slate of auction items to ever be compiled in
Speaker 1: the history of Western civilization. You can go right now
Speaker 1: and bid on a hunt at the Durham family farm
Speaker 1: with Bubbly Doug durn himself. It's the winner's choice. You
Speaker 1: do a buck hunt for one or a deer hunt.
Speaker 1: For one opening day of rifles season, so opening weekend
Speaker 1: of rifle for one or three people, do a turkey
Speaker 1: hunt on Doug's place, hanging out with Doug, cruising around
Speaker 1: with Doug. We have a custom log trappers cabin from
Speaker 1: Naughty Log Homes. Okay, so this is a totally built
Speaker 1: trappers cabin that you can have, get shipped out and
Speaker 1: you get assembled where you want it. Okay. We have
Speaker 1: a art commission, an original art commission of your choosing.
Speaker 1: Go on Instagram and go to at Jamie Jamie Underscore
Speaker 1: Wild Art. Okay, go look at her work. You can
Speaker 1: get an art commission from her. We have a signed arrow,
Speaker 1: a chunk of an aluminum arrow signed by Ted Nugent
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety one from a whiplash bash. And we
Speaker 1: have what in the art world they call the provenance.
Speaker 1: We have how this arrow flowed through ownership to get
Speaker 1: into your hands, says Ted Nugent ninety one on an
Speaker 1: aluminum arrow shaft. Great story to go with that. Everybody
Speaker 1: knows our beloved Seth Morris used to go by the
Speaker 1: flip Flop Flesher. His wife is a professional artist. She
Speaker 1: has a gallery. She makes her living with art. We
Speaker 1: have original artwork from her Kelsey Morris original artwork. We
Speaker 1: have my weather be Mark five used in many me
Speaker 1: Eater episodes, forthcoming episode where I shoot a pretty stomper
Speaker 1: mule deer in Idaho. I killed a bull with on
Speaker 1: a media episode, a lot of media episodes, a left
Speaker 1: handed whether it be Mark five and three hundred win
Speaker 1: mag that exact rifle. We have a Carolina custom rifle
Speaker 1: that I use in a bunch more Meat Eater episodes,
Speaker 1: including the famous Moose Charge episode. That rifle is available
Speaker 1: for auction, and there is a dinner for four at
Speaker 1: my house. So the winning bidder and three guests will
Speaker 1: at a time that we picked together, will come to
Speaker 1: my house to be wined and dined for auction. Doug
Speaker 1: Duran was bragging up how his auction item was kicking
Speaker 1: my dinner's ass. But I have to point out right
Speaker 1: now that it's probably humiliating to Doug the degree to
Speaker 1: which my dinner is kicking his farm's ass. So you
Speaker 1: better go help Bubbly out before he gets sad. Got
Speaker 1: to go to the Meeater dot com and find you know,
Speaker 1: there's all kinds of links and stuff. Auction house of
Speaker 1: Oddities or go to at Steve Ranella on Instagram and
Speaker 1: we will put the Auction House of Oddities link in
Speaker 1: my bio. You'll find it. Thank you everybody. Now back
Speaker 1: to regular program. Okay, we're at the Cornell Lab of
Speaker 1: Oh you know, that's what they call you, guys over
Speaker 1: in the disease Party. You're the Lab of oh Nice,
Speaker 1: the Lab of Ornithology. And we are seeded with someone
Speaker 1: who we've inadvertently talked about a whole bunch. That's not right,
Speaker 1: we talked about without naming your name, because we have
Speaker 1: again and again and again on the show on social
Speaker 1: media otherwise brought up the Merlin bird app and have
Speaker 1: office said we all get the person that made the
Speaker 1: Merlin Bird app on the podcast. And here she is,
Speaker 1: Jesse Barry.
Speaker 3: Hey, it's great to be here.
Speaker 1: Ye, joined as well by an ornithologist Chris Wood. And
Speaker 1: if you are into e Bird, I'm going to go
Speaker 1: back on Mrlam and explain eBird.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So, the idea of Ebert is there's thousands, tens of thousands,
Speaker 5: millions of people around the world that like birds, like
Speaker 5: watching them. This is a place for those all your
Speaker 5: observations of birds to go into a centralized database. You
Speaker 5: can see that information. But even more importantly than a
Speaker 5: team of scientists can analyze that information, that information is
Speaker 5: then used by groups like Fish and Wildlife Service and
Speaker 5: others for policy action.
Speaker 1: Yep, and we're gonna and Chris is gonna explain how
Speaker 1: you can exploit eBird to get better bag limits on ducks.
Speaker 5: Orn's going to talk about that.
Speaker 1: I'm joke about. We're gonna get We're gonna get into
Speaker 1: Ebert and then Oron Robinson, another ornithologist.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I work with the data after it comes
Speaker 2: through Ebert and all the filters. We can create these
Speaker 2: these distribution maps for thousands and thousands of vcs, and
Speaker 2: we can take that eBird data and use it in
Speaker 2: conservation or management applications.
Speaker 1: And you're a duck hunter? Yes, where'd you grow up?
Speaker 2: Grew up in Mobile, Alabama?
Speaker 1: Okay, you still hunt there?
Speaker 2: Not very often?
Speaker 1: No, already mainly hunt ducks.
Speaker 2: Now Arkansas. We've got some good family friends in Arkansas.
Speaker 1: Okay, go over there once a year. Do you often
Speaker 1: meet other ornithologists who are disappointed to hear that you're
Speaker 1: a duck hunter? Or is that pretty common.
Speaker 2: In the duck world. Most of the folks that study
Speaker 2: ducks are also duck hunters.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a pictures that I have people that studied the
Speaker 1: ducks hunt ducks. Yeah, you know.
Speaker 2: But no, I haven't really gotten any any pushback on
Speaker 2: the fact that I enjoy duck hunting.
Speaker 1: It makes sense to people. All Right, we got it.
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna explain Merlin real quick, or you could
Speaker 1: probably do a better job explaining Merlin, but I'll explain
Speaker 1: how it came to me. Jannis Prutellus, who's on the
Speaker 1: show all the time, you used to be on every
Speaker 1: episode show, he found out about it and told me
Speaker 1: about it, and I got into it. It's an app.
Speaker 1: You open up the app, you can go to sound
Speaker 1: id and it just starts populating with whatever birds are
Speaker 1: going on. I got a lot of questions about how
Speaker 1: this functions and some other problems, but then we started
Speaker 1: having a lot of fun of raiding each other's turkey calls,
Speaker 1: whether you can trick Merlin, getting into trying to fool
Speaker 1: Merlin in other ways, and also a sort of a
Speaker 1: slight a little bit of a contest about who can
Speaker 1: get the most birds going at anyone time. And I'm
Speaker 1: not that high. I had nine going in eastern Kansas
Speaker 1: this year, which I thought was pretty good. But I've
Speaker 1: met many people who've been who've had in the teens
Speaker 1: and anyone sitting. But I had nine and I don't know,
Speaker 1: you know, twenty thirty minutes leaning against one tree, which
Speaker 1: I thought was pretty impressive. I've also found it helpful
Speaker 1: for when you're somewhere and you, like in southeast Alaska,
Speaker 1: there's this bird I'm always hearing. I can't remember what
Speaker 1: the help was even though I looked it up. You
Speaker 1: never in a million years are going to get a
Speaker 1: chance to see it because it's in the canopy of
Speaker 1: old growth and able to like figure out what you're
Speaker 1: listening to. So if you get Merlin's Free, still still free,
Speaker 1: you guys probably steal people's data.
Speaker 3: No, no, it doesn't feed back, It doesn't feedback. No,
Speaker 3: it's still a whole point, totally separate. So we get
Speaker 3: people excited about watching birds and then hopefully some of
Speaker 3: them start contributing data to the e bird, and that's
Speaker 3: where just steal whatever anybody's hearing. Yeah, you know, we're
Speaker 3: still trying to be like above the line on some
Speaker 3: of these things. And when we make that shift, you know,
Speaker 3: make it very intentional that you know, we're not just
Speaker 3: listening in, we're not eavesdropping on you.
Speaker 1: Oh no, but I would like so this doesn't report
Speaker 1: back to you. I thought that'd be the only thing
Speaker 1: you have to gain from it.
Speaker 3: It doesn't right now. We'll make that step coming up
Speaker 3: in the next few years.
Speaker 1: I've been just assuming, and that's why I felt a
Speaker 1: little bad when we're messing with it, that I would
Speaker 1: throw off some data.
Speaker 3: No, it's okay, Yeah, okay. We want people to have
Speaker 3: fun just enjoying the app, and then we're collecting real
Speaker 3: data for science. We want you know, that's a different thing,
Speaker 3: and we want people know that too.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Hunting turkeys, you know, it's humiliating. If someone has
Speaker 1: Merlin open and someone calls and it doesn't recognize it
Speaker 1: as a wild turkey, it's humiliating. Yeah. Then we got
Speaker 1: into this spring trying to do a barred owl an
Speaker 1: owl hoot, which it's humbling, piliated woodpacker calls humbling crow.
Speaker 3: Tough.
Speaker 1: Tough, Yeah, raven tough. You can beat it on a
Speaker 1: bard owl.
Speaker 3: I can.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I test you. Yeah, it doesn't like you know what,
Speaker 1: it doesn't like noises and rooms though. Have you noticed that?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's you know, really tuned in for the outdoors.
Speaker 3: So all the data that Merlin has used to learn
Speaker 3: these sounds is coming from outside. So yeah, it's not
Speaker 3: as good on the inside.
Speaker 1: Do you dare try to do a test?
Speaker 3: Yeah, sure, you'll do it.
Speaker 1: Okay, got it on. I can see my voice bouncing
Speaker 1: up and down. Okay you ready? Oh nice? Right there. Now.
Speaker 1: My buddy Seth he we had one in southeast Alaska
Speaker 1: this year, going nuts, couple in the tree and he
Speaker 1: for two nights sat out with Merlin, open it, calling Merlin,
Speaker 1: binging it. He couldn't get it. Eventually got it and
Speaker 1: he feels that it's in the hall.
Speaker 3: Yeah you got.
Speaker 1: It's very picky now, yeah, that's where he he had
Speaker 1: to work on that. And once he worked on that,
Speaker 1: he was able to get it, but he wasn't quite
Speaker 1: clear on what he did. But all sudden he got it.
Speaker 1: Where would trick it? But here's the thing I don't get.
Speaker 1: I have the bird Song Bible. You've met with the
Speaker 1: bird Song Bible team.
Speaker 3: Here, put that up.
Speaker 1: Those you guys, our sounds are in there. Well, we'redly.
Speaker 1: My kids like the mess of the bird Song Bible.
Speaker 1: The bird Song Bible can't fool the app but it
Speaker 1: must be something. Going through recording and coming out the
Speaker 1: other side, it loses some essential elements.
Speaker 3: So the sounds in that particular book with the little
Speaker 3: speaker are really compressed. And that was you know, ten
Speaker 3: fifteen years ago when there just wasn't the technology to
Speaker 3: put a good speaker next to a book. So yeah,
Speaker 3: those sounds have been shrunk down so much that Merlin
Speaker 3: can't really see the signal I got.
Speaker 1: So that's what it is.
Speaker 3: I think.
Speaker 1: So I didn't know this was you, but I came
Speaker 1: into contact years ago with and I want you start
Speaker 1: by explaining the McAuley library. But years ago I was
Speaker 1: trying to figure out a game call for a blue grouse,
Speaker 1: which leads I gotta digress because it leaves me not
Speaker 1: our question. Do you guys know how they try to
Speaker 1: the blue grouse into two different grouse? Do you believe that?
Speaker 1: Or I mean do you buy that? Like who gets
Speaker 1: to decide? Yeah, So there's like it seems like it's
Speaker 1: be up to God. That's one. That's one perspective, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean.
Speaker 5: I think I think the thing is is there's really
Speaker 5: no such thing as a species, right, It's an artificial
Speaker 5: construct that people have invented to try to make sense
Speaker 5: of the natural world. And there's certain things that are
Speaker 5: that are really you know, obviously differentiated, and other things
Speaker 5: that are that are very very close and it's hard
Speaker 5: to understand. And so in the case of what's now,
Speaker 5: these two different species of grouse, they're separated, you know
Speaker 5: a little bit. Basically one of them is in the
Speaker 5: Pacific North Northwest, the others in.
Speaker 1: The Rockies sooty and dusky the city in the Pacific Northwest,
Speaker 1: the dusky and the Rockies.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and so there have been a series of studies
Speaker 5: and right now, usually what people are looking at, what
Speaker 5: scientists are looking for is that they're looking for a
Speaker 5: combination of voke differences. And so those two those two
Speaker 5: species as we're considering them now, do have very distinct
Speaker 5: vocal differences.
Speaker 1: The number of number of them, yeah, different.
Speaker 5: Exactly, and one of them, you know, soodies will sit
Speaker 5: up in trees to give those dusky grouse basically sit
Speaker 5: very very low to deliver those those vocalizations, and or
Speaker 5: right on the ground exactly look at at most like
Speaker 5: a foot up right, And and so those that mating
Speaker 5: behavior is a very strong sexual selection pressure that that
Speaker 5: sort of as that happens over hundreds and thousands of years,
Speaker 5: they really start to become distinct populations.
Speaker 1: Is the idea that they're is the is the split
Speaker 1: widening with them, like the connectivity diminishing with them?
Speaker 5: You know, I don't know. I don't know the specifics
Speaker 5: of that, but what's likely to happen is is as
Speaker 5: you're seeing sort of the combined effects of climate change
Speaker 5: and then just human cause changes in forests, it's likely
Speaker 5: for that to shift over time. And so that's something
Speaker 5: that we're increasingly seeing with a lot of kind of
Speaker 5: species limits. I don't know the specifics of those of
Speaker 5: those two individuals, but.
Speaker 1: One of them has a different color eye comb, right,
Speaker 1: or they one of them has tends to have an
Speaker 1: orange and one has a tends to have a yellow
Speaker 1: e comb.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and there's some differences in the tailband as well.
Speaker 5: But part of that gets confusing because there's different subspecies
Speaker 5: within each of those populations as well. And so there's
Speaker 5: subspecies of dusky grouse that have broad tail bands, others
Speaker 5: that have narrow tail bands, and so it actually does
Speaker 5: end up getting to be quite a bit more confusing.
Speaker 5: And what happens is grouse in general don't travel very
Speaker 5: long distances. They may migrate, but they're elevational migrants, particularly
Speaker 5: those in the Rockies. They're not moving, you know, thousands
Speaker 5: of miles like Swainson's thrush. And so what that means
Speaker 5: is that there's it's more likely for those populace, for
Speaker 5: those birds to sort of diverge and not come into
Speaker 5: contact as much as other Sorry, the lights just went out,
Speaker 5: I don't know, looks fine, and Warren said, let there
Speaker 5: be light there we go, so go on, and yeah,
Speaker 5: I mean so, So because of that that that's there's
Speaker 5: a whole bunch of different things that come at play
Speaker 5: as sort of how things end up end up diverging
Speaker 5: into separate species. But it's a very very dynamic process.
Speaker 1: Our Fish and Game Agency they have not made the switch,
Speaker 1: so they are still blue grouse. They've not moved them
Speaker 1: to dusky grouse. They have Uh when you go in,
Speaker 1: do do bison? They do bison, but not buffalo, pronghorn
Speaker 1: or antelope but not pronghorn, and blue grouse or blue
Speaker 1: grouse but not dusky grouse. I made the switch, but
Speaker 1: then I switched back. Not imhing about switching back again.
Speaker 1: I think you should, so I'll continue with switching. I
Speaker 1: wanted to make a cutie grouse call because in Alaska
Speaker 1: you can hunt sudi grouse in the spring, but they're
Speaker 1: hard to find up in the tree, but they'll call.
Speaker 1: It's the mail up there, right, And I thought you
Speaker 1: could hide and then draw it down. So I had
Speaker 1: a guy who that's a game call maker, and I
Speaker 1: was sending him all I was trying to find good vocalizations,
Speaker 1: and I wound up sending him all the McCauley Library
Speaker 1: blue grouse. So do excuse me, Citi grouse records. And
Speaker 1: I had no until the day, I had no idea
Speaker 1: that was you guys.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So mcaulay Library started in nineteen twenty nine. The very
Speaker 3: first bird songs were recorded right here in Ithico.
Speaker 1: Uh huh.
Speaker 3: And so yeah, it was the collaboration between Arthur Allen
Speaker 3: and Peter Paul Kellogg. And Arthur Allen was an ornithologist,
Speaker 3: Peter Paul Kellogg an engineer, and they were just trying
Speaker 3: to figure out how they could study you know, birds,
Speaker 3: you know, more carefully and so they're using the technology
Speaker 3: of the day to go out and record those behaviors,
Speaker 3: which ended up being a bunch of equipment used for films.
Speaker 3: So that early film technology enabled us to start to
Speaker 3: document these wildlife sounds. And you know, we're still have
Speaker 3: folks all over the world who are going out and
Speaker 3: recording birds and other wildlife and bring them to the
Speaker 3: archive here.
Speaker 1: Does anyone have they must? But early we got to
Speaker 1: go hold you know, the extinct you have three was
Speaker 1: it two or three? I rebuild woodpackers three two males
Speaker 1: and females in your collections. So we were able to
Speaker 1: hold the extinct ivybuild a woodpacker, the extinct Carolina parakeet, observe,
Speaker 1: but did not hold the heath hen, which was like
Speaker 1: a basically, oh man, it'd be like a sharp tail
Speaker 1: grouse that lived in Martha's vineyard. You know, uh, does
Speaker 1: any are there recordings of their calls?
Speaker 3: So there are recordings of ivorybuild woodpecker, and a little
Speaker 3: bit of motion picture film too, which we have in
Speaker 3: the back room.
Speaker 1: As well, those from the Singer forest, wasn't it.
Speaker 3: We don't have any heathens or Eskimo curlew was never recorded.
Speaker 3: I don't think Carolina parakeet was either. So yeah, a
Speaker 3: lot of those you know, species that were one extinct
Speaker 3: in the early nineteen hundreds missed that window of being recorded.
Speaker 3: Ivybuilds one of the few that we were able to capture.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so walk me through from from starting from the
Speaker 1: mcaulay library, how did like how many birds sounds are
Speaker 1: in Merlin?
Speaker 3: Merlin can cover a thousand species in the sound i
Speaker 3: D feature where you can hit record and Merlin can
Speaker 3: identify them. And then there's now ten five hundred species
Speaker 3: of birds that you can explore and listen to right
Speaker 3: from the app. Now, so basically all the birdies can
Speaker 3: recognize the thousand yep and as we get more data
Speaker 3: coming into the archive, we'll be able to add more species.
Speaker 3: So it takes a lot of example recordings and experts
Speaker 3: to help Merlin really dig into learning what those that
Speaker 3: species sounds like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, when you you know, like many people, I'm reflexively
Speaker 1: anti AI, but this is very much.
Speaker 3: AI, right, Yeah, this is definitely machine learning. This is
Speaker 3: a we're ten plus years into really trying to understand
Speaker 3: how to incorporate machine learning into orthological research and ways
Speaker 3: to engage people with birds. So we try to think
Speaker 3: like we're the good guys and the AI side of things.
Speaker 1: So explain how it works and how you ever populated it,
Speaker 1: and how it can sort through all the background noise
Speaker 1: or that you could be in in a room. I
Speaker 1: realized it doesn't like a ton of unusual background noise,
Speaker 1: but you can be in a room where people are conversing,
Speaker 1: or on a patio with people conversing, and it's picking
Speaker 1: out some bird off in the distance, and like, it's
Speaker 1: just so hard to picture how it's sorting out. Right, Like,
Speaker 1: you can sit because you have a you know, your
Speaker 1: ears have kind of a three sixty cents of what's
Speaker 1: going on around you, and you're able to sort things
Speaker 1: by distance. But when it's coming through into a microphone,
Speaker 1: like something's losing track of well that's to my left right,
Speaker 1: it gets flattened. Yeah, you know, all the sound is
Speaker 1: flattened into a single sphere and it's not like, oh no,
Speaker 1: that's a thing that has nothing to do with this
Speaker 1: way over there, but the person talking to me is
Speaker 1: right here. I just can't even picture how you begin
Speaker 1: to get a thing that could pluck it out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So one way to think about it is, you know,
Speaker 3: sounds can be converted into a picture. So we basically
Speaker 3: take you know, that recording and it turns into a
Speaker 3: graph where you've got the time and the frequency and
Speaker 3: that will you know, produce a signal. So if a
Speaker 3: cardinal's got those introductory notes, you can see exactly where
Speaker 3: all the notes are in the cardinal song. And so
Speaker 3: what we did is basically look at the all the
Speaker 3: recordings of them, call a library archive or a subset,
Speaker 3: and then you know, essentially train Merlin to identify those
Speaker 3: recordings by having experts draw boxes around all of the
Speaker 3: times that a bird sings in that particular recording. So
Speaker 3: again we're taking the sound, we're moving it into a
Speaker 3: picture and then going online and annotating every time a
Speaker 3: cardinal sings, every time a chickadee sings in the background.
Speaker 3: And originally we're just you know, picking out Okay, if
Speaker 3: we're trying to teach you how to identify cardinals, we'll
Speaker 3: just drop boxes around the cardinals. But then we realized
Speaker 3: that if we drew boxes and labeled everything in that soundscape,
Speaker 3: then Merlin was able to figure out exactly what was
Speaker 3: going on in that landscape that was a jump we
Speaker 3: didn't really expect, but it's really thanks to like all
Speaker 3: the folks who put those recordings into the archive and
Speaker 3: then the experts who took you know, hours and hours,
Speaker 3: like in a very time consuming way making those annotations,
Speaker 3: and then it goes into the machine learning system. And
Speaker 3: so Grant Van Horne is the leading computer scientist on
Speaker 3: this project, and he's really figured out how you can
Speaker 3: you know, tweak this system to put those real time
Speaker 3: predictions back out. So part of the fun is that
Speaker 3: Merlin's like lighting up, and and any as any species
Speaker 3: starts to vocalize, it's picking that up. And that's really
Speaker 3: Grant's hard work testing out how to make a system
Speaker 3: that will do that and also run on a phone.
Speaker 3: So that's the other really cool thing is that we
Speaker 3: been able to leverage Apple's hardware to put these algorithms
Speaker 3: right on a device that can work without a connection
Speaker 3: to the internet.
Speaker 1: Have you guys been surprised by how many like it's
Speaker 1: its rate of adoption with users?
Speaker 3: Yeah, pleasantly surprised to me, Yeah, Like.
Speaker 1: How can you say how many people are out there
Speaker 1: using it?
Speaker 3: Three and a half million in July. Yeah, on a
Speaker 3: given weekend.
Speaker 1: On me Turkey hunters.
Speaker 3: I don't know, Turkey was like a little lower on
Speaker 3: the list of frequently identified birds, and.
Speaker 1: I might have guessed, but oh really yeah, okay, so
Speaker 1: it's not all turkey hunters. So this is the thing
Speaker 1: that really surprised me. I just assumed that the whole
Speaker 1: point of Merlin was that it would allow ornithologists to
Speaker 1: get these location specific, time specific snapshots of birds sounds,
Speaker 1: and that any time I was using I never you know,
Speaker 1: I was just like everybody, you never read terms of service.
Speaker 1: You just are like, Okay. I just assumed that when
Speaker 1: I had it open and it was listening, that it
Speaker 1: went into some database somewhere of you know, at blank date,
Speaker 1: at blank time, at blank location, here's what was going on.
Speaker 1: But you're not doing that, not yet.
Speaker 3: That is the next step, okay, Because that ability to
Speaker 3: monitor a landscape for like three minutes of a nice
Speaker 3: recording is going to give us a tremendous amount of
Speaker 3: information about the species that are there, and so we're
Speaker 3: going to soon be preparing kind of the eBird you know,
Speaker 3: data model and how all that those observations are handled
Speaker 3: and incorporate this kind of different type of data into
Speaker 3: that system. But it's a pretty big jump to go
Speaker 3: from birdwatchers putting in a sighting to now here's basically
Speaker 3: an automated system collecting that information. So I've got a
Speaker 3: lot of research and experiments to do, but certainly that's
Speaker 3: where it's heading. And you're going to imagine in years
Speaker 3: to come, you know, putting devices out on the landscape
Speaker 3: to really monitor spots where you know people don't go
Speaker 3: very often.
Speaker 1: But that's going on right now, right yeah, because I
Speaker 1: know people do it with Turkey researchers that just put
Speaker 1: stuff up to pick up gobbles yep.
Speaker 3: And you know, I think it's going to become something
Speaker 3: that more people can do. And hopefully it doesn't have
Speaker 3: to be like a researcher putting those devices out, but
Speaker 3: you know, somebody backpacking up into the high peaks would
Speaker 3: be able to do it too.
Speaker 1: And get yourself one of them Chinese spy balloons man,
Speaker 1: and just pull that thing around sucking up bird sounds.
Speaker 1: It'd be great.
Speaker 6: Uh.
Speaker 1: One thing that we had dinner last night, we talked
Speaker 1: and I've seen it in some of the stuff you
Speaker 1: guys do that with with the with the stuff you
Speaker 1: gather through e bird and maybe it'll be demonstrated in
Speaker 1: Merlin that it's just it seems like you guys say
Speaker 1: that bird numbers are just declining and just that's it.
Speaker 5: Is that there's a lot more complexity to it, and
Speaker 5: I think I think one of the things that we're
Speaker 5: able to see now is we have people all around
Speaker 5: the world. You know, there's almost a million people who've
Speaker 5: contributed their sightings to eBird.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 5: They're in every country in the world. And so from that,
Speaker 5: because they're in different habitats, they're in different geographic locations,
Speaker 5: they're they're there all year round, we're able to see
Speaker 5: not just that a species is necessarily declining, but this
Speaker 5: sort of tapestry and complexity of how that decline might
Speaker 5: be taking place. And so it might be that some
Speaker 5: birds a pattern is that, you know, some birds are
Speaker 5: shifting their populations to the north with climate change, and
Speaker 5: so that's part of what is really interesting for us
Speaker 5: to figure out, is is just exactly how that's happened,
Speaker 5: because then we can start to understand what the d are,
Speaker 5: what the causes of these declines might be that otherwise
Speaker 5: would be really really hard to figure out. I mean,
Speaker 5: we often think about birds as being the canary and
Speaker 5: the coal mine, if you will, and that they're really
Speaker 5: good proxies for understanding natural systems overall, because natural systems
Speaker 5: are very, very complicated, and we wanted to think about
Speaker 5: how do you kind of measure the heartbeat of the
Speaker 5: planet and an ecosystem. It turns out that birds end
Speaker 5: up being a really really good way to do that.
Speaker 5: Because you have hundreds of thousands of people that are
Speaker 5: watching birds, they can report the sightings that they see.
Speaker 5: Then we can take that information sort of like Orn
Speaker 5: was talking about, and link other that information with remote
Speaker 5: sensed imagery. So since we know where you are, we
Speaker 5: can link that and then understand information about the habitat
Speaker 5: at a variety of scales. You know, we can understand
Speaker 5: what the habitat's like within you know, one hundred meters
Speaker 5: of where you were, within a mile of where you were,
Speaker 5: and within ten miles, and can start to say, like, okay,
Speaker 5: it seems like this bird during the breeding season requires
Speaker 5: this type of habitat during another type of you know,
Speaker 5: maybe post breeding, you know, after the young leave the
Speaker 5: nest and are moving around, they may switch to a
Speaker 5: slightly different type of habitat and being able to understand
Speaker 5: how those connections happen can be really important for conservation.
Speaker 1: But I mean, are there you know, I mean, are
Speaker 1: there as many birds in the US as there was
Speaker 1: twenty five years ago. No, they're not. Okay, that's what
Speaker 1: I'm trying. That's what.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there's but you know, overall, there's there's basically based
Speaker 5: on some of the work that teams here and others others,
Speaker 5: did three billion birds have been lost in like the
Speaker 5: last forty years, three billion with a.
Speaker 1: Bee of all sorts, of.
Speaker 5: All sorts, And I mean it's a very very common.
Speaker 5: It's it's the most species are declining.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 5: If you go on to our website, we have a
Speaker 5: science section on there and you can basically go through
Speaker 5: and for more than four hundred species see exactly what's
Speaker 5: happening and where those birds are declining, where they might
Speaker 5: be increasing. So it is complex, and there are areas
Speaker 5: that birds are increasing, and there's certain species and groups
Speaker 5: of birds that are increasing, but the overall pattern right
Speaker 5: now is one where birds are really declining, particularly things
Speaker 5: that might be migrants that are traveling long distances, shore birds,
Speaker 5: grassland birds. Those are some of the major groups of
Speaker 5: birds that have very very significant declines.
Speaker 1: I was surprised to learn recently that there's only five
Speaker 1: species of birds that have a global population of one billion.
Speaker 5: Where did you read that?
Speaker 1: I read it in a book called Wild New World
Speaker 1: by the historian dam Floores. Huh, the English sparrow, a goal,
Speaker 1: which surprised me. I can't remember what goal it was.
Speaker 1: What else is in there? The European starling? Maybe, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's five spieces of birds that they think have a
Speaker 1: global population more than one billion.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's measuring the absolute number of birds ends up
Speaker 5: being a very very difficult thing.
Speaker 1: You're not buying it.
Speaker 5: All I'm saying is a very difficult thing to figure out.
Speaker 5: You know, it's actually easier to understand the percent decline
Speaker 5: in a total population of birds because you're looking at
Speaker 5: the relative difference than saying sort of the absolute number
Speaker 5: of birds. Because if you think about some birds, like
Speaker 5: a bald eagle, it they tend to sit out in
Speaker 5: the open or they're flying around. They're big, they're easily detectable.
Speaker 5: But something like a red eyed vireo or a Swainson's thrush.
Speaker 5: I think that's the example of a bird that's sort
Speaker 5: of hiding up in the woods. If you're an expert birdwatcher,
Speaker 5: maybe you're hearing that and identifying it as a swains
Speaker 5: and strutch, but a lot of other people would wouldn't
Speaker 5: see those birds because of those detection differences. It can
Speaker 5: be really difficult to sort of compare one species to
Speaker 5: another species. And some other birds, you know, if you
Speaker 5: think about red wing blackbird, they can have very clumped distribution,
Speaker 5: So around marshes they're very very abundant, but if you
Speaker 5: get away from their habitats, they're much less common at
Speaker 5: certain times of the year than they gather in massive
Speaker 5: flocks of you know, tens of thousands to millions of birds,
Speaker 5: and so it's just it's a very difficult thing to
Speaker 5: sort of say, this is the absolute number of any species.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, it's rough though, over a billion, over
Speaker 1: a billion? Can you I'm going to look this up,
Speaker 1: but just to ask, are you surprised because you would
Speaker 1: think that it would be more than that. Are you
Speaker 1: surprised to hear there are birds that have a global
Speaker 1: that might have a global population, or you just think
Speaker 1: that anyone saying that is overreach.
Speaker 5: Any time that that there's a definitive statement that there
Speaker 5: are x number of species that meet some threshold that's
Speaker 5: in comparison to others is often something where I would
Speaker 5: kind of pause and raise my eyebrows and think about
Speaker 5: just because of the difficulty in understanding that there's there's
Speaker 5: also a lot of systems that may not be heavily covered,
Speaker 5: or where there's a lot of people that are actually
Speaker 5: going and looking at birds, and so just to sort
Speaker 5: of be able to figure that out is a complicated
Speaker 5: you know, it's something that I mean that is difficult
Speaker 5: to do with a level of confidence that you know,
Speaker 5: I'd be comfortable making a statement.
Speaker 1: Like that writing into a book.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I probably wouldn't. I probably wouldn't do that.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm going to follow up with you because we've
Speaker 1: talked about that was even a trivia one of Spencer's
Speaker 1: trivia questions.
Speaker 3: If I remember was maybe I wasn't on that something.
Speaker 1: About that or no, no, I think I maybe suggested
Speaker 1: it to them. I'll get back to you on that.
Speaker 1: With E bird, you feel that E bird where people
Speaker 1: from around the world. How many people use E bird?
Speaker 1: A million?
Speaker 5: There's yeah, there's about a million people who have used
Speaker 5: the bird, and in you know, any year about a
Speaker 5: quarter million people.
Speaker 1: So prior to E bird, and it seems like you
Speaker 1: guys are really optimistic about what you can garner from that.
Speaker 1: Prior to E bird, how was anyone ever taking a
Speaker 1: stab at what's going on with bird population?
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's a really good question. There's a there's a
Speaker 5: survey that's been going on in the US for a
Speaker 5: long a long time called the Breeding Bird Survey, which
Speaker 5: is basically a series of of of points that people
Speaker 5: are doing along roads where they go out every spring.
Speaker 1: And they.
Speaker 5: They are able to infer what's happening with with bird
Speaker 5: populations during the breeding season. And so that's that's one
Speaker 5: way that people have been doing it. One of the
Speaker 5: longest citizen science projects is something called the Christmas Bird
Speaker 5: Count that's been going on for over one hundred years.
Speaker 5: So the idea that you know, citizen scientists and people
Speaker 5: can contribute to science is not a new idea at all.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's something that's been happening for a long time.
Speaker 5: But with the advent of the Internet and the ability
Speaker 5: to exchange information very quickly, it's been a lot easier
Speaker 5: for us to very quickly be able to amass you know,
Speaker 5: over one and a half billion records from all over
Speaker 5: the world, and that scale of large amounts of data
Speaker 5: then allows us to get much more insight than we
Speaker 5: would be able to get with with other methods. And
Speaker 5: one of the things it's exciting now is it's not
Speaker 5: necessarily that we're only using eBird data. We're often integrating
Speaker 5: that data with other data sets as well, so we're
Speaker 5: able to bring in some of the information that Fish
Speaker 5: and Wildlife Service may have gathered and then bring that
Speaker 5: together with information that we have. But it turns out
Speaker 5: one of the things that's a little surprising that people
Speaker 5: may not appreciate is usually people are doing surveys where
Speaker 5: birds are, and so if you're doing a survey for
Speaker 5: bald eagles, there tends to be an emphasis on saying, Okay,
Speaker 5: these are places where eagles are, We're going to do
Speaker 5: my survey where the eagles are. What happens then, is
Speaker 5: if you're trying to extrapolate that across everywhere and you
Speaker 5: have no information on where eagles are not, then the
Speaker 5: models basically fall apart because they you don't have that information.
Speaker 5: eBird ends up being a really good resource for this,
Speaker 5: because we're asking people to record all the birds that
Speaker 5: they're able to detect and identify and then put an
Speaker 5: account for. And that gives us sort of not just
Speaker 5: information about where birds are, but where they're.
Speaker 1: Not because you've asked them to enter all birds exactly.
Speaker 5: And we know that there's differences between people, right, Like
Speaker 5: we know if you go out with Jesse, you're gonna
Speaker 5: see you're going to detect and identify way way more
Speaker 5: birds than if you just you know, go out on
Speaker 5: your own, because she's one of the best bird people
Speaker 5: in the world.
Speaker 1: One of the best. Do you have a life list?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've been keeping a lifeless since I was nine. Yeah.
Speaker 1: How many birds are on the life list?
Speaker 3: It's not a really impressive number. It's a couple thousand.
Speaker 3: But I think the thing that we've done this.
Speaker 1: Spit how many are ten there's like one birds.
Speaker 3: Almost made it to ten thousand.
Speaker 1: But yeah, like he throws a lot of money at it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, his life is dedicated to traveling, but we do
Speaker 3: that's kind of fun, is try to figure out how
Speaker 3: many species we can see in twenty four hours. And
Speaker 3: so you know, for example, we went down to Texas
Speaker 3: in April, so the corner leve Morphology actually has a
Speaker 3: birding team where compete. We do compete and but you know,
Speaker 3: conservation Alise wins. We're raising money for conservation, so donors pledge,
Speaker 3: you know, traditionally by the number of species that we
Speaker 3: would see, and we would spend you know, a week
Speaker 3: planning a route to like pick up as many birds
Speaker 3: and then take twenty four hours to run that route
Speaker 3: time down to the minute to see how many birds
Speaker 3: we could areas probably Yeah, so you're you're getting the
Speaker 3: coastal areas you're gonna get you know, the grasslands or
Speaker 3: any habitat you can put on that route. It's kind
Speaker 3: of the goal because you know, different habitats, you're gonna
Speaker 3: get different species and them eithers get And one of
Speaker 3: the other rules is that ninety five percent of the
Speaker 3: species all team members need to see. So if you've
Speaker 3: got five people on the team, you're trying to make
Speaker 3: sure everybody's picking up all the birds all day long,
Speaker 3: so it's not just like one guy, can you know,
Speaker 3: find them all?
Speaker 1: And what's a good twenty four hour period?
Speaker 3: A good total anywhere, I mean, you know, two hundred
Speaker 3: or something like that is something people work towards in
Speaker 3: most regions. But there's one day in Texas we pulled
Speaker 3: off two hundred and ninety four species and set the
Speaker 3: record for North America.
Speaker 1: That's all yeah, yeah, humming to ninety four yeah, in
Speaker 1: one day in Texas.
Speaker 3: One day in Texas on a really epic migration day.
Speaker 3: So we had watched the weather. We knew that their
Speaker 3: you know front was coming in, which was dropping birds
Speaker 3: on the Texas coast. But the conditions were really good
Speaker 3: that year. We had some lingering waterfall that wasn't expected
Speaker 3: to be in the region, and then just a lot
Speaker 3: of practice. But on those days you get to put
Speaker 3: your birding skills to the test by like finding things
Speaker 3: that weren't expected on the route and just being the
Speaker 3: first guy to like pick the merlin. Flying over unexpected
Speaker 3: paragrin is part of them.
Speaker 5: It's really similar to hunting in a lot of ways,
Speaker 5: because what you do is you know that you spend
Speaker 5: this time scouting and understanding exactly what you know. In
Speaker 5: this case, about three hundred species of birds are doing
Speaker 5: sometimes to the level of that individual, Like if it's
Speaker 5: something that's rare in a region, you know, maybe there's
Speaker 5: a cinnamon teal that's that's lingering that wouldn't usually be
Speaker 5: in that area. You know, it's not just that it's there.
Speaker 5: You kind of need to figure out, well, like when
Speaker 5: is it actually like swimming out where you can see
Speaker 5: it versus hiding in the in the reeds. And so
Speaker 5: you have people that are basically trying to get these
Speaker 5: very intimate understandings of exactly what's happening sometimes with individual birds.
Speaker 5: And then there's also kind of the magic that happens,
Speaker 5: you know, like like when you're hunting that's just completely unexpected,
Speaker 5: like something that you didn't know was there happens. And
Speaker 5: so there's this element where you sort of know there's
Speaker 5: some things about these birds at a place that that
Speaker 5: you're you're trying to put those birds together on a route.
Speaker 5: But then there's also you know that you can create
Speaker 5: almost opportunities around dusk and down in particular where you
Speaker 5: know things are moving more. You know that there is
Speaker 5: these different factors, and so you're trying to sort of
Speaker 5: fit these things together and pull together a route that
Speaker 5: you know, you see how many birds you can see?
Speaker 5: You should we should do one of these together, see
Speaker 5: if we can have you see two hundred spieces of
Speaker 5: birds in a day.
Speaker 1: I'd like it, But I'm trying to think of some
Speaker 1: things have you had? Do you have you gotten all ptarmigans.
Speaker 3: Like in a lifetime?
Speaker 5: Yeah, okay we did in our Alaska big day.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah we uh.
Speaker 1: You got all on one day. I know friends that
Speaker 1: have gotten gotten one on one day.
Speaker 3: That's awesome.
Speaker 1: Collected. Yeah, does anybody is that still a thing like
Speaker 1: when people used to go out with their following piece
Speaker 1: and like shotgun birds.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's still there's a limited amount of scientific collecting
Speaker 3: that goes on a limited amount.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that would be a circumstance. Would I still like
Speaker 1: an acceptable thing to do? Like back in the Audubon
Speaker 1: or Darwin days and they just run around with their
Speaker 1: fowling piece and like collect birds.
Speaker 3: So these days museums tend to pick up more salvage birds.
Speaker 3: So birds hit a window roadkill those are going to museums.
Speaker 3: But there are certain species where there's some really interesting
Speaker 3: questions around what is driving the changes in their population.
Speaker 3: Where you know, if you collect you know, ten individuals
Speaker 3: or even something like that can really start to unlock
Speaker 3: those questions of how those populations are changing and why.
Speaker 1: Have you ever been out with someone doing that. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it feels like real kind of naughty.
Speaker 3: I feel like it kind of does, because it's like
Speaker 3: you've got this very specific permit for just a little
Speaker 3: bit of sampling, and you kind of know in the
Speaker 3: back of your head, you know, it's been hundreds of
Speaker 3: years in some of those species since they've been targeted
Speaker 3: in that way.
Speaker 1: So oh yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2: Several years ago, when I was doing with Masters, we
Speaker 2: had a permit to kill.
Speaker 1: Brown pelicans, uh huh.
Speaker 2: And that was pretty uh, pretty intell. There's some big bird.
Speaker 1: And they were collecting them for what purpose?
Speaker 2: Collecting him for to look for environmental toxins and so
Speaker 2: they're still toxins. So they would take you know, a
Speaker 2: little piece of breast tissue, little liver, and some brain tissue.
Speaker 2: The only way to get that is to you know,
Speaker 2: you know, go shoot them.
Speaker 1: I have to do like some mortal Yeah. What uh
Speaker 1: what birds right now? Or like in the US, what
Speaker 1: classifications of birds are most imperiled. You hear a lot
Speaker 1: about grassland, which is you know, I guess obvious because
Speaker 1: of loss of grassland habitat, But are there classifications of
Speaker 1: birds where it's just not like clearly understood things that
Speaker 1: you guys look at that you're that you're puzzled about.
Speaker 2: Shore birds are are declining pretty rapidly. We have We've
Speaker 2: done some studies on shore birds in the Pacific Flyway
Speaker 2: and it's it's almost all bad news there. And it's
Speaker 2: hard to know why. It could be loss of habitat
Speaker 2: on the overwintering grounds that in South America that is
Speaker 2: a definite possibility, crowding on the beaches, things like that,
Speaker 2: and it could be you know, breeding habitat up. You
Speaker 2: know a lot of these shore birds breed up in
Speaker 2: the boreal regions and that's you know, being affected by
Speaker 2: climate change things like that. But shore birds, I would say,
Speaker 2: along with the grassland birds are pretty imperiled.
Speaker 1: The ones that are more alarming. Yep. Do you know
Speaker 1: there was a there was a ten thousand year period
Speaker 1: when basically from the end of the place has scene extinctions.
Speaker 1: It was a ten thousand year period where only one
Speaker 1: creature that they know about and what is now the
Speaker 1: US one extinct. You know, some like coastal goose in California.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: And then we had all you know, with with European
Speaker 1: arrival in the New World. We then launched in this
Speaker 1: whole other epic of extinctions. But uh, do you think
Speaker 1: things like do you see things that that would suggest
Speaker 1: that we're that we're headed for more extinctions in the
Speaker 1: US with bird species? Oh?
Speaker 2: Man, that's that's it's hard to say. You know, there
Speaker 2: there's a lot of a lot of species for which
Speaker 2: we we do these trends, these these you know, long
Speaker 2: term trends that are declining. You know, very few are
Speaker 2: are increasing. Uh, And it's uh, you know it it
Speaker 2: does seem like more bad news than good, that's for sure.
Speaker 2: You know, there are we we see. So one of
Speaker 2: the things you see in uh, you know, when you
Speaker 2: do these these studies on population trends is that you'll
Speaker 2: see that it's not all decline or all growth. They'll
Speaker 2: be you know, it's spatially you know, different the declines
Speaker 2: and the growth. So they'll be growing in one region
Speaker 2: and declining in another. You know, you maybe that's evidence
Speaker 2: of a range shift. Maybe they're declining in one region
Speaker 2: and growing in another, not because they're dying over here,
Speaker 2: but because they're moving from one place to the other.
Speaker 2: So you see more over here. So sometimes it's hard
Speaker 2: to tease that apart just looking at this population data
Speaker 2: and then of course things that are you know, super
Speaker 2: reliant on people like snow geese. We looked at snow
Speaker 2: geese earlier, you know, the white fronted geese. Those populations
Speaker 2: are exploding because of farms. They can exploit farms things
Speaker 2: like that, whereas other waterfowl aren't doing so well, you know.
Speaker 2: So it's it's hard to say like that we're heading
Speaker 2: towards another mass extinction, but more birds that not are
Speaker 2: definitely in decline right now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what uh if you when when you hear about client.
Speaker 1: You guys have mentioned climate change a couple of times,
Speaker 1: and it's easy to picture how things can lose from
Speaker 1: climate changes because shifting habitats, and it takes them a
Speaker 1: long time to adjust to shifting habitats. But does it
Speaker 1: wouldn't it have to be that? I mean, there's got
Speaker 1: to be like birds who are having new area opened
Speaker 1: up to them, Like who's on the winning end? I mean,
Speaker 1: I imagine you know, you talk about all these birds
Speaker 1: that that have woron out from human activity, means like
Speaker 1: Canada geese have really done well thanks to humans. English
Speaker 1: sparrows have done really well thanks to humans starlings, crows
Speaker 1: have done well thanks to humans. Are there things that
Speaker 1: that you see that you'd see on the increase because
Speaker 1: there used to be areas that that that they had
Speaker 1: a northern limit that's opening up to them. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think northern mockingbird is one that has pushed north
Speaker 2: in the last twenty years or so, and it's it's
Speaker 2: likely due to you know, it can now tolerate what's
Speaker 2: going on further north than than it's previous range limit, So.
Speaker 1: It's opening up habitat. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5: Part of it also is that it's it's often not
Speaker 5: just climate change in isolation, but also other human land use,
Speaker 5: so that the what what can happen is when you
Speaker 5: have sort of changes in climate and the connectivity between
Speaker 5: habitat has been altered and so that there isn't that
Speaker 5: connectivity that there may have that there may have once been.
Speaker 5: That creates a different type of problem for for birds
Speaker 5: and other and particularly less mobile animals to be able
Speaker 5: to respond.
Speaker 1: To explain that, like we give give that in terms
Speaker 1: of a particular bird.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So if you think about me, let me think
Speaker 5: if I can come up with something. If you're a
Speaker 5: grassland bird, I'll be sort of general, so it applies
Speaker 5: more than sort of any specifically. If you're a grassland
Speaker 5: bird and you are things are getting warmer, so generally,
Speaker 5: what would happen is you would be shifting to the
Speaker 5: north and you may be doing pretty well in things
Speaker 5: like Pawnee National Grasslands or Commanche National Grasslands or some
Speaker 5: of these different grasslands that have been set aside. What
Speaker 5: happens is as as things become more warmer and warmer,
Speaker 5: that habitat in that place may not be right for
Speaker 5: them anymore. You always have some percentage of birds that
Speaker 5: are are quote unquote making mistakes maybe or going to
Speaker 5: places where they wandering around to varying degrees, and it
Speaker 5: really varies depending on the species the degree to which
Speaker 5: that happens. What happens is if there are fewer places
Speaker 5: nearby for those birds to find, if those are all
Speaker 5: corn and soybean farms, now they may not disperse to
Speaker 5: another area that has sort of the appropriate habitat that
Speaker 5: you might that you might move to. So it might
Speaker 5: be like, you know, maybe there is this other habitat
Speaker 5: that would be you know, work out really well for them,
Speaker 5: but they have to get through a whole bunch of
Speaker 5: other stuff in order to reach there, and there just
Speaker 5: aren't enough individuals that would sort of quote unquote figure
Speaker 5: out that this other place exists.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I got you. What generally is, do you guys
Speaker 1: look at rough grouse much?
Speaker 5: Do we have rough grouse on there?
Speaker 1: Because here's the thing that just that it's one of
Speaker 1: those kind of frustrating things where you have this bird
Speaker 1: it's widely recognized that or the bob white quail, it's
Speaker 1: widely understood that it's just tribution is shrinking. States that
Speaker 1: used to have great quail hunting aren't having it now.
Speaker 1: States that used to have great rough grouse hunting aren't
Speaker 1: having it now. And you talk to people in Pennsylvania
Speaker 1: about it, right, And then when you ask someone what's
Speaker 1: going on? And I'm not saying people should clean it up,
Speaker 1: but you say what's going on, it's like it's too
Speaker 1: many things. There's so many things that's unknown. You know,
Speaker 1: is there any way to kind of like tackle with
Speaker 1: rough grouse? For instance, between what you hear about not
Speaker 1: is it as what's the mosquito born pathogen that seems
Speaker 1: to kill them? West Nile kills a lot habitat right,
Speaker 1: And you get into quail, And some people will tell
Speaker 1: you fire ants habitat destruction. Whatever you know, is that
Speaker 1: a thing you guys can speak to at all with
Speaker 1: some of these birds that just have bad news after
Speaker 1: bad news after bad news, and it's like death by
Speaker 1: a thousand cuts.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, that's exactly right. I mean, and usually,
Speaker 5: at least in the US, and I think broadly across
Speaker 5: the world, loss of habitat or changes in habitat tend
Speaker 5: to be the major driver for loss of number, either
Speaker 5: abundance or in rain shifts. Then you have additive effects,
Speaker 5: so as forests in the east are maturing, Basically what
Speaker 5: you're having is a lot of loss of that early
Speaker 5: successional habitats that things like American woodcock and ruffed grouse
Speaker 5: are using. And there's also a lot of need to
Speaker 5: have connectivity between different types of habitats that you may
Speaker 5: not have to the same degree.
Speaker 1: That you once had.
Speaker 5: And so what happens is at different stages in a
Speaker 5: bird's life they need different types of habitat. The reality
Speaker 5: is is that that information we bill don't have that
Speaker 5: for most species, it's really hard to understand exactly what
Speaker 5: birds need and then how that varies across both space
Speaker 5: and time. Most studies tend to be done when birds
Speaker 5: are most detectable, so you know, you might be able
Speaker 5: to go out and do surveys for one rough grouse
Speaker 5: or drumming. You understand a lot about the needs for
Speaker 5: what rough grouse needs when they're displaying. But then you
Speaker 5: you know, to go and put you know, radio, whether
Speaker 5: it's radio telemetry or newer methods of monitoring individual birds
Speaker 5: is a much more expensive, time intensive to really understand
Speaker 5: what's happening. And then there's a question of to what
Speaker 5: extent does what you found out in that study area
Speaker 5: with maybe thirteen fifteen birds apply to other areas. Are
Speaker 5: they using that same thing or is it that that's
Speaker 5: already an area that the birds are limited and maybe
Speaker 5: not doing exactly what they want, but they're doing something
Speaker 5: that they can. And so that's kind of the idea
Speaker 5: behind Ebert is to get enough people that are in
Speaker 5: every habitat every time of the year that we can
Speaker 5: start to understand sort of how these things are playing
Speaker 5: out and how birds are responding, and then figuring out
Speaker 5: how to link that with other types of data and
Speaker 5: these integrated population models, which is really what Warren does
Speaker 5: a lot.
Speaker 1: But when people are using Ebert, are you asking them
Speaker 1: about is it a juvenile or not a juvenile? Are
Speaker 1: you just going by the time of year.
Speaker 5: So we're mostly using the time of year. But people
Speaker 5: are able, you know, they can they can take photographs
Speaker 5: upload those photographs in the McCauley library. So there's researchers
Speaker 5: that have used the photos in the McCauley library to
Speaker 5: look at things like what are the percentage of juveniles,
Speaker 5: how does it compare to the year before understanding that
Speaker 5: the idea is that the relative percentages of what people
Speaker 5: are photographing for one year to the next should probably
Speaker 5: be pretty similar. There shouldn't be a reason that one
Speaker 5: year people are really deciding to just photograph juveniles, in
Speaker 5: the next year they're just photographing adult There should be
Speaker 5: some ratio that's that's consistent, and so trying to look
Speaker 5: at that over time is something that people can do.
Speaker 5: And then people that are interested. There is a there's
Speaker 5: an age and sex scrid where people can put how
Speaker 5: many adult males, how many adult females, how many juveniles.
Speaker 5: There's breeding codes that people can enter, so they can
Speaker 5: they can say that this is this is an area
Speaker 5: where a bird had a brood of young that were
Speaker 5: with it. There's a lot of different information that people
Speaker 5: can put in beyond just sort of the species and
Speaker 5: number of individuals, And.
Speaker 2: There are specific surveys run through ebirds. So various states
Speaker 2: will have their breeding bird surveys done through ebirds, so
Speaker 2: they will be putting in you know, we saw black
Speaker 2: throat of blue warbler breeding on a nest, you know,
Speaker 2: or something, we saw this bird with chicks, things like that,
Speaker 2: and those individual projects that use Ebert for that data
Speaker 2: will absolutely use that stuff to uh, you know, in
Speaker 2: their in their studies.
Speaker 1: There's an annual bird there's an annual raptor count in
Speaker 1: a mountain range near our house. I can't remember what
Speaker 1: date it is, but it's a migratory raptor count. My
Speaker 1: kids have gone out to participate in it. So that's
Speaker 1: the kind of thing that gives you like an annual snapshot,
Speaker 1: and they probably measure some kind of like thing like
Speaker 1: effort yep, you know. Uh, I was asking you guys before,
Speaker 1: is there ever a birder who's so bad they get
Speaker 1: eighty six off eBird?
Speaker 2: If I haven't gotten booted, then I don't know if
Speaker 2: anybody will.
Speaker 1: Mean You're like, there's no way you saw that. You know,
Speaker 1: there's no cock of the rock. You can't keep saying
Speaker 1: you saw that.
Speaker 5: There's no cock of the rocks in Ithaca. Usually it's
Speaker 5: very very rare that we end up booting somebody, and
Speaker 5: usually it's it's for the same reasons that somebody might get,
Speaker 5: you know, booted from a social media site. Right, it's
Speaker 5: not that it's an intentional error that somebody's made if
Speaker 5: they're trying to you know, if somebody says that they
Speaker 5: saw a rare bird and then they take a photograph
Speaker 5: that they snatched off the Internet of that bird at
Speaker 5: a different place, you know, in that case, you know,
Speaker 5: we'll figure it out. If it's a kid or somebody
Speaker 5: that's kind of screwing around and just messing around, but
Speaker 5: that's really really rare. Usually the mistakes that people are
Speaker 5: making are kind of honest mistakes, and we have we
Speaker 5: have methods that allow us to just understand the differences
Speaker 5: and understand that people are learning. And what people sometimes
Speaker 5: forget is these same challenges apply to basically any professional
Speaker 5: survey too. You're going to have people that maybe they
Speaker 5: all are experts, but for whatever reason. People might be
Speaker 5: more tuned in and really know certain vocalizations of certain birds.
Speaker 5: They may focus more on forests, they may understand the
Speaker 5: grasslands a little bit more. And so we were able
Speaker 5: to because there's one and a half billion records, we
Speaker 5: can start to understand those differences and not say, well, dude,
Speaker 5: this guy is an idiot.
Speaker 1: We had to get them off right.
Speaker 5: We can still be a pretty inclusive place where just
Speaker 5: about everybody can participate, and then we can have different
Speaker 5: weights in terms of how we use that data.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we learn about the individual Ebert users by you know,
Speaker 2: the the time it takes them to accumulate so many
Speaker 2: species in a particular habitat in a particular region, and
Speaker 2: we can use that in these models, just like we
Speaker 2: do effort to determine, you know, the the the expertise
Speaker 2: essentially of an individual eburter.
Speaker 1: So you can tier it out to be you can
Speaker 1: tear it out to be people who are like high
Speaker 1: consistent users scoring a lot, and then like audit those
Speaker 1: individuals in somewhere and not audit them, but go and
Speaker 1: look at what they're up to.
Speaker 2: Yes, And we can also do that regionally and seasonally,
Speaker 2: Like I'm I would be a pretty decent birder in
Speaker 2: the northeastern United States. But if I went to Spain,
Speaker 2: I would be terrible. And we would account.
Speaker 1: For that, meaning because you'd lose familiarity.
Speaker 2: Right, I would not know most of the birds over there.
Speaker 1: Are you guys aware of the Himalayan snowcock?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Okay, so they live in the Ruby Range of Nevada.
Speaker 1: And some years ago I was thinking about going hunting
Speaker 1: for one. It's a high effort, low reward kind of thing,
Speaker 1: fairly low success rates. But I wound up finding online
Speaker 1: this little birder club. And I don't think they would
Speaker 1: have done this if they knew there's people like me
Speaker 1: out there. But there's this little birder club that would
Speaker 1: talk about where exactly people over the years had seen
Speaker 1: Himalayan snow cocks, which is gold. I haven't gone into Eburn, look,
Speaker 1: but but would that be helpful for someone trying to
Speaker 1: find a Himalayan snowcock in the Ruby Mountains? Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean you can be like, oh man, two days ago,
Speaker 1: there's one right there.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, I think I think the thing is
Speaker 5: is in the US. You know, hunting is a highly
Speaker 5: regulated pursuit. People understand what's happening with these birds. And
Speaker 5: you know, if anything, what we need is more hunters,
Speaker 5: more people that are out fishing that you know, we
Speaker 5: were talking about Merlin a little bit earlier about you
Speaker 5: know what, what are you really using that for? For us?
Speaker 5: It's this huge engagement window. You know, if one in
Speaker 5: seventy people in the US have used Merlin in the
Speaker 5: last in the last year, that's a lot of people
Speaker 5: that are being exposed to birds, being exposed to natural systems.
Speaker 5: And sometimes it's easy to focus on maybe differences that
Speaker 5: exist either within the birding community, within the hunting community,
Speaker 5: or between those and say like there could be points
Speaker 5: of friction that you know, that's certainly true. There also
Speaker 5: can be incredible points of overlap because at the end
Speaker 5: of the day, we're interested in the same thing. You know,
Speaker 5: we want there to be natural systems that can support
Speaker 5: vibrant population of birds and mammals and have natural places
Speaker 5: and so so this is a there's a lot of
Speaker 5: benefit I think to thinking about, you know, just what
Speaker 5: are the ways that we can get more people interested
Speaker 5: in the natural world.
Speaker 1: Yeah, see, I have persecution complex. So when we were
Speaker 1: talking and you're talking about as your database grows in
Speaker 1: Cornell Ornithology Lab and eBird would share information with management
Speaker 1: agencies right where my head went right away, as there's
Speaker 1: a thing that will happen now and in for instance,
Speaker 1: there was a one of the times recently when it
Speaker 1: looked like they were the US Fish and Wildlife of
Speaker 1: US will now and then petition to get the grizzly
Speaker 1: bear delisted. So the agency that manages the grizzly bear
Speaker 1: as an endangered species will occasionally actually move to unload
Speaker 1: their management, meaning they're saying, as the management agency, we
Speaker 1: suggest that these be removed from federal oversight, and they'll
Speaker 1: get it'll get litigated. One of the times it will
Speaker 1: seems so close to be moving to state management that
Speaker 1: a couple states did a draw they were going to
Speaker 1: issue I think Wyoming was going to issue twenty grizzly
Speaker 1: bear tags. Idaho is going to issue one grizzly bear tag.
Speaker 1: Hunters Montana chicken shit it out and wasn't going to
Speaker 1: do any and there was a movement for people to
Speaker 1: it was like, hey, go and put in these. So
Speaker 1: within the non hunting world, they were encouraging people to
Speaker 1: apply for the tags, try to get the tags so
Speaker 1: that they don't fall into hunter's hands. So the menu
Speaker 1: you told me that as some of the persecution complex,
Speaker 1: I immediately thought, those sons of bitches are going to
Speaker 1: underreport game birds in order to in order to deprive opportunity. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, luckily the.
Speaker 5: You know, the just like the hunting community, there there
Speaker 5: can be friendly competition. You know, the burden community kind
Speaker 5: of has the same thing. People want to be the
Speaker 5: person who's seen a.
Speaker 1: Lot of different speceis.
Speaker 5: They want to have that and so there's often enough
Speaker 5: enough pressure. And I mean I do think that there's
Speaker 5: a sincere belief too that when you have better information
Speaker 5: and can do better science, you're gonna have better decisions
Speaker 5: that people can that people can make. And I mean
Speaker 5: that's kind of the idea of what we're trying to
Speaker 5: do and that all these people are trying to help
Speaker 5: with is you know, right now, state agencies don't have
Speaker 5: the information that they need. You know, if RAWA passes,
Speaker 5: how are state agencies going to figure out exactly where
Speaker 5: they want to make the investment to have the biggest impact.
Speaker 5: As we have data sets like eBird, I can look
Speaker 5: at this at sort of comprehensive levels. You can really
Speaker 5: start identifying like, well, these are the places that you know,
Speaker 5: if you want to bring back populations of birds, these
Speaker 5: are the places where you could focus on and really
Speaker 5: have impact. And it's a way of figuring out how
Speaker 5: we take the sort of scarce resources that we have
Speaker 5: within the conservation community and really use them most effectively.
Speaker 1: I would just think that, like, as I think about
Speaker 1: it from a citizen scientist tool, it just seems to
Speaker 1: me that the sound recordings somehow more valuable, do you
Speaker 1: know what I mean? Because you're not running it through
Speaker 1: you're not running it through It's just less fallible than
Speaker 1: running it through people. I mean, and I'm not trying.
Speaker 1: I don't want anybody want to criticize like Ebert as
Speaker 1: a tool. But let's say Ebert had total adoption in America. Okay,
Speaker 1: so three hundred some million Americans are making a daily
Speaker 1: chore of chronicling what birds they see around them. I
Speaker 1: think you'd hit like such at that point, you'd hit
Speaker 1: that there was just so much information that any that
Speaker 1: mistakes and things would be drowned out right. But I
Speaker 1: can't picture in its current form how it could be.
Speaker 1: And you know, better me. But I can't picture in
Speaker 1: its current form spread globally that number of people that
Speaker 1: you could actually, like, really with confidence make management decisions
Speaker 1: about it by it. Like you even mentioned me one
Speaker 1: time the bird you were saying we were taking last
Speaker 1: night that flies down the center of a waterway and
Speaker 1: that they would they would not be reported because they're.
Speaker 3: Flying well the limitations to the aerial surveys in Montreal.
Speaker 1: Ok. Yeah, so.
Speaker 2: I get that question all the time, you know, how
Speaker 2: can we trust this?
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a that's a quicker way, and that's a
Speaker 1: quick way of saying, is like, how would you ever
Speaker 1: get to where you trusted enough that you're really looking
Speaker 1: at bird populations and not that you're looking at human habits? Right.
Speaker 2: That's so that's almost exactly how I phrase it. Is
Speaker 2: we got to make sure we're modeling the birds and
Speaker 2: not the birders, right, and we do that with all
Speaker 2: of the effort that's put in, so we know that
Speaker 2: if you go out for two and a half hours
Speaker 2: and you travel three miles, you are far more likely
Speaker 2: to see a given species than if I'm just sitting
Speaker 2: on my porch and make a checklist for five minutes.
Speaker 2: We account for that, we account for the expertise, like
Speaker 2: we talked about, so we know and you'll notice on
Speaker 2: our maps these are relative abundance, where we're not estimating
Speaker 2: actual abundance that would be you know, that's that's a
Speaker 2: huge ask of of E bird data because you know,
Speaker 2: in general, people are bad at counting.
Speaker 1: I get where you're like dive in a little bit
Speaker 1: when you say relative abundance.
Speaker 2: So relative abundance as people understand, Yeah, as we have
Speaker 2: defined it is. Uh, it is the average number of
Speaker 2: space or average number of individuals of a given species
Speaker 2: an expert E birder would expect to see in one
Speaker 2: of these three by three pixels at the optimal time
Speaker 2: of day for detection. And that's defined by the model
Speaker 2: traveling one kilometer and birding for one hour. So that's
Speaker 2: a that's a long definition of relative abundance.
Speaker 1: Well that's what it is. Hit me with one. Let's
Speaker 1: take the red breasted rob and okay in June or
Speaker 1: just give me any kind of example of what the
Speaker 1: number might be.
Speaker 2: So for roughed grouse here we're looking at it. This
Speaker 2: ranges from you know, almost nothing to fourteen is the
Speaker 2: darkest purple we can see on this map. So that
Speaker 2: would be.
Speaker 1: Man, I grew up in a really good gross spot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I knew it, you know.
Speaker 2: So that's and again relative abundance. You can think about
Speaker 2: that as there are more here than there are here. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and then this puts numbers to just how many more
Speaker 2: there are in a given spot.
Speaker 1: So if we look at what's interesting about this is
Speaker 1: you could have you could uniformally reduced by fifty rough
Speaker 1: grouse populations and that stays the same because it's relative, right.
Speaker 2: Yes, if you just cut it in half, so we
Speaker 2: can look at one, this is hooded merganzer. So rough
Speaker 2: grouse are not migratory. Hooded merganser is. So we can
Speaker 2: see this change across the year. And that's what we're
Speaker 2: looking at. Here is relative abundance at each week of
Speaker 2: the year.
Speaker 5: Back of.
Speaker 1: Man. This is the thing. So I want to explain
Speaker 1: people what we're looking at. We're looking at, this is
Speaker 1: the court, we're looking at. This is all off Ebert.
Speaker 2: So this is run through some very sophisticated models that
Speaker 2: account for all those things we've talked about as far
Speaker 2: as effort and account for environmental variables different land cover.
Speaker 2: We have more than eighty four variables in this model
Speaker 2: that account for things like elevation.
Speaker 1: Weather.
Speaker 2: We have hourly weather in this model attached to a checklist.
Speaker 2: We've got various water layers. We have tidal layers, mudflats,
Speaker 2: those kinds of things. We have all kinds of things
Speaker 2: that are accounted for in this to make sure that
Speaker 2: we're not just modeling where people go, but where they're
Speaker 2: actually seeing these birds.
Speaker 1: What you can watch here and so if people go
Speaker 1: to Eber they can find all this. Yes, yeah, what
Speaker 1: you're watching here is is like a color coded map
Speaker 1: showing bird densities as they migrate across the continent. And
Speaker 1: a thing I like about when I talk about like
Speaker 1: human error is when they're all gone. They're all gone, right,
Speaker 1: meaning when when everything migrates, nor if you're not seeing
Speaker 1: like little mistakes pop up, or is that because they've
Speaker 1: been filtered out?
Speaker 2: They may have been filtered out by the modeling process.
Speaker 2: Because at you know, where we are here in you
Speaker 2: know June or July into June is where we are now,
Speaker 2: You're not going to see any hooded morganzas on the
Speaker 2: Texas Gulf Coast.
Speaker 1: You shouldn't. That's the thing that surprises me is that
Speaker 1: that the migrations are so complete that you don't have more.
Speaker 1: We're just like some for some weird reason that hangs around,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 2: And there may be a reporter or to from there.
Speaker 2: But if it's just a reporter or to the way
Speaker 2: the modeling works the way, there's all this spatial filtering
Speaker 2: that goes on to make sure that you know, because
Speaker 2: if there is a hooded merganser there at this time
Speaker 2: of year, a lot of people are going to go
Speaker 2: see it, and a lot of people are going to
Speaker 2: put that on their checklist. So it in the raw
Speaker 2: Eyburn data, it's going to look like, you know, several
Speaker 2: hundred people saw hood in Merganza in that one spot
Speaker 2: that day. We're only going to use one of those
Speaker 2: checklists across that.
Speaker 1: Well, I filtered that stuff out, okay, right, that makes sense. Yeah,
Speaker 1: remember what was it a few years ago? Last year
Speaker 1: some birds showed up off the northeast, that stellar sea eagle. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the stellar sea eagle.
Speaker 5: Everybody was going to see. Yeah, and what.
Speaker 1: So were people when that stellar's see he took a
Speaker 1: wrong turn or screwed something up right and north of
Speaker 1: New England or something.
Speaker 5: Yeah, bird a bird in Japan, probably jumped over, went
Speaker 5: into Alaska, kept going going across, and then wound up
Speaker 5: in the northeast, maybe went down to Texas, maybe went
Speaker 5: back up. That bird then is something that you know,
Speaker 5: there's only one of them in the US.
Speaker 1: So if you want to see that a lot on
Speaker 1: the bird.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean at times, hundreds of reports of that
Speaker 5: individ gone.
Speaker 1: Look hell, yeah, did you really?
Speaker 5: We actually didn't because we had to manage a bunch
Speaker 5: of stuff, so we weren't to go.
Speaker 3: But you left to go see that Birden got in
Speaker 3: their car right away as soon.
Speaker 5: As and then when it changed states, they wanted not
Speaker 5: only did they want to see it in Massachuse, they
Speaker 5: wanted to make sure that they saw it in Maine.
Speaker 1: Because what's the advantage of that, Because it's a different states.
Speaker 5: It's a different lists, it's the same, it's the same thing. Like,
Speaker 5: you know, why would you want to you know, maybe
Speaker 5: shoot different different species of animals.
Speaker 1: Like it's in different.
Speaker 5: Maybe maybe I mean different species's whitetail.
Speaker 3: We can sponsor and we can initiate the sport of.
Speaker 5: A pro.
Speaker 1: Huge thing, because yeah, I am guilty of that. I'm
Speaker 1: real interested in what states I got a turkey in Yeah, okay.
Speaker 2: It is.
Speaker 1: I thought it was dumb. Get smart.
Speaker 5: But what ends up what ends up being pretty cool here, though,
Speaker 5: is when you have all those people that are going
Speaker 5: to see that that stellar seagull at some place, what
Speaker 5: happens is we can start to understand something about the
Speaker 5: sensor network, So the group of people that are going
Speaker 5: there and how their lists are different between them. So
Speaker 5: they're all there, they all are focused on stellar siegel,
Speaker 5: but we're asking them to give us a complete list
Speaker 5: of all the birds that they see, so we can
Speaker 5: start to tease about those differences that are between the
Speaker 5: observers to understand the actual natural biological signal by having
Speaker 5: people go and see those. So what we try to
Speaker 5: do is think strategically, like how do we use some
Speaker 5: of these unusual circumstances to our advantage to be able
Speaker 5: to tease apart the differences between biology and human behavior.
Speaker 1: So have you I feel that that would be a
Speaker 1: great example of somewhere where you could really spend a
Speaker 1: lot of time on demographics. Human demographics. Okay, so let's
Speaker 1: say you didn't follow the news all right, you don't
Speaker 1: follow the news at all, and all of a sudden.
Speaker 1: It's just that there's this huge sudden population of stellar
Speaker 1: sea eagles in Maine. Okay, would you look at that
Speaker 1: and uh, it's kind of two different questions, But would
Speaker 1: you look at that and immediately think that's got to
Speaker 1: be a single bird? You just would?
Speaker 5: You would, because we we understand basically with an eye bird,
Speaker 5: you know, we have all we have all this data
Speaker 5: now to tell us where birds are across time and space.
Speaker 5: We know what the maximum count ends up being in
Speaker 5: so when we look at something like that, we can
Speaker 5: we can see the difference between when something might be
Speaker 5: a phenomenon caused by weather or something like that. So
Speaker 5: there's there's been other cases where there's birds like shore birds.
Speaker 5: Let's say, where there have been several different individuals all
Speaker 5: of a bird that's usually pretty rare. In this case,
Speaker 5: we could say something like northern lapwing. It's a European
Speaker 5: species that's usually it's migratory there, very very rare that
Speaker 5: it makes it over to the US. But sometimes you
Speaker 5: can have these storm systems that can blow those birds
Speaker 5: over here. In that case, what we can see is
Speaker 5: that there might be counts of three birds at one place,
Speaker 5: five birds at another place, and we can understand sort
Speaker 5: of how those birds are moving and so if and
Speaker 5: because they're rare and unusual events, people want to take
Speaker 5: pictures of them because they're noteworthy, And so then we
Speaker 5: can actually go in and really dive in and say, okay,
Speaker 5: like let's look at the molt pattern on this bird
Speaker 5: and look at the exact where on the ttertules. And
Speaker 5: so we've been able to look at you know, in
Speaker 5: the case of that sea eagle, as people were seeing
Speaker 5: at different places. You know, we didn't just sort of
Speaker 5: make the assumption that it was the same bird. People
Speaker 5: looked at the exact featherwhere to understand like, okay, it
Speaker 5: looks like this is the same bird because look at
Speaker 5: this scapular feather and this weird pattern that it has.
Speaker 5: It's very unusual. Just in the same way that you know,
Speaker 5: we we can do with people. You know, it's a
Speaker 5: lot harder to do with birds. But when you're just
Speaker 5: looking at sort of one or two individuals all of
Speaker 5: a sudden, you can really you know, given the photographic
Speaker 5: equipment that people have available, we can really understand that
Speaker 5: with a lot of detail. Now, which is pretty cool.
Speaker 1: How many have you ever looked how many individuals logged
Speaker 1: that bird?
Speaker 5: You know, I haven't. I haven't looked.
Speaker 1: Do you feel that it'd be hundreds of thousands us? Yeah,
Speaker 1: got to hit off that bird. Yeah. Had you guys
Speaker 1: ever seen that? You didn't go, look, what is that
Speaker 1: bird on your bird list?
Speaker 5: No, it's not, which is even more that makes it more.
Speaker 5: I mean, this is not this would be like it's
Speaker 5: you know, we I have seen snow cock. Yeah, they mountains. Yeah,
Speaker 5: because it's a you know, part of it is tell
Speaker 5: me where later on?
Speaker 1: Well it was it ended up getting close?
Speaker 5: Yeah? And what's I mean part of it is, you know,
Speaker 5: whether it's birding or hunting, like it's an excuse to
Speaker 5: go and and spend some time and in kind of
Speaker 5: a magical place. And you know, the focus might be
Speaker 5: there on some specific thing, but sometimes what you remember
Speaker 5: the most from that may not even be related to that.
Speaker 5: So you know, going up to that, you know, glacial Lake,
Speaker 5: seeing rosy finches and pine grossbeaks, and I mean it's
Speaker 5: just a it's a pretty cool, magical place. And you know,
Speaker 5: whether it's hunting or fishing or birds like you it's
Speaker 5: just this excuse to go and spend some time in
Speaker 5: a natural system and smell the crisp air in the
Speaker 5: morning and and you know, listen to the natural world
Speaker 5: and sort of detach from the the day to day,
Speaker 5: which you know sometimes in great Uh.
Speaker 1: My dad had he ranked all birds into two rough categories.
Speaker 1: Uh those games birds. There's tweety birds and just the uh.
Speaker 1: And that's the thing like we growing up. Man, you
Speaker 1: knew some birds, but it was just there was Yeah,
Speaker 1: there was the ones that you hunt for, you know,
Speaker 1: and then the ones that you didn't. And man, I
Speaker 1: I missed so many good opportunities to learn birds. And
Speaker 1: I still struggle with like identifying all the hawks up high,
Speaker 1: you know, and people that can do that, I'm jealous
Speaker 1: of that shit bad. You know. Do you guys allow uh?
Speaker 1: Do you allow yourselves as professional ornithologists to have favorite birds? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Of course, Yeah, what's your favorite?
Speaker 3: My favorite is a long tailed duck, So yeah, I
Speaker 3: mean they you know, I grew up on the shore
Speaker 3: of Lake Ontario and there were just hundreds of them
Speaker 3: out there all winter long. Because I just love that
Speaker 3: experience watching them throughout the winter and then knowing that
Speaker 3: they were traveling all the way to the Arctic completely
Speaker 3: changing their plumage over getting those all black heads and everything.
Speaker 3: Just you know, even as a ten year old, I
Speaker 3: was like thinking, man, wouldn't it be cool to go
Speaker 3: all the way to their breeding grounds and imagining the
Speaker 3: migrations that they do. And so that's that's my favorite bird.
Speaker 1: Did you grow up knowing that bird by a different name?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, my family still it's like old squawk
Speaker 3: come over.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. It's a that we know. We had
Speaker 1: quite a few of those in some areas and mission
Speaker 1: you have quite a few of them, and adoption of
Speaker 1: the new name is not wise.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's mixed, a very mixed rate of adoption.
Speaker 1: So that's when you like, when you like favorite.
Speaker 5: It's tough for me. I mean, I don't I tend
Speaker 5: to be you know, whatever I'm looking at is is special.
Speaker 5: It's like you know, who's your favorite kid? Right, Like
Speaker 5: there's oh, there's something.
Speaker 1: Depends what what I'm talking about.
Speaker 5: They always ask what, No, I mean if today there's
Speaker 5: a there's a big owl, great gray owl.
Speaker 1: I know that that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's it's just you know, it's a it's an
Speaker 5: indicator of some of the you know, really nice boreal forests.
Speaker 5: Really really cool bird. You don't see them very often.
Speaker 5: Sometimes they stage these eruptions, you know, into Michigan or Minnesota, Wisconsin.
Speaker 5: I was fortunate one year to go up there during
Speaker 5: one of these big eruptions and so over two hundred
Speaker 5: in a day.
Speaker 1: And and you.
Speaker 5: Know, just just birds. And you know, anytime you see
Speaker 5: things that it has your answer asked these questions, like
Speaker 5: you know, what's what's driving that? Are they mostly young birds?
Speaker 5: Are they one year old birds? And you know, you
Speaker 5: you just start looking at things and thinking about things
Speaker 5: in a different, you know, different.
Speaker 1: Way mentioned that. I remember one time I can even
Speaker 1: tell you the owner of the field and the there
Speaker 1: was a there was a farm family, the zelden Rust family,
Speaker 1: and one day there was a snowy owl. So this
Speaker 1: is Michigan, you know, a snowy owl sitting in their field,
Speaker 1: and like that was the thing people went to watch,
Speaker 1: you know. Oh yeah. And then I remember my brother
Speaker 1: Danny hitting a great horn. He hit it, hit him
Speaker 1: and did real damage out the car, like broke the
Speaker 1: grill out of the car and stuff, you know, hitting
Speaker 1: that thing. And like you it's funny the way you
Speaker 1: get certain like bird interactions burned into your head. I
Speaker 1: remember being a little kid one day and even though
Speaker 1: we had a lot of rough grouse, like just seeing
Speaker 1: a rough grouse in the yard, which is the least
Speaker 1: rough grouse he looking, you know, like on a like
Speaker 1: on a mode lawn, right, and it burns in your
Speaker 1: head in a weird way.
Speaker 5: Totally. We had this right when COVID started. I remember
Speaker 5: the lab basically had just closed. Everybody brought their stuff home.
Speaker 5: We knew we were entering this sort of new space,
Speaker 5: and I was like, well, you know, at least we've
Speaker 5: got this rough grouse right outside our house that's drum
Speaker 5: and it was just like, you know, the world is
Speaker 5: a bunch of terrible stuff that's happening right now, but
Speaker 5: we have this grouse. And then the next day it's morning,
Speaker 5: we're drinking coffee, you know, and and we hear this
Speaker 5: and we on the second story. We go up there
Speaker 5: and there's this roughed grouse that's sitting there. Well, of course, Jesse,
Speaker 5: she's she's pretty.
Speaker 1: It's dead.
Speaker 5: It is dead on the roof. Well, it hits there's
Speaker 5: sort of a you know, there's the bottom level of
Speaker 5: the roof and then an upper roof and so it
Speaker 5: hit the window on the second store it fell, and
Speaker 5: so Jesse was also you know, we were traumatized, but
Speaker 5: she was also pretty excited that we would be able
Speaker 5: to have the rough grouse for the rough grouse for dinner.
Speaker 1: Time, getting the hard society society exactly.
Speaker 3: That was the week you couldn't find onions in the store.
Speaker 5: But it was, you know, it was this thing that
Speaker 5: was just like crushing.
Speaker 1: I was like, the world really is you know.
Speaker 5: And and then the next day, luckily there was a
Speaker 5: it wasn't our roughed grause that it was another bird
Speaker 5: that through there. So then I was like, okay, Jesse,
Speaker 5: we can I'm okay eating that eating the grasse tonight.
Speaker 5: What's your favorite bird?
Speaker 2: You know, I I love waterfowl, but I would say
Speaker 2: my my favorite bird is probably reddish egret. Really growing
Speaker 2: up on the on the Gulf coast, uh, seeing them
Speaker 2: was was special because they're they're I'm not gonna say
Speaker 2: they're rare where I where I was, uh in Alabama
Speaker 2: on the Gulf coast, but you're not going to see
Speaker 2: a ton of them when you're out and they uh,
Speaker 2: they they'll run like wind sprints to stir up the water,
Speaker 2: confuse fish, and then they'll shade the water with their
Speaker 2: wings and do this weird little dance and then pick
Speaker 2: fish out. It's just there, you know, a blast to watch.
Speaker 1: We used to have when we were kids. My dad
Speaker 1: would use a for a live well. He'd use the
Speaker 1: washing machine agitator like the like. So it's a those
Speaker 1: old steel perforated tanks. It was inside old washing machines
Speaker 1: and had that center at that center piece in it.
Speaker 1: But he'd just take those out and set them in
Speaker 1: the water because they're perforated and steal and that would
Speaker 1: be the live well. So when you caught bluegills, we'd
Speaker 1: throw our bluegills in this perforated tank. They just sat
Speaker 1: in the water, and then when there got to be
Speaker 1: enough of them in there, he'd go clean all the bluegills.
Speaker 1: And we used to watch blue herons and they would
Speaker 1: never figure out that those things couldn't get away, and
Speaker 1: they would stalk that tank, you know, from fifty yards away.
Speaker 1: Like every morning, he'd lay in there and stalk that
Speaker 1: tank and look up over the edge and so careful,
Speaker 1: and you might be like he's just sitting there and
Speaker 1: just grab it, you know, but he'd make his strike
Speaker 1: and grab it. You know. But my favorite bird man
Speaker 1: is I think it transcends burden. But it's a turkey. Yeah,
Speaker 1: wild turkey.
Speaker 5: Yeah, almost the national symbol.
Speaker 1: Well you know, it's funny. We just talked about this today. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't No, it wasn't really, but you know,
Speaker 1: it's a good it's a good story. It's a good story.
Speaker 1: It's a good story. So you know that whole deal
Speaker 1: that he was being like a little bit, he was
Speaker 1: being cute. Yeah, yeah, so e birds free, participations free,
Speaker 1: Merlin's free. We're with, Uh, we're with I told you this,
Speaker 1: but we're with a famous documentarian the other day and
Speaker 1: I was talking about how much I liked Merlin and
Speaker 1: he asked how much it was and I told him
Speaker 1: it was free, and he said, well, I'm going to
Speaker 1: get it because I don't buy anything on the internet,
Speaker 1: so it's free. And you don't even spy on people.
Speaker 3: No, No, we just want people to go out and
Speaker 3: look at birds and enjoy the natural world and care
Speaker 3: more about this stuff.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's effective, man, I have it is. Uh. Yeah, I've
Speaker 1: learned a ton about birds man from from doing it.
Speaker 1: I need to start remembering them better. But I've learned,
Speaker 1: I've learned a ton about birds.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's easy to kind of get those answers from
Speaker 3: Merlin and then not really think about it again. So
Speaker 3: we're thinking about features. It would be fun to, like,
Speaker 3: you know, test those skills over time.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you what though, It is so satisfying even
Speaker 1: though you don't recall the name it is. So it
Speaker 1: scratches the biggest itch to hear something off from the
Speaker 1: trees and then finally be able to put a name
Speaker 1: to it. And a lot of times it's some bird
Speaker 1: you heard about, you know, but you just you just
Speaker 1: didn't know. I didn't know what it was. So it's
Speaker 1: great and I love you. Guys put out so much
Speaker 1: great stuffs at the ornithology Lab. Yeah, it's impressive. So
Speaker 1: I encourage people to go and get in and participate
Speaker 1: in ibird Ebert not ibird participating eBird and overlog stuff
Speaker 1: you like to hunt. I'm joking, don't overlog something science
Speaker 1: and for you and for you uh Nevada Ruby Mountain hunters,
Speaker 1: keep keep logging them in because someday I'm gonna come
Speaker 1: look for one. Did you log yours? Yeah?
Speaker 5: They're in there.
Speaker 1: It's in there.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think it might be a photode.
Speaker 1: You might regret that, man, because people want to know
Speaker 1: where those birds are. They're not native though not native.
Speaker 1: Any guys want to throw in that. I failed to
Speaker 1: ask about that. You think I should have asked about You.
Speaker 3: Haven't been playing as much trivia lately, so kartin then, though,
Speaker 3: would be fun of like just tossing some extra We're
Speaker 3: gonna throw you some bird sounds and play along. Yeah,
Speaker 3: play along. There's a couple of warm ups for you
Speaker 3: that you.
Speaker 1: Know, like easy one, Yeah, easy ones, like a mallard.
Speaker 1: Hit me on the mallard.
Speaker 5: That's actually really tough because they sound a lot like
Speaker 5: a black duck. She would have played like black duck.
Speaker 1: Yeah, don't do don't do any kind of trick stuff.
Speaker 1: I do this one.
Speaker 3: You totally know that one?
Speaker 5: Ye?
Speaker 1: Why do I know that? One?
Speaker 3: Most frequently heard in June Northern region birds?
Speaker 1: I mean, I know it, but I can't tell you
Speaker 1: what it is. I don't know.
Speaker 5: Think about caribou. Yeah, you're on a caribou hunt.
Speaker 1: Yeah that's right, that's right. Yeah. Yeah, Because we used
Speaker 1: to remember, like remember the three Stooges and Curly to
Speaker 1: have that. Yeah, yeah, we used to talk about. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I forgot about that one. I told you I wasn't
Speaker 1: gonna do. Yeah, Okay, I know that bird. I know
Speaker 1: that one. That's the one up high in the tree tops.
Speaker 3: Yep, that's the one.
Speaker 1: It's a yeah, he lives up in the canopy in
Speaker 1: the old Girl's forest, the Viriowainson's rush, Swainson's throw Okay,
Speaker 1: Slainson's thrush.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So Swainson's rush is in the old growth and
Speaker 3: you know, across the North America and the breeding grounds
Speaker 3: and then they go all the way to South.
Speaker 1: America for the winters they do.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so they're gonna be So that.
Speaker 1: One is the one that when you're bear hunting in
Speaker 1: Southeast Alaska, it's always doing that. And that's one of
Speaker 1: the ones I wanted to zapp with Merlin, right because
Speaker 1: I wanted to zappa with Maryland to find out what
Speaker 1: it was. And that was totally satisfied. But then forgot
Speaker 1: what his fame was.
Speaker 3: But yeah, these guys are going into the Andes for
Speaker 3: the winter. So you imagine them flying at night almost NonStop,
Speaker 3: all the way uh down to the spots. So you know,
Speaker 3: when we we're thinking about protecting ham Dad is not
Speaker 3: just you know, where they're breeding up in North America,
Speaker 3: but also working with groups in Columbia and Ecuador and
Speaker 3: Peru to make sure that the wintering grounds are protected
Speaker 3: for these species and the stops that they have in between.
Speaker 3: So a lot.
Speaker 1: So those birds you're listening to in southeast Alaska going
Speaker 1: to South America.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: One of the things to notice that that Jesse was
Speaker 2: talking about is you can see how small the wintering
Speaker 2: range is, and when they come back to breed, you
Speaker 2: see how huge it is they disperse.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So so that's that's why it's important to get this
Speaker 2: this full annual cycle picture, so we can you know,
Speaker 2: really pinpoint where they are down here to help you
Speaker 2: conserve habitat and whatnot.
Speaker 3: Steve, for listeners at home, what are you seeing?
Speaker 1: Oh? So he it's uh what it goes along the
Speaker 1: face of the Andes. So it's all across the you know,
Speaker 1: all across the north a little bit north of the
Speaker 1: Boreal forest, right, but like from coastal Alaska, all across Canada.
Speaker 1: But then when they migrate, they consolidate around the Andes
Speaker 1: in South America. Is that down the spine of the
Speaker 1: Andes or the or the East Face. It's the spine
Speaker 1: of the Andes and some like, you know, some more north,
Speaker 1: but they really concentrate down there, and then they're and
Speaker 1: then they're Pacific to Atlantic, across the Arctic or across
Speaker 1: the North. God man, they like they're like a global bird,
Speaker 1: not global, but just using huge amounts of territory.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's really impressive.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of opportunities for vulnerability exactly. Yep.
Speaker 3: And you think about, you know, a bird like that migrating,
Speaker 3: they've got all those challenges along the way, whether it's
Speaker 3: you know, window strikes or big storms or you know,
Speaker 3: not having enough food before they take off on a
Speaker 3: long flight. There's lots of things that are contributing to
Speaker 3: major challenges.
Speaker 2: For a lot has to go right to get from
Speaker 2: the southern end of that range to the north.
Speaker 1: Kind'm gonna memorize that.
Speaker 3: Bird on a Swains and swain st Okay, So this
Speaker 3: one just guess like what state it was recorded, Just
Speaker 3: pick state.
Speaker 1: Nevada.
Speaker 3: So this one is Hawaii and it's a pretty special song.
Speaker 3: So you can hear it's kind of jazzy, bubbly. There's
Speaker 3: some pauses in there that's kind of interesting. And so
Speaker 3: this is the recording of a kawaioh and oos were
Speaker 3: her family and birds that lived on the Hawaiian islands.
Speaker 3: But they were hunted by the Polynesian emperors because they
Speaker 3: liked their feathers for the robes. They lost their habitat
Speaker 3: to cattle ranching, and pretty soon there was only one
Speaker 3: species of left, the kaio. And that bird that we
Speaker 3: were listening to was the last quaio is the last
Speaker 3: male to ever lived.
Speaker 5: And so he would play them again.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the last of its kind. Who recorded that
Speaker 1: This was.
Speaker 3: A fine prat nineteen eighty eight, And when you hear
Speaker 3: it again, it takes on this whole new meaning. Right,
Speaker 3: it's kind of melancholiny. And you hear those spaces in
Speaker 3: between the notes, and that's where the female would have
Speaker 3: completed the duet. So o o's were a dueting species,
Speaker 3: and we're only hearing half the song. We don't really
Speaker 3: know what the full song looks like.
Speaker 1: And eighty eight eighty eight, Yeah, nineteen eighty eight, I
Speaker 1: don't know. I didn't know a bird went extinct.
Speaker 3: In eighty eight yeah, it's this isn't you know a
Speaker 3: bird that's well known. There's still a lot of stories
Speaker 3: out there like that, are you know the actually Wi
Speaker 3: curlew went extinct in you know, probably the mid nineteen hundreds.
Speaker 3: But yeah, these are all sad stories that we're losing
Speaker 3: these species, but they're really meant to be inspiring that
Speaker 3: there's still an opportunity to save some of the species
Speaker 3: that are declining now.
Speaker 5: Well, and that and that Kawai oh you know, as
Speaker 5: people figured this out and this bird is kind of
Speaker 5: rediscovered in this area, it really did start to focus
Speaker 5: on conservation of the of of both in Kawai and
Speaker 5: other Hawaiian islands and trying to figure out how you
Speaker 5: pull together these partnerships of groups like the nature conservancies
Speaker 5: states to think about and you know, how you how
Speaker 5: you can set aside habitat, create connectivity to move for
Speaker 5: birds to be able to move and oftentimes, you know,
Speaker 5: it's it's birds that are the things that first highlight
Speaker 5: that there's something that could be going wrong in a system.
Speaker 5: And so why while Kawaii oh oh is you know,
Speaker 5: it's the first the first family of birds that we've lost,
Speaker 5: you know, really in modern times where it's it's not
Speaker 5: just that individual species, but as you go up and
Speaker 5: it's not just you know, the genus that those birds
Speaker 5: were in, but a fairly long lineage of birds that
Speaker 5: you know, all of the representatives of them are now gone.
Speaker 5: That that power that birds have, you know now when
Speaker 5: you hear that sound and that bit of knowledge that
Speaker 5: you have that it's human actions that have caused that
Speaker 5: to take place. You know, really has this change you
Speaker 5: know that I think when you hear that sound now
Speaker 5: is the power of birds and the ability to say like,
Speaker 5: oh my gosh, this is this is not a sustainable
Speaker 5: way that we're living. This isn't going to be It's
Speaker 5: certainly not sustainable for them, they're gone. It's probably not
Speaker 5: sustainable for us. We really need to change our behavior.
Speaker 5: And then you can look at things like bald eagle.
Speaker 5: You know that the same thing was happening to populations
Speaker 5: of bald eagle or you know, you may find this
Speaker 5: hard to believe, but Canada Goose. You know, you look
Speaker 5: at maximum Canada Goose, the success or maybe even over
Speaker 5: success of the effect that human action can have when
Speaker 5: we understand sort of what's happening. You know, people are
Speaker 5: people are pretty amazing. We can shrew things up real well,
Speaker 5: but we also have the power to change our actions,
Speaker 5: you know, protect natural places, restore the places that we've lost,
Speaker 5: and then change the way that we're living with natural systems.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Uh. You know, my dad was a hunter in
Speaker 1: the late forties early fifties, and their ideas and attitudes
Speaker 1: about geese were so different. And for a long time
Speaker 1: there was a goose on the Sand County Almanac. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it was like a special thing. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: he wrote all about like the call the goose, you know,
Speaker 1: and now it people like just go golfing, dude. It's like,
Speaker 1: you right, exactly is there more?
Speaker 3: Yeah, we got here's one.
Speaker 1: I haven't got any right yet.
Speaker 3: Inching out So.
Speaker 5: So you can hear the Swainson's thrush in there. There's
Speaker 5: lots of stuff.
Speaker 2: Give me a hint.
Speaker 5: It's not a bird.
Speaker 1: Ess is trying to trying. She's trying to trick you,
Speaker 1: like I don't know, like a porcupine, I don't know.
Speaker 1: A beaver.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I dropped that microphone on the top of
Speaker 3: a beaver lodge.
Speaker 1: You can hear them in there.
Speaker 3: And then you're hearing the kits in the lodge.
Speaker 1: Yea, my wife was telling me about the Yeah, my
Speaker 1: wife was listening to recordings of what they sound like.
Speaker 1: I was like, that's not true. She's like, no, man,
Speaker 1: they're vocal, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like for the whole hour they just kept doing that.
Speaker 1: But let me hear that again. My wife was playing
Speaker 1: it's playing that for me. Where is that?
Speaker 3: That's about runner miles north of Toronto.
Speaker 1: Yeah, my wife was talking about how much noise beavers
Speaker 1: make and I was like, no, they don't.
Speaker 3: I didn't know until I dropped the microphone on the
Speaker 3: top of the lodge. But then like one more kind
Speaker 3: of out there.
Speaker 1: That's a bomb falling.
Speaker 5: Not what I thought.
Speaker 1: It was a space ship.
Speaker 3: The UFOs didn't.
Speaker 1: Oh, man, I have no idea. That's crazy.
Speaker 3: So this is bearded seal.
Speaker 1: Oh that's a bearded seal microphone underwater.
Speaker 2: That's crazy.
Speaker 3: It turns out there starting to sing louder now that
Speaker 3: there's more industrial noise under water this this are increasing
Speaker 3: their volume to try to compensate.
Speaker 1: That's great noise, loud and proud what I get zero?
Speaker 5: But are you glad you played?
Speaker 1: I'm glad I played. I got a zero and I
Speaker 1: think that there's a problem in my brain with like,
Speaker 1: there's the problem my brain with remembering, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: like as signing noise.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, it might help you to look at
Speaker 3: the spectrograms and the Merlin app because if you're more visual,
Speaker 3: you can kind of start to see the pattern of
Speaker 3: notes like in a picture, which really helps me remember.
Speaker 1: So, yeah, but I can do. I can listen to
Speaker 1: f M radio and tell you what song it is,
Speaker 1: three three beats in.
Speaker 2: It's just practice familiarity.
Speaker 5: Just swab out your like, yeah, you're.
Speaker 3: Driving around and just put on bird. So that's what
Speaker 3: I did.
Speaker 1: That's great. Thanks, thanks for doing that. Well, thank you
Speaker 1: very much for coming on. I hope people keep. I
Speaker 1: hope people go and get the tools and start logging
Speaker 1: their bird stuff and be like a citizen scientist.
Speaker 5: Man, Well, we'll see you on there, will Yah.
Speaker 1: We'll be able to look up my stuff and check
Speaker 1: my work. Yeah, give you some feedback. You're doing it wrong.
Speaker 5: We gotta we got a team, and we got a
Speaker 5: team in Montana that'll probably be in touch if you report.
Speaker 5: If you report that cock of the rock, they will
Speaker 5: definitely flag you.
Speaker 1: Oh really, this they monitor it. We we keep We
Speaker 1: do keep a list of we do keep a list
Speaker 1: of the birds we see in certain areas, and we
Speaker 1: keep a good list of the birds we see in
Speaker 1: our yard. And it was fun, is ye today I heard
Speaker 1: I was on the phone with someone I was gonna
Speaker 1: work call, and I was hearing this bird. I was like, man,
Speaker 1: I don't think that's like. It was like a hawk
Speaker 1: and a tree but didn't quite sound like a redtail,
Speaker 1: but doing that like again and again, and I actually
Speaker 1: at one point said I have to go from it.
Speaker 1: I'll call you right back. Hung up. The call opened up, Merlin,
Speaker 1: because I couldn't. Weirdly, I couldn't open it up while
Speaker 1: I was on the phone.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, that was your the audio.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was pissed about that. So I hung up
Speaker 1: my call, turned it on. That bird quit doing that noise.
Speaker 1: Called the person back and minute I got him back
Speaker 1: on the phone and started up again, hung up, turned
Speaker 1: it back on. The bird quit. After the call I took,
Speaker 1: I told my kid to take that phone, and I said,
Speaker 1: I want you to go over in the neighbor's yard
Speaker 1: and find out that bird. And he came back a
Speaker 1: while later said he never did it again. So to
Speaker 1: this day, it's still a mystery. But I was going
Speaker 1: to add it to the Ronela family list, but wasn't
Speaker 1: able to do it. All right, But thank you guys
Speaker 1: very much. I appreciate it. Man. Yeah, I hope that
Speaker 1: you're able to solve problems and and help us make
Speaker 1: good habitat decisions.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, it takes a team, yeah, to save to save
Speaker 1: America's birds, So thank you very much. O.
Speaker 6: Ride on on the seal Gray, shine like silver in
Speaker 6: the sun. Ride ride on alone, sweetheart.
Speaker 4: We're done beat this damn horse today, taking her new one. Ride.
Speaker 4: We're done beat this damn horse today, So take your
Speaker 4: new one and ride on.
Speaker 6: Mhm.