Speaker 1: Pushkin. Imagine there's a place someone like a window open.
Speaker 1: Imagine there's a place in our world where the known
Speaker 1: things go. A corridor of the mind lined with metal
Speaker 1: file cases, stocked with dead birds, lined up in rows, yellow, lime, green, blue,
Speaker 1: flame red like gems in a jewel case. This place,
Speaker 1: this aviary, stores the facts that matter and matters of fact.
Speaker 1: It lies in a time between now and then. The
Speaker 1: sign on the door reads the last Archive. Step outside
Speaker 1: to a house in Silver Spring, Maryland, in the year
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty eight, Rachel Carson, a nature writer, had just
Speaker 1: started work on a new book. She hadn't decided what
Speaker 1: to call it yet, but she knew what she wanted
Speaker 1: to say. People all over the country bird lovers noticed
Speaker 1: something in nineteen fifty eight. When spring came, the birds
Speaker 1: didn't come. The robins didn't come. The tufted titmis didn't come,
Speaker 1: the songbirds, the shore birds. There were just very few birds.
Speaker 1: Carson threw herself into a world of research, even though
Speaker 1: she was busy, exhausted. She was taking care of both
Speaker 1: her adopted son, a six year old boy named Roger,
Speaker 1: and her eighty nine year old mother, who was dying.
Speaker 1: Carson read and she researched all summer. That fall, the
Speaker 1: postman brought a package to her door, a gift for Roger.
Speaker 1: It was a vinyl record, American Bird Songs, Volume one.
Speaker 1: Here are the songs and calls of sixty familiar birds
Speaker 1: as recorded in the woods, fields and gardens of North
Speaker 1: America the Laboratory of Ornithology at Carnell University. Some of
Speaker 1: the birds are widely distributed, others are restricted to special habitat.
Speaker 1: Roger listened to this record over and over. Carson sat
Speaker 1: down to write a thank you note to the sender.
Speaker 1: One of our actors is going to read it. But
Speaker 1: let me just say first that I've listened to recordings
Speaker 1: of the actual Rachel Carson, who has sort of an
Speaker 1: odd voice, and this really is what she sounds like,
Speaker 1: so much so that it gives me the chills. The
Speaker 1: record of bird Song that came Friday gave Roger the
Speaker 1: greatest delight, First the thrill of receiving a package by mail,
Speaker 1: then the pleasure in the record itself. He has a
Speaker 1: very sweet feeling for all living things and loves to
Speaker 1: go out with me and look and listen to all
Speaker 1: that goes on. I know he will have great pleasure
Speaker 1: in recognizing the song from this record, First the mocking
Speaker 1: bird that still pours his song down our chimney, then
Speaker 1: the cardinals that begin to whistle in January, and all
Speaker 1: the rest. There was a special and unheralded thrill for
Speaker 1: me in the record. During the song of the wood peewee,
Speaker 1: I heard in the background the unmistakable voice of the veery,
Speaker 1: not once, but several times. Of all, the bird song
Speaker 1: that has the quality of purest magic for me, considered
Speaker 1: America's foremost songbird is the hermit thrush, now singing from
Speaker 1: a balsam spire in the Adirondack Mountains. How do you
Speaker 1: even record a hermit thrush atop a balsam spire in
Speaker 1: the Adirondack Mountains? And what happened to the birds in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty eight? Welcome to the last Archive, the show
Speaker 1: about how we know what we know and why it
Speaker 1: seems lately as if we don't know anything anymore. A
Speaker 1: while ago, when I was researching an essay about Rachel
Speaker 1: Carson for The New Yorker, I got completely lost in
Speaker 1: these recordings of bird songs. Carson was writing a book
Speaker 1: while Roger played these thirty threes, over and over again.
Speaker 1: It was called Silent Spring, and it changed the world.
Speaker 1: But I can't shake the feeling that if you're writing
Speaker 1: sound Spring now, nothing would change. Carson is to me
Speaker 1: a kind of canary in a coal mine, a warning.
Speaker 1: People were able to listen to her then and to
Speaker 1: act on what she said in a way that people
Speaker 1: don't listen to warnings and act on them these days
Speaker 1: until it seems it's too late. This season, we've been
Speaker 1: trying to solve a Who've done it? Who killed Truth?
Speaker 1: And this might sound nuts, but I decided to do
Speaker 1: what I thought maybe Carson would do. She would ask
Speaker 1: the birds next, the veries descending spirals. Rachel Carson was
Speaker 1: born in western Pennsylvania in nineteen oh seven on a
Speaker 1: sixty five acre farm along the Allegheny River. Her mother
Speaker 1: took her for long walks, teaching her the names and
Speaker 1: songs of all the birds. This is almost always how
Speaker 1: it works, parent to child, the passing on of a
Speaker 1: body of knowledge. All her life, Carson was fascinated by birds.
Speaker 1: Wherever Carson went, she'd listen, and then there were the
Speaker 1: sounds of other smaller birds, the rattling call of the
Speaker 1: kingfisher that perched between forays after fish on the posts
Speaker 1: of the dock, the call of the phoebe that nested
Speaker 1: under the eaves of the cabin, the red starts that
Speaker 1: foraged in the birches on the hill behind the cabin,
Speaker 1: and forever, it seemed to me asked each other the
Speaker 1: way to wiscast it, for I could easily twist their
Speaker 1: syllables into the witch's wiscassette witch's wiscassette. The oven bird
Speaker 1: sometimes called teacher bird from its song. People have always
Speaker 1: listened to birds, and they've been trying to write down
Speaker 1: their songs for thousands of years. A lot of birds,
Speaker 1: like the cuckoo or the chickadee, are named after the
Speaker 1: songs they sing. The first person to try to render
Speaker 1: birdsong in musical notation did that in the year sixteen fifty.
Speaker 1: Eighteenth century scholars then tried to understand birdsong not as
Speaker 1: music but as language, and people started trying to record
Speaker 1: the sound of birds in eighteen eighty nine, almost as
Speaker 1: soon as the phonograph was invented. As a little girl,
Speaker 1: Chursen kept a list of birds, writing them down in
Speaker 1: a notebook when she spotted them. Counting birds making bird
Speaker 1: lists had just become a hobby in the United States.
Speaker 1: Bird enthusiasts hoped this hobby would replace bird hunting because
Speaker 1: people had begun to notice that certain species of birds
Speaker 1: were disappearing, especially one, the passenger pigeon a dove. In
Speaker 1: the seventeenth century, over North America, flocks of passenger pigeons
Speaker 1: rushing across the sky could block out the sun for
Speaker 1: hours and hours and hours. The flocks were huge, some
Speaker 1: estimated more than two hundred miles long. You could knock
Speaker 1: passenger pigeons out of the sky with a stick by
Speaker 1: the dozens. People ate pigeon pot pie, broiled pigeons, roast pigeons,
Speaker 1: stuffed pigeon, you get the idea. They gorged on pigeons.
Speaker 1: By the middle of the nineteenth century, shooting passenger pigeons
Speaker 1: had become a sport. In eighteen sixty nine, one hunter
Speaker 1: made a bet that he could kill five hundred in
Speaker 1: a single day. Took him only nine hours. Hunters would
Speaker 1: ride wagons out to pigeon nesting sites and slaughter them
Speaker 1: by the thousands, then ship the carcass as to cities
Speaker 1: by train on ice cars. You could make a lot
Speaker 1: of money shooting passenger pigeons, or you could just do
Speaker 1: it for practice. Dead birds became a fashion. Like fur coats.
Speaker 1: Women wore bird feathers on their hats, and sometimes whole birds, terns, herons, gulls, egrets.
Speaker 1: In eighteen eighty six, an ornithologist in New York counted
Speaker 1: the birds on women's hats. He spotted one hundred and
Speaker 1: seventy four birds from forty species in just two days. Finally,
Speaker 1: by eighteen ninety, people began to notice the passenger pigeons
Speaker 1: had disappeared. Spring came and the flocks didn't come back.
Speaker 1: Some people thought they'd migrated to Argentina or something. Those
Speaker 1: are the bird, declined denialists, but most people weren't denialists.
Speaker 1: Newspaper writers began to lament this sad passing their children
Speaker 1: would never know a passenger pigeon. Toronto Globe and Mail,
Speaker 1: June thirtieth, nineteen hundred. The present generation knows little or
Speaker 1: nothing of wild pigeons except by hearsay, and is apt
Speaker 1: to scoff at the stories of old timers when they
Speaker 1: tell of the enormous flocks of these beautiful birds that
Speaker 1: numbered millions and fairly darkened the face of the sun
Speaker 1: in their flight, or actually broke down large lines of
Speaker 1: trees when they sit on it. Some people tried to
Speaker 1: do something. They founded the first conservation movements, the Audubon Society,
Speaker 1: the American Ornithologists Union. I believe you have an announcement
Speaker 1: to make. They held gatherings like this one. On December ninth,
Speaker 1: nineteen o nine in New York, someone proposed a reward
Speaker 1: of one hundred dollars for a freshly killed passenger pigeon.
Speaker 1: The idea was to preserve it for posterity or for science,
Speaker 1: or both, but people still had misgivings about killing birds,
Speaker 1: even for sciences. You have something to say, Indeed, sir,
Speaker 1: I would not kill a specimen for one thousand dollars,
Speaker 1: even to prove that I had seen one. And I
Speaker 1: wish that everyone else feels as I do. All offers
Speaker 1: for skins or dead birds ought to be withdrawn because
Speaker 1: at the present crisis, these might result in killing the
Speaker 1: last pair. Yes, I wish to withdraw my offer of
Speaker 1: one thousand dollars for a freshly killed passenger pigeon. Well,
Speaker 1: then why not let your offer stem for the location
Speaker 1: of a live specimen. I would gladly give two hundred
Speaker 1: dollars for that. I am authorized to offer the following
Speaker 1: award three hundred dollars for first information of a nesting
Speaker 1: pair of wild passenger pigeons undisturbed. Once they finally got organized,
Speaker 1: bird lovers would go on to have a lot of influence.
Speaker 1: But for the passenger pigeon, it came to eight Boston Globe,
Speaker 1: December eighteenth, nineteen ten. One solitary passenger pigeon, ending her
Speaker 1: life at the Zoological Garden in Cincinnati, is today all
Speaker 1: that remains of an American species that early in the
Speaker 1: last century swarmed over the continent in flocks numbering billions.
Speaker 1: Her name was Martha. When Rachel Carson was seven years old, Martha,
Speaker 1: the last passenger pigeon, died The next year, eight year
Speaker 1: old Rachel wrote her very first story. It's about a
Speaker 1: pair of friends looking for a house. She kept on
Speaker 1: writing and writing about birds. Countless discoveries made the day memorable.
Speaker 1: The bob White's nest tightly packed with eggs, the oriole's
Speaker 1: aerial cradle, the framework of sticks which the cuckoo calls
Speaker 1: a nest, and the lichen covered home of the humming
Speaker 1: bird Carson went to college and then in nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: two to graduate school, enrolling in a PhD program at
Speaker 1: Johns Hopkins studying zoology, but after a few years she
Speaker 1: had to drop out to take a job to feed
Speaker 1: her family. She never married, but during the depression she
Speaker 1: supported her parents and her sister and brother and their
Speaker 1: kids too. She started working for what became the US
Speaker 1: Fish and Wildlife Service, mainly writing reports and producing a
Speaker 1: radio program. She kept on thinking about birds, though, and
Speaker 1: so do a lot of other people. During the Second
Speaker 1: World War, the BBC tried to keep up its own
Speaker 1: long standing tradition of broadcasting bird song over the radio
Speaker 1: to help people keep calm and carry on. But in
Speaker 1: this recording you can hear the sound of Royal Air
Speaker 1: Force bombers flying above the birds. After the war, Rachel
Speaker 1: Carson wrote a beautiful, stirring study of the sea. The
Speaker 1: Sea Around Us, appeared in The New Yorker as a
Speaker 1: profile of the Sea, the New Yorker's first ever profile
Speaker 1: of something other than a person who won a National
Speaker 1: Book Award, who was on the New York Times bestseller
Speaker 1: list for a record breaking eighty six weeks. She bought
Speaker 1: a little summer house in Maine, where she wrote another bestseller,
Speaker 1: The Edge of the Sea. In nineteen fifty five. She
Speaker 1: was still taking care of all her family, her mother
Speaker 1: and niece, and her niece's little boy, Roger. That year,
Speaker 1: Carson took Roger for a walk in the woods. He
Speaker 1: was three. Roger went along to listen for veeries, his
Speaker 1: first bird walk, I guess, and I'd like to have
Speaker 1: had a movie. He was told we'd have to be quiet,
Speaker 1: so he tiptoed along the path with elaborate caution, talking
Speaker 1: in a loud whisper. He seemed to find the whole
Speaker 1: experience very exciting. Roger's still around. My producer Ben, and
Speaker 1: I'd drove out to his house to meet him and
Speaker 1: his wife, Wendy and their old yellow lab. I came
Speaker 1: to talk about birds and about that album A Bird
Speaker 1: Song had come in the mail in nineteen fifty eight.
Speaker 1: And would you any more microphones? Yeah? I see that.
Speaker 1: I shouldn't have even bothered with the recording. Roger's in
Speaker 1: the recording business. That's why his house is full of microphones.
Speaker 1: But as for birds, he never got the bug the
Speaker 1: way Rachel Carson did. She tried very hard, but you know,
Speaker 1: the truth is I was a little boy, and you
Speaker 1: know I appreciated it, and I appreciate the birds. But
Speaker 1: but you know, I was never the house in Maine
Speaker 1: had they used to have these stairs that would go
Speaker 1: down and she could go down there and lie there
Speaker 1: for three hours listening and looking at the birds, and
Speaker 1: you know, I'd be lucky to make five minutes. Roger
Speaker 1: was kind of embarrassed that he didn't turn out to
Speaker 1: be a bird expert. Carson said that he was as
Speaker 1: lively as seventeen crickets. He just couldn't sit still long enough,
Speaker 1: quietly enough to really watch birds. I get that I
Speaker 1: don't have the bird bug either. I have more of
Speaker 1: the dog bug. Hi, baby, get a word in here.
Speaker 1: There were a lot of birds at the bird feeder
Speaker 1: outside Roger's window. Neither of us had any idea what
Speaker 1: a single one of them was. Instead, we played with
Speaker 1: his dog. Something else we have in common. We've both
Speaker 1: been in love at different times with this album, The
Speaker 1: mocking Bird is a favorite, singing and ever changing medley,
Speaker 1: often repeating each phrase three to five times. The spring
Speaker 1: of nineteen fifty eight, after Roger turned six, that was
Speaker 1: the Silent Spring when birdwatchers noticed that there just weren't
Speaker 1: a lot of birds around. It turned out that the
Speaker 1: birds had been poisoned by DDT, a pesticide the towns
Speaker 1: had been spraying all over the country. Members of an
Speaker 1: organization called the Committee Against Mass Poisoning filed a lawsuit
Speaker 1: in New York to try to stop the spraying. They
Speaker 1: asked Carson to write about it. They also center that
Speaker 1: album Birdsong for Roger. Carson wanted to cover the trial,
Speaker 1: but taking care of Roger and her mother, she really
Speaker 1: wasn't in much of a position to. She thought, though,
Speaker 1: that another New Yorker writer maybe ought to cover the trial.
Speaker 1: It has occurred to me that eb White might be
Speaker 1: interested for various reasons, and it is the sort of
Speaker 1: thing he could be devastating about. If he chose, I
Speaker 1: thought I might write him. Eb White was one of
Speaker 1: the best loved writers in the country. Dear mister White,
Speaker 1: it would delight me beyond measure if you should be
Speaker 1: moved to take up your own pen against this nonsense,
Speaker 1: though that is far too mild a word. There is
Speaker 1: an enormous body effect waiting to support anyone who will
Speaker 1: speak out to the public, and I shall be happy
Speaker 1: to supply the references. Rachel Carson. White said no, that
Speaker 1: Carson should write the article. He later told her that
Speaker 1: he himself didn't know a chlorinated hydrocarbon from a squash bug,
Speaker 1: and so Carson did write the article. It took her
Speaker 1: four years and agreed to the size of a book.
Speaker 1: It's the book she'd always be known for. It reads
Speaker 1: to me like a eulogy for the last passenger pigeon Martha,
Speaker 1: as if all the birds were the last of their species,
Speaker 1: as if all the living things might disappear. There was
Speaker 1: a strange stillness the birds, for example, where had they gone?
Speaker 1: Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding
Speaker 1: stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen
Speaker 1: anywhere were moribund. They trembled violently and could not fly.
Speaker 1: It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that
Speaker 1: had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens,
Speaker 1: and scores of other bird voices. There was now no sound.
Speaker 1: Only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.
Speaker 1: For a long time, Carson called the book men against
Speaker 1: the earth. Then she came up with a new title,
Speaker 1: Silent Spring, was published in The New Yorker in the
Speaker 1: summer of nineteen sixty two, and as a book a
Speaker 1: few months later. Afternoon, I have several announcements to make.
Speaker 1: The President John F. Kennedy was asked about it at
Speaker 1: a press conference. There appears to be growing concern among
Speaker 1: scienas such a possibility of dangerous long range side effects
Speaker 1: from the widespread use of DDT and other pesticides. Have
Speaker 1: you considered asking the Department of Culture or the Public
Speaker 1: Health Service to take a closer look at this? Yes,
Speaker 1: and I know that they already are, I think particularly
Speaker 1: of course, since Miss Carson's book, But they are examining
Speaker 1: the matter. A few books have so wholly changed the world.
Speaker 1: Miss Carson's book led to the passage of the Clean
Speaker 1: Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Wilderness Act, the
Speaker 1: Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and it
Speaker 1: helped establish the Environmental Protection Agency. At least for a
Speaker 1: while too, the spring of DDT slowed down. Today, It's
Speaker 1: not just the birds. It's not just DDT. It really
Speaker 1: is man against the Earth. We've poisoned the entire planet
Speaker 1: with carbon emissions. We've changed the very climate, clean water,
Speaker 1: clean air. When it comes to carbon, there is no silence.
Speaker 1: There's a flood of fossil fuel industry pr great, gushing
Speaker 1: gobs of it, like Xon touting its clean gas over
Speaker 1: one million miles to pool that xons advanced clean engine
Speaker 1: formula will keep entire fuel systems running clean and intake vowels.
Speaker 1: When the birds went silent, and Rachel Carson noticed and
Speaker 1: wrote about it, that changed everything. Now we notice everything,
Speaker 1: the species extinctions, the rising temperatures, the melting ice, the
Speaker 1: frightening weather, the floods and fires, the refugees, the spread
Speaker 1: of diseases, the pandemics. We notice, but we don't do
Speaker 1: nearly enough. Why I still think the birds have an answer.
Speaker 1: The Morse code of the yellow bellied sapsucker is less
Speaker 1: regular than the drum of other woodbeckers, and it's call
Speaker 1: note as harsh. I mean, like a collect baseball cards.
Speaker 1: You have dinosaurs, you count birds. You when you started
Speaker 1: counting boods three you're kidding. That's Ken Rosenberg and applied
Speaker 1: conservationist at the Cornell Lab forn Mythology in Ithaca, New York.
Speaker 1: He's lead author of a huge study published in the
Speaker 1: journal Science it demonstrated that close to three billion birds
Speaker 1: have disappeared from the United States and Canada since nineteen seventy.
Speaker 1: My producer Ben and I went to see him at
Speaker 1: Cornell and we went for a walk to listen for
Speaker 1: birds in a sanctuary called sap Sucker Woods. What do
Speaker 1: we sing over there? Cardinal? I felt haunted there by
Speaker 1: Rachel Carson. I don't know that she'd ever been to
Speaker 1: Sapsucker Woods, but it's the place she would have loved.
Speaker 1: While she was writing Sound Spring, she'd been an unbearable
Speaker 1: pain from surgery and radiation. She could barely walk. She'd
Speaker 1: been treated for tumors on her breasts and cancer had spread.
Speaker 1: She'd go on TV wearing a wig. She testified before Congress,
Speaker 1: hiding from everyone that she'd come in on a wheelchair.
Speaker 1: She died in nineteen sixty four, only fifty six years old.
Speaker 1: She had her ashes spread in the sea, her ideas
Speaker 1: spread everywhere, in the flight of every bird. Rachel Carson's.
Speaker 1: One of Rachel Carson's close friends who was Chandler Robbins,
Speaker 1: who worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and
Speaker 1: they would go bird watching together. In response to Rachel's work,
Speaker 1: Chandler Robbins created the Breeding Bird Survey, the North American
Speaker 1: Breeding Survey, and it was just this vision he had
Speaker 1: that Wow, we could count birds everywhere, and it is
Speaker 1: the primary source of all our bird data. That's what
Speaker 1: our whole paper was really based on, was fifty years
Speaker 1: of Breeding Bird Survey data. It's as if Carson is
Speaker 1: one of Rosenberg's co authors. I love that and birds
Speaker 1: are a body of evidence. After the disappearance of the
Speaker 1: passenger pigeon, the Audubon Society had urged people not to
Speaker 1: hunt birds, but to go out and count them, and
Speaker 1: they did. Their lists had just kept piling up count
Speaker 1: after count after count data. Every year. At Christmas, there's
Speaker 1: this thing called the Christmas Bird Count. All over the country.
Speaker 1: People get up in the morning, go meet up in
Speaker 1: assigned spot with other birders, and fan out to count birds.
Speaker 1: It's like the US Census, except not every ten years
Speaker 1: every year, and not done by a government agency, but
Speaker 1: just by regular people. Bird counting is probably the richest
Speaker 1: kind of citizen science ever known. We had a data
Speaker 1: set from nineteen seventy to twenty seventeen, forty eight year
Speaker 1: data set, and that was the primary data set we
Speaker 1: also we also used the Christmas Bird Count, which dates
Speaker 1: back even farther, so we were pretty blown away when
Speaker 1: we ran those numbers and found this net loss of
Speaker 1: three billion birds across five hundred and twenty nine species.
Speaker 1: So that's the big story, is that not only are
Speaker 1: a lot of species declining in their population, but we
Speaker 1: are seeing this tremendous total overall loss of abundance of birds,
Speaker 1: which is what's going to have bigger effects on the ecosystems.
Speaker 1: The abundant red eyed bureos in the tree tops can
Speaker 1: become monotonous and the regularity of their short, robin like phrases.
Speaker 1: I started asking Rosenberg about how they made those recordings
Speaker 1: decades ago, and he said he really didn't know anything
Speaker 1: about them. But then, just at that moment, a guy
Speaker 1: just happened to walk past on this little wooden bridge
Speaker 1: we were on, and Rosenberg called him over. Actually, Leo
Speaker 1: probably narrow spit because he has tourist of the lab.
Speaker 1: Leo Sack, a public program's assistant and librarian as a
Speaker 1: lab I'm not I'm not a historic expert on this. Yes,
Speaker 1: I'm on the visitor center team. I do some tourist
Speaker 1: of the building. So my understanding is that in nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty nine, Fox Movie Tone approached Arthur Allen and said,
Speaker 1: we have a new technology that we're trying out putting
Speaker 1: sound into movies instead of having silent films, and we
Speaker 1: want to show off this new technology using birdsong, and
Speaker 1: can you help us get some recordings of birdsong. Arthur A.
Speaker 1: Allen was the guy who started the lab here. Also
Speaker 1: he is the voice on that old Cornell Birdsong album.
Speaker 1: This is him ros livers and shorter phrases from Canada
Speaker 1: to Florida. In nineteen fifteen, the year after Martha the
Speaker 1: Passenger pigeon died, Professor Allen taped up a sign on
Speaker 1: his office door. It said Laboratory of Warnithology. The door
Speaker 1: was just a door to his office, but he planted
Speaker 1: his flag. I like to think of that lab is
Speaker 1: a little like the last archive. Imagine there's a place
Speaker 1: in our world where the birds go. So when Fox
Speaker 1: Movie Tone came to Arthur Allen about recording birds, of
Speaker 1: course he said yes. And the story is I've heard
Speaker 1: it is that they started out chasing the birds around
Speaker 1: with their big, heavy equipment, and songbirds being songbirds, flew away.
Speaker 1: But Fortunately, doctor Allen was very interested in the behaviors
Speaker 1: of birds, and so could figure out things like where
Speaker 1: was the bird likely to perch on its own and sing?
Speaker 1: And so they set up their equipment, pointed at a
Speaker 1: likely spot, walked away from it, and sure enough, Uh,
Speaker 1: some of the birds came and sang into their microphones.
Speaker 1: Who's excellent? I can't believe you're just that was the
Speaker 1: most fortuitous. I think you swooped down and dropped out
Speaker 1: of the sky may be rarer than catching a songbird.
Speaker 1: The recording device that album American Bird Songs that a
Speaker 1: friend of Carson's had mailed to Roger in nineteen fifty eight,
Speaker 1: Much of it was recorded in these very woods. Here
Speaker 1: are the songs and calls of sixty familiar birds as
Speaker 1: recorded in the woods, fields and gardens of North America
Speaker 1: the Laboratory of Ornithology at Cornell University. Unless otherwise stated,
Speaker 1: they were recorded in central New York State. There are
Speaker 1: three billion fewer birds in the US and Canada now
Speaker 1: than there were then, and we wouldn't even know if
Speaker 1: it weren't for all the bird counting that people do.
Speaker 1: Ken Rosenberg study doesn't make an argument about what's causing
Speaker 1: this decline, but a lot of other research points to
Speaker 1: climate change, and as Rosenberg study says, all other threats
Speaker 1: to birds are exacerbated by climate change within one human lifetime,
Speaker 1: within my lifetime, we've lost more than a quarter of
Speaker 1: our birds. Silent spring, silent century, through the night, the
Speaker 1: incessant cause of the purple whale can be heard from
Speaker 1: New Brunswick to northern Georgia. Once I started looking for
Speaker 1: people obsessed with recorded birds, I found them everywhere. John Fitzpatrick,
Speaker 1: director of the Cornell Lab Befornathology, was eight when he
Speaker 1: first heard an LP of North American bird songs, because
Speaker 1: that was a bird geek and I wanted to understand
Speaker 1: what the bird songs were that I was listening to,
Speaker 1: and so I memorized all the bird songs of Minnesota
Speaker 1: from that record, and that was the first time I'd
Speaker 1: ever heard of this place. I love that Arthur Allen
Speaker 1: created the lab, and his voice on that record of
Speaker 1: bird song taught young John Fitzpatrick to love birds. Everyone
Speaker 1: calls him fits and now fitz is the man behind eBird,
Speaker 1: an online crowdsourced bird database. The lab does all kinds
Speaker 1: of different things. Fitz has a whole room in the
Speaker 1: lab basement with drawers filled with stuffed birds. They even
Speaker 1: had a passenger pigeon. But of all the things they
Speaker 1: do at the lab, the place where Fits really lit
Speaker 1: up was when he showed us the collection of bird song.
Speaker 1: So this is the the archive, this is like this
Speaker 1: is like Mecca. This is like day in the largest
Speaker 1: physical repository of natural sounds in the world. Here hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands of recordings in this room. You can lock
Speaker 1: the door behind you and leave it to her. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's fun. Every bird you can imagine across decades and decades.
Speaker 1: I guess if you love a thing, you want to
Speaker 1: hold onto every detail about it. Put it in a lab,
Speaker 1: keep it in a drawer, recorded on wax, lock it
Speaker 1: in an archive. But these bird songs aren't just sitting here.
Speaker 1: Fits is on a mission, a mission to change Hollywood's
Speaker 1: bird illiteracy. So most moviemakers don't know that a lot
Speaker 1: of us can actually tell what that bird is, and
Speaker 1: that that's in the wrong continent. You know, you hear
Speaker 1: loons in Africa, and you hear morning warblers in South
Speaker 1: American rainforests, and it's crazy. The good filmmakers Lucas, Terry Malick,
Speaker 1: El Spielberg. These guys when they need a track, they
Speaker 1: actually they want to get a tract from the authorities
Speaker 1: who know what birds are there, and they can get
Speaker 1: the best recordings possible. They come here, Yeah, and they
Speaker 1: come here. So let's see Harry Potter movies. They use
Speaker 1: sounds from here, the owls, the griffin say hello tou.
Speaker 1: In fact, this is a true story. That griffin which
Speaker 1: makes this sort of weird screeching sound that is flying.
Speaker 1: That screeching sound is a limpkin. It's an American snail
Speaker 1: eating bird that looks like a heron, and it's got
Speaker 1: a very wild sound, And they used the limpkin sound.
Speaker 1: The particular recording they used was recorded by Arthur Allen.
Speaker 1: Most fascinating of all the sounds that come from the
Speaker 1: larger Southern swamplands are the weird cries of the lympkins.
Speaker 1: Perhaps they have given rise to some of the superstitions
Speaker 1: that haunt our fast disappearing marshes. After explaining to us
Speaker 1: about hippogriffs, Fitz took us to see a machine that
Speaker 1: the labit invented, some AI gizmo that's supposed to be
Speaker 1: able to name birds by listening to bird songs, and
Speaker 1: one day it's supposed to be able to count birds
Speaker 1: by listening to those songs. It's not citizen science, it's
Speaker 1: computer science. But Fitz is way better than the machine.
Speaker 1: The gold correct watching fits try to beat the AI machine.
Speaker 1: I found as if wondering about other ways that we
Speaker 1: can know about change over time, aside from birds. I
Speaker 1: was getting a little tired of listening to birds, to
Speaker 1: be honest, and then okay, stick with me. I started
Speaker 1: thinking about another kind of bird song, tweets. You can
Speaker 1: count tweets human tweets on Twitter, sort of like the
Speaker 1: way you can count bird calls and someone has friend.
Speaker 1: Moore is an assistant professor in the UC Davis Department
Speaker 1: of Environmental Science and Policy, and she's the lead author
Speaker 1: of a study of tweets. She and her team collected
Speaker 1: more than two billion Twitter posts about the weather. The
Speaker 1: idea for this payback came from the observation that everyone
Speaker 1: talks about the weather, the kind of almost a kind
Speaker 1: of universal phenomenon that wherever you go you can chat yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah exactly. American Tweets, Volume one. Here are the tweets
Speaker 1: and posts of several high volume Twitter accounts has recorded
Speaker 1: on smartphones and laptops across North America. It's so hot
Speaker 1: dog something about a rainy day, so cozy, it's pretty warmth.
Speaker 1: I'm so mad about the snow outside. Oh MG, I
Speaker 1: swear when it comes to driving in the rain, people
Speaker 1: in southern California are idiots on the road. The weather
Speaker 1: is nuts. Okay, so I'd rather listen to bird song.
Speaker 1: But more study, it's genius. What I thought was cool
Speaker 1: about the study was, you know, how do you how
Speaker 1: do you measure the phenomenon of you know, the remarkability
Speaker 1: of temperature? And with these new large social media data
Speaker 1: their it can allow us to get at these questions
Speaker 1: than to measure the phenomenon in a really kind of
Speaker 1: comprehensive way. More designed to study to measure the remarkability
Speaker 1: of climate based on geolocated tweets about the weather. Her
Speaker 1: study is actually weirdly a lot like Ken Rosenberg's bird study,
Speaker 1: kind of mixed up with Fitz's lab study of bird song.
Speaker 1: Think about Twitter as human bird song, and then the
Speaker 1: Twitter feed is a kind of citizen science. We are
Speaker 1: the birds, but we're collecting our own data. Worrying about
Speaker 1: our own demise long before coronavirus, because even then there
Speaker 1: was plenty to worry about. You know, I think that
Speaker 1: one theory of change that maybe some people have, which
Speaker 1: is really that eventually climate change will just become so
Speaker 1: bad it will become obvious that we have to do
Speaker 1: something about It will kind of the urgency of it
Speaker 1: will become immediately apparent. It will get everyone on board
Speaker 1: and will kind of collectively come to the sailor that's
Speaker 1: the time by which it's too late to do anything.
Speaker 1: Remark Ability changes rapidly with repeated exposure to unusual temperatures,
Speaker 1: Franmore and her team wrote in their report. In other words,
Speaker 1: we get used to new weather and something between two
Speaker 1: and eight years. You don't compare this year's weather to
Speaker 1: the weather of your childhood. You compare this year's weather
Speaker 1: to last year's weather. It turns out we get used
Speaker 1: to a new climate really fast. Even if it's killing us.
Speaker 1: Really is an epistemological problem, it's not quite an evidentiary problem.
Speaker 1: We have endless evidence. Fossil fuel companies have been suppressing
Speaker 1: that evidence for decades, but I mean, man, the jig
Speaker 1: is up still. It's not easy to pay attention to
Speaker 1: that evidence. For the reasons more study illustrates who killed
Speaker 1: truth Exxon Shell, Yes, God damn it. But also the
Speaker 1: slowness of time it's so hard to notice. That makes
Speaker 1: it even more impressive that Rachel Carson did over increasingly
Speaker 1: large areas of the United States. Spring now comes unheralded
Speaker 1: by the return of the birds, and the early mornings
Speaker 1: are strangely silent, where once they were filled with the
Speaker 1: beauty of bird song. It can be hard to notice
Speaker 1: change that takes place on so long a timescale, a
Speaker 1: human lifetime or even longer, like climate change DDT. That
Speaker 1: stuff was sprayed one day and the next day the
Speaker 1: world seemed quieter. You could notice that, you could follow
Speaker 1: a lawsuit to stop the spraying, you could write a book. Also,
Speaker 1: the DDT industry, the DDT lobby was tiny. The fossil
Speaker 1: fuel industries are gigantic, and they control a massive part
Speaker 1: of the world's economy. Then, too, climate change is slower. Still,
Speaker 1: you can see it, and people have been writing books
Speaker 1: about it for a very long time. Rachel Carson first
Speaker 1: wrote about it in nineteen fifty, twelve years before she
Speaker 1: published Silent Spring. It is now established beyond question that
Speaker 1: a definite change in the Arctic climate set in about
Speaker 1: nineteen hundred, that it became astonishingly marked about nineteen thirty,
Speaker 1: and that it is now spreading into subarctic and temperate regions.
Speaker 1: The frigid top of the world is very clearly warming up.
Speaker 1: After writing about DDT in Silent Spring, Carson started working
Speaker 1: on a new book about the warming of the seas.
Speaker 1: But of course by then she was dying. The December
Speaker 1: after Silent Spring came out, she fainted from pain in
Speaker 1: a department store while shopping for a Christmas present for Roger.
Speaker 1: She's buying him a record player. Roger would lose her
Speaker 1: not long afterward. But what if she'd finished that book,
Speaker 1: the book she'd wanted to write about climate change decades
Speaker 1: and decades and decades ago. We live in an age
Speaker 1: of risings. In our own lifetime. We are witnessing a
Speaker 1: startling alteration of climate. Carson never wrote that book. I
Speaker 1: still think a lot though, about what it might have
Speaker 1: happened if she had. She'd lived long enough. She wrote
Speaker 1: Sound Spring at a time when books were a big deal.
Speaker 1: She could go on CBS at a time on there
Speaker 1: only three television networks, and she could testify before Congress
Speaker 1: at a time when Congress wasn't polarized, at time when
Speaker 1: laws actually got written and passed. That's why I wish
Speaker 1: so dearly that she'd lived to write the book she
Speaker 1: planned to write about the warming of the seas, before
Speaker 1: the political chaos, before the no holds barred defense of
Speaker 1: the fossil fuel industry, before internet driven conspiracy theories, before
Speaker 1: social media mob rule, before the virus silent killer of
Speaker 1: our spring. We went back out to sap Sucker Woods
Speaker 1: to listen to the birds, then back to our hotel,
Speaker 1: turned in for the night. It had one more place
Speaker 1: to go in the morning. The last place Ben and
Speaker 1: I went during our visit to Cornell was the archive
Speaker 1: entering the Crotch Library. Crotch Library, Crotch Library. There's another
Speaker 1: story about the Silence of Birds, written by someone who'd
Speaker 1: been an undergraduate at Cornell when it first founded its
Speaker 1: Laboratory of Oneithology, eb White. His papers are at Cornell.
Speaker 1: An archivist Asian Neely had pulled a few folders for
Speaker 1: US Morning Yes in nineteen fifty eight, when Rachel Carson
Speaker 1: had asked eb White to write the book that became
Speaker 1: Silent Spring. She had thought of White because he was
Speaker 1: such a charming writer, and because he wrote a lot
Speaker 1: about nature Stuart Little in nineteen forty five, Charlotte's Web
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty two. I don't think Carson really wanted
Speaker 1: White to write about DDT. She was really just slyly
Speaker 1: getting his help and pitching the story to the New Yorker. Anyway,
Speaker 1: Carson and White had stayed close, and after Carson died,
Speaker 1: White wrote one last children's book, The Trumpet of the Swan,
Speaker 1: Analogy for the Earth. On a lonely pond on a
Speaker 1: day in spring, some baby swans were hatched. One of
Speaker 1: the young swans had a problem. He had come into
Speaker 1: the world without a voice. He couldn't utter a sound.
Speaker 1: I have written the story of this little swan, and
Speaker 1: I will read it to you. During the whole of
Speaker 1: our visit to Ithaca, I'd been overwhelmed by this scale,
Speaker 1: the enormity of evidence for species extinction and for climate change.
Speaker 1: All that bird data, billions and billions of observations, people
Speaker 1: wandering in the woods and fields and long beaches counting birds.
Speaker 1: Then there's the study of billions of tweets. But sitting
Speaker 1: in that arc five with Ebe White's papers, I remembered
Speaker 1: how badly people also need stories fables. The fifth signet
Speaker 1: was different. He opened his mouth but didn't say a thing.
Speaker 1: He made an effort to say beep, but no sound came.
Speaker 1: I think he came into the world lacking a voice.
Speaker 1: A young male Swan will be greatly handicapped in finding
Speaker 1: a mate if he is unable to say co ho
Speaker 1: co ho. Nearly everyone we talked to you for this
Speaker 1: episode they'd first gotten fascinated with birds in the natural
Speaker 1: world has little kids. That's one reason Ben and I
Speaker 1: were in the eb White archive to read letters to
Speaker 1: him that had been written by little kids. This is
Speaker 1: a pack of letters from the combinations in the third
Speaker 1: grade classroom. Dear mister White, I am a pupil from
Speaker 1: Saint Leo's Primary School in Altona, North My name is
Speaker 1: Diana and I'm eleven years of eight. I have read
Speaker 1: both of your books, Trumpet of the one at Charles
Speaker 1: Webb and I was reading the books. They really got
Speaker 1: to me because they are so interesting. Lots of other
Speaker 1: people have read your books and they feel the same
Speaker 1: way about them. The books really makes sense not like
Speaker 1: other books you're expect. Dear Diane, I'm glad you think
Speaker 1: the books makes sense. The books make sense, stories makes sense.
Speaker 1: If Carson were writing today, she'd get death threats on Twitter.
Speaker 1: He be White, he got love letters from children. Dear
Speaker 1: mister E. B. White. Our teacher, Missus mcelnahey, read Charles
Speaker 1: Webb to our third grade class earlier this year. We
Speaker 1: enjoyed it very much. This past months, she read The
Speaker 1: Trumpet the Swan. So many interesting things resulted from your
Speaker 1: book that we thought you might like to hear about them.
Speaker 1: We decided to write a class poem about the Trumpet
Speaker 1: of the Swan. We discussed the order of events in
Speaker 1: the story and put down our ideas on two lines
Speaker 1: at a time. The poem we wrote is enclosed with
Speaker 1: this letter, and here's the phone. Louie a Downey Signet
Speaker 1: was born a trumpeter swan without a horn. I'm sorry
Speaker 1: I didn't want to laugh at their boom. Louis a
Speaker 1: Downey Signet was born a trumpeter swan without a horn. Sam,
Speaker 1: a boy who liked the young Swan, would often sit
Speaker 1: by the clear, quiet pond. Louie could not even say cohoe.
Speaker 1: So the Cobs stole a trumpet for Louis to blow.
Speaker 1: Louis played taps, had a camp for boys to earn
Speaker 1: the money to pay for the noise. Louie married Serena,
Speaker 1: and new signets were born, and Louis played on with
Speaker 1: his shiny horn. By the third grade class, Hilliard Elementary School,
Speaker 1: Room twenty Dear mister, why blah blah blahlave your books?
Speaker 1: Do you like swans? I do. My grandparents live on
Speaker 1: a saltwater pond, and sometimes when we're visiting, swan swam
Speaker 1: up to the shore looking for food. A fine feathered friend, Steven.
Speaker 1: Dear Stephen, I liked your letter, Thanks for writing. I
Speaker 1: never see swans here at home, only geese, but I
Speaker 1: think I would like swans. They are admirable birds. Reading
Speaker 1: those letters it was like listening to the best bird song.
Speaker 1: Lyrical and clear, noble and proud call and response. They
Speaker 1: gave us faith, and they gave us hope. Maybe people
Speaker 1: can be admirable birds too. From the Last Archive Coho.
Speaker 1: The Last Archive is produced by Sophie Crane, mccabbin and
Speaker 1: Ben Natt of Faffrey. Our editor is Julia Barton and
Speaker 1: our executive producer is Mio Lobell, Jason Gambrell and Martine
Speaker 1: Gonzalez are our engineers. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original
Speaker 1: music by Matthis Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Symphinette.
Speaker 1: Many of our sound effects are from Harry Jeanette Junior
Speaker 1: and the Star Janette Foundation. Our full proof players are
Speaker 1: Barlow Adams and Daniel Berger Jones, Jesse Henson, John Kuntz,
Speaker 1: Becca A. Lewis and Maurice Emmanuel Parent. The Last Argive
Speaker 1: is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Special thanks to
Speaker 1: Simon Leek, to Ryan McKittrick in the American Repertory Theater,
Speaker 1: to Scott Edwards, to Aisha Neely at Cornell, the McCaulay
Speaker 1: Library at the Cornell Lab of Worn Athology, and everyone
Speaker 1: at the Cornell Lab of Worn Athology. At Pushkin. Thanks
Speaker 1: to Heather Fane, Maya Caney, Carly mcgliory, Emily Rustick, Eric Sandler,
Speaker 1: Maggie Taylor, and Jacob Weisberg. Our research assistants are Michelle Gau,
Speaker 1: Olivia Oldham, Oliver Ruskin Kutz, Emily Spector, and Henrietta Riley,
Speaker 1: who he'd like to specially thank for all of her
Speaker 1: help with Bird's song. I'm Jollipoor,