The MeatEater PodcastEp. 470: Identifying Tweety Birds With the Merlin App
Steven Rinella talks with Jessie Barry, Chris Wood, and Orin Robinson.
Topics discussed: Trying to beat the Merlin app with human bird calls; how it’s all in the “hwaaah”; the earliest recordings of bird sounds; a collection of extinct bird specimens; mapping the tapestry and complexity of bird population declines; when you’ve kept a bird watching list since you were 9-years-old; Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology’s competitive birding team; permits for sampling; the birds that have done well because of humans; Steve’s persecution complex; citizen science; relative abundance; two categories: game birds and tweety birds; how Merlin doesn’t spy on people; bird call trivia; and more.
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The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for el First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light dot com. F I R S T L I t E dot com. Hey guys, it's uh Steve and I have such an important message that it's so important to fill. The engineer advised me on how to hold my phone to get the best quality where it's about six inches from my mouth at an angle so it doesn't go when you talk. That's how important this messages. The auction House of Oddity, our Meat Eater auction House of Oddities is up, live and running right now, probably the most impressive slate of auction items to ever be compiled in the history of Western civilization. You can go right now and bid on a hunt at the Durham family farm with Bubbly Doug durn himself. It's the winner's choice. You do a buck hunt for one or a deer hunt. For one opening day of rifles season, so opening weekend of rifle for one or three people, do a turkey hunt on Doug's place, hanging out with Doug, cruising around with Doug. We have a custom log trappers cabin from Naughty Log Homes. Okay, so this is a totally built trappers cabin that you can have, get shipped out and you get assembled where you want it. Okay. We have a art commission, an original art commission of your choosing. Go on Instagram and go to at Jamie Jamie Underscore Wild Art. Okay, go look at her work. You can get an art commission from her. We have a signed arrow, a chunk of an aluminum arrow signed by Ted Nugent in nineteen ninety one from a whiplash bash. And we have what in the art world they call the provenance. We have how this arrow flowed through ownership to get into your hands, says Ted Nugent ninety one on an aluminum arrow shaft. Great story to go with that. Everybody knows our beloved Seth Morris used to go by the flip Flop Flesher. His wife is a professional artist. She has a gallery. She makes her living with art. We have original artwork from her Kelsey Morris original artwork. We have my weather be Mark five used in many me Eater episodes, forthcoming episode where I shoot a pretty stomper mule deer in Idaho. I killed a bull with on a media episode, a lot of media episodes, a left handed whether it be Mark five and three hundred win mag that exact rifle. We have a Carolina custom rifle that I use in a bunch more Meat Eater episodes, including the famous Moose Charge episode. That rifle is available for auction, and there is a dinner for four at my house. So the winning bidder and three guests will at a time that we picked together, will come to my house to be wined and dined for auction. Doug Duran was bragging up how his auction item was kicking my dinner's ass. But I have to point out right now that it's probably humiliating to Doug the degree to which my dinner is kicking his farm's ass. So you better go help Bubbly out before he gets sad. Got to go to the Meeater dot com and find you know, there's all kinds of links and stuff. Auction house of Oddities or go to at Steve Ranella on Instagram and we will put the Auction House of Oddities link in my bio. You'll find it. Thank you everybody. Now back to regular program. Okay, we're at the Cornell Lab of Oh you know, that's what they call you, guys over in the disease Party. You're the Lab of oh Nice, the Lab of Ornithology. And we are seeded with someone who we've inadvertently talked about a whole bunch. That's not right, we talked about without naming your name, because we have again and again and again on the show on social media otherwise brought up the Merlin bird app and have office said we all get the person that made the Merlin Bird app on the podcast. And here she is, Jesse Barry.
Hey, it's great to be here.
Ye, joined as well by an ornithologist Chris Wood. And if you are into e Bird, I'm going to go back on Mrlam and explain eBird.
Yeah.
So, the idea of Ebert is there's thousands, tens of thousands, millions of people around the world that like birds, like watching them. This is a place for those all your observations of birds to go into a centralized database. You can see that information. But even more importantly than a team of scientists can analyze that information, that information is then used by groups like Fish and Wildlife Service and others for policy action.
Yep, and we're gonna and Chris is gonna explain how you can exploit eBird to get better bag limits on ducks.
Orn's going to talk about that.
I'm joke about. We're gonna get We're gonna get into Ebert and then Oron Robinson, another ornithologist.
Yeah, so I work with the data after it comes through Ebert and all the filters. We can create these these distribution maps for thousands and thousands of vcs, and we can take that eBird data and use it in conservation or management applications.
And you're a duck hunter? Yes, where'd you grow up?
Grew up in Mobile, Alabama?
Okay, you still hunt there?
Not very often?
No, already mainly hunt ducks.
Now Arkansas. We've got some good family friends in Arkansas.
Okay, go over there once a year. Do you often meet other ornithologists who are disappointed to hear that you're a duck hunter? Or is that pretty common.
In the duck world. Most of the folks that study ducks are also duck hunters.
Yeah, a pictures that I have people that studied the ducks hunt ducks. Yeah, you know.
But no, I haven't really gotten any any pushback on the fact that I enjoy duck hunting.
It makes sense to people. All Right, we got it. So I'm gonna explain Merlin real quick, or you could probably do a better job explaining Merlin, but I'll explain how it came to me. Jannis Prutellus, who's on the show all the time, you used to be on every episode show, he found out about it and told me about it, and I got into it. It's an app. You open up the app, you can go to sound id and it just starts populating with whatever birds are going on. I got a lot of questions about how this functions and some other problems, but then we started having a lot of fun of raiding each other's turkey calls, whether you can trick Merlin, getting into trying to fool Merlin in other ways, and also a sort of a slight a little bit of a contest about who can get the most birds going at anyone time. And I'm not that high. I had nine going in eastern Kansas this year, which I thought was pretty good. But I've met many people who've been who've had in the teens and anyone sitting. But I had nine and I don't know, you know, twenty thirty minutes leaning against one tree, which I thought was pretty impressive. I've also found it helpful for when you're somewhere and you, like in southeast Alaska, there's this bird I'm always hearing. I can't remember what the help was even though I looked it up. You never in a million years are going to get a chance to see it because it's in the canopy of old growth and able to like figure out what you're listening to. So if you get Merlin's Free, still still free, you guys probably steal people's data.
No, no, it doesn't feed back, It doesn't feedback. No, it's still a whole point, totally separate. So we get people excited about watching birds and then hopefully some of them start contributing data to the e bird, and that's where just steal whatever anybody's hearing. Yeah, you know, we're still trying to be like above the line on some of these things. And when we make that shift, you know, make it very intentional that you know, we're not just listening in, we're not eavesdropping on you.
Oh no, but I would like so this doesn't report back to you. I thought that'd be the only thing you have to gain from it.
It doesn't right now. We'll make that step coming up in the next few years.
I've been just assuming, and that's why I felt a little bad when we're messing with it, that I would throw off some data.
No, it's okay, Yeah, okay. We want people to have fun just enjoying the app, and then we're collecting real data for science. We want you know, that's a different thing, and we want people know that too.
Yeah. Hunting turkeys, you know, it's humiliating. If someone has Merlin open and someone calls and it doesn't recognize it as a wild turkey, it's humiliating. Yeah. Then we got into this spring trying to do a barred owl an owl hoot, which it's humbling, piliated woodpacker calls humbling crow.
Tough.
Tough, Yeah, raven tough. You can beat it on a bard owl.
I can.
Yeah, I test you. Yeah, it doesn't like you know what, it doesn't like noises and rooms though. Have you noticed that?
Yeah, it's you know, really tuned in for the outdoors. So all the data that Merlin has used to learn these sounds is coming from outside. So yeah, it's not as good on the inside.
Do you dare try to do a test?
Yeah, sure, you'll do it.
Okay, got it on. I can see my voice bouncing up and down. Okay you ready? Oh nice? Right there. Now. My buddy Seth he we had one in southeast Alaska this year, going nuts, couple in the tree and he for two nights sat out with Merlin, open it, calling Merlin, binging it. He couldn't get it. Eventually got it and he feels that it's in the hall.
Yeah you got.
It's very picky now, yeah, that's where he he had to work on that. And once he worked on that, he was able to get it, but he wasn't quite clear on what he did. But all sudden he got it. Where would trick it? But here's the thing I don't get. I have the bird Song Bible. You've met with the bird Song Bible team.
Here, put that up.
Those you guys, our sounds are in there. Well, we'redly. My kids like the mess of the bird Song Bible. The bird Song Bible can't fool the app but it must be something. Going through recording and coming out the other side, it loses some essential elements.
So the sounds in that particular book with the little speaker are really compressed. And that was you know, ten fifteen years ago when there just wasn't the technology to put a good speaker next to a book. So yeah, those sounds have been shrunk down so much that Merlin can't really see the signal I got.
So that's what it is.
I think.
So I didn't know this was you, but I came into contact years ago with and I want you start by explaining the McAuley library. But years ago I was trying to figure out a game call for a blue grouse, which leads I gotta digress because it leaves me not our question. Do you guys know how they try to the blue grouse into two different grouse? Do you believe that? Or I mean do you buy that? Like who gets to decide? Yeah, So there's like it seems like it's be up to God. That's one. That's one perspective, you know what I mean.
I think I think the thing is is there's really no such thing as a species, right, It's an artificial construct that people have invented to try to make sense of the natural world. And there's certain things that are that are really you know, obviously differentiated, and other things that are that are very very close and it's hard to understand. And so in the case of what's now, these two different species of grouse, they're separated, you know a little bit. Basically one of them is in the Pacific North Northwest, the others in.
The Rockies sooty and dusky the city in the Pacific Northwest, the dusky and the Rockies.
Yeah, and so there have been a series of studies and right now, usually what people are looking at, what scientists are looking for is that they're looking for a combination of voke differences. And so those two those two species as we're considering them now, do have very distinct vocal differences.
The number of number of them, yeah, different.
Exactly, and one of them, you know, soodies will sit up in trees to give those dusky grouse basically sit very very low to deliver those those vocalizations, and or right on the ground exactly look at at most like a foot up right, And and so those that mating behavior is a very strong sexual selection pressure that that sort of as that happens over hundreds and thousands of years, they really start to become distinct populations.
Is the idea that they're is the is the split widening with them, like the connectivity diminishing with them?
You know, I don't know. I don't know the specifics of that, but what's likely to happen is is as you're seeing sort of the combined effects of climate change and then just human cause changes in forests, it's likely for that to shift over time. And so that's something that we're increasingly seeing with a lot of kind of species limits. I don't know the specifics of those of those two individuals, but.
One of them has a different color eye comb, right, or they one of them has tends to have an orange and one has a tends to have a yellow e comb.
Yeah, and there's some differences in the tailband as well. But part of that gets confusing because there's different subspecies within each of those populations as well. And so there's subspecies of dusky grouse that have broad tail bands, others that have narrow tail bands, and so it actually does end up getting to be quite a bit more confusing. And what happens is grouse in general don't travel very long distances. They may migrate, but they're elevational migrants, particularly those in the Rockies. They're not moving, you know, thousands of miles like Swainson's thrush. And so what that means is that there's it's more likely for those populace, for those birds to sort of diverge and not come into contact as much as other Sorry, the lights just went out, I don't know, looks fine, and Warren said, let there be light there we go, so go on, and yeah, I mean so, So because of that that that's there's a whole bunch of different things that come at play as sort of how things end up end up diverging into separate species. But it's a very very dynamic process.
Our Fish and Game Agency they have not made the switch, so they are still blue grouse. They've not moved them to dusky grouse. They have Uh when you go in, do do bison? They do bison, but not buffalo, pronghorn or antelope but not pronghorn, and blue grouse or blue grouse but not dusky grouse. I made the switch, but then I switched back. Not imhing about switching back again. I think you should, so I'll continue with switching. I wanted to make a cutie grouse call because in Alaska you can hunt sudi grouse in the spring, but they're hard to find up in the tree, but they'll call. It's the mail up there, right, And I thought you could hide and then draw it down. So I had a guy who that's a game call maker, and I was sending him all I was trying to find good vocalizations, and I wound up sending him all the McCauley Library blue grouse. So do excuse me, Citi grouse records. And I had no until the day, I had no idea that was you guys.
Yeah.
So mcaulay Library started in nineteen twenty nine. The very first bird songs were recorded right here in Ithico.
Uh huh.
And so yeah, it was the collaboration between Arthur Allen and Peter Paul Kellogg. And Arthur Allen was an ornithologist, Peter Paul Kellogg an engineer, and they were just trying to figure out how they could study you know, birds, you know, more carefully and so they're using the technology of the day to go out and record those behaviors, which ended up being a bunch of equipment used for films. So that early film technology enabled us to start to document these wildlife sounds. And you know, we're still have folks all over the world who are going out and recording birds and other wildlife and bring them to the archive here.
Does anyone have they must? But early we got to go hold you know, the extinct you have three was it two or three? I rebuild woodpackers three two males and females in your collections. So we were able to hold the extinct ivybuild a woodpacker, the extinct Carolina parakeet, observe, but did not hold the heath hen, which was like a basically, oh man, it'd be like a sharp tail grouse that lived in Martha's vineyard. You know, uh, does any are there recordings of their calls?
So there are recordings of ivorybuild woodpecker, and a little bit of motion picture film too, which we have in the back room.
As well, those from the Singer forest, wasn't it.
We don't have any heathens or Eskimo curlew was never recorded. I don't think Carolina parakeet was either. So yeah, a lot of those you know, species that were one extinct in the early nineteen hundreds missed that window of being recorded. Ivybuilds one of the few that we were able to capture.
Yeah, so walk me through from from starting from the mcaulay library, how did like how many birds sounds are in Merlin?
Merlin can cover a thousand species in the sound i D feature where you can hit record and Merlin can identify them. And then there's now ten five hundred species of birds that you can explore and listen to right from the app. Now, so basically all the birdies can recognize the thousand yep and as we get more data coming into the archive, we'll be able to add more species. So it takes a lot of example recordings and experts to help Merlin really dig into learning what those that species sounds like.
Yeah, when you you know, like many people, I'm reflexively anti AI, but this is very much.
AI, right, Yeah, this is definitely machine learning. This is a we're ten plus years into really trying to understand how to incorporate machine learning into orthological research and ways to engage people with birds. So we try to think like we're the good guys and the AI side of things.
So explain how it works and how you ever populated it, and how it can sort through all the background noise or that you could be in in a room. I realized it doesn't like a ton of unusual background noise, but you can be in a room where people are conversing, or on a patio with people conversing, and it's picking out some bird off in the distance, and like, it's just so hard to picture how it's sorting out. Right, Like, you can sit because you have a you know, your ears have kind of a three sixty cents of what's going on around you, and you're able to sort things by distance. But when it's coming through into a microphone, like something's losing track of well that's to my left right, it gets flattened. Yeah, you know, all the sound is flattened into a single sphere and it's not like, oh no, that's a thing that has nothing to do with this way over there, but the person talking to me is right here. I just can't even picture how you begin to get a thing that could pluck it out.
Yeah, So one way to think about it is, you know, sounds can be converted into a picture. So we basically take you know, that recording and it turns into a graph where you've got the time and the frequency and that will you know, produce a signal. So if a cardinal's got those introductory notes, you can see exactly where all the notes are in the cardinal song. And so what we did is basically look at the all the recordings of them, call a library archive or a subset, and then you know, essentially train Merlin to identify those recordings by having experts draw boxes around all of the times that a bird sings in that particular recording. So again we're taking the sound, we're moving it into a picture and then going online and annotating every time a cardinal sings, every time a chickadee sings in the background. And originally we're just you know, picking out Okay, if we're trying to teach you how to identify cardinals, we'll just drop boxes around the cardinals. But then we realized that if we drew boxes and labeled everything in that soundscape, then Merlin was able to figure out exactly what was going on in that landscape that was a jump we didn't really expect, but it's really thanks to like all the folks who put those recordings into the archive and then the experts who took you know, hours and hours, like in a very time consuming way making those annotations, and then it goes into the machine learning system. And so Grant Van Horne is the leading computer scientist on this project, and he's really figured out how you can you know, tweak this system to put those real time predictions back out. So part of the fun is that Merlin's like lighting up, and and any as any species starts to vocalize, it's picking that up. And that's really Grant's hard work testing out how to make a system that will do that and also run on a phone. So that's the other really cool thing is that we been able to leverage Apple's hardware to put these algorithms right on a device that can work without a connection to the internet.
Have you guys been surprised by how many like it's its rate of adoption with users?
Yeah, pleasantly surprised to me, Yeah, Like.
How can you say how many people are out there using it?
Three and a half million in July. Yeah, on a given weekend.
On me Turkey hunters.
I don't know, Turkey was like a little lower on the list of frequently identified birds, and.
I might have guessed, but oh really yeah, okay, so it's not all turkey hunters. So this is the thing that really surprised me. I just assumed that the whole point of Merlin was that it would allow ornithologists to get these location specific, time specific snapshots of birds sounds, and that any time I was using I never you know, I was just like everybody, you never read terms of service. You just are like, Okay. I just assumed that when I had it open and it was listening, that it went into some database somewhere of you know, at blank date, at blank time, at blank location, here's what was going on. But you're not doing that, not yet.
That is the next step, okay, Because that ability to monitor a landscape for like three minutes of a nice recording is going to give us a tremendous amount of information about the species that are there, and so we're going to soon be preparing kind of the eBird you know, data model and how all that those observations are handled and incorporate this kind of different type of data into that system. But it's a pretty big jump to go from birdwatchers putting in a sighting to now here's basically an automated system collecting that information. So I've got a lot of research and experiments to do, but certainly that's where it's heading. And you're going to imagine in years to come, you know, putting devices out on the landscape to really monitor spots where you know people don't go very often.
But that's going on right now, right yeah, because I know people do it with Turkey researchers that just put stuff up to pick up gobbles yep.
And you know, I think it's going to become something that more people can do. And hopefully it doesn't have to be like a researcher putting those devices out, but you know, somebody backpacking up into the high peaks would be able to do it too.
And get yourself one of them Chinese spy balloons man, and just pull that thing around sucking up bird sounds. It'd be great.
Uh.
One thing that we had dinner last night, we talked and I've seen it in some of the stuff you guys do that with with the with the stuff you gather through e bird and maybe it'll be demonstrated in Merlin that it's just it seems like you guys say that bird numbers are just declining and just that's it.
Is that there's a lot more complexity to it, and I think I think one of the things that we're able to see now is we have people all around the world. You know, there's almost a million people who've contributed their sightings to eBird.
Uh.
They're in every country in the world. And so from that, because they're in different habitats, they're in different geographic locations, they're they're there all year round, we're able to see not just that a species is necessarily declining, but this sort of tapestry and complexity of how that decline might be taking place. And so it might be that some birds a pattern is that, you know, some birds are shifting their populations to the north with climate change, and so that's part of what is really interesting for us to figure out, is is just exactly how that's happened, because then we can start to understand what the d are, what the causes of these declines might be that otherwise would be really really hard to figure out. I mean, we often think about birds as being the canary and the coal mine, if you will, and that they're really good proxies for understanding natural systems overall, because natural systems are very, very complicated, and we wanted to think about how do you kind of measure the heartbeat of the planet and an ecosystem. It turns out that birds end up being a really really good way to do that. Because you have hundreds of thousands of people that are watching birds, they can report the sightings that they see. Then we can take that information sort of like Orn was talking about, and link other that information with remote sensed imagery. So since we know where you are, we can link that and then understand information about the habitat at a variety of scales. You know, we can understand what the habitat's like within you know, one hundred meters of where you were, within a mile of where you were, and within ten miles, and can start to say, like, okay, it seems like this bird during the breeding season requires this type of habitat during another type of you know, maybe post breeding, you know, after the young leave the nest and are moving around, they may switch to a slightly different type of habitat and being able to understand how those connections happen can be really important for conservation.
But I mean, are there you know, I mean, are there as many birds in the US as there was twenty five years ago. No, they're not. Okay, that's what I'm trying. That's what.
Yeah, there's but you know, overall, there's there's basically based on some of the work that teams here and others others, did three billion birds have been lost in like the last forty years, three billion with a.
Bee of all sorts, of.
All sorts, And I mean it's a very very common. It's it's the most species are declining.
You know.
If you go on to our website, we have a science section on there and you can basically go through and for more than four hundred species see exactly what's happening and where those birds are declining, where they might be increasing. So it is complex, and there are areas that birds are increasing, and there's certain species and groups of birds that are increasing, but the overall pattern right now is one where birds are really declining, particularly things that might be migrants that are traveling long distances, shore birds, grassland birds. Those are some of the major groups of birds that have very very significant declines.
I was surprised to learn recently that there's only five species of birds that have a global population of one billion.
Where did you read that?
I read it in a book called Wild New World by the historian dam Floores. Huh, the English sparrow, a goal, which surprised me. I can't remember what goal it was. What else is in there? The European starling? Maybe, Yeah, there's five spieces of birds that they think have a global population more than one billion.
Yeah, it's measuring the absolute number of birds ends up being a very very difficult thing.
You're not buying it.
All I'm saying is a very difficult thing to figure out. You know, it's actually easier to understand the percent decline in a total population of birds because you're looking at the relative difference than saying sort of the absolute number of birds. Because if you think about some birds, like a bald eagle, it they tend to sit out in the open or they're flying around. They're big, they're easily detectable. But something like a red eyed vireo or a Swainson's thrush. I think that's the example of a bird that's sort of hiding up in the woods. If you're an expert birdwatcher, maybe you're hearing that and identifying it as a swains and strutch, but a lot of other people would wouldn't see those birds because of those detection differences. It can be really difficult to sort of compare one species to another species. And some other birds, you know, if you think about red wing blackbird, they can have very clumped distribution, So around marshes they're very very abundant, but if you get away from their habitats, they're much less common at certain times of the year than they gather in massive flocks of you know, tens of thousands to millions of birds, and so it's just it's a very difficult thing to sort of say, this is the absolute number of any species.
Yeah, you know, it's rough though, over a billion, over a billion? Can you I'm going to look this up, but just to ask, are you surprised because you would think that it would be more than that. Are you surprised to hear there are birds that have a global that might have a global population, or you just think that anyone saying that is overreach.
Any time that that there's a definitive statement that there are x number of species that meet some threshold that's in comparison to others is often something where I would kind of pause and raise my eyebrows and think about just because of the difficulty in understanding that there's there's also a lot of systems that may not be heavily covered, or where there's a lot of people that are actually going and looking at birds, and so just to sort of be able to figure that out is a complicated you know, it's something that I mean that is difficult to do with a level of confidence that you know, I'd be comfortable making a statement.
Like that writing into a book.
Yeah, I probably wouldn't. I probably wouldn't do that.
Well, I'm going to follow up with you because we've talked about that was even a trivia one of Spencer's trivia questions.
If I remember was maybe I wasn't on that something.
About that or no, no, I think I maybe suggested it to them. I'll get back to you on that. With E bird, you feel that E bird where people from around the world. How many people use E bird? A million?
There's yeah, there's about a million people who have used the bird, and in you know, any year about a quarter million people.
So prior to E bird, and it seems like you guys are really optimistic about what you can garner from that. Prior to E bird, how was anyone ever taking a stab at what's going on with bird population?
Yeah, that's a really good question. There's a there's a survey that's been going on in the US for a long a long time called the Breeding Bird Survey, which is basically a series of of of points that people are doing along roads where they go out every spring.
And they.
They are able to infer what's happening with with bird populations during the breeding season. And so that's that's one way that people have been doing it. One of the longest citizen science projects is something called the Christmas Bird Count that's been going on for over one hundred years. So the idea that you know, citizen scientists and people can contribute to science is not a new idea at all. I mean, it's something that's been happening for a long time. But with the advent of the Internet and the ability to exchange information very quickly, it's been a lot easier for us to very quickly be able to amass you know, over one and a half billion records from all over the world, and that scale of large amounts of data then allows us to get much more insight than we would be able to get with with other methods. And one of the things it's exciting now is it's not necessarily that we're only using eBird data. We're often integrating that data with other data sets as well, so we're able to bring in some of the information that Fish and Wildlife Service may have gathered and then bring that together with information that we have. But it turns out one of the things that's a little surprising that people may not appreciate is usually people are doing surveys where birds are, and so if you're doing a survey for bald eagles, there tends to be an emphasis on saying, Okay, these are places where eagles are, We're going to do my survey where the eagles are. What happens then, is if you're trying to extrapolate that across everywhere and you have no information on where eagles are not, then the models basically fall apart because they you don't have that information. eBird ends up being a really good resource for this, because we're asking people to record all the birds that they're able to detect and identify and then put an account for. And that gives us sort of not just information about where birds are, but where they're.
Not because you've asked them to enter all birds exactly.
And we know that there's differences between people, right, Like we know if you go out with Jesse, you're gonna see you're going to detect and identify way way more birds than if you just you know, go out on your own, because she's one of the best bird people in the world.
One of the best. Do you have a life list?
Yeah?
Yeah, I've been keeping a lifeless since I was nine. Yeah.
How many birds are on the life list?
It's not a really impressive number. It's a couple thousand. But I think the thing that we've done this.
Spit how many are ten there's like one birds.
Almost made it to ten thousand.
But yeah, like he throws a lot of money at it.
Yeah, his life is dedicated to traveling, but we do that's kind of fun, is try to figure out how many species we can see in twenty four hours. And so you know, for example, we went down to Texas in April, so the corner leve Morphology actually has a birding team where compete. We do compete and but you know, conservation Alise wins. We're raising money for conservation, so donors pledge, you know, traditionally by the number of species that we would see, and we would spend you know, a week planning a route to like pick up as many birds and then take twenty four hours to run that route time down to the minute to see how many birds we could areas probably Yeah, so you're you're getting the coastal areas you're gonna get you know, the grasslands or any habitat you can put on that route. It's kind of the goal because you know, different habitats, you're gonna get different species and them eithers get And one of the other rules is that ninety five percent of the species all team members need to see. So if you've got five people on the team, you're trying to make sure everybody's picking up all the birds all day long, so it's not just like one guy, can you know, find them all?
And what's a good twenty four hour period?
A good total anywhere, I mean, you know, two hundred or something like that is something people work towards in most regions. But there's one day in Texas we pulled off two hundred and ninety four species and set the record for North America.
That's all yeah, yeah, humming to ninety four yeah, in one day in Texas.
One day in Texas on a really epic migration day. So we had watched the weather. We knew that their you know front was coming in, which was dropping birds on the Texas coast. But the conditions were really good that year. We had some lingering waterfall that wasn't expected to be in the region, and then just a lot of practice. But on those days you get to put your birding skills to the test by like finding things that weren't expected on the route and just being the first guy to like pick the merlin. Flying over unexpected paragrin is part of them.
It's really similar to hunting in a lot of ways, because what you do is you know that you spend this time scouting and understanding exactly what you know. In this case, about three hundred species of birds are doing sometimes to the level of that individual, Like if it's something that's rare in a region, you know, maybe there's a cinnamon teal that's that's lingering that wouldn't usually be in that area. You know, it's not just that it's there. You kind of need to figure out, well, like when is it actually like swimming out where you can see it versus hiding in the in the reeds. And so you have people that are basically trying to get these very intimate understandings of exactly what's happening sometimes with individual birds. And then there's also kind of the magic that happens, you know, like like when you're hunting that's just completely unexpected, like something that you didn't know was there happens. And so there's this element where you sort of know there's some things about these birds at a place that that you're you're trying to put those birds together on a route. But then there's also you know that you can create almost opportunities around dusk and down in particular where you know things are moving more. You know that there is these different factors, and so you're trying to sort of fit these things together and pull together a route that you know, you see how many birds you can see? You should we should do one of these together, see if we can have you see two hundred spieces of birds in a day.
I'd like it, But I'm trying to think of some things have you had? Do you have you gotten all ptarmigans.
Like in a lifetime?
Yeah, okay we did in our Alaska big day.
Yeah yeah we uh.
You got all on one day. I know friends that have gotten gotten one on one day.
That's awesome.
Collected. Yeah, does anybody is that still a thing like when people used to go out with their following piece and like shotgun birds.
Yeah, that's still there's a limited amount of scientific collecting that goes on a limited amount.
Yeah, that would be a circumstance. Would I still like an acceptable thing to do? Like back in the Audubon or Darwin days and they just run around with their fowling piece and like collect birds.
So these days museums tend to pick up more salvage birds. So birds hit a window roadkill those are going to museums. But there are certain species where there's some really interesting questions around what is driving the changes in their population. Where you know, if you collect you know, ten individuals or even something like that can really start to unlock those questions of how those populations are changing and why.
Have you ever been out with someone doing that. Yeah, yeah, it feels like real kind of naughty.
I feel like it kind of does, because it's like you've got this very specific permit for just a little bit of sampling, and you kind of know in the back of your head, you know, it's been hundreds of years in some of those species since they've been targeted in that way.
So oh yeah, for sure.
Several years ago, when I was doing with Masters, we had a permit to kill.
Brown pelicans, uh huh.
And that was pretty uh, pretty intell. There's some big bird.
And they were collecting them for what purpose?
Collecting him for to look for environmental toxins and so they're still toxins. So they would take you know, a little piece of breast tissue, little liver, and some brain tissue. The only way to get that is to you know, you know, go shoot them.
I have to do like some mortal Yeah. What uh what birds right now? Or like in the US, what classifications of birds are most imperiled. You hear a lot about grassland, which is you know, I guess obvious because of loss of grassland habitat, But are there classifications of birds where it's just not like clearly understood things that you guys look at that you're that you're puzzled about.
Shore birds are are declining pretty rapidly. We have We've done some studies on shore birds in the Pacific Flyway and it's it's almost all bad news there. And it's hard to know why. It could be loss of habitat on the overwintering grounds that in South America that is a definite possibility, crowding on the beaches, things like that, and it could be you know, breeding habitat up. You know a lot of these shore birds breed up in the boreal regions and that's you know, being affected by climate change things like that. But shore birds, I would say, along with the grassland birds are pretty imperiled.
The ones that are more alarming. Yep. Do you know there was a there was a ten thousand year period when basically from the end of the place has scene extinctions. It was a ten thousand year period where only one creature that they know about and what is now the US one extinct. You know, some like coastal goose in California.
Uh.
And then we had all you know, with with European arrival in the New World. We then launched in this whole other epic of extinctions. But uh, do you think things like do you see things that that would suggest that we're that we're headed for more extinctions in the US with bird species? Oh?
Man, that's that's it's hard to say. You know, there there's a lot of a lot of species for which we we do these trends, these these you know, long term trends that are declining. You know, very few are are increasing. Uh, And it's uh, you know it it does seem like more bad news than good, that's for sure. You know, there are we we see. So one of the things you see in uh, you know, when you do these these studies on population trends is that you'll see that it's not all decline or all growth. They'll be you know, it's spatially you know, different the declines and the growth. So they'll be growing in one region and declining in another. You know, you maybe that's evidence of a range shift. Maybe they're declining in one region and growing in another, not because they're dying over here, but because they're moving from one place to the other. So you see more over here. So sometimes it's hard to tease that apart just looking at this population data and then of course things that are you know, super reliant on people like snow geese. We looked at snow geese earlier, you know, the white fronted geese. Those populations are exploding because of farms. They can exploit farms things like that, whereas other waterfowl aren't doing so well, you know. So it's it's hard to say like that we're heading towards another mass extinction, but more birds that not are definitely in decline right now.
Yeah, what uh if you when when you hear about client. You guys have mentioned climate change a couple of times, and it's easy to picture how things can lose from climate changes because shifting habitats, and it takes them a long time to adjust to shifting habitats. But does it wouldn't it have to be that? I mean, there's got to be like birds who are having new area opened up to them, Like who's on the winning end? I mean, I imagine you know, you talk about all these birds that that have woron out from human activity, means like Canada geese have really done well thanks to humans. English sparrows have done really well thanks to humans starlings, crows have done well thanks to humans. Are there things that that you see that you'd see on the increase because there used to be areas that that that they had a northern limit that's opening up to them. Yeah.
I think northern mockingbird is one that has pushed north in the last twenty years or so, and it's it's likely due to you know, it can now tolerate what's going on further north than than it's previous range limit, So.
It's opening up habitat. Yeah. Yeah.
Part of it also is that it's it's often not just climate change in isolation, but also other human land use, so that the what what can happen is when you have sort of changes in climate and the connectivity between habitat has been altered and so that there isn't that connectivity that there may have that there may have once been. That creates a different type of problem for for birds and other and particularly less mobile animals to be able to respond.
To explain that, like we give give that in terms of a particular bird.
Yeah, So if you think about me, let me think if I can come up with something. If you're a grassland bird, I'll be sort of general, so it applies more than sort of any specifically. If you're a grassland bird and you are things are getting warmer, so generally, what would happen is you would be shifting to the north and you may be doing pretty well in things like Pawnee National Grasslands or Commanche National Grasslands or some of these different grasslands that have been set aside. What happens is as as things become more warmer and warmer, that habitat in that place may not be right for them anymore. You always have some percentage of birds that are are quote unquote making mistakes maybe or going to places where they wandering around to varying degrees, and it really varies depending on the species the degree to which that happens. What happens is if there are fewer places nearby for those birds to find, if those are all corn and soybean farms, now they may not disperse to another area that has sort of the appropriate habitat that you might that you might move to. So it might be like, you know, maybe there is this other habitat that would be you know, work out really well for them, but they have to get through a whole bunch of other stuff in order to reach there, and there just aren't enough individuals that would sort of quote unquote figure out that this other place exists.
Yeah, I got you. What generally is, do you guys look at rough grouse much?
Do we have rough grouse on there?
Because here's the thing that just that it's one of those kind of frustrating things where you have this bird it's widely recognized that or the bob white quail, it's widely understood that it's just tribution is shrinking. States that used to have great quail hunting aren't having it now. States that used to have great rough grouse hunting aren't having it now. And you talk to people in Pennsylvania about it, right, And then when you ask someone what's going on? And I'm not saying people should clean it up, but you say what's going on, it's like it's too many things. There's so many things that's unknown. You know, is there any way to kind of like tackle with rough grouse? For instance, between what you hear about not is it as what's the mosquito born pathogen that seems to kill them? West Nile kills a lot habitat right, And you get into quail, And some people will tell you fire ants habitat destruction. Whatever you know, is that a thing you guys can speak to at all with some of these birds that just have bad news after bad news after bad news, and it's like death by a thousand cuts.
Yeah, I mean, that's exactly right. I mean, and usually, at least in the US, and I think broadly across the world, loss of habitat or changes in habitat tend to be the major driver for loss of number, either abundance or in rain shifts. Then you have additive effects, so as forests in the east are maturing, Basically what you're having is a lot of loss of that early successional habitats that things like American woodcock and ruffed grouse are using. And there's also a lot of need to have connectivity between different types of habitats that you may not have to the same degree.
That you once had.
And so what happens is at different stages in a bird's life they need different types of habitat. The reality is is that that information we bill don't have that for most species, it's really hard to understand exactly what birds need and then how that varies across both space and time. Most studies tend to be done when birds are most detectable, so you know, you might be able to go out and do surveys for one rough grouse or drumming. You understand a lot about the needs for what rough grouse needs when they're displaying. But then you you know, to go and put you know, radio, whether it's radio telemetry or newer methods of monitoring individual birds is a much more expensive, time intensive to really understand what's happening. And then there's a question of to what extent does what you found out in that study area with maybe thirteen fifteen birds apply to other areas. Are they using that same thing or is it that that's already an area that the birds are limited and maybe not doing exactly what they want, but they're doing something that they can. And so that's kind of the idea behind Ebert is to get enough people that are in every habitat every time of the year that we can start to understand sort of how these things are playing out and how birds are responding, and then figuring out how to link that with other types of data and these integrated population models, which is really what Warren does a lot.
But when people are using Ebert, are you asking them about is it a juvenile or not a juvenile? Are you just going by the time of year.
So we're mostly using the time of year. But people are able, you know, they can they can take photographs upload those photographs in the McCauley library. So there's researchers that have used the photos in the McCauley library to look at things like what are the percentage of juveniles, how does it compare to the year before understanding that the idea is that the relative percentages of what people are photographing for one year to the next should probably be pretty similar. There shouldn't be a reason that one year people are really deciding to just photograph juveniles, in the next year they're just photographing adult There should be some ratio that's that's consistent, and so trying to look at that over time is something that people can do. And then people that are interested. There is a there's an age and sex scrid where people can put how many adult males, how many adult females, how many juveniles. There's breeding codes that people can enter, so they can they can say that this is this is an area where a bird had a brood of young that were with it. There's a lot of different information that people can put in beyond just sort of the species and number of individuals, And.
There are specific surveys run through ebirds. So various states will have their breeding bird surveys done through ebirds, so they will be putting in you know, we saw black throat of blue warbler breeding on a nest, you know, or something, we saw this bird with chicks, things like that, and those individual projects that use Ebert for that data will absolutely use that stuff to uh, you know, in their in their studies.
There's an annual bird there's an annual raptor count in a mountain range near our house. I can't remember what date it is, but it's a migratory raptor count. My kids have gone out to participate in it. So that's the kind of thing that gives you like an annual snapshot, and they probably measure some kind of like thing like effort yep, you know. Uh, I was asking you guys before, is there ever a birder who's so bad they get eighty six off eBird?
If I haven't gotten booted, then I don't know if anybody will.
Mean You're like, there's no way you saw that. You know, there's no cock of the rock. You can't keep saying you saw that.
There's no cock of the rocks in Ithaca. Usually it's very very rare that we end up booting somebody, and usually it's it's for the same reasons that somebody might get, you know, booted from a social media site. Right, it's not that it's an intentional error that somebody's made if they're trying to you know, if somebody says that they saw a rare bird and then they take a photograph that they snatched off the Internet of that bird at a different place, you know, in that case, you know, we'll figure it out. If it's a kid or somebody that's kind of screwing around and just messing around, but that's really really rare. Usually the mistakes that people are making are kind of honest mistakes, and we have we have methods that allow us to just understand the differences and understand that people are learning. And what people sometimes forget is these same challenges apply to basically any professional survey too. You're going to have people that maybe they all are experts, but for whatever reason. People might be more tuned in and really know certain vocalizations of certain birds. They may focus more on forests, they may understand the grasslands a little bit more. And so we were able to because there's one and a half billion records, we can start to understand those differences and not say, well, dude, this guy is an idiot.
We had to get them off right.
We can still be a pretty inclusive place where just about everybody can participate, and then we can have different weights in terms of how we use that data.
Yeah, we learn about the individual Ebert users by you know, the the time it takes them to accumulate so many species in a particular habitat in a particular region, and we can use that in these models, just like we do effort to determine, you know, the the the expertise essentially of an individual eburter.
So you can tier it out to be you can tear it out to be people who are like high consistent users scoring a lot, and then like audit those individuals in somewhere and not audit them, but go and look at what they're up to.
Yes, And we can also do that regionally and seasonally, Like I'm I would be a pretty decent birder in the northeastern United States. But if I went to Spain, I would be terrible. And we would account.
For that, meaning because you'd lose familiarity.
Right, I would not know most of the birds over there.
Are you guys aware of the Himalayan snowcock?
Yeah?
Okay, so they live in the Ruby Range of Nevada. And some years ago I was thinking about going hunting for one. It's a high effort, low reward kind of thing, fairly low success rates. But I wound up finding online this little birder club. And I don't think they would have done this if they knew there's people like me out there. But there's this little birder club that would talk about where exactly people over the years had seen Himalayan snow cocks, which is gold. I haven't gone into Eburn, look, but but would that be helpful for someone trying to find a Himalayan snowcock in the Ruby Mountains? Yeah, I mean you can be like, oh man, two days ago, there's one right there.
Yeah, I mean, I think I think the thing is is in the US. You know, hunting is a highly regulated pursuit. People understand what's happening with these birds. And you know, if anything, what we need is more hunters, more people that are out fishing that you know, we were talking about Merlin a little bit earlier about you know what, what are you really using that for? For us? It's this huge engagement window. You know, if one in seventy people in the US have used Merlin in the last in the last year, that's a lot of people that are being exposed to birds, being exposed to natural systems. And sometimes it's easy to focus on maybe differences that exist either within the birding community, within the hunting community, or between those and say like there could be points of friction that you know, that's certainly true. There also can be incredible points of overlap because at the end of the day, we're interested in the same thing. You know, we want there to be natural systems that can support vibrant population of birds and mammals and have natural places and so so this is a there's a lot of benefit I think to thinking about, you know, just what are the ways that we can get more people interested in the natural world.
Yeah, see, I have persecution complex. So when we were talking and you're talking about as your database grows in Cornell Ornithology Lab and eBird would share information with management agencies right where my head went right away, as there's a thing that will happen now and in for instance, there was a one of the times recently when it looked like they were the US Fish and Wildlife of US will now and then petition to get the grizzly bear delisted. So the agency that manages the grizzly bear as an endangered species will occasionally actually move to unload their management, meaning they're saying, as the management agency, we suggest that these be removed from federal oversight, and they'll get it'll get litigated. One of the times it will seems so close to be moving to state management that a couple states did a draw they were going to issue I think Wyoming was going to issue twenty grizzly bear tags. Idaho is going to issue one grizzly bear tag. Hunters Montana chicken shit it out and wasn't going to do any and there was a movement for people to it was like, hey, go and put in these. So within the non hunting world, they were encouraging people to apply for the tags, try to get the tags so that they don't fall into hunter's hands. So the menu you told me that as some of the persecution complex, I immediately thought, those sons of bitches are going to underreport game birds in order to in order to deprive opportunity. Yeah, you know, luckily the.
You know, the just like the hunting community, there there can be friendly competition. You know, the burden community kind of has the same thing. People want to be the person who's seen a.
Lot of different speceis.
They want to have that and so there's often enough enough pressure. And I mean I do think that there's a sincere belief too that when you have better information and can do better science, you're gonna have better decisions that people can that people can make. And I mean that's kind of the idea of what we're trying to do and that all these people are trying to help with is you know, right now, state agencies don't have the information that they need. You know, if RAWA passes, how are state agencies going to figure out exactly where they want to make the investment to have the biggest impact. As we have data sets like eBird, I can look at this at sort of comprehensive levels. You can really start identifying like, well, these are the places that you know, if you want to bring back populations of birds, these are the places where you could focus on and really have impact. And it's a way of figuring out how we take the sort of scarce resources that we have within the conservation community and really use them most effectively.
I would just think that, like, as I think about it from a citizen scientist tool, it just seems to me that the sound recordings somehow more valuable, do you know what I mean? Because you're not running it through you're not running it through It's just less fallible than running it through people. I mean, and I'm not trying. I don't want anybody want to criticize like Ebert as a tool. But let's say Ebert had total adoption in America. Okay, so three hundred some million Americans are making a daily chore of chronicling what birds they see around them. I think you'd hit like such at that point, you'd hit that there was just so much information that any that mistakes and things would be drowned out right. But I can't picture in its current form how it could be. And you know, better me. But I can't picture in its current form spread globally that number of people that you could actually, like, really with confidence make management decisions about it by it. Like you even mentioned me one time the bird you were saying we were taking last night that flies down the center of a waterway and that they would they would not be reported because they're.
Flying well the limitations to the aerial surveys in Montreal.
Ok. Yeah, so.
I get that question all the time, you know, how can we trust this?
Yeah, that's a that's a quicker way, and that's a quick way of saying, is like, how would you ever get to where you trusted enough that you're really looking at bird populations and not that you're looking at human habits? Right.
That's so that's almost exactly how I phrase it. Is we got to make sure we're modeling the birds and not the birders, right, and we do that with all of the effort that's put in, so we know that if you go out for two and a half hours and you travel three miles, you are far more likely to see a given species than if I'm just sitting on my porch and make a checklist for five minutes. We account for that, we account for the expertise, like we talked about, so we know and you'll notice on our maps these are relative abundance, where we're not estimating actual abundance that would be you know, that's that's a huge ask of of E bird data because you know, in general, people are bad at counting.
I get where you're like dive in a little bit when you say relative abundance.
So relative abundance as people understand, Yeah, as we have defined it is. Uh, it is the average number of space or average number of individuals of a given species an expert E birder would expect to see in one of these three by three pixels at the optimal time of day for detection. And that's defined by the model traveling one kilometer and birding for one hour. So that's a that's a long definition of relative abundance.
Well that's what it is. Hit me with one. Let's take the red breasted rob and okay in June or just give me any kind of example of what the number might be.
So for roughed grouse here we're looking at it. This ranges from you know, almost nothing to fourteen is the darkest purple we can see on this map. So that would be.
Man, I grew up in a really good gross spot. Yeah, I knew it, you know.
So that's and again relative abundance. You can think about that as there are more here than there are here. Yeah, and then this puts numbers to just how many more there are in a given spot.
So if we look at what's interesting about this is you could have you could uniformally reduced by fifty rough grouse populations and that stays the same because it's relative, right.
Yes, if you just cut it in half, so we can look at one, this is hooded merganzer. So rough grouse are not migratory. Hooded merganser is. So we can see this change across the year. And that's what we're looking at. Here is relative abundance at each week of the year.
Back of.
Man. This is the thing. So I want to explain people what we're looking at. We're looking at, this is the court, we're looking at. This is all off Ebert.
So this is run through some very sophisticated models that account for all those things we've talked about as far as effort and account for environmental variables different land cover. We have more than eighty four variables in this model that account for things like elevation.
Weather.
We have hourly weather in this model attached to a checklist. We've got various water layers. We have tidal layers, mudflats, those kinds of things. We have all kinds of things that are accounted for in this to make sure that we're not just modeling where people go, but where they're actually seeing these birds.
What you can watch here and so if people go to Eber they can find all this. Yes, yeah, what you're watching here is is like a color coded map showing bird densities as they migrate across the continent. And a thing I like about when I talk about like human error is when they're all gone. They're all gone, right, meaning when when everything migrates, nor if you're not seeing like little mistakes pop up, or is that because they've been filtered out?
They may have been filtered out by the modeling process. Because at you know, where we are here in you know June or July into June is where we are now, You're not going to see any hooded morganzas on the Texas Gulf Coast.
You shouldn't. That's the thing that surprises me is that that the migrations are so complete that you don't have more. We're just like some for some weird reason that hangs around, you know.
And there may be a reporter or to from there. But if it's just a reporter or to the way the modeling works the way, there's all this spatial filtering that goes on to make sure that you know, because if there is a hooded merganser there at this time of year, a lot of people are going to go see it, and a lot of people are going to put that on their checklist. So it in the raw Eyburn data, it's going to look like, you know, several hundred people saw hood in Merganza in that one spot that day. We're only going to use one of those checklists across that.
Well, I filtered that stuff out, okay, right, that makes sense. Yeah, remember what was it a few years ago? Last year some birds showed up off the northeast, that stellar sea eagle. Yeah, the stellar sea eagle.
Everybody was going to see. Yeah, and what.
So were people when that stellar's see he took a wrong turn or screwed something up right and north of New England or something.
Yeah, bird a bird in Japan, probably jumped over, went into Alaska, kept going going across, and then wound up in the northeast, maybe went down to Texas, maybe went back up. That bird then is something that you know, there's only one of them in the US.
So if you want to see that a lot on the bird.
Yeah, I mean at times, hundreds of reports of that individ gone.
Look hell, yeah, did you really?
We actually didn't because we had to manage a bunch of stuff, so we weren't to go.
But you left to go see that Birden got in their car right away as soon.
As and then when it changed states, they wanted not only did they want to see it in Massachuse, they wanted to make sure that they saw it in Maine.
Because what's the advantage of that, Because it's a different states.
It's a different lists, it's the same, it's the same thing. Like, you know, why would you want to you know, maybe shoot different different species of animals.
Like it's in different.
Maybe maybe I mean different species's whitetail.
We can sponsor and we can initiate the sport of.
A pro.
Huge thing, because yeah, I am guilty of that. I'm real interested in what states I got a turkey in Yeah, okay.
It is.
I thought it was dumb. Get smart.
But what ends up what ends up being pretty cool here, though, is when you have all those people that are going to see that that stellar seagull at some place, what happens is we can start to understand something about the sensor network, So the group of people that are going there and how their lists are different between them. So they're all there, they all are focused on stellar siegel, but we're asking them to give us a complete list of all the birds that they see, so we can start to tease about those differences that are between the observers to understand the actual natural biological signal by having people go and see those. So what we try to do is think strategically, like how do we use some of these unusual circumstances to our advantage to be able to tease apart the differences between biology and human behavior.
So have you I feel that that would be a great example of somewhere where you could really spend a lot of time on demographics. Human demographics. Okay, so let's say you didn't follow the news all right, you don't follow the news at all, and all of a sudden. It's just that there's this huge sudden population of stellar sea eagles in Maine. Okay, would you look at that and uh, it's kind of two different questions, But would you look at that and immediately think that's got to be a single bird? You just would?
You would, because we we understand basically with an eye bird, you know, we have all we have all this data now to tell us where birds are across time and space. We know what the maximum count ends up being in so when we look at something like that, we can we can see the difference between when something might be a phenomenon caused by weather or something like that. So there's there's been other cases where there's birds like shore birds. Let's say, where there have been several different individuals all of a bird that's usually pretty rare. In this case, we could say something like northern lapwing. It's a European species that's usually it's migratory there, very very rare that it makes it over to the US. But sometimes you can have these storm systems that can blow those birds over here. In that case, what we can see is that there might be counts of three birds at one place, five birds at another place, and we can understand sort of how those birds are moving and so if and because they're rare and unusual events, people want to take pictures of them because they're noteworthy, And so then we can actually go in and really dive in and say, okay, like let's look at the molt pattern on this bird and look at the exact where on the ttertules. And so we've been able to look at you know, in the case of that sea eagle, as people were seeing at different places. You know, we didn't just sort of make the assumption that it was the same bird. People looked at the exact featherwhere to understand like, okay, it looks like this is the same bird because look at this scapular feather and this weird pattern that it has. It's very unusual. Just in the same way that you know, we we can do with people. You know, it's a lot harder to do with birds. But when you're just looking at sort of one or two individuals all of a sudden, you can really you know, given the photographic equipment that people have available, we can really understand that with a lot of detail. Now, which is pretty cool.
How many have you ever looked how many individuals logged that bird?
You know, I haven't. I haven't looked.
Do you feel that it'd be hundreds of thousands us? Yeah, got to hit off that bird. Yeah. Had you guys ever seen that? You didn't go, look, what is that bird on your bird list?
No, it's not, which is even more that makes it more. I mean, this is not this would be like it's you know, we I have seen snow cock. Yeah, they mountains. Yeah, because it's a you know, part of it is tell me where later on?
Well it was it ended up getting close?
Yeah? And what's I mean part of it is, you know, whether it's birding or hunting, like it's an excuse to go and and spend some time and in kind of a magical place. And you know, the focus might be there on some specific thing, but sometimes what you remember the most from that may not even be related to that. So you know, going up to that, you know, glacial Lake, seeing rosy finches and pine grossbeaks, and I mean it's just a it's a pretty cool, magical place. And you know, whether it's hunting or fishing or birds like you it's just this excuse to go and spend some time in a natural system and smell the crisp air in the morning and and you know, listen to the natural world and sort of detach from the the day to day, which you know sometimes in great Uh.
My dad had he ranked all birds into two rough categories. Uh those games birds. There's tweety birds and just the uh. And that's the thing like we growing up. Man, you knew some birds, but it was just there was Yeah, there was the ones that you hunt for, you know, and then the ones that you didn't. And man, I I missed so many good opportunities to learn birds. And I still struggle with like identifying all the hawks up high, you know, and people that can do that, I'm jealous of that shit bad. You know. Do you guys allow uh? Do you allow yourselves as professional ornithologists to have favorite birds? Yeah? Of course, Yeah, what's your favorite?
My favorite is a long tailed duck, So yeah, I mean they you know, I grew up on the shore of Lake Ontario and there were just hundreds of them out there all winter long. Because I just love that experience watching them throughout the winter and then knowing that they were traveling all the way to the Arctic completely changing their plumage over getting those all black heads and everything. Just you know, even as a ten year old, I was like thinking, man, wouldn't it be cool to go all the way to their breeding grounds and imagining the migrations that they do. And so that's that's my favorite bird.
Did you grow up knowing that bird by a different name?
Oh yeah, yeah, my family still it's like old squawk come over.
Yeah, for sure. It's a that we know. We had quite a few of those in some areas and mission you have quite a few of them, and adoption of the new name is not wise.
Yeah, it's mixed, a very mixed rate of adoption.
So that's when you like, when you like favorite.
It's tough for me. I mean, I don't I tend to be you know, whatever I'm looking at is is special. It's like you know, who's your favorite kid? Right, Like there's oh, there's something.
Depends what what I'm talking about.
They always ask what, No, I mean if today there's a there's a big owl, great gray owl.
I know that that.
Yeah, it's it's just you know, it's a it's an indicator of some of the you know, really nice boreal forests. Really really cool bird. You don't see them very often. Sometimes they stage these eruptions, you know, into Michigan or Minnesota, Wisconsin. I was fortunate one year to go up there during one of these big eruptions and so over two hundred in a day.
And and you.
Know, just just birds. And you know, anytime you see things that it has your answer asked these questions, like you know, what's what's driving that? Are they mostly young birds? Are they one year old birds? And you know, you you just start looking at things and thinking about things in a different, you know, different.
Way mentioned that. I remember one time I can even tell you the owner of the field and the there was a there was a farm family, the zelden Rust family, and one day there was a snowy owl. So this is Michigan, you know, a snowy owl sitting in their field, and like that was the thing people went to watch, you know. Oh yeah. And then I remember my brother Danny hitting a great horn. He hit it, hit him and did real damage out the car, like broke the grill out of the car and stuff, you know, hitting that thing. And like you it's funny the way you get certain like bird interactions burned into your head. I remember being a little kid one day and even though we had a lot of rough grouse, like just seeing a rough grouse in the yard, which is the least rough grouse he looking, you know, like on a like on a mode lawn, right, and it burns in your head in a weird way.
Totally. We had this right when COVID started. I remember the lab basically had just closed. Everybody brought their stuff home. We knew we were entering this sort of new space, and I was like, well, you know, at least we've got this rough grouse right outside our house that's drum and it was just like, you know, the world is a bunch of terrible stuff that's happening right now, but we have this grouse. And then the next day it's morning, we're drinking coffee, you know, and and we hear this and we on the second story. We go up there and there's this roughed grouse that's sitting there. Well, of course, Jesse, she's she's pretty.
It's dead.
It is dead on the roof. Well, it hits there's sort of a you know, there's the bottom level of the roof and then an upper roof and so it hit the window on the second store it fell, and so Jesse was also you know, we were traumatized, but she was also pretty excited that we would be able to have the rough grouse for the rough grouse for dinner.
Time, getting the hard society society exactly.
That was the week you couldn't find onions in the store.
But it was, you know, it was this thing that was just like crushing.
I was like, the world really is you know.
And and then the next day, luckily there was a it wasn't our roughed grause that it was another bird that through there. So then I was like, okay, Jesse, we can I'm okay eating that eating the grasse tonight. What's your favorite bird?
You know, I I love waterfowl, but I would say my my favorite bird is probably reddish egret. Really growing up on the on the Gulf coast, uh, seeing them was was special because they're they're I'm not gonna say they're rare where I where I was, uh in Alabama on the Gulf coast, but you're not going to see a ton of them when you're out and they uh, they they'll run like wind sprints to stir up the water, confuse fish, and then they'll shade the water with their wings and do this weird little dance and then pick fish out. It's just there, you know, a blast to watch.
We used to have when we were kids. My dad would use a for a live well. He'd use the washing machine agitator like the like. So it's a those old steel perforated tanks. It was inside old washing machines and had that center at that center piece in it. But he'd just take those out and set them in the water because they're perforated and steal and that would be the live well. So when you caught bluegills, we'd throw our bluegills in this perforated tank. They just sat in the water, and then when there got to be enough of them in there, he'd go clean all the bluegills. And we used to watch blue herons and they would never figure out that those things couldn't get away, and they would stalk that tank, you know, from fifty yards away. Like every morning, he'd lay in there and stalk that tank and look up over the edge and so careful, and you might be like he's just sitting there and just grab it, you know, but he'd make his strike and grab it. You know. But my favorite bird man is I think it transcends burden. But it's a turkey. Yeah, wild turkey.
Yeah, almost the national symbol.
Well you know, it's funny. We just talked about this today. Yeah, and it wasn't No, it wasn't really, but you know, it's a good it's a good story. It's a good story. It's a good story. So you know that whole deal that he was being like a little bit, he was being cute. Yeah, yeah, so e birds free, participations free, Merlin's free. We're with, Uh, we're with I told you this, but we're with a famous documentarian the other day and I was talking about how much I liked Merlin and he asked how much it was and I told him it was free, and he said, well, I'm going to get it because I don't buy anything on the internet, so it's free. And you don't even spy on people.
No, No, we just want people to go out and look at birds and enjoy the natural world and care more about this stuff.
Yeah.
It's effective, man, I have it is. Uh. Yeah, I've learned a ton about birds man from from doing it. I need to start remembering them better. But I've learned, I've learned a ton about birds.
Yeah, it's easy to kind of get those answers from Merlin and then not really think about it again. So we're thinking about features. It would be fun to, like, you know, test those skills over time.
I'll tell you what though, It is so satisfying even though you don't recall the name it is. So it scratches the biggest itch to hear something off from the trees and then finally be able to put a name to it. And a lot of times it's some bird you heard about, you know, but you just you just didn't know. I didn't know what it was. So it's great and I love you. Guys put out so much great stuffs at the ornithology Lab. Yeah, it's impressive. So I encourage people to go and get in and participate in ibird Ebert not ibird participating eBird and overlog stuff you like to hunt. I'm joking, don't overlog something science and for you and for you uh Nevada Ruby Mountain hunters, keep keep logging them in because someday I'm gonna come look for one. Did you log yours? Yeah?
They're in there.
It's in there.
Yeah, I think it might be a photode.
You might regret that, man, because people want to know where those birds are. They're not native though not native. Any guys want to throw in that. I failed to ask about that. You think I should have asked about You.
Haven't been playing as much trivia lately, so kartin then, though, would be fun of like just tossing some extra We're gonna throw you some bird sounds and play along. Yeah, play along. There's a couple of warm ups for you that you.
Know, like easy one, Yeah, easy ones, like a mallard. Hit me on the mallard.
That's actually really tough because they sound a lot like a black duck. She would have played like black duck.
Yeah, don't do don't do any kind of trick stuff. I do this one.
You totally know that one?
Ye?
Why do I know that? One?
Most frequently heard in June Northern region birds?
I mean, I know it, but I can't tell you what it is. I don't know.
Think about caribou. Yeah, you're on a caribou hunt.
Yeah that's right, that's right. Yeah. Yeah, Because we used to remember, like remember the three Stooges and Curly to have that. Yeah, yeah, we used to talk about. Yeah, yeah, I forgot about that one. I told you I wasn't gonna do. Yeah, Okay, I know that bird. I know that one. That's the one up high in the tree tops.
Yep, that's the one.
It's a yeah, he lives up in the canopy in the old Girl's forest, the Viriowainson's rush, Swainson's throw Okay, Slainson's thrush.
Yeah. So Swainson's rush is in the old growth and you know, across the North America and the breeding grounds and then they go all the way to South.
America for the winters they do.
Yeah, so they're gonna be So that.
One is the one that when you're bear hunting in Southeast Alaska, it's always doing that. And that's one of the ones I wanted to zapp with Merlin, right because I wanted to zappa with Maryland to find out what it was. And that was totally satisfied. But then forgot what his fame was.
But yeah, these guys are going into the Andes for the winter. So you imagine them flying at night almost NonStop, all the way uh down to the spots. So you know, when we we're thinking about protecting ham Dad is not just you know, where they're breeding up in North America, but also working with groups in Columbia and Ecuador and Peru to make sure that the wintering grounds are protected for these species and the stops that they have in between. So a lot.
So those birds you're listening to in southeast Alaska going to South America.
Yeah.
Yeah.
One of the things to notice that that Jesse was talking about is you can see how small the wintering range is, and when they come back to breed, you see how huge it is they disperse.
Yeah.
So so that's that's why it's important to get this this full annual cycle picture, so we can you know, really pinpoint where they are down here to help you conserve habitat and whatnot.
Steve, for listeners at home, what are you seeing?
Oh? So he it's uh what it goes along the face of the Andes. So it's all across the you know, all across the north a little bit north of the Boreal forest, right, but like from coastal Alaska, all across Canada. But then when they migrate, they consolidate around the Andes in South America. Is that down the spine of the Andes or the or the East Face. It's the spine of the Andes and some like, you know, some more north, but they really concentrate down there, and then they're and then they're Pacific to Atlantic, across the Arctic or across the North. God man, they like they're like a global bird, not global, but just using huge amounts of territory.
Yeah, that's really impressive.
There's a lot of opportunities for vulnerability exactly. Yep.
And you think about, you know, a bird like that migrating, they've got all those challenges along the way, whether it's you know, window strikes or big storms or you know, not having enough food before they take off on a long flight. There's lots of things that are contributing to major challenges.
For a lot has to go right to get from the southern end of that range to the north.
Kind'm gonna memorize that.
Bird on a Swains and swain st Okay, So this one just guess like what state it was recorded, Just pick state.
Nevada.
So this one is Hawaii and it's a pretty special song. So you can hear it's kind of jazzy, bubbly. There's some pauses in there that's kind of interesting. And so this is the recording of a kawaioh and oos were her family and birds that lived on the Hawaiian islands. But they were hunted by the Polynesian emperors because they liked their feathers for the robes. They lost their habitat to cattle ranching, and pretty soon there was only one species of left, the kaio. And that bird that we were listening to was the last quaio is the last male to ever lived.
And so he would play them again.
Yeah, that's the last of its kind. Who recorded that This was.
A fine prat nineteen eighty eight, And when you hear it again, it takes on this whole new meaning. Right, it's kind of melancholiny. And you hear those spaces in between the notes, and that's where the female would have completed the duet. So o o's were a dueting species, and we're only hearing half the song. We don't really know what the full song looks like.
And eighty eight eighty eight, Yeah, nineteen eighty eight, I don't know. I didn't know a bird went extinct.
In eighty eight yeah, it's this isn't you know a bird that's well known. There's still a lot of stories out there like that, are you know the actually Wi curlew went extinct in you know, probably the mid nineteen hundreds. But yeah, these are all sad stories that we're losing these species, but they're really meant to be inspiring that there's still an opportunity to save some of the species that are declining now.
Well, and that and that Kawai oh you know, as people figured this out and this bird is kind of rediscovered in this area, it really did start to focus on conservation of the of of both in Kawai and other Hawaiian islands and trying to figure out how you pull together these partnerships of groups like the nature conservancies states to think about and you know, how you how you can set aside habitat, create connectivity to move for birds to be able to move and oftentimes, you know, it's it's birds that are the things that first highlight that there's something that could be going wrong in a system. And so why while Kawaii oh oh is you know, it's the first the first family of birds that we've lost, you know, really in modern times where it's it's not just that individual species, but as you go up and it's not just you know, the genus that those birds were in, but a fairly long lineage of birds that you know, all of the representatives of them are now gone. That that power that birds have, you know now when you hear that sound and that bit of knowledge that you have that it's human actions that have caused that to take place. You know, really has this change you know that I think when you hear that sound now is the power of birds and the ability to say like, oh my gosh, this is this is not a sustainable way that we're living. This isn't going to be It's certainly not sustainable for them, they're gone. It's probably not sustainable for us. We really need to change our behavior. And then you can look at things like bald eagle. You know that the same thing was happening to populations of bald eagle or you know, you may find this hard to believe, but Canada Goose. You know, you look at maximum Canada Goose, the success or maybe even over success of the effect that human action can have when we understand sort of what's happening. You know, people are people are pretty amazing. We can shrew things up real well, but we also have the power to change our actions, you know, protect natural places, restore the places that we've lost, and then change the way that we're living with natural systems.
Yeah. Uh. You know, my dad was a hunter in the late forties early fifties, and their ideas and attitudes about geese were so different. And for a long time there was a goose on the Sand County Almanac. Yeah, I mean it was like a special thing. Yeah, and he wrote all about like the call the goose, you know, and now it people like just go golfing, dude. It's like, you right, exactly is there more?
Yeah, we got here's one.
I haven't got any right yet.
Inching out So.
So you can hear the Swainson's thrush in there. There's lots of stuff.
Give me a hint.
It's not a bird.
Ess is trying to trying. She's trying to trick you, like I don't know, like a porcupine, I don't know. A beaver.
Yeah, so I dropped that microphone on the top of a beaver lodge.
You can hear them in there.
And then you're hearing the kits in the lodge.
Yea, my wife was telling me about the Yeah, my wife was listening to recordings of what they sound like. I was like, that's not true. She's like, no, man, they're vocal, you know.
Yeah, like for the whole hour they just kept doing that.
But let me hear that again. My wife was playing it's playing that for me. Where is that?
That's about runner miles north of Toronto.
Yeah, my wife was talking about how much noise beavers make and I was like, no, they don't.
I didn't know until I dropped the microphone on the top of the lodge. But then like one more kind of out there.
That's a bomb falling.
Not what I thought.
It was a space ship.
The UFOs didn't.
Oh, man, I have no idea. That's crazy.
So this is bearded seal.
Oh that's a bearded seal microphone underwater.
That's crazy.
It turns out there starting to sing louder now that there's more industrial noise under water this this are increasing their volume to try to compensate.
That's great noise, loud and proud what I get zero?
But are you glad you played?
I'm glad I played. I got a zero and I think that there's a problem in my brain with like, there's the problem my brain with remembering, uh, you know, like as signing noise.
Well, you know, it might help you to look at the spectrograms and the Merlin app because if you're more visual, you can kind of start to see the pattern of notes like in a picture, which really helps me remember.
So, yeah, but I can do. I can listen to f M radio and tell you what song it is, three three beats in.
It's just practice familiarity.
Just swab out your like, yeah, you're.
Driving around and just put on bird. So that's what I did.
That's great. Thanks, thanks for doing that. Well, thank you very much for coming on. I hope people keep. I hope people go and get the tools and start logging their bird stuff and be like a citizen scientist.
Man, Well, we'll see you on there, will Yah.
We'll be able to look up my stuff and check my work. Yeah, give you some feedback. You're doing it wrong.
We gotta we got a team, and we got a team in Montana that'll probably be in touch if you report. If you report that cock of the rock, they will definitely flag you.
Oh really, this they monitor it. We we keep We do keep a list of we do keep a list of the birds we see in certain areas, and we keep a good list of the birds we see in our yard. And it was fun, is ye today I heard I was on the phone with someone I was gonna work call, and I was hearing this bird. I was like, man, I don't think that's like. It was like a hawk and a tree but didn't quite sound like a redtail, but doing that like again and again, and I actually at one point said I have to go from it. I'll call you right back. Hung up. The call opened up, Merlin, because I couldn't. Weirdly, I couldn't open it up while I was on the phone.
Oh yeah, that was your the audio.
Yeah, that was pissed about that. So I hung up my call, turned it on. That bird quit doing that noise. Called the person back and minute I got him back on the phone and started up again, hung up, turned it back on. The bird quit. After the call I took, I told my kid to take that phone, and I said, I want you to go over in the neighbor's yard and find out that bird. And he came back a while later said he never did it again. So to this day, it's still a mystery. But I was going to add it to the Ronela family list, but wasn't able to do it. All right, But thank you guys very much. I appreciate it. Man. Yeah, I hope that you're able to solve problems and and help us make good habitat decisions.
Yeah.
Well, it takes a team, yeah, to save to save America's birds, So thank you very much. O.
Ride on on the seal Gray, shine like silver in the sun. Ride ride on alone, sweetheart.
We're done beat this damn horse today, taking her new one. Ride. We're done beat this damn horse today, So take your new one and ride on.
Mhm.
