Ologies with Alie Ward - Wildlife Ecology (FIELDWORK) with Corina Newsome

Episode Date: June 8, 2021

Human-sucking mud holes. Beautiful birdsongs. Early mornings. Eyeball gnats. Stunning vistas. The long-awaited episode with ornithologist Corina Newsome is finally here and we talk all about the day-to-day-realities of being a Wildlife Ecologist. She dishes about working in zoos, getting her masters, housing for grad students, nest checking, birding apps, camera traps, #BlackBirdersWeek, and more. She is hilarious, informative, and dedicated to her work in avian conservation and truly has the best laugh. Also: saxophones in the bushes and whether or not animals are laughing at her.Visit Corina Newsome’s website, Instagram and TwitterA donation was made to SkypeAScientist.comMore episode sources and linksSponsors of OlogiesTranscripts & bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, totes, masks… Follow @ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @alieward on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray MorrisTranscripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. Dwyer

Oh, hey, it's the contact lens that's definitely in the wrong eye. Ali Ward, back with a long-awaited episode, I've had my sights set on thisologist. I've been waiting to have her on. Literally for years, she's a busy dame. She's all over the news. She's leading movements. She's communicating science. She's tromping through salt marshes, checking on little birdies, collecting data, and then

just getting a dying master's degree in it. Thisologist got her bachelor's in zoo and wildlife biology from Malone University and just got her master's studying bird conservation at Georgia Southern University. I need to calm down. I need to chill out. I'm so thrilled for her. I'm so excited about this. We finally got to do this interview now that she has like two seconds to breathe.

I have followed her on Twitter for a few years and I've always had just a huge science crush on her. I've always wanted to have her on the show. She's hilarious and warm and smart and she's so dedicated, so informative. We've done ornithology already and I wasn't sure which ology would be the most appropriate. We chatted before we rolled on the interview. When people think of wildlife ecology, I think a lot of them are like, I love being outdoors. I love working with animals.

How can I be a wildlife? Without being a veterinarian or someone who ends up on a tiger documentary. Being under that umbrella or the wildlife ecology umbrella would be totally cool. All right. Cool. We can focus it on field work. Yeah. There's a lot of talk of field work and also there's a lot of cackling on my end because

she makes me cackle a lot. But before we get the interview, a quick thank you to everyone who submitted questions for this ologist at patreon.com slash ologies. It costs just a dollar a month to join that behind the scenes family. Thank you to everyone who sends the podcast to friends and families and Xs and Bumble matches. Everyone who subscribes that helps so much and everyone who rates and leaves reviews keeps it up in the charts. Also I creep on them like someone hiding in a bush with a pirate telescope and then I

pick one to read each week. This week, thank you to Radar the cat who wrote, imagine getting a pedicure with your girlfriend while howling with a laughter about toads pooping. You will laugh out loud at the most unlikely hidden and obscure scientific marvels and cry sometimes too. So thanks to everyone who left reviews this week. I saw them all. They warmed my paternal heart.

Okay. Onward. Wildlife ecology. What is this field? What is it? So it involves studying animals in their natural habitats and figuring out what effect people have on animals and then coming up with scientifically sound solutions for conservation and to protect them.

So critter learners and protectors. Some wildlife ecologists are out in the field a bunch checking on their animals and one thing I love so much about this oligous psychon is how she brings us into the field with her. So in this episode we talk about seaside sparrows, wetlands, saltwater marshes, fluffy mud, getting laughed at by birds, sweat, swamps, nests, snails, whether or not you should ditch your bird feeder, midnight minks, and practical fieldwork dilemmas that will shock and maybe change you forever. So gear up, hunger down, and get ready to observe the majesty of bird nerd, ornithologist,

zoologist, one of my favorite scientists and someone I'm honored to possibly introduce you to, wildlife ecologist Karina Newsom. My name is Karina Newsom and I use she, her pronouns. Awesome. You are a wildlife ecologist, correct? Yes, yes, yes indeed. How many oligists have you been? Because you've also been a zoologist, you're an ornithologist, like let's count.

How many? How many can we call you? It's been a few oligists. I think I started out in the realm of wildlife messing with beetles, like a beetle oligist. There is a more official name for that. Koleopterology, study of beetles and weevils. Say it with me now. Then I moved over to zoo keeping and focusing on zoo science, so zooology may be a more

appropriate term there, and then now ornithology has become really my whole life. And so most of the work that I do now, whether it's field science or it's community outreach, it's centered around ornithology. When did you kind of end up, if you will, migrating down that ornithological path? How did you feel when you started in the zookeeper world? Can you tell me a little bit about that? Yeah, so birds really started singing my name. We're just on a roll with the puns here.

When I was forced to take ornithology and undergrad, which I was definitely not excited about because I knew nothing about native birds and that's what the kind of class was focused on. But when I got into the class and I was introduced to the blue jay, something about the blue jay is so magical. The beautiful colors, the mimicry, the cognition, all of it together, I really immediately was fixated on birds and have been chasing them ever since. And so even though I didn't necessarily study birds until further down the line in grad

school recently, starting in 2018, that's essentially when my migration direction was oriented. That ornithology class set me on my course. Was it something also about their behavior? Blue jays are corvids, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I know you know, Kaylee, who's the Corvid Queen.

See the 2018 Corvid Thanatology episode with Dr. Kaylee Swift, aka Corvid Research on Twitter. We discuss crow funerals. They sometimes involve small orgies with the dead. Yes. But yes, along with probes and ravens, blue jays are a Corvid. Birds in general are simply the most incredible birds. And they're also the birds that I think get the most hate, you know, between the ravens and the crows.

People think the black birds are kind of bad omens associated with death, you know, think about the birds, the Hitchcock movie, all this, right? Birds are not aggressive creatures, miss. They bring beauty into the world. The chaos. Some people don't like blue jays because they can oftentimes scare other birds off the feeder because they either directly kind of just like push birds off or they can mimic the sounds of raptors nearby.

And so the birds think there's a threat that's not their bird. You know, they can very much manipulate their environment to get access to the food. But to me, that's just like a mark of their incredible cognition. And like, there's like, there's no end to the tunnel that is Corvid's. And we're always learning so much about them. They can use tools. They can build tools like there is just really no limit. I know that they always take the peanuts that I put out for the crows and the ravens.

First, they're always like, I'm in and I'm out and they get all the peanuts. And I'm like, well, I was leaving those out for whatever bird got them first. So blue jays, you were less afraid to get the peanut. Peanut is yours. Well, every every picture you see of a blue jay, there's a peanut or two in its mouth. So I that makes sense to me. Yeah, like the ballsy bird gets the nut. I don't know. There's something about it.

There's a new adage. What it is. What is like, tell me a little bit about where you grew up. You're from Pennsylvania. I'm from Philadelphia, which in theory is in Pennsylvania. But if you're from Philly, you do not associate with Pennsylvania. I got no idea. I shan't it up in the water.

What is it like for someone growing up in Philly? Like what kind of wildlife or what kind of animals or zoos did you grow up with? So as an adult, I'm realizing that there was a lot more wildlife around that I was aware of. I didn't really have like environmental educators in my academic or, you know, educational experience as a kid. So I was not aware of it. But apparently we got everything from like coyotes to big old snapping turtles to all kinds of birds growing up.

The only thing that I really noticed were like the robins every few years. They, you know, when they would migrate through, my mom would be like, the robins are back. And that was really all that I noticed about the birds. And of course, we would have occasionally see a nice gray squirrel. We also would like find these brown little snakes, which I still don't know what they are. In my memory, they're just kind of like seared in my mind as a brown snake that we would find in a field. So I didn't think there was a whole lot growing up, but apparently there is.

But we do have a really awesome zoo called the Philadelphia Zoo, which is the first zoo in the country, actually, which is not great historically, right? It's used to not start out as like honorable institutions whatsoever for people or wildlife. But they are now real conservation leaders in the realm of wildlife conservation. And that's actually where I got my start in wildlife conservation. When I was offered an internship at the zoo, there was a sister or friend from my church who was the lead carnivore keeper at the Philly Zoo. And she was a black woman from like my general neighborhood.

And it was just it was almost like my star is aligned. And that's that's how I ended up getting through the gates. And she was a carnivore keeper. The lead. Oh, yeah, carnivore keeper. What kind of meat freezers were involved? Like so she would she really she took me behind the scenes to show me literally everything from the meat freezers to like the stacks of paperwork to like breeding in danger carnivores.

Like she she specialized in giant river otters. Oh, my God. Yeah. And like I still have a note in my purse that was 10. Oh, my God, that was 10 years ago. She wrote a note for me when I was 18. Like if you want to study giant otters, because I was really into it, she was like, call this number. It links you to South America, to this woman who I have that note with me to this day.

Just in case the birds turn on me. But what a passport just into like if you're into this, there's a home for you. Seriously, I can't ever forget it. At the zoo, did you ever get to put on the headset and be like, and this is the river otter, Gerald, you know, you know, I did. You know, I put on that mic. Yes. So whenever I had the opportunity to to like either yell or put on some sort of like voice amplifier, I absolutely did it.

It was it was weird because I was absolute. I live my way through the interview for that position. I was there. Like, do you like talking in front of people? I had never spoken in front of a crowd of more than five people in my life. I was like, oh, I love, yes, I love crowds. And they're like, you know, do you like kids? Can't stand kids.

Couldn't put me in the nursery at church. Do not put me near a job. I was like, yes, I love the children, you know, and I got the job. And I was I went in shaking and sweating. But like I by the end of my first internship, I when I tell you the microphone, the amplified voice, me gathering crowds to tell them about what look that was like where I thrive. Yeah. Yeah.

What did you love so much about it? I like I started to realize that like excitement was infectious. So I was never faking how excited I was about the information I was sharing. I realized that when I was very obvious about how excited I was at first, I tried to be reserved. But when I really started to kind of let it out and let it loose, I was like, everybody in this room is excited now. OK, so it just kind of kept feeding my energy around the the educating

of the public about wildlife. And so it yeah, it was it was incredible. And you're still obviously you're doing that on Twitter and on Instagram. Like, you're one of my favorite science follows. You're one of those like very much hashtag FF this person immediately. Can reach your timeline. You are welcome. Seriously, follow hood naturalist on all platforms.

You are welcome in advance. Karina is amazing. OK, so she got her bachelors in zoo and wildlife biology and went back the zoo route doing environmental education there. But she says that life can be tough as you're working your way up the ranks in zoos, though you may love the job. You could have just graduated college by making nine bucks an hour. So she had already begun doing research as a senior in college,

answering questions about carnivorous beetles. And she decided to head to graduate school. And, you know, in a zoo, you take animals and you put them in your environment. But when it comes to fieldwork, you were doing the exact opposite pretty much by nature. What was your first kind of fieldwork expedition? So my first entrance into fieldwork was actually in graduate school. So after graduating undergrad, I had worked as a zookeeper for almost four years.

And, you know, as I said, always kind of oriented toward birds. I was like, whatever I do next, I want it to be about birds and studying birds. And so when I started applying to grad school and looking for an adviser, I found one who was studying the kind of research I wanted to do. She was in South Georgia. And so I did a phone interview with her and she saw my resume that I had never been in the field before, which was it was concerning, can be concerning, particularly in a place like South Georgia, where it's super hot.

The insects are otherworldly and there's just a number of factors that might scare someone away. But she took a chance on me, right? So this city girl, you know what I mean? Really kind of like not about surprising bugs went down to South Georgia and started fieldwork. And so I took the call, I answered the call and I went down to South Georgia to start studying birds.

And my first field season, I have to say, so I was living in it's bizarre because it's not just the work in fieldwork that can be challenging, exciting, right? Also the field housing where you live to do the fieldwork is his own plot line. Buckle up for a situation many of us haven't considered when it comes to the challenges of being a wildlife ecologist. So I was living in South, like on the coast of Georgia, studying this little bird called the seaside sparrow.

And I was living on this massive property. It was actually a previous slave plantation. That's another thing. Oh, my God. But it was five thousand acres of straight up woods. And I was in a small cabin in the middle of it, like smack dab. And I had never been in the forests in my life. Like for that long living subjected to the whipper wills and the chimney swifts that were procreating in the chimney.

You know, both birds, right? I love them when I tell you they got into my head. Alley fieldwork is a is a whole it's its own world. Let's back up a second. How I mean, this is a really naive question, but how and how did you end up staying on a former slave plantation? How does that who decides that?

Yeah. So for students, graduate students or undergraduate students, when you're doing fieldwork in a, you know, not close to where you live, you have to find field housing and usually you can either pay for it, you know, like rent an apartment or something like that. But if you don't have money for that, I was a, you know, I don't have money to pay two rents, right? I had my own apartment back near my school and my professor. It was her first year.

Usually, professors don't even take students in their first year, but she took me. So there wasn't really money to pay for me to live somewhere else. And so there is this massive government owned wildlife management area where they house people doing research on Georgia's coast. And it just happened to be an area that was reclaimed from the owners, previous owners of it. And before that, it was a slave plantation.

And because of the weird culture and like very toxic and kind of upsetting culture on the coast of Georgia, like they want to preserve a lot of the structures and they want to preserve all the houses and they want to preserve the way it used to be. And I'm just like, right? So I was I was just thankful to have somewhere to live. But I was like, this is kind of like very disturbing, right? You could literally see the houses where like my enslaved ancestors

were forced to live to work this land that I'm now recreating on and kind of like having a blast looking for birds. And you know what I mean? Like it just was it was surreal and disturbing. Sometimes it obviously would prompt me to be pretty reflective about just the fact that I was doing what I was doing, especially, you know, where I was doing it. No one seemed fazed by it.

Like no one I ever spoke with there was ever said anything about it. But I, you know, I knew it was going on. It was very obvious. Look, it was it was weird. I still haven't even fully processed that that situation. Yeah, but it was disorienting a little. Yeah. Were there any other people of color that were doing field work with you? Or was that isolating like doubly and from a social level as well? The young woman who was helping me collect data that summer is with a black woman.

And so we were kind of weathering it together. And I told her before she moved there, like, hey, this is what's up. My advisor also did the same thing before I agreed to even be in her lab. She was like, this is where the research is happening. This is what I've seen. This is what racist white people have felt comfortable saying around me when I'm down here. Like she gave me the whole rundown. So I didn't go in, you know, not knowing what I was getting into.

We basically like stuck it out together and were extremely cognizant of the way that the white people were kind of interacting with the land and like seemed oblivious as to its history or at least undisturbed by it. But yeah, it was kind of like we had each other's backs out there. I mean, the wild thing, Ali, is that the following year, 2020, this past summer, I was going to live there again, but they were going to put me in the actual house where they had the enslaved people. Like that's where I was going to have to live.

And I was like, y'all have lost your mind. Like if y'all don't, man, it just the whole situation is just very unsettling down there. To be honest, I remember you posting about that. And yeah, being gutted that that was another thing that you had to consider. Yeah, in the wake of a pretty intense election year as well. Yeah. So just like thank you because I didn't have to live there because you and the oligites. Wait, is that what we're called? Yeah. Yeah.

OK, OK, I thought I messed it up like really like rally behind me. Donated money so that I did not have to live in that like, you know what I mean? Like that was going to be awful. And I was able to stay, you know, in a safe place. And so I'm very extremely grateful, so grateful. Yeah. So yes, oligites may have seen Karina's post regrammed last summer. And for as much as social media could suck a lot of us dry on the day to day, just knowing that we can use it to rally around someone who deserves better is really powerful.

So thank you to all the oligites who saw that post and who tossed in a few bucks to get fellow oligite and oligist Karina into better housing for fieldwork. It would be so amazing if people getting a master's didn't have to pay double rent or stay somewhere dangerous or traumatizing. But yes, when you think about a wildlife ecologist, you may envision things like test tubes and pipettes and butterfly nets. But the day to day realities can be much more complex.

When you're doing fieldwork in South Georgia or wherever you are, can you tell me a little bit like what is the day like for a wildlife ecologist? I'm picturing. I'm picturing your alarm goes off at four thirty. You are dressed with some sort of rubber pants on and you have a thermos of coffee by five a.m. You're at the door. True or false? That is true on Sundays. However, actually no coffee because you'll get the runs in the marsh.

You don't want the runs. So I was working in a like coastal salt marsh, tidal salt marsh, the high tide happened twice a day where I was in the Atlantic coast. And so your life is dictated by the tides and high tides shift by an hour every day. And you don't want to be out there on either side of the high tide. You could very easily drown in like two feet of water because of the way the marsh mud is set up.

Because when you're walking in the marsh, you are in mud all the time. But sometimes that mud just lets go of you, breaks your trust. Completely. And you sink up to like your waist, right? If you're by yourself, which is what I was for a lot of the time, especially 2020, as you try to get out, you can sink yourself in more. And this is with no water. Think imagine if there's two feet of water to work with, right?

You could literally drown. So anyway, the point being, you don't want to be out there near high tide. So some days high tide was at a certain hour that meant that I had to get up really, really early in the morning. Never before the birds, though. So that was good. I don't have to be awake before the birds because they get up early. But right around when birds start getting active at sunrise,

which is usually around like 5.36 a.m. And so some days I would be out there really early if the tides were lowest at that time. And then some days it was like, oh, no, low tide is going to be in the middle of the day, like where there's not a cloud in sight, no sea breeze. You'll see the sea, but we're not going to give you any breeze. So Karina says it was intense. And news to me, if you zoom on a map of Eastern Georgia and then you zoom in a little further,

you'll see that the coast line isn't so much a line as it's like an ombre, like a balayage of sea fading from ocean to barrier islands to estuaries and tributaries that feather inland. So toggle your zoomed-in map to a satellite view and you will see patches of tall marsh plants called cordgrass between these threads of creeks and waterways that reach 15 to 20 miles inward. It's a giant fertile wetland left after the last ice age 12,000 years ago,

once exploited for rice farming, but rising and falling twice a day and just teeming with life. When I tell you, there is no place like Georgia's coast. There is no place like Georgia's salt marshes. It is golden out there, Ali. Golden. Never seen it. I don't even know what the difference is between a marsh and a bog

and a swamp and a wetland. What is it? So marshes are a kind of wetland. Oftentimes swamps tend to be freshwater. Coastal salt marshes are saltwater. They're tidal, as I said just now. So it is an extremely dynamic environment. Something is always changing, whether it's water flowing.

And when I tell you, when the tide is going out or coming in, that water is rushing in, Ali. It is watching it. It's like, am I in a movie? Like you'll literally just see the water pouring into the creeks. It's like, things live here. Things survive here and have adapted to thrive, salt everywhere, water rushing in and out constantly in one direction or the other.

It's, yeah. Obviously, there are sparrows there, but what other kind of critters are in there? Like if you had to give me a who's who of who's going to be at the salt marsh party, and this is actually the problem because I would get so distracted out there. I'm like, I'm here to find nests. I need to find the nest, but look at this crab. So in the invertebrate section, you have your periwinkle snails,

which are apparently not native, which is a problem, but very cool to look at. They are in the millions out in the marsh, like sliding up and down the grass, moving in the mud. These little sea snails, by the by, are not a purplish blue like their floral homonyms. I looked it up expecting to find a bunch of blue snails. But they're actually kind of mud colored,

and their name comes from a root meaning spiral muscle. So they slide up and down the marsh's cord grass, grasping fungus off of the blades, which first off, licking dinner off a blade, incredibly goth, very intimidating. But the cord grass is kind of like, actually, your spiny tongues are leaving me more susceptible to worse fungus, if you don't mind.

But the snails are abundant and very cute, and some people eat them. They would definitely be at the salt marsh cookout. You have the fiddler crabs, which are the stars of the show, Allie. So fiddler crabs, as you might know, have one big claw and one small claw, the males do. And they are characters.

I'm like, crabs are characters, Allie. And you add one big claw, and it's just like, I could watch this crab all day. Sun beating down, sunscreen melted off me. I could sit here all day. And they come in beautiful colors, and they just have drama between each other. You'll see them chasing each other.

It's just like telenovela for crabs. And so it's just so much happening in the crab world, and there's different species of crabs out there as well. But fiddler crabs take the cake. And then in the mammal category, you have not as many different kinds, but you have raccoons. You have rice rats, which are rats that are adapted

to this semi-aquatic environment. And mink. Mink are super secretive. They are all kind of secretive. Mink you will probably never see with your eyeballs. I only ever saw them on the camera trap. But rice rats, they build their nests in the marsh, and I've seen little babies running around,

and they kill the seaside sparrows. So in theory, I'm supposed to be like, ah, whatever. But I love them all. I love the rice rats. These suckers can swim, too. They swim across a fast-moving river. I mean, beeline across, no problem. Oh my god, I was going to ask how they stay out of the tide,

but they just don't. In the tide. They go in it. Yeah, they're not playing. I loved up rice rats, and they look like rats. But with a very boobable little nose and a white belly, and also they'll paddle across the swamp, giving not a fuck in the world.

Something that your motorcycle riding uncle is probably too scared to do. And then in the bird realm, of course, like you said, the seaside sparrows, which is what I studied, but I mean, every size, color, shape you can imagine. Great egrets, which are all white yellow beaks. You have rosy spoon bills, which are pink, and have spoon-shaped bills.

You have woodstorks that sound like... Desk came back to life when they vocalized. Sometimes you get like a tricolored heron, which they just sneak up on you. Usually you can kind of hear birds beating their wings around you to warn you they're coming. These bad boys will just be behind you. You don't know it.

And they let out a nice heron squawk, which sounds very much like a dinosaur. Very interesting creatures out there. And what kind... I don't even know how you start your fieldwork, because how far are you tromping out? And are there nest sites that you're like, okay, that's nest number 26a.

This is nest number 26c. How do you even get the lay of the land? You got to spot on. So just to kind of give you a picture of what the marsh looks like, there is a big old, all this grass that's lining basically the ocean. And then there's these little creeks

that cut into it from the big water around the marsh. And seaside sparrows put their nests on the creek. And there's usually one pair in there for one nest at a time per creek. So think of the creeks in the marsh like freeways. And saltwater sparrows are kind of making their nests on the shoulder of the road. Just like beep beep, pull over, make a house, have some babies.

So it's not just like walking directly out into the marsh. It's walking up and down each side of these creeks, looking for nests, which I actually, you know what's so funny? While I was doing the research, I was like, how far am I walking every day? But I was afraid that if I actually knew the number, I would like not be able to do it anymore

because I would be freaked out. So I forgot to calculate how far I was walking every day. I'll have to find that out, but a lot, a lot. And I usually, there is about four to six hours that you have between high tides where the water is like not dangerous. And so in that five, six hour period, I would be walking up and down these tidal creeks,

usually about 15 of them or so, looking for nests. And just like you said, like each one is labeled with some kind of number, letter combination GPS mark. So I know where it is, you know, some measurements taken, like how many eggs are in here? How high is this nest off the ground because they build their nests kind of elevated in the grass. And looking for these nests feels basically impossible.

And I don't even know how I graduated. They're made of marsh grass, and they're hidden by marsh grass. So it's literally like, there's nothing about the nest that isn't the marsh, which you're looking through the mean. So the birdies make these nests, side note, with an overhanging dome to hide the off-white and chocolate speckled eggs. Because when the tides rise,

their little eggy babies might just float and bob away for a bit. So the top of the dome nest keeps them from drifting off. So just imagine, your new parent, the bassinet containing your triplets or quadruplets just periodically floods from the bottom, like a rowboat with a leak. Naturally, smack a top on there so they don't flood away when you're off eating bugs.

But when you're out doing fieldwork, looking for nests made of grass in the grass and you can't see them, what other senses can you use? I would give up and use my blood as money to consult an oracle. But Karina's a better field scientist than I am. So I would have to use the behavior of the parents. So I'd be walking through the marsh and as soon as I heard this like chipping sound,

it's like chip, chip, chip, chip. I was like, okay, it's a game of Marco Polo now. And so I'm like moving around, making some sounds to kind of prompt the parents to basically let me know when I'm close and they would get real excited when you get close to the nest. And that's how you zero in on its location.

And I have literally walked in circles for three hours before looking for a nest because I heard you, yeah. Oh my God. There have been some extreme kind of like Marco Polo standoffs out in the marsh. But yeah, that's kind of what it looks like to go looking for those seaside sparrow nests.

Do they have a vocalization that means that they're laughing at you? Listen, when I tell you about the end of my field season, I was convinced that every animal out there was against me and that the seaside sparrows hired them. So I wouldn't be surprised that they had laughing at me sounds. I'm sure they, I'm sure they did. And what are you looking for?

Are you looking to see like how many eggs do they have? Has anyone parasitized them? What are you writing down? And is it a clipboard or moleskin or what's, or your phone notes? Good question. So my overarching question for the seaside sparrow was understanding nest predation

and how it varied across the landscape as you get closer to certain variables, like closeness to the nearby roads or closeness to the water body that the marsh was lining to see if there was a spatial pattern to where nest predation threat was highest. And so I would use a write in the rain notebook that is waterproof and thank God

because it literally was just caked in my sweat. My advisor was like, Karina, how do you do this to your, I said, look, the Mars done it to me first. Okay. But yeah, so I would write down all the information I was collecting, nest height, number of eggs, and I would go back every few days and check on nests that I had already found

to see if there had been any nests lost. And some nests even have video cameras on them so that I could identify the species of predator that was depredating those nests. What was eating them? When I tell you drama unfolds, I thought the crabs had a monopoly on the drama. Absolutely not.

So I was studying specifically mammalian predators, right? But obviously, like, when you have a camera on a nest, you get all of the plot line. So I was finding mammals, like the ones I mentioned, like raccoons, marsh rice rats, as well as American mink. But come to find out, marsh wrens, okay? Wrens are known for being extraordinarily territorial

during the breeding season. They will do anything to kind of keep control of the resources around their nests, the space, right? So one day, you know, and my advisor was like, I think marsh wrens are a killing sea-sized throw eggs, but I don't know, she'd never put a camera out there. I put a camera out there. Allie, when I tell you,

I saw a marsh wren fly over to the nest, I said, wait, so I'm just watching hours and hours of video, right? So I'm like, what? It seemed like it had been watching the mother, because it came as soon as the mother left the nest, so I assume go find food. So first, it lands on the edge of the nest and is like looking at the eggs.

I'm like, what are you about to do? It starts when I tell you, like, take with its whole chest poking holes in the eggs. I'm talking about, like, bam, bam, bam, bam. And just not just one, like, one would have been more than enough to kill the egg. I'm talking about bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, right? And then it isn't stopped there, right?

It starts drinking the egg. So I'm like, okay, okay, now you're a predator as well. And then, Allie, it picks the egg up and just throws it out of the nest. When I tell you, wow, I, because I had found, there have been several instances where there would be an active nest with like several eggs in it,

and then I'll come back and check it out the next time. And it wouldn't be like there would be egg fragments, you know, in like a, you know, a yokey inside, like a rat had made a meal of an egg. They would just be gone. And I'm like, what has happened? Like, I literally could not figure out why that was happening.

Turns out these little wrens that are half the size of a seaside sparrow, they are competitors that stop at absolutely nothing, nothing at all. Bam, killing, bam, drinking, bam, getting rid of the evidence. Wren Life is like a salt marsh Mad Max apocalypse film about a zombie high on flocka, who was also undercover in this CIA,

which is a film heads up I would pay to see. Was this the first time that it had really been observed because you had camera traps? That's right, yeah. So other marsh, other wren species, like I think I'm gonna say like maybe Carolina wrens and I think house wrens have been observed doing this kind of behavior where they're killing eggs,

sometimes killing the already hatched offspring of even other of their own species to kind of maintain control of the, you know, monopoly on the resources, but it had never been noted in the marsh wren. Like we all assumed that's what was happening. It was like, all of your cousins are doing this, you're probably doing it too,

but it had never been recorded or noted before, published before. So I think I'm gonna try to publish that observation just to be like, yep, we were all, what we thought was happening is what's happening with the marsh wren. And you know, do wildlife ecologists, do you ever have to help control invasive populations

like with starlings or anything like that? Or, hmm. So some people are tasked with the management of invasive species. And sometimes even the management of native species, for example, predators, right? If there's like particularly vulnerable populations of say some shore bird, right?

Wildlife ecologists and wildlife managers might go out and set up basically physical barriers to prevent even native predators like, you know, like a raccoon or something like that from being able to access the nests of these birds just to add a layer of protection because their populations aren't doing well. So there's definitely times

when that kind of management goes into play. The starlings then would not do with the marsh. So yeah, I think the starlings looked at the marsh and was like, y'all got that. We got everything else, y'all got the marsh. Yeah, so I never had to, I had never seen a starling out in the salt marsh or anywhere near the marsh.

Starlings, side note, dark, iridescent and white-spotted birds whose beaks are dark in the winter and yellow in the summer and they're invasive in the US. They're all related to 60 that were set loose in Central Park in the late 1800s by a German guy named Eugene Scheifelen who also introduced the house sparrow to the US.

Thanks Eugene, but those 60 released starlings now number in the hundreds of millions across all 50 states. They do a billion dollars in damage yearly to crops and buildings and they tend to gather in these big noisy flocks whose swooping flights look like a lava lamp in the sky or airborne choreography. And they're called murmurations.

Now I've also heard murmurs that they edge out native species so much that some ecologists straight up kill them when they see them. No hesitation. So where can you see them? Apparently not in the marsh. They're not up for twice daily flooding

where there are very few pizza crusts to peck at. I only really saw them in the dollar store parking lots near the marsh, yeah. I just learned about them recently. I was like, what's this pretty iridescent bird? I had no idea that there was so much drama with it. But speaking of things that, well speaking of fieldwork, can you tell me a little bit about mosquitoes?

How do you do your work without constantly checking to see if there are things biting different parts of your body? It's actually not mosquito. I mean mosquitoes are their own thing, but sand gnats, biting gnats are the thing. They're like it, right? And they're so tiny that like, you know, usually you can put like a mosquito net on to deal with mosquitoes.

These are so small that they fly right through any mesh that you might think about putting on your body. And so you basically have to just deal, like you just have to look at them, eat you. That's it. And so I would, you would literally, we would have a net out in the mist net where we would catch the birds and immediately run out there

because the gnats would eat them alive if we didn't. And we would, you know, take the birds out of the net, you know, start processing the birds, meaning like measuring them and taking the information that we needed. And the gnats would literally be on your exposed skin in the hundreds. Like one time my advisor,

I was not with her for this thank the Lord because I would have made a scene. My advisor was out in the marsh during the winter doing the same thing. Elizabeth Hunter, Dr. Elizabeth Hunter, shout out to her. There is, I do not know any more bad ass field, field work biologist on the planet.

She was out there. The gnats alley were on her eyeballs. No, biting her eyeballs alley. No, no, I would take my diploma. I would give it back to the university and I would just go and I would work at Best Buy. I would just be like, I sell, I sell washing machines now. You're like, life change.

No, no, I wouldn't. On eyeballs? On the, on the, on the cornea. I'm using that. I'm using those eyeballs. Thank you. When I, she showed me pictures, like someone was like around her and took pictures

of like the gnats just on her everywhere. Ali, I've never seen anything like it in my life. I was like, you're going to be really disappointed in me, Elizabeth, because like under no circumstance. You hear me? My plan B was in Best Buy. It was actually Home Depot because I'm like, I shine in orange and I love, I love the wood section.

So like, I'm more than happy to like switch over, right? I mean, Dr. Elizabeth, let's get you some goggles. We're getting you goggles. The best goggles possible? Christian Dior, I don't know who makes the most like Louis Vuitton goggles. Like we're doing it. I don't care if we need to bedazzle them.

We're getting you goggles. People are out there chopping shallots with goggles. This woman deserves them. Oh, she deserves the world. Yeah. Just skin-crawly. I have so many questions from patrons, by the way, who just love you.

Can I ask you some in the lightning round? Yes. Okay. Some people just wrote in. This is my favorite one. Some people just write in, not with a question, but just big fan of Karina's work. They're just big fans and that they follow you.

I love y'all too. I feel like this is like you're reading your Yelp reviews at your funeral. You know what I mean? Like someone needs to do this. No, Diana Teeters, there's no questions, but I just want to express how awesome you are and just how excited I am for your episode.

Just saying. Thank you. Just saying a lot of love for you. But before we get to them, let's toss a little cash. Each episode, we donate to a cause of theologist choosing this week for pointing the old money canon at Skype a Scientist, which Skype a Scientist creates a database of thousands of scientists

and helps them connect with teachers, classrooms, groups, and the public all over the globe. They give students the opportunity to get to know a real scientist and get the answers to their questions straight from the source. They also do like your book club needs a scientist or your scout gathering.

They're great. There are 6,000 real scientists in their database and they are straight up wonderful. They were co-founded by your favorite toothologist, squid expert, Dr. Sarah McNulty. So thanks, Karina, for that. And thanks, Skype a Scientist, for giving groups of curious people access to so many

diverse scientists in every field imaginable. We love you. That donation made possible by sponsors. Okay. Back to work fielding your questions about field work. First time question asker, Joanna McHugh. Good question. How many times have you gotten stuck in pluff mud?

And I don't know what pluff mud is, but I want to ask you, is that a term? Is it fluffy mud? Basically, it's like very loose mud. Yep. That's a good question. I honestly don't know how many times because after a while it's like your brain

is almost on autopilot and you don't even notice when you have fallen. But like it's a situation where like you fall in, right? And at first you feel almost betrayed by the marsh. It's like, I've been out here sweating my behind off, right? Like, and you got to do this to me. Eventually you don't even notice, but you know, you have to army crawl out of it.

So you fall in up to your waist and then you basically lean over and pull yourself out using grass and other things around you. Yeah, many, many times a built character is what I'll say. Do you have to do specific exercises to like build up the muscles that pull you out of pluff mud? Yes, to even just walk.

Because the way that I describe walking in the marsh, it's like walking upstairs for six hours. And so I went out there without having trained at all and I was out there for an hour and 13 minutes, Ali. And I was like, I can't do this. I can't do it. And so that was just like, you know, when I first got there and Elizabeth was like,

you might have to do some training. That's what I do. So that's what I did. I literally started running on the treadmill, which is not a thing that I do. I started running a little treadmill doing the stair steppers, all that, to get my hip flexors right.

Because you got it. Yeah, you got to work out. And it was interesting because there was a period of time, like after my last field season was over, where I had to go back out and just check on something. And there had probably been about three weeks to a month between then and the last time I was in the marsh. When I tell you I was seeing stars within minutes

of being out there, I was like, oh, see, yeah. Like you cannot let the marsh leave your blood. And if you're listening to this and thinking, I love biology, I love wildlife, but my body can't do that. What about disability access for scientists? So I did some research and I hear that consulting firms need project managers to track and plan field work.

There was also something called GIS, a geographic information system that acts as a framework for gathering and managing and analyzing data. And we have a really cool episode coming up with a scientist named Emily Ackerman, who is a systems biologist. So stay tuned for that very soon.

Naomi T is a new question asker and wants to know what's the strangest thing that you've found in the marsh? Have you ever found anyone's car keys or like a buried treasure? I wish. I found, so there are multiple times where I was like, is that a body?

And then it wasn't. I think that's the strangest thing that I probably found. I mean, not interesting stuff, but just like large things that like, like how did water carry this? But I guess water can carry basically anything like huge cement like blocks and pipes and just things that seem like should have sank immediately

upon entering the water. The water just brought right through the marsh. So that's why you want to take care of your watersheds. A watershed is essentially the pathways leading to the ocean or the big bodies of water. And I always get the word watershed mixed up with watershed down, which was a 1972 novel about some psychic rabbits,

which in writing this aside, I learned was a story that the author made up on long car rides until his daughters forced him to write it all up in a novel. And it was rejected by seven publishers before going on to sell over 50 million copies. So this aside is your weird creepy sign to just go work on that thing that you want to work on.

Just creeping in your brain, go do it. Word to the wise, for sure. Paige McLaughlin wants to know, what sets a sparrow apart from other birds as in what makes a sparrow a sparrow and not a fincher, a swift or a wren in this case? Yeah. So there are a lot of things physically, morphologically about a sparrow

that's different from any other songbird. Some of the differences are in diet. So sparrows are known for eating a lot of plant material. They'll eat both depending on the time of the year, but they're really good at eating a lot of plant material seeds, things like that. Seaside sparrows are different because they do have a really heavily invertebrate diet

being in the marsh. Okay. So remember, the salty, bloody marsh is hard-living, man, in some cases. But there's less competition for bug launches for these small, little brown and cream-colored seaside sparrows. They also physically look a little different. They have a beak shape that's a little different from, say, a finch or a swift,

which is like a strictly insect-eating bird. And so a lot of the physical characteristics of a sparrow versus any other bird are about how it finds food. A lot of the adaptations that birds have physically are about finding food. Yeah. Well, Mike Samenski wants to ask,

why are they so dang and cute? And also, does the small strip of yellow near their beaks serve any evolutionary purpose? Oh, you know, it's about the yellow strip. I love it. So they, yeah, they are definitely slept on. I think a lot of people think of seaside sparrows and they're like, oh, it looks like every other,

what I would imagine to be small bird, sparrow bird, you know, but that yellow band, absolutely that little yellow block right above its eye definitely pops. I don't know that it has any evolutionary purpose that we are aware of, right? It's such a small feature. I imagine that there is some amount of selection

that obviously made it stay. Males, I think, have a more prominent yellow spot on their face. And yeah, outside of that, I am not aware of it serving any particular evolutionary purpose. Perhaps one day you'll be the first to publish a paper on it. What is this yellow stripe about? I know.

So this yellow patch, if you're trying to imagine it, looks like if a brownish bird just had a fabulous mustard-colored eyebrows. Just a little pop of color. It's technically called a supercilium, which is another word for eyebrow, which is also the origin of the word supercilious, which means haughty.

Also, if anyone is a professional eyebrow scientist or groomer, please call yourself a superciliologist. And I looked up on Google Scholar for a minute trying to find the function of this mustard supercilium. When I learned that in seaside sparrows, it's actually called a superloral because it doesn't extend past the eye. But honestly, I'm still excited to talk to an eyebrow expert,

maybe just privately, one on one. Matt Thompson had a great question. He is a student studying wildlife ecology and wanted to know if there are any interesting symbiotic relationships with sparrows and other birds in the marsh lens. Any of them friends? You know what I like to say? Friendship, and I don't like to say that.

This is the first time I'm saying it. Friendships don't really happen in the marsh. It's just like mutually assorted destruction. They're not there to make friends. When it comes to symbiosis, I am not with the birds, definitely not any necessarily symbiotic relationships. Competition is the main social interaction that the songbirds in the marsh are having,

especially during the breeding season. And on that note of songbirds, Myles R and Lizzie Martinez both wanted to ask if, well, Myles wants to know, can you give us your best sparrow call and do birds actually respond if you make the noise good enough? And then Lizzie wants to know, what's your favorite bird sound? All right.

So the song is too complex for me, but I'm going to give it a try with a seaside sparrow. So it's like, do you do it? I can't do it. I'm sorry. If that were its call, and then at the end it went, I can't do it. I'm sorry.

With a fucking best bird call ever. The bird just buzzed out laughing in the middle of its call, and someone's like, oh, I'm getting hornier every second. Who was doing that? That was my best. That was good. It was good. I have a sparrow sitting on the window sill right now

being like, hey, who's in there? Who is that? That was amazing. Also, here is what the seaside sparrow does sound like. So that's a little cutie she studies, but patron Katie Courtwright asked about birding by ear, and first time asker Lizzie Martinez wants to know, what is your favorite bird sound?

My favorite bird sound? Probably, let me think about this. Yes, it is, it's not in the marsh, unfortunately, but the wood thrush. It literally sounds like a flute. I'm not kidding. You would think that there is a floutist, a classically trained floutist behind you in the forest,

and you wouldn't even be uncomfortable with that. You're just like, oh, yeah, that works. But it's the wood thrush. They have the most beautiful song on this planet. I once was in a park and a man playing a saxophone came out of the bushes and just walked through the park. It was kind of magical, but it was also like, it was a little bit uncomfortable, but I had been...

That's like not a soft instrument. It was really, it really changed my whole day. I had been crying earlier that day because I had $1 in my checking account and I had to have a big gulp for lunch and so I went to the park to have some privacy to cry and some guy just came out of the bushes playing the saxophone. That almost, you know what I mean?

That seems like a trajectory changing experience. What in the world? I know, I know. It was such a good one, but if it had just been a bird, I wouldn't have been mad either. Yeah, no, I hear you. But the man, the saxophone. The man with the saxophone.

We got one question from a couple people. Julia Splatorf and Karine Filion and Killian Dixon all want to know, is it true that touching a bird's nest means that the bird will abandon it entirely? Will you mess with a nest and the parents are like, we're out, bite? Yeah, so that is a common question.

That can be the case for other groups of animals, like some mammals, but birds are not that way. Bird banding and studying nesting is a really widespread kind of field of study. And there has never been any pattern of nest abandonment because humans have handled the offspring. Birds can smell. So birds are able to detect smells around them.

I'm not sure if they can tell if it's on their chicks or not. But yeah, no, they will come back to the nest immediately. Sometimes while you're there, if you're making them mad enough, they will come and try to show you off. Do sparrows ever abandon nests for any reason? Yeah, so nest abandonment does happen. So in the title marsh, one of the main reasons why a nest would be abandoned

is if the eggs die, which the mother can tell if they die. So if a high tide came in and the nest was too low and they got flooded and the eggs drowned, and eggs can drown because as they're developing, they breathe through the eggshell. And so they can survive for about 30 minutes underwater, but if it's longer, they'll probably drown. And so it'll take her a little bit of time,

but she'll realize eventually that those eggs are not viable and she'll leave and then start a new nest. So there have been times where I found a nest that had eggs and I'm like, oh, yes. And I put a camera and just like days go by and she never shows up. And so that's kind of like your cue that those eggs probably didn't survive. So yes, even birds have rainbow babies, which is a term I just learned this week.

It means a kid born after the loss of another baby from miscarriage or death and infancy, according to thebump.com. I had to look it up. It's so sweet and so sad. So a lot of hugs going out to all the bird and human parents out there. Now, from sentiment to arson. Kareen Filion wants to know, do birds really spread fires on purpose?

Is that a thing? Oh, yeah. So I think this is in Australia. I believe this is in Australia where there's this wrap. I believe it's a raptor. I don't remember what it's called, but they will take advantage of fires. So they'll grab a burning limb,

like a tree limb that's on the ground that has fire on it. Like if there's a forest fire, and they will use that as a tool to flush out prey. So they'll carry a literally a flaming piece of tree, drop it somewhere to flush out prey. Allie, you may have to double check on that. I think like, but there, yes. Oh, okay.

I double checked. And hell, yes. Birds light fires. Birds light fires. Birds are arsonists on purpose. Are you ready for this? So in the 2018 paper titled Intentional Fire Spreading by Firehawk Raptors in Northern Australia,

which was published in the Journal of Ethnobiology, the authors wrote that they documented indigenous ecological knowledge and non-indigenous observations of intentional fire spreading by the fire-foraging raptors, black kite, the whistling kite, and the brown falcon in tropical Australian savannas. And they said observers report both solo and cooperative attempts, often successful,

to spread wildfires intentionally via either a single occasion or repeated transport of burning sticks in talons or beaks. And the team on that paper notes that most of the data they've worked on is in collaboration with Aboriginal peoples, and they have known this for probably 40,000 years or more. So the birds light fires, and then a bunch of them wait for all the bush critters to run out,

and then it's just a buffet. Can you imagine how amped the birds are right before this? Like, oh, shit, man. Tonight's the night. We're going to do some pyro shit. We're going to eat until my feathers don't fit. It's going to be lit. Fire, fire-using birds exist.

I mean, if that's not a tool, I don't know what is. Like, that's some tool use. You know what I mean? Right, like, top of the line. Yes. I'm going to look that up. Ash Jalhouse has a question. What is your favorite movie, and why is it Fern Gully?

Feel free to, say, Ash, disagree if you need to. It's interesting, because Fern Gully, I have not seen that in so long, but whenever I hear the words Fern Gully, I get goosebumps on my back, and I don't know. I don't remember what that movie is about. I just know that as a kid, it enchanted the mess out of me. So it might be my favorite movie, and I just don't remember, but in my conscious mind, my favorite movie is Shrek 2.

I know all the words and all the songs. So I have never seen Fern Gully, but it was about rainforest destruction. Now, Karina's actual favorite movie, of course, Shrek 2. So just when you think people ain't no good, get ready for changes, because after holding out for a hero, we are accidentally in love with this wildlife ecologist. Karina, you're so true.

Also, go ahead and listen to the Shrek 2 soundtrack and know that those were titles for most of the songs. Sorry. Are there any good wildlife ecologists in any movies? Oh, like real life wildlife ecologists? Or just in general, like, did any movie get it right? So there's this movie called The Big Year, and so it's not necessarily like wildlife ecologists.

Like, they're not like professionally trained scientists necessarily, but they're bird enthusiasts who go out looking for as many birds as they can in a year. And when I tell you that movie got the birding community, right? Like, ruthless cutthroat looking for all the bird, like, yeah. Steve Martin, Jack Black, Owen Wilson. Most people wake up one day and realize they didn't do everything they wanted to do.

The Big Year got birders right. Oh, my God. Well, on that note, Giselle Martinez, Evan Griffin, Jenny Lowe, Rhodes, and Caitlin Svebeck want to know if you have tips for beginning birders. I would say that you should start wherever you are. So if you have a front yard or somewhere outside around you where you have noticed that there are birds,

figure out what those birds are. And there are some free apps that exist to help you identify birds by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. So I would download this app called Merlin Bird ID. It's really like user-friendly. It'll present you with some silhouettes, like, what's the shape of the bird? What's the color?

Where are you? And it'll give you some options with pictures. Highly recommend. Her favorite apps for bird songs. There's one called BirdNet that analyzes a bird song like Frickin Shazam and tells you what it thinks it is. But you have to stop yourself from excited, high-pitched shrieking using it because it's so cool.

There's also another one called Cherpomatic, which I commend for picking an app name that is just recklessly adorable. You know, if you're trying to get the birds to come to you instead of you romping around to look for the birds, a lot of questions, including someone who calls themselves cheese, want to know are bird feeders bad? Jessica Craver wants to know how you feel about Amiri Young,

Kyle Harper, Sylvia T, and Miranda Panda. Want to know, like, why is it okay to feed birds when it's bad to feed other wild animals? What do we do? So everyone from cheese to Amanda Panda, that's a really good question. When it comes to, you know, whenever you see signs, like, please don't feed the wildlife,

that's usually because people hand feed the wildlife, right? It's like people handing a can of the goose a slice of bread. And that association of human hands-me-food can be very dangerous for people, ranging from geese to bears, you know, and everything in between. So when it comes to birds, a lot of times, because birds are so mobile, like they move around so much, providing essentially a food source in your backyard isn't bad,

especially because where people are living, there used to probably be some sort of food source there that no longer exists because your house is there. Not to guilt you, but just to give you an idea. So feeding birds is good, I think, and it definitely helps to draw birds to your backyard. If you're interested in some really easy ways to draw birds, hummingbird feeders are like one of the cheapest and easiest ways to go.

It's literally three parts water, one part white sugar. Boom, there you go. There's your hummingbird food, and it's actually just fine for them, it's good. Yeah, so lots of ways, cheap ways to draw birds to where you are, no matter where you live. There was someone told me recently, someone put a hummingbird feeder with just like that combination on,

they were like in the 32nd floor of some high-rise apartment, and a hummingbird found it. Oh, yeah. Worth it. Be careful hanging it, but worth it, you know? Listen, look. Body inside the building, keep the body inside. The arm goes out the body inside.

Please, the hummingbird will find you. As we're recording this, out my window is a hummingbird nest, and I'm literally looking at two tiny baby hummingbirds with their cute little fricking faces. True story, I'm gonna send you a picture after this. They're so cute. Are you kidding me? Yeah, it's the best, and I didn't realize it was there

until I sat here a couple episodes ago to record. Anyway, but yeah, I will send you a picture. There are these two little tiny babies. Holy crap. I know, I've never seen a hummingbird nest. I know, I'm just staring at them like such a creep. Such a creep. Oh, you know what?

A first-time question asker, Joyce Cuxi, wants to know, what happens to the ecosystem when they drain a marsh? It's really bad, right? They say, is there a way to correct it later on? That's a really good question. So kind of deteriorating a marsh through draining or any other sort of mechanism is bad, because marshes serve as natural barriers for us.

So for example, they prevent like really large storm surges. So if you're someone on the coast and you live, you know, close to the ocean, you want your marshes to be intact because they're serving to prevent, you know, you getting flooded and for storms are being as bad as they could be. They're very important for that kind of ecosystem service. Marshes can be restored. When it comes to water flow, I have to admit

that I'm not entirely sure about what that process would entail, restoring the flow of water into a marsh. But marsh restoration is absolutely something that happens, work that gets done on coasts across the United States, even kind of doing things like putting oyster shells on the edge of the marsh to kind of shore up the siding, so to speak, of it so that it's strong and it's serving as a good barrier to the ocean

that is, you know, knocking against it continually. So yeah, a lot of ways to do marsh restoration and very thankfully that is happening in Georgia and around the country. Essentially, the ocean is creeping further and further toward the land and so there's just less marsh, but it also increases the average heights of high tide. So when you have, you know, for example, seaside sparrows

that place their nests in the marsh grass, like those high tides are getting higher and flooding becomes a bigger and bigger risk for them. And so they're expected to continue to lose more nests to flooding. When it comes to sea level rise, that's more of like a massively unified effort, right? Like the world getting their act together

and the United States and like other big kind of polluting groups of people like getting their act together, making large scale industrial level changes to how we treat the earth. But there are other things like we can, you know, for example, sea level rise exacerbates some other threats like nest predation, which is actually why I'm studying nest predation.

And so we can address the kind of secondary issues that happen as a result of climate change. And that's kind of where my work comes in. Oh, and, you know, other people want your job, essentially. They'd like to be Karina Newsom, Kasey Wheatley, and first I'm quest Jessica Andy Morrison and Caitlin Svabeck, big fans of your work in Andy's words. And as an aspiring wildlife ecologist,

what's the balance between lab work and field work and any tips for finding field jobs? Thank you all for your kind words. I would say that for me, lab work is data entry. So all of my data collection and any sort of, you know, actual hands on science that I'm doing is happening out in the field. But, and this is advice that my advisor,

Dr. Elizabeth Hunter shared with me, don't let data input pile up, right? I could be out there all summer long, have months and months of data, and then have to sit for days and enter this data. So as you're collecting that data, put it in right away. And then you will save yourself a lot of heartache and that balance will be much easier to manage.

So like tidying or flossing, just do a little every day to get yourself out of a rotten, horrifying mess later. Now, how about getting into wildlife ecology? Should you work at a zoo first? How do we have Karina's life stomping around marshes, watching videos of minks stealing eggs in the moonlight? I would recommend taking, if you can, field technician jobs.

So typically when you go to grad school and you're doing field work in grad school, that advisor is going to want you to have had experience in the field. My zoo experience and my passion seem to make my advisor, trust me enough, to take on the marsh. But generally, you want to look for maybe even seasonal jobs. And there's a job board called Texas A&M Job Board

where you can find a lot of the jobs that are typically ecology based, that pop up summer seasonal, summer year round, summer part time, whatever I guess is best for you. Check that job board and get as much experience as you can before, if you want to go to grad school, it is not required that you go to grad school to be a wildlife ecologist, right?

There are many jobs at all different levels, but that is one place to look for those jobs and that experience. Oh, that's good to know. Oral of Grandma Ken, always sends in great questions. And how do we keep researchers safe in the field? What do universities need to do to invest in that? And also, what has it been like from your perspective

looking at Black Birders Week and how it's taken off? And were you surprised and have you seen the community demonstrably improve at all? Just a couple of questions there. But like, all great questions. But yeah, obviously, I'm a huge fan of Black Birders Week. Have you seen anything change in the last year since you were part of its launch?

Yeah, so the one thing that I would say, I think by and large, the most that's happened has been a lot of conversations. And I definitely recognize that conversations need to happen, but the only time I want to have a conversation is if you are writing down what I'm saying and what we're saying and what you're hearing and planning to implement.

Like, otherwise, please don't ask me to speak on this topic. It's kind of where I'm at. There have been some examples of people kind of taking it to heart right away. And to me, the best demonstration of that has been the National Wildlife Federation. Like, literally during Black Birders Week last year, they created a pot of money to fund Black Indigenous people

of color who were interested in wildlife conservation to fund their internships. Because a lot of times, unfortunately, internships tend to be unpaid. So they put money, which is this takes money. They also held a series of round tables with people from different parts of the country, from different areas of expertise in wildlife conservation

to craft legislative recommendations for Congress that they're going to bring before Congress to help make birding recreationally and science professionally safer for Black people. So they, to me, took off. They hit the ground running with that. And so I've been very grateful for their work. So that's been the best example for me.

And then when it comes to how to keep people safe, like a few minutes ago, we were talking about the fact that they have housing for researchers, coastal researchers, and people doing ecology on the coast of Georgia, living on a plantation that very much kind of celebrates that era as opposed to reckoning with it, right? Like, if you're going to bring students here, tell the truth, don't sit here and glorify what was a horrific time

in African-American history, in Indigenous people's history. And so that is an element of safety. And I think that universities need to invest funding into placing their students and their researchers when they have to go live somewhere else in places that are safe, that feel safe and that are safe. I think that being able to identify people as professionals out in the field is important.

And I actually, I can't remember who it was on Twitter, her university, she had asked her university, hey, can you get big magnets that say the school's name for students to put on their cars while they're out in their field site, right? Because I'd be parked by the marsh that's right on the road. And it's just a red Mitsubishi, right? My little brinky dink, hoopty,

and people see this black girl out in the marsh and, like, what in the world is she doing? I would have loved to have, like, a magnet. And it's just easy, right? Like, I don't have to take the school vehicle. I'm not, like, freaking out. Like, I'm going to scratch the vehicle. But yeah, I mean, with my field equipment,

I could just take my car and I could put the little sticky on there. I'm like, that's genius, right? Just because a lot of the danger that comes with field work is people. A lot of the fear that comes with field work has to do with the people who live in those areas. And so making sure your students feel comfortable

and are actually safe and not having to, like, fight for their credibility, right? Or having to explain their credibility to people who don't believe them. 100%. And one thing I, about Black Birders Week that was so great is it spawned so many other weeks, too. You know, Black and Neuro, Black and Endocrinology.

Your whole timeline can change where it's Black Birders Week isn't just one week. Start following people with so many different kinds of voices from people who are neurodivergent to actually autistic hashtags and disabled in academia. And you start to really get to see thoughts all year round. And so I love that about Black Birders Week. Yeah, I'm a better person because of the people

that I have come in contact with and have been able to learn from since then. It's incredible. Yeah, I'm so excited to see everyone celebrate the second year of it. Yes! And I just want to say the Black AF and STEM Collective, last year I was so honored to be a part of the organizing

this year. I've been watching and participating from the outside and they have done a phenomenal, phenomenal job. I have learned, as I said, learned so much over and over again. You can never learn enough, right? It's just absorbing so much, networking with so many people. Last questions I always ask. What sucks the most from people to mud systemic racism paperwork?

That's hard because systemic racism always takes the cake, you know what I'm saying? But when it comes to the physical marsh, the thing that sucks the most would have to be the heat and humidity combination. It, I will never discourage anyone from being a marsh scientist. It'll change your life, you'll be better for it. But when I tell you that, son, my melanin just walked out on me.

It was like, we're good. My sunscreen would last for a total of six minutes. And I'd be out there for like six hours. And then like the humidity because you're right on the ocean, but for some reason it just doesn't give you any breeze. Like I said that before, it's like, where's the breeze? No breeze. It's just air that's sitting still around you.

It's just very interesting. But you see dolphins and sharks and manatees in the water. So, you know, you can hardly notice it. We need to get you one of those fans that clip onto a necklace, you know, like a little swamp cooler necklace. Why did I think of that? Don't think I'm not gonna google that right after this. Oh my God.

I googled it and yes, you can own a personal neck fan, some with rechargeable mini USB batteries. Just let a little robot blow on your neck. What about the best thing about field work? Like the thing you love the most or birds? Listen, the thing that I love the most about, I guess, bird field work is that... Well, I mean field work in general because it's like even though birds are my focus, like I said, I get distracted by every living thing out there.

You are peeling back the curtain. It's like you're getting like privileged with the opportunity to see things that people don't usually get to see about the life of birds, the life of whatever wildlife you're studying. And, you know, different technologies and different survival strategies, right, have allowed us to be able to, you know, enter these spaces like salt marshes without drowning and, you know, equipment to video monitor and see what's going on at night when we otherwise wouldn't be able to.

And it's like, wow, you get to peel back the curtain to see what no one else is seeing. So maybe it's a behavior that people have seen before, right? But like you are the only human being that saw this bird incubate her eggs every single night. Like you got to see something so intimate and so miraculous really, right, as the development of a clutch of eggs. And it just, I, every time I would look through any of the hundreds of hours of video that I was looking through or pictures or I was, I had chills. Many times cried like at what I was given the gift to see because I really,

I am from very much like the middle of the city up north. Like I never thought that I, that I would get to see stuff like this, like ever. I didn't think I was ever going to get out of Philly to be honest. But like, not that, you know, you need to get out of Philly, but that for me was just like, I didn't think I was going to leave my home. And I get to watch seaside sprayow chicks grow up next to the ocean where there are every manner of wildlife that you can think of thriving around them. And it just, I could, I could wax.

Oh, Lord, I'm waxing, waxing emotional again forever. But yeah, that's, that's my favorite thing. And the way that you bring it to people is so wonderful. I feel like I can picture you out there so much, whether it's like covered in mud or whatever it is. Like it's, it's such a joy that you bring us along and we don't smell anything. So that's a bonus. You don't got to smell a thing.

Thank you, Allie. It's always a joy to see people's reactions and engaging with me on the things that make me the most excited. You're a treasure. Keep doing it. So ask wonderful people, wonderful questions, because honestly, not to bum you out, but you will die one day. So you might as well just make the most of it.

Also, they almost never laugh at you. And if they do laugh at you, they're pricks. So click the links in the show notes and follow Corina Newsome, hood naturalist, as soon as digitally possible. Again, hood underscore naturalist on Twitter and Instagram. Yo welks, people. While you're at it, you can follow Allie G's on Instagram and Twitter at Allie G's.

I'm on both at Allie Ward with 1L. You can join the patron, patreon.com slash Allie G's for a dollar a month. There is an Allie G's podcast subreddit. Hello. You can join the conservation conversations there. Thank you also to Aaron Talbert for adminning the Allie G's podcast Facebook group. Thank you, Noelle and Shannon and Bonnie of the Comedy Podcast. You are that for managing merch.

T-shirts, totes, hats, visors, and more all available at AllieG'sMerch.com. Emily White of The Wardery makes our transcripts. She's excellent. Kayla Patton bleeps episodes. Noelle Dilworth schedules our interviews. Susan Hale does the books and the Instagram quizzes. Hunk of the Year, Jared Sleeper of Mind Gem Media edits alongside Stephen Ray Morris of The Percast and C. Jurassic Wright podcasts.

Nick Thorburn wrote the theme music. And if you stick around through the credits, I confess a secret to you. This week, one is that I'm not used to wearing rings with any precious gems on them, but did you know the underside, the underside gets gunky? And if you clean it with some hot water and dish soap and a toothbrush, suddenly your gemstone ring is just as sparkly as all heck again. Very fun thing to clean also, if you like to clean things that are gross. I didn't know that.

Okay, per by. Those are birds.