Science Friday - Christmas Bird Count, Black Birders Week, Science Diction: Vaccine. Jan 1, 2021, Part 1

Episode Date: January 1, 2021

Where Did The Word ‘Vaccine’ Come From? As we head into 2021, there’s one word on all of our minds: Vaccine. It may be in headlines right and left these days, but the word was actually coined more than a century ago.  In the 1700s, smallpox seemed unbeatable. People tried all sorts of things to protect themselves, from taking herbal remedies to tossing back 12 bottles of beer a day. Nothing worked.  Then Edward Jenner, an English doctor, heard a rumor about a possible solution. It wasn’t a cure, but Jenner thought he might be able to stop smallpox infections, before its dreaded symptoms began. One spring day, with the help of a milkmaid, an eight-year-old boy, and a cow named Blossom, he decided to run an experiment.  In this segment, Science Diction host Johanna Mayer tells the story of that ethically questionable, but ultimately world-altering experiment, and how it gave us the word “vaccine.” New Year, New Birds This year’s Audubon Christmas Bird Count is anything but usual: Since gatherings are unsafe, it’s up to individuals to count what they can, where they are. But eager birders are still out there counting crows, chickadees, and grosbeaks in the name of community science. Ira joins a flock of bird nerds—Audubon’s Geoff LeBaron and Joanna Wu, and author and nature photographer Dudley Edmondson—to talk about the wonders of winter birding, and what decades of data show about how birds are shifting in a warming, changing world. Plus, how to make the most of birding while sheltering in place. Birds Of A Feather: Making Science More Inclusive It’s been six months since Black birders took over Twitter in solidarity with New York City birder and science writer Christian Cooper, who posted a video of a white woman threatening to call the police on him the very same day that George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis. In response, Black naturalists and birders celebrated their communities and told stories about similar harassment in the outdoors for #BlackBirdersWeek. Other Black scientists have held their own visibility campaigns with #BlackInNeuro, #BlackInAstro, and dozens of other disciplines. SciFri producer Christie Taylor talks to herpetologist Chelsea Connor, a co-founder of Black Birders Week, about her relationship with the outdoors, and what comes next for creating, and maintaining, spaces where Black scientists can thrive.  Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. It's the most wonderful time of the year for watching our feathered friends. And a bit later, it's our annual Christmas bird count. But first, as we head into 2021, there's one word that's on all of our minds, vaccine. These days, it's in the headlines left and right. But have you ever wondered where the word vaccine came from? Science Diction is our podcast about words and science history. Each episode features a word. and how it came to be and the science that happened along the way. Science Diction host Johanna Mayer has the story of the word vaccine. It goes back to a disease, a test subject, and a cow.

Picture a fairy tale gone disastrously wrong. And there are cows everywhere. In one corner of the room, a man stares in shock at his own nose, which has sprouted a tiny cow. Meanwhile, a woman wearing a bonnet barfs out a cow. The man sitting next door is covered in lumps that look kind of like pimples, but are actually, in fact, a bunch of tiny baby cows. A cow is crawling out of another guy's ear.

A woman is sprouting a pair of cow horns. It is a cow paloza. And sitting at the center of this whole cow cacophony is a remarkably cow-free woman. She's white-knuckling her chair with one arm, and her other arm is in the grip of this really cold, nasty-looking man. And he's plunging a big, fat needle into her arm. She's getting vaccinated. This truly wild anti-vax cartoon was published in 1802,

and the message is clear. If you get vaccinated, you are turning into a cow. Stay away. Obviously, we know that's not true, but it turns out our beloved bovine friends do have a lot to do with the origins of the word vaccine. And so did a person in that cartoon. The man smack dab in the middle of those vaccinated half-cow humans sticking the needle into that scared woman's arm. His name was Edward Jenner, and he would go down in history as the inventor of the smallpox vaccine. Smallpox.

This disease caused tiny, painful postules to pop up all over your body. And it is tough to overemphasize how devastating that disease was. Before we eradicated it, about a third of people who got it died. The British used it as biological warfare against the Native Americans. Smallpox was instrumental in the fall of both the Aztec and the Inca empires. It was bad. And for thousands of years, it seemed like there was just no escape. From farmers in Africa to Egyptian pharaohs, everyone got it, no one was safe.

And people tried everything they could think of to protect themselves, from herbal remedies to prescribing 12 bottles of small beer every 24 hours. That was a real recommendation from a 17th. century doctor. None of that worked. But a lot of people were doing something that did. Well, kind of. They were deliberately exposing themselves to smallpox. And the idea was that you would get a mild smallpox infection, but it would be much less severe than a full-blown case. People in Africa and Asia and pretty much all over the world had independently figured this out. There's even a story from the 1700s about a woman in Turkey who used to wander the marketplace with a nutshell. And inside the nutshell, she kept blisters from smallpox infections.

And in exchange for a gift, she would infect you. Obviously, giving yourself smallpox on purpose was kind of dangerous. It didn't always work. People still died. It was also sort of gross. but it was the best that people had. Until Edward Jenner comes along. The story goes that one fine day,

Edward overheard a milkmaid proudly declare, I shall never have smallpox, for I have had cowpox. I shall never have an ugly pockmarked face. Her words were ringing in Edward's ears years later when he decided to test this milkmaid's. theory that if you had cowpox, you wouldn't get smallpox. Now, the milkmaid story, it's probably apocryphal. But it is true that Edward didn't just come up with this brilliant scheme by himself.

There was also a farmer named Benjamin Justy, who definitely tested this out before Edward. We think that Edward probably just heard about this theory from locals who worked with cows in their everyday lives. But in any case, there was a definite logic to this idea. Smallpox and cowpox are part of the same viral family. The two diseases just manifest differently. Obviously, we know smallpox was serious. Cowpox, on the other hand, wasn't so bad. You usually just got kind of gross, but ultimately mild soars.

So if this worked, if you actually could use cowpox to prevent smallpox, this was the answer. So for 30 years, that was the idea that was turning around and simmering in the back of Edward's brain. And in 1796, he finally decided to test it out. The experiment was simple. Edward needed just two things. A fresh sample of cowpox and a test subject. The cowpox sample, easy enough.

Edward knew a young woman who lived nearby. Her name was Sarah Nelms, and she had a favorite cow. She was brown and white, and her name was Blossom. Thanks to Blossom, Sarah just so happened to have a fresh cowpox sore on her hand. The test subject was a little more complicated. Edward chose an eight-year-old boy named James Phipps. James was the son of Edward's gardener, and this is not totally clear whether he did it as a favor or maybe the gardener just felt like he couldn't say no to his boss. But somehow James wound up sitting in a room with Edward and Sarah.

Edward scratched open James's skin, scraped some fresh material from the cowpox lesion on Sarah's hand, courtesy of blossom, and he rubbed it into James's cuts. James got a mild fever. He was kind of uncomfortable. He lost his appetite. But then he got better. Pretty much standard fare for a case of cowpox. But then came the real test. About a month later, Edward took James aside again. And this time, he exposed him to actual fresh smallpox matter. And James didn't get sick. It worked. Edward exposed James to smallpox more than 20 times, and he never got sick. James was immune to smallpox.

Just going to state the obvious here, testing live viruses on an eight-year-old kid breaks about a thousand ethical rules. But it went down in history as the first official, scientifically documented vaccination. And today, we know why Edwards' experiments worked. Here's a quick recap from biology class. Since cowpox and smallpox belonged to the same family, once James was infected with cowpox, his body was able to develop the defenses to kick it. And then, once he was exposed to smallpox, those same defenses were able to say, oh, hey, yeah, we recognize this, and nip it in the bud.

So, here's where we get the word vaccine. Edward wrote up his findings in a report called an inquiry into the causes and effects of the varioli vaccinee. In Latin, varioli means postules, and vaccini means essentially something that comes from a cow. So, varioli vaccini basically means cow pustules, or cowpox. And for a long time, the word vaccine was used specifically to talk about using cowpox to prevent smallpox. It wasn't until almost 100 years later that it came to mean more. And it was thanks to Louis Pester. He was a really big fan of Edwards and he wanted to kind of honor him.

So when Pester created the rabies vaccine, he suggested that we start using the word vaccination to mean anytime we inoculate against any information. just like we use the word today. Smallpox was eradicated in 1980, about 200 years after Edward sat down with James Phipps. We went from this disease that killed so many people to something that's just gone. Caput. And that's not all thanks to Edward Jenner. All those people across Africa and Asia, that woman with the blisters in the nutshell and turkey, the farmer who first guessed at the cowpox solution,

they laid the foundation. But Edward rigorously tested it and he wrote it down. And he really dedicated himself to the cause. He didn't just run tests and publish papers. Decades after his famous experiment, Edward kept doing the hard work himself, giving out vaccinations to local poor kids for free. I can't get this image from Edward's later years

out of my head. In the garden of his country house, in the shadow of some yew trees, sits this little stone hut. And that's where he would give these vaccinations. It's got a thatched roof. It's decorated with these big chunks of bark from forest trees. Honestly, it looks kind of like a toadstool. Or like a smurf hut? But there are stories of kids lining up all the way through Edward's garden, down the block, and into the nearby town. all waiting for Edward to inoculate them. The man who helped end this truly horrific disease would sit in that backyard hut,

devoting himself to this cause that he believed in above all else. He called the hut the Temple of Vaccinia. For Science Friday, I'm Johanna Mayer. The Temple of Vaccinia, so much more poetic than the pharmacy where I got my flu shot this year. For more wordy, nerdy science stories like these, subscribe to our Science Diction podcast wherever you get your podcasts. As promised, after the break, it's the annual Christmas bird count.

We'll talk about what 120 years of data can tell us about our favorite feathered friends and how they're faring in our changing world. This one's not just for the birds. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Did you take a birding during the pandemic? Yeah?

Well, you know, you're not alone. During the year of staying at home, I will admit to watching the birds in my backyard feeders brought me some joy and comfort and even a sense of adventure. Even as winter takes hold and the rest of the world slows down a bit, the birds always seem to have something going on, do you notice? So as we enter a new, hopefully better year, it is now the season to not just watch the birds, but to count them. The National Audubon Society's annual Christmas bird couch wraps up next

week, the 120 first year of a community science project that has spanned the country since 1900. Whether you've been participating in the Count, or looking for identification help, getting some fresh air while social distancing, or just excitedly scanning the skies for finches and snowy owls this winter, we're here to talk about all of it. Joining me today to help? Jeff LeBaron, director of the Christmas Bird Count. He's in Williamsburg, Massachusetts. Hi, Welcome, Jeff. It's great to be on the program, Ira. Thank you very much. Nice to have you. Dudley Edmondson, an author, nature photographer, and yes, Berta, based in Duluth, Minnesota. Hi, Dudley. Hello. Nice to be here. Nice to have you. And Joanna Wu, an avian ecologist for the Audubon Society. She joins us from San Francisco. Welcome.

Hi, it's a pleasure to be here. Nice to have you. Just a quick note. This segment was recorded in front of a live Zoom audience. Find out about joining a future recording at ScienceFriday.com slash live stream. Okay, let's go right into this. For starters, I introduced you, but I'd like you to introduce your local birds. So let's have a round robin of the birds that are hanging out where you are. Dudley, kick us off here. You know, I pay a lot of attention to the birds in my backyard like most people. And birds I have are like chickadees and blue jays, lots of cardinals, which is odd for northern Minnesota.

lots of woodpeckers and a few winter finches around. And Joanna? Yeah, I have seen a Robin recently, which was fun. And here in San Francisco, we get a lot of wintering birds, and that's really exciting as well. I took a walk over the weekend and saw Rain Nike Duck, Buffalohead, even Northern Shore, which are birds we only see here in the winter. And in my backyard, it's been a pleasure to see such a colorful bird as the Townsend's warbler.

and California tories, of course, white-found and golden-crown sparrows. Nice. Jeff, what have you seen? Up until recently, we actually had a big flock of Robbins around, but they've eaten all the crab apples in the trees and moved on. We do have a lovely flock of cedar wax wings still here, sort of picking up the pieces that are left. But mostly it's the chickadees, which I absolutely adore. They have more personality than just about any other bird.

And we do have this flight of winter finches moving through as well, which is really exciting. I mentioned the annual Christmas bird count. What would this look like in a normal year? In a normal year, a lot of people would be going out and counting birds in their specific areas in their 15-mile diameter circles and then getting together at the end of the day, probably for a compilation gathering. And everybody talks about all the fun things that they saw and hopefully some exciting, new or unusual things in the circle. Unfortunately, this year we can't do that because of COVID. So it's going to be a very, very interesting year. And it could give us a lot of stuff to look at in terms of analyzing how this year turns out in relation. And Joanna, all of this counting gets you data, right?

As an ecologist, what's so useful about knowing what birds people are seeing during any particular time of the year? Yeah, as Jeff said, this has been going on for over 120 years. The Christmas bird count is one of the longest standing datasets that we have available in science. It's incredible amount of information, and it really helps us get at those long-term trends. For example, Ashrafang did a study looking at trends from the 1960s to the recent years and found that birds on average have shifted northward in the centroid of their range is about 40 miles, which is an incredible finding. So data like that can help us get trends like that.

And also we can look at trends within each individual state for each species and look at how each species has been doing over that time period. So it's an incredible data set. And I thank all of you who have been collecting that to do so via Christmas Bird account, via E-Bird. We're using that information as well. We can't do it without you. Yeah, good point. Jeff, this is a community science project. That means the data isn't gathered by people with scientific degrees necessarily.

Is the data still useful? The data is still extremely useful. As Joanna mentioned, it's one of the only two data sets that we have available to look at what's happening on a continental basis. over time with the birds of North America particularly, but increasingly also in Latin America. The reason that it isn't necessarily important for like trained ornithologists to be doing the Christmas bird count is because people go out in their own area and do the same thing in the same place every year with the same skill set in the same way. So there's a consistency of the way the results are collected over time in each count circle and therefore we get really good trend data

which we can then compare with the breeding bird survey, which is the other survey. that we use to look at summer data. And it really does give us this amazing view into how birds are doing over time and also how they're shifting their ranges. Okay, let's go to our first question from the audience. Amy Wilkins has a question about how to accurately count birds. Hi, go ahead. My question is, how do you know you are not counting the same bird over and over again? Oh, good question. Jeff, you have an answer for that? Yes, the Christmas bird count has a methodology to it in that the people who are out in the field are actually moving along a route. And once they're done with their area and their route or roots, then they don't actually

keep counting birds. When they're driving through somebody else's area, they don't pirate the birds that they're seeing. At this time of year, the birds aren't really all that mobile. They're pretty much stationary. So that we're pretty well assured that, you know, for most of the birds that we're counting, we're not double counting species. The challenge in different methodology is with feeder watchers. You don't want to keep counting chickadees or towhees. that are coming into your feeder for the whole day because it's likely that then you will be double counting. So for feeder watchers, what we ask them to do

is keep track of the amount of time that they're watching their feeders and only take the maximum number that they see or hear of any given species at one time. We're probably getting a little bit of undercounting, but we're not certainly getting over-counding or double-counting. Okay, time for another round robin. I've heard of this concept called a sparkbird

or a gateway bird as the bird that got you first. interested in birds, right? Jeff, tell me what your gateway bird was. The most dramatic one was a rosebreasted groves beak. I used to live in Needon, Massachusetts, and we had some apple trees in the backyard. And one day when I was about five years old, I was out under the apple tree, and a chipmunk fell out of the tree. And I was like, oh, that's different. And pretty soon the chipmunk falls out of the tree again. And we looked a little bit further out, and there's this adult male rosebreasted grosbeak further out the branch. Beyond him was the female sitting on the nest. And every time that chipmunk would climb the tree to go to get toward the nest, he'd knock the chipmunk out of the tree.

So that was certainly one of the first spark birds that I had. Joanna, what was your gateway bird? Yeah, I started birding more as a scientific experience after I took up an internship in college. But I think my biggest aha moment that summer was when we caught a flock of over 150 pine ciskins in northern California in the summer. In our misnets, which we had permits for, we just had so. many pinecans. It was just like extract, let them go, extract, let them go. It was just an incredible experience. Wow, that must have been. And Dudley, tell us yours. I remember actually in junior high

school doing book reports on birds. And birds of prey was one of those. And I remember reading about peregrins. And I just really got hooked on raptors every since then. It's a lot that has to do with the speed. I mean, peregrins are crazy fast birds. And so that to me was just something. thing that was just so exciting that this bird could fly, you know, over 100 miles an hour. Just crazy. I want to talk about going out looking for birds this winter. Are the birds we're going to see, say, in Duluth, going to be migrating from somewhere else or are they more likely to be permanent residence, Dudley?

Yeah, you know, I'm on the Mississippi Flyway, and so my birds are coming from central Canada and heading south into Texas. and I have birds that are hanging around like chickadees and winter finches and things, but birds that are moving through, bald eagles, rough-legged hawks, things like that are coming through. All of the songbirds and smaller birds have passed through and they're probably already down in Central and South America. But, yeah, I mean, I'm getting a lot of what you would call typical feeder birds,

cardinals and woodpeckers and chickadees and things like that. Joanna, what about San Francisco? I know you had your winter in August, so what the birds coming or going from? In winter, in California in general, we get over 500 species, which is really unusual compared to other states of our latitude in the U.S. So it's an incredible time to bird in winter in California. It's not even that cold. It's just about 10 degrees colder than our summer in San Francisco, I should say. And so we do, as I mentioned, get a lot of waterbirds that come down from the Arctic. After they breathe there, they come down here and they spend their

winters here. One of my favorites is the sanderling that breeds in the high Arctic and it winters along the coast. It's interesting because it really is gone like two or two and a half months of the year and it spends the rest of its time here. So it's not even accurate to call it winter. Voters sometimes call it a non-breeding range and that's really what they're doing. They're spending their non-breeding time here. And then we do get some birds like the hermit thrush and Towson's warbler that come down in terms of songbirds. But of course we have some that my great south as well. So it's a little bit of a mix. And Jeff, what about if the Bee Gees were going to Massachusetts, what would they be seeing? Well, this year, actually, they would be seeing a rather amazing

diversity of the winter finches. We've had both species across bills, both evening and pine groves beaks, especially pine grows beaks being unusual. And lots of Ciskins went through early and purple finches also. They had a big flight in their way south of here for the most part now. What we have right now are mostly red crossbills and red poles floating around. And then then the regular wintering species, both not hatches that we have in the east, red-breasted and white-breasted and black-capped chickadees and some flocks of Robinson things. And we're actually more increasingly having wintering eastern bluebirds here also. It's a nice diversity, although I'm not on the coast, so I don't get to see some of the cool stuff that Joanna has. If I may jump in with a quick note about purple finches, one of my favorite ways to tell purple finches and house finches apart is by their vocalizations. I almost can never tell them apart by looking at them. but the purple finch has a really spiraling and different call, like a watery kind of call, whereas the housefinch has a very distinct ending that goes upward.

So I encourage new birders out there to try to learn some songs of birds when they're trying to go out and listen because a lot of times you don't get to see them when they're high up in the trees, but calls are a great way to go about it. Joanna, that's a great segue to our next question from someone in our audience. Delwyn Elder has a question about bird songs. Go ahead. Thank you for taking my call. What's a good way to get started learning how to identify birds based on their bird song or calls? Yeah. The way I learned was basically by taking a phone or something, you can download the Audubon or Merlin app and they have bird songs in there.

And I would suggest just going out, if you hear something, you can try to match it up in your phone and play the birds song. Don't play it too loud. It might attract different birds in, but just try to kind of match it up in the field. I think that's the best way. Of course, you can practice at home, but it's always better to be hearing kind of the real bird in one year and then you're the bird call in the other. But Jeff and Dudley, if you have anything to suggest, least to do. Yeah, I remember way back in the day of CDs and things, I actually learned my bird songs by bringing along a stack of Audubon or someone who made. CDs of bird songs. And I would stick them in my CD player as I was driving to go birding. And I would be listening the entire way. So I was constantly listening to bird songs, either on cassette or CD. And then I just learned them. And I still now learn them every season.

I'll do a little refresher and listen so that by the time birds are back in the area, I know American Red start from a Murrow Warbler or something like that. Jeff? Well, yes, I work for Audubon, but Audubon has a free birding app, which has an amazing variety of bird vocalizations in with the species. So that's one really easy place to go. And you can do that through the Audubon website as well. In addition to the Laboratory of Ornithology's website, which is absolutely wonderful, if you're really interested in all the different kinds of vocalizations that a given bird can make, there's a website called X-E-N-O-K-N-T-O.

It's X-E-N-O-H-A-N-N-T-O. And it's probably the largest library of bird sounds that I know. That's another good resource if you, you know, you think you heard a Wren or a cardinal, you know, to go and listen to all different kinds of noises that they can make. Just a reminder, I'm Ira Flato, and this is Science Friday. Talking to bird nerds, Jeff Flabaron, Dudley Edmondson, Joanna Wu, about winter birding and what community science can tell us about how birds are doing in a changing world. Joanne, I want to talk about the downside because I know you're specifically researching how climate change may be affecting how bird ranges change. Can you fill us in on a bit about what you're learning? Yeah, a lot of my work at Albaughan has been looking at climate projections and we're saying,

hey, like we know from the big 3 million birds paper that was published earlier, that birds are declining. But looking forward, what can we predict about where birds might be in the future? So some of our has been relating where birds are currently. And we use a ton of community science collected data for that purpose. And then we take variables such as some precipitation, minimum and maximum temperature. We even looked at land use, change projections,

and we made predictions about where these birds might range in the future. So for example, the Dark Eye Junko is projected to move northward if it is to track its current climate conditions. The California quail, our state bird, is also projected to move northward, northward and largely out of California, unfortunately. So a lot of birds will have to adapt to new

conditions. And if they can adapt, they may be able to stay in place and kind of go against some our predictions. But science has found that birds do a mix of things. Some of them do track the climatic niche and some are able to exploit new niches and kind of stay in place, particularly the urban adapted species and the generalist. So that's the kind of work we've been looking at. You know, we've been hearing that the Arctic regions are the fastest changing regions in the world. Are there Arctic birds that are being affected by this? Yeah, unfortunately, the Arctic species are the ones we found to be the hardest hit by climate change. All 100% of our 16 Arctic species that we modeled are expected to have high vulnerability to future climate change.

For example, the Emperor moves, which has nowhere to go, it can't move northward, is projected to lose all of its range unless it can adapt very fast, which not all birds can do, many birds can't. So yeah, the Arctic and the boreal zones are definitely areas to watch for and try to conserve as much as we can.

Dudley, as a seasoned bird watcher, can you tell anecdotally, you know, how the birds are changing in your region over time? No doubt. I mean, I've been keeping records, data, my own little citizen science thing going on here at my property for 30 years. And I can tell you, I didn't have cardinals in my yard any time of the year,

25 years ago. I have cardinals in my yard all winter now. And I'm 180 miles south of the Canadian border. It just doesn't make sense to me. I've got red belly woodpeckers all winter. None of that makes sense. What I should have is evening and pine groves beaks, common red poles, juncos, things like that. And those birds are few and far between when winter really sets in. And so I used to have hordes of red poles. I mean, hundreds of common red poles have come to my feeders. And they don't anymore. It's very sad. We have to take a short break. And when we come back more on both the joys and usefulness of birdwatching and your questions. This is Science Friday. I am I reflato. We're celebrating winter birding.

season with a conversation about the Audubon Society's annual Christmas bird count, something we do every year, and just the joys of bird identification. With bird nerds Jeff LeBarran, director of the Christmas bird count, he's in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, author Nature photographer and Berta Dudley Edmondson in Duluth, Minnesota, and Audubon avian ecologist Joanna Wu. She's in San Francisco. And a reminder that we recorded this conversation in front of a live Zoom audience. Find out about joining a future recording at Science Friday.com slash live stream. I know Mario Alonso has a question. Hi, Mario.

Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thank you for taking my call. I live in Cincinnati, Ohio, and every year we see barred owls, usually a pair of barred owls, and sometimes we see outlets there. But I've noticed that during the months between November and January, I never see the owls. So my question is, are they migratory? or is it behaviorally they're changing what they're doing on IDOC? We have a lot of bard owls around here in New England.

They become sort of the most common breeding larger owl. It used to be the Great Horn, but the Great Horn numbers went down after West Nile virus. With the Bartels, what seems to happen is, yes, they do change their behavior if they're actually nesting in the park there. Once the young of fledged, then they'll disperse out and around. What we see here sometimes in the Northeast is when there's been a really good year where lots and lots of bardals are produced, if there are lots of small rodents from the season before, then we actually do get a post-breeding dispersal movement, and it's mostly the young birds that are moving. They're not a really migratory species, but there certainly is some dispersal and movement during the

winter. Joanna, I understand that you have a project, a group called Galbatrosses, where you specialize in identifying female birds. Why is this so important for science, Joanna? Yeah, thanks for asking. male birds have dominated the birding world, partially because they're more flashy, they're brighter, and in a lot of the species, males sing the majority of songs, although we're finding more and more that female birds do sing as well. But that was actually led to a lot of conservation implications. For example, one researcher found that the golden-winged warbler actually has sexually segregated habitat use in winter, meaning that females winter at kind of a lower elevation habitat in the neotropics force, males use higher elevation, more intact forests.

When logging happens, it tends to hit those lower elevations first just because it's easier to access. And so they're finding that more females have been lost over a period of time than males in the same general region. When you lump the males and females together in a study, you might boost some of the details and the nuances when females use different habitats than males. Ornithology, whether it's the science or birdwatching, started in the 1800s. largely with kind of a male biased clubs, and some of those white-centric policies still affect us today. And one of the amazing things about bringing more diverse voices to ornithology and birding is that a diverse of types of questions that are asked, and it makes our science stronger.

That's an interesting point. Let me go to the last couple of questions I have, Dudley. I mean, we have all these travel restrictions. I think more of us are looking at birds in our backyard like I do than ever before. How do we make the most of a small space when it's hard to travel to specific birding hotspots? Yeah, I mean, birds really don't need a lot. They need food, shelter. This time of year, they need water. Having a water feature, a heated bird bath is a really good way to bring birds to your yard. And in the winter, I've seen everything from sharpshin hawks to foxes coming in to my bird bath.

Having food and shelter, piling up some brush or leaf matter, and then definitely having a heated bird bath is a really good way to bring birds to your yard. Let me ask one last round-robin question, because I know 2020 has been a harder year for us going out chasing favorite species. So let me begin by asking as we enter a new year, what are the birds that you're most hoping to see in 2021? And Jeff, you can start. I would hope to continue to sort of follow this winter finch invasion. The evening growsbeaks that we've had moving through in flocks this year in the east, it's the first time in decades that actually they've been moving in those kinds of numbers. So it's going to be really interesting to track those birds because they're all the way down in some instances, even to panhandle of Florida. I'll be looking forward to seeing them as they come back through. But honestly, it's like when people ask me, what's my favorite bird, it's whatever I'm looking at at the time. So oftentimes the bird I look forward to, most is the first bird that I'll get on January 1st. That's a very political, correct answer. Thank you.

Joanna, what will you be looking for? Well, my nemesis bird or a bird that I keep trying to see is the California condor. It is got one of the, maybe it has the largest wingspan in the U.S., and I have gone out a few times to try to look for it, but they're just so uncommon. They're pretty endangered, but they're recovering. And so I'm going to try to go down to Pinnacle's National Park. again and try to look for them. Yeah, I, three-toed woodpecker for me,

it's kind of a nemesis bird. I mean, I looked for it last year multiple times. People would say, hey, it's over here. I get there. I never saw the bird. And that happened to me at least three times. So I'll continue to look for three-toed woodpecker. All right. I want to thank all of you for taking time for us today. Joanna Wu, an avian ecologist for the National Audubon Society, Dudley Edmondson, author and wildlife photographer and avid birder,

Jeff LeBaron, director of the Audubon Society's annual Christmas bird count. Thank you all for joining us today. Thanks, Ira. Appreciate it. Thank you, Ira. I want to thank everybody that does Christmas bird counts, too, because without you, we wouldn't have the database we have, so it's wonderful. And I want to thank our Zoom audience. Thank you all out there in Zoom land for joining us for this recording.

It's great to have you. We have one more chapter in our bird story for you. This one, though, is about birders, and who gets to spend time in the great outdoors without being viewed with suspicion or even put in danger? Producer Christy Taylor has more. This Memorial Day, the same day that Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, a black New York City birder named Christian Cooper was birding in Central Park when a white woman threatened to call the police on him.

He captured the incident on video. Well, in the wake of George Floyd's death, Black Lives Matter activists took to the streets, in cities nationwide, Black Birders and other scientists were also responding to Christian Cooper's story. They organized, and in early June, they took to Twitter with hashtag Black Birders Week. If you followed the hashtag, you saw both sides of being black in the natural world. Smiling faces, on the one hand, of people thrilled to be in the woods, staring down a hard-to-spot warbler through gigantic binoculars. But these black bird lovers also shared stories of being threatened, followed, or just given sideways looks while out birding.

They talked about how they didn't feel welcome or necessarily safe all the time while pursuing a hobby they loved or data they needed for their jobs. One of those birders was Chelsea Connor, a freshly minted herpetologist in Texas, who also birds in her free time. She's a co-founder of Black Birders Week, and she joins me today. Welcome to Science Friday, Chelsea. Hi, thank you so much for having me. First, tell me more about how Black Birders Week

got started in the wake of that incident with Christian Cooper in Central Park. So after seeing the video, we have a group chat. It's a bunch of black biologists and naturalists and scientists. And we talked about it. And we talked about the impact of video and how commonplace it was and how sad that is. And that, as we all know, it shouldn't have happened to begin with. So Anna suggested, Anna Gifty suggested that we do something in honor of Christian. We were all on board. And then next thing we know we started planning this week. The whole purpose of it was to highlight the challenges that black naturalist and biologists face in the field, putting specific emphasis on burders. And also to, you know, have these conversations and

start some action regarding how we handle them and listening to black people and making sure that things like that never happen again. And Black Birder Week specifically took place on Twitter, right? What were the kinds of things that were happening as part of this event? We had a theme for each day. So first day was Black in Nature and that was just celebrating everybody who enjoys being outdoors. And that includes any kind of outdoors, even in urban environments. And the next day, we had post a bird and we shared bird stories.

I shared bird folklore from back home. I'm from the Caribbean. And then we had Ask a Black Birders. A lot of people sent in questions about birds for the Blackbirders. We all answered them. We went live on Instagram, answered some on Twitter. It was a lot of fun. We had two live stream sessions, one with Dr. Drew Lange.

and the other with Christian Cooper. And they talked about positive and negative experiences that they've had while birding. So that includes like being stopped by people or, you know, just their favorite bird and their favorite birding experience. We made sure to highlight both sides of the coin there because that is really important. It's a reality and it needs to be discussed. And then the last day was black women who bird. And as a black woman, I recognize that I am part of.

of two marginalized communities, I identify as female, and I am also black. And that serves to make it even more unique experience for black women who are in the naturalist field. And we wanted to highlight that with the last day, just focusing on the black women in the birding community and their experiences and their joys. We had some live streams for that too.

One of them was with Monterey Bay Aquarium, which is one of my favorite aquariums. So it was a dream of true. to bird with them. We did virtual bird watching. The video is still up on their YouTube if you want to see that. I remember looking through Twitter that week in June and just seeing so many nerdy birders just looking joyful out in nature. Is that how you feel when you're out birding? Yes. It's so much fun. I'm learning more and more like North American birds. I'm used to the ones that come through my island and the ones that live specifically in the Caribbean.

But I've been working on my North American IDs. It's a lot of fun. And birding is kind of like solving a puzzle. Like with sparrows, a lot of them look alike. They're all these small brown birds. There's specific things you have to look for to be able to identify them from one another. And piecing that together is so much fun to do. Just a quick reminder that this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

I'm Christy Taylor. Talking to Chelsea Connor, a co-founder of Black Birders Week, about how it started and where it's going now. I wonder if I can ask what kinds of racism you've encountered while trying to just observe nature. Sometimes it's pretty subtle. It's just like if you're like looking at a stream, like looking for tadpoles or something,

like sometimes you look up and there's like, one or two, like, older white men looking at you, like, what are you doing? You're up to no good. We need to keep an eye on this one. Like, like, that kind of energy. And then sometimes it's more of, like, you know, like, just coming up to you and asking you, what are you doing here? Like, you have no rights to be at a park. I know that some other birders have had a lot worse experiences than I have. And I think that's because I generally avoid going outside once I have a white friend with me to be perfectly honest. Yeah.

So then when we look at Blackbirders Week, you know, this huge push to raise the profile of Black Birders and Black scientists, do you feel like people saw you more as a result of this outreach? And did you see things change as a result? Yeah, I would definitely say that people saw me more. They saw all of us more. A lot of people follow our group, Twitter. now and they actively participate. So there's a lot of people out there who are willing to be part of the conversation

and also hopefully willing to put into action the things that they're taking away from the conversations that we're having. In terms of like change NWF, that's a National Wildlife Federation, started a scholarship for people of color. And we've also recently partnered with them to have these roundtable discussions. about making the outdoors inclusive. So recently on our Twitter, if you missed it, I live tweeted the whole thing. That was me.

The response is just incredibly positive. People are there and people are listening. So people are definitely willing to hear the conversations. So we need to go to the next step of, you know, putting that into action. Yeah. And, you know, I hear the word visibility. I hear, you know, you talk about conversations and learning, you know, white people learning. It's January 1st of 2021.

What kind of New Year's resolutions should institutions and people be setting when it comes to eliminating racism in the outdoors and nurturing black scientists and nature lovers? It's very important that you listen. And when you create these spaces, you don't just create them and think that the work is done. because there are going to be people within your institution that are going to challenge people that you've made those spaces for. So the people in the space need to feel safe. They need to feel like they have your support. They need to actually have your support. And when something happens and they bring those concerns to you, whether they be microaggressions or a higher level of negative interaction,

you take some definitive action to make it clear to everybody that that behavior is not going to be. accepted and that, you know, everybody is equal at this workplace, at school, wherever it is that you are, wherever it is that you're in charge of. It is vital that you not just say you're going to listen to the black people that are, that you're working with that you're, that are advising you. And it's also important that you pay black people for their labor. It is not an easy thing to constantly open up and talk about racism and talk about how to make it better and how to improve your DEI efforts. And people pay people to advise them on diversity, equity and and inclusion. So there's no reason why you should just stop your black coworker or your black

friend and be like, hey, what do you think about this and get that free labor out of them? pay people for their time. It is important, especially the labor. Racism is so often dramatic to ask somebody to open up that trauma for you and not pay them for their time or provide some other compensation for them having to do that kind of labor for you is unfair. Chelsea, thank you so much for speaking with me today. Yeah, no problem. Thank you so much for having me. Chelsea Connor is a herpetologist and co-founder of Black Birders Week. She joined me from Wichita Falls, Texas.

For Science Friday, I'm Christy Taylor. Charles Berkwist is our director. Our producer is our Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, Katie Feather, and Kathleen Davis. B.J. Leatherman, composed our theme music. And on the Science Friday Vox Pop app this week, what questions do you have about COVID-19 vaccines? Please share them with us. We'll tackle that topic on a future show.

Again, what questions? do you have about COVID-19 vaccines? That's on the Science Friday Voxpop app, wherever you get your apps. Have a happy and safe new year. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.