Science Friday - Climate Summit, Offshore Wind, Hummingbirds. April 23, 2021, Part 1

Episode Date: April 23, 2021

World Leaders Gather Virtually For Climate Summit Forty world leaders attended an international summit on climate change to discuss how each country would commit to decreasing emissions. Sophie Bushwick from Scientific American fills us in on the commitments stated during the meeting. Plus, she talks about China launching its space station and how researchers were able to read a 17th-century letter without opening it. Offshore Wind Power Moves Forward In Massachusetts Back in 2016, the state of Massachusetts pledged to begin buying wind energy from local sources within the decade. The next year, a company called Vineyard Wind filed paperwork proposing an offshore wind farm that would involve 62 turbines situated about 12 miles off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. The project has been stalled in regulatory review and limbo ever since. Now, there are signs that the project may finally be moving forward.   Environmental journalist Miriam Wassser of WBUR updates Ira on the project, including how it may contribute to Biden administration plans to go all-in on wind power.  Setting New Goals At An Earth Week Climate Summit This week, world leaders met online to discuss global climate policy and targets for carbon emissions reductions. The climate summit, organized by the Biden White House, comes just after the United States formally rejoined the Paris climate accords that were abandoned by the Trump administration. In connection with the summit, the Biden administration announced a national goal of a 50% reduction (based on 2005 levels) in carbon emissions by 2030—a significant boost to the targets proposed in the original Paris accords. And European Union nations announced the outlines of a climate deal that would put the EU on target for “climate neutrality” by 2050. The EU also committed to a 55% reduction in emissions over 1990 levels by 2030. Other climate policy actions are in the works at home as well—including major support for renewable energy projects in the Biden administration’s proposed infrastructure plan. Emily Atkin, who writes the climate-focused newsletter HEATED, joins Ira to discuss the latest goings-on in climate policy, and whether the federal government is finally getting serious about the threat of climate change. The Dazzling Rufous Hummingbird, Threatened By Climate Change The Rufous hummingbird has a reputation as one of the continent’s most tenacious birds of its size. Weighing less than a nickel and topping out at three inches long, it’s migratory journey is one of the world’s longest. Each spring, just as flowers start to bloom, it will travel nearly 4,000 miles—from Mexico to Alaska. Yet climate change is taking its toll on even these tenacious birds. The population of rufous hummingbirds, one of the most common hummingbird species in the U.S., is decreasing dramatically. And the Rufous may soon join the list of 37 hummingbird species currently threatened with extinction, according to an analysis by BirdLife International. Jon Dunn, natural history writer and photographer set out to document as many of these remarkable bejeweled birds as he could before they are gone. He joins Ira to talk about their shared fascination with hummingbirds and his new book, The Glitter In the Green: In Search of Hummingbirds. 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. This Earth Day, President Biden kicked off a two-day International Summit on climate change, which he called the existential crisis of our time. And like many of us, the summit was conducted virtually online with 40 world leaders in attendance. Each country discussed how they would commit to decreasing emissions. Sophie Bushwick is here to fill us in on that story and other science headlines from the week. She's technology editor for Scientific American based in New York. Welcome back. Sophia, always good to have you. Thanks, Ira. Well, let's get right into this. There were 40 different countries. Give us some brief highlights of how some of these countries intend to cut emissions. Well, one of the announcements was Biden saying

that he wants to cut U.S. emissions by about half by the end of 2030, which is a relatively short-term goal. Well, I was just wondering if you had any other information on what the other countries were pledging. So China said they're going to move to carbon neutrality in a much faster timeline. So they're committing to, it's sort of vague. They've committed to move from carbon peak to carbon neutrality in a much shorter time span. A lot of the stuff that they're claiming to do isn't quanta, for example, China has committed to moving to carbon neutrality. Brazil just moved up their goal for carbon neutrality. So now they want to reach carbon neutrality by 2050. Yeah. We're going to be digging deeply into those numbers later, so I'm glad you brought that up. Let's move on to the CDC reporting that 27% of the U.S.

population is fully vaccinated, but some areas are seeing surges and cases, and one of those is Michigan. What is happening there? So Michigan is being hit by a surge. They've been reporting thousands of new infections per day, and it's starting to fill up hospitals. The issues with Michigan aren't limited to the state, there are other states that are also experiencing their own increases in cases, including Minnesota and Pennsylvania, but in Michigan, it just seems to be particularly severe. And the governor actually requested more doses of vaccine from the federal government, from the Biden administration, but they were turned down because the claim was that increasing the number of vaccines going to the state isn't going to directly fight an acute surge like this one.

Yeah, you may have more vaccine, but if people are not taking the vaccine, what's the sense? Right. And the other thing is that a lot of the people who are now being seen in hospitals are people who just either haven't been vaccinated yet. So we're talking younger populations, whereas in many earlier surges, it was people who were over the age of 65 or over the age of 75. Now they're seeing more people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s relative to the total number of cases. And there are other states that are seeing an increase in cases as well. Absolutely. Yes, this is a trend we're seeing across the country. And it's, there could be a couple different factors going into it. One of them could be the spread of the more contagious variant in the

US. Another could be what people are calling pandemic fatigue. People have been being careful for so long. And now there's positive news and the vaccines are front and center in the news. So some people might be letting their precautions slip at a time when it's not quite safe to do so yet. Very interesting. Let's go on to the two, uh, news about what's happening on Mars. NASA has a helicopter sort of a drone on Mars that we've been watching all week. Fill us in on it's been able to actually lift off the surface for the first time. That's right. This is the first powered flight on another planet. This is particularly exciting because the ingenuity helicopter actually has a piece of the Wright Brothers original plane

contained with it. It's got a little postage size stamp of the cloth from the body of that plane with it as it creates another first in the history of aviation. And what is it supposed to be doing there? Does it have any instruments on board for taking measurements? So far, the goal of this helicopter is to just take images and to test out how powered flight on another planet works. So on Mars, the atmosphere is much thinner than on Earth. So, for example, this particular helicopter has about a four-foot wingspan, but it weighs about four pounds. It's just a very light, very large wingspan craft. And it needs to have that size and it needs to have its blade spin faster because of the atmosphere. So it'll help its success or the things that it struggles

with will help NASA researchers design more efficient aircraft for flying on Mars, for taking pictures and places that would be hard for a ground-based rover to reach and for doing sort of reconnaissance for people or robots who are limited to the ground. Perseverance had a very busy week. It also made oxygen for the first time on Mars out of the thin atmosphere there. That's right. So Perseverance has an instrument with a very cool name of Moxie, which takes carbon dioxide and breaks it down to produce oxygen. And in this first test, it created enough oxygen to sustain a human being for about 10 minutes. The great thing about making oxygen on Mars is that that way, astronauts or humans who are coming from Earth, wouldn't need to. to bring all of their supplies with them, they could create some of the oxygen that they need not only for breathing, but also for fuel right on the planet. Yeah, this is a really interesting first step because we've talked about this for years,

but we've never actually seen it done on Mars. It's a very exciting first step, and it'll be interesting to see how they scale this up in maybe future versions of this instrument will be bigger and able to produce a larger volume of oxygen. Let's talk about other space news. China is launching its own. space station? That's right. The Chinese space station is launching its first module at the end of this month. And then over the next months and a couple years, they're going to be launching more modules and to be sending crude missions up. And they're going to be putting together a new space

station that will be able to operate for about 10 years. So is this a statement by China that we are now seriously space voyagers like you are? China has actually been working on the idea of launching their own space station like this since the 90s. And it's not as big as the international space station. So it'll be a smaller footprint. But it's definitely a footprint. It's definitely a presence in space that does seem to be signaling more ambitions in that space. Because the International Space Station is getting pretty old. That's right. The CSS, the Chinese space station is going to be brand new. And the ISS is, you could say, nearing the end of its useful life. It's an aging presence in space. So it'll have a younger competitor now. Now, I understand that the Russians have also said that they might launch

their own space station, and the way they said it was sort of a poke in the eye to the American space station. So Russia and the U.S. astronauts from both countries have worked together on the International Space Station for years. The Soyuz rockets from Russia are used in American launches, and there's been a cooperative relationship for a long time. So this signals a potential strain and change with that relationship. What other space projects are in the works there by China, by Russia, by other countries? Well, China is launching a few years after they complete the Chinese space station. They're planning to launch a telescope that will be akin to Hubble in its ability to

image the sky. And the China Sky Survey telescope is going to be fairly close in terms of spatially to the Chinese space station and the idea is that if it needs repairs or to be fixed, that the two could dock together and the Chinese space station could people or astronauts in the Chinese space station could do maintenance on the China Sky Survey telescope. Very forward-looking. I remember we had to rely on the space shuttle to go up and fix the Hubble in its early days. So that's a great idea. Your next story hits the Venn diagram of Science Friday favorite topics. There's a study that looks at the microbiome of bees. Very interesting.

That's right. Bees in the same beehive actually have the same smell, and they use this smell to identify each other. But in previous studies, researchers found you could bring in a bee from a different hive that's genetically distinct. And instead of being rejected, it actually starts smelling like its new hive mates. So they thought that what's going on here could potentially be that the microbiome is shared and then creates a shared scent. So in this new study, they looked at bees from the same colony from the same hive and they gave these bees different gut microbiomes. And the bees not only smelled different, but started attacking and biting each other because they didn't recognize each other as members of the same hive. Did they kick the bees out of the hive or

killed them or what happened to those bees? The researchers just observed the bees attacking each other in this particular case. And these were newly hatched bees. They were genetically sisters. So it's really interesting that in this case, the genome of the gut microbiome seems to have trumped the actual genome of the bees themselves. They were really relying on the gut microbiome to recognize each other. And when they couldn't do that, they attacked. Wow, that is very interesting. Finally, something I know that you've written about, researchers read a 17th century letter without ever opening it. So did a little magic going on here. If you look at images of what the researchers call a virtual unfolding algorithm, so they took these high-resolution images of this folded up and sealed letter, and then they developed an algorithm that would automatically unfold it without actually unfolding it.

there is actually video of an animation of this happening. And you can see the exact manner in which this historical letter was folded that researchers might not have been able to discover. Because one of the things they're interested in using this algorithm for is studying how exactly were people folding their letters and keeping them in this self-contained little packet in the era before envelopes. And it turns out there's a whole variety of different methods. And it's really helpful to be able to study them without actually opening the letter,

which destroys some of that evidence. And so this was in time before people put stuff in an envelope. You had to fold it for security? That's right. Some of these security methods were also very intense. So you might fold your letter and then cut a slit in it and take another piece of paper, thread it through the slit, fold it around the outside, seal it with sealing wax. And the idea is that if I want to sneak your letter and, you know, open it and then seal it back up,

I can't do that because doing so would tear the letter in the process. So this was a kind of security method in the era before, you know, digital encryption. It was used in conjunction with, you know, with codes. And it was actually used by spies historically. Where did the scientists get this letter from? So this letter is part of a whole box of undelivered mail from the Hague. Wait a minute. I delivered bail.

That sounds familiar. Even back then, huh? Even back then, well, back then, instead of the person who sends the letter buying a stamp to pay for it, it's the person who picks up the letter who has to pay for the delivery of the letter. So if you couldn't pay to pick up your letter or if maybe you'd moved away from a place, you wouldn't be able to have the mail delivered to you. You would have had to go to the post office to get it. And some people didn't come to the post office.

So for the people who worked there, they would throw the mail and the unpicked up letters trunk, and we have this cache of documents that's like a snapshot of that era. Fascinating. Thank you, Sophie, Sophie Bushwick, technology editor for Scientific American. Time for a break, and when we come back, the U.S.'s largest offshore wind power project situated off the New England coast may get the green light. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO.

St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. If your goal is to increase your reliance on renewable energy, a windy out-of-the-way place seems ideal. How about the coastline of New England?

Strong winds, proximity to the population, all sounds good. For years, though, a project called Cape Wind never had the wind at its back, with powerful opponents saying it would damage iconic coastal views. But now a different wind project positioned further offshore is close to getting the green light from federal regulators. Joining me now to talk about the Vine Project and what happens now is Miriam Wasser, a reporter for WBUR's Environment Team.

Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira. Thanks for having me. Nice to have you. Okay, so this is a major offshore wind farm. I know the company bills it as the first. utility scale offshore wind energy project? Correct. The Vineyard Wind Project, which will be located about 12 miles off of Martha's Vineyard, is going to have 62 turbines. And it will provide about 800 megawatts of power, which is enough to provide electricity for like 400,000 homes in the state every year. There are seven wind turbines off the Atlantic coast right now. Five of them are off the coast of Rhode Island. That's the Block Island project, which started producing some power in late 2016, but it's pretty small. It produces about 30 megawatts of power. So compared that to

Vineyard Wind's 800 megawatts. And then there are two research turbines off the coast of Virginia, but they don't feed power into the grid. Years ago, we talked a lot about a similar project called Cape Wind that was bogged down in regulatory review for years. What was it about this project that allowed it to go much further than the Cape Wind project? I think there's two things. The first is just the fact that Cape Wind was going to be about, I think it was like four and a half miles off the coast of Cape Cod. You would definitely see it from the land. And it just got a ton of pushback from local residents and actually some pretty prominent elected officials in Massachusetts because people were worried that it was going to

ruin their ocean view scape. And you don't have that with vineyard wind. It's farther off the coast. You'll see it a little bit from Martha's Vineyard, but again, faint and in the distance. Factor two, I think, is just the context and that context being climate change. I think a decade later, more people realize just how dire this situation is and that we need to rely more on renewable energy and carbon-free sources of power, and we don't really have time to wait. This project sort of checks off many boxes in the Biden building plan, not only just building wind turbines and green energy, but creating thousands of jobs along the way. Yeah, there's going to be hundreds of construction jobs, just like literally putting these

things together in the water because they're so big that they all have to be constructed offshore. each turbine blade is about the size of a football field. Pretty big. These are ginormous, yeah. So hundreds of construction jobs and then jobs for people who need to lay underground cables and people who need to build the ships that we need to manufacture all this stuff. Cable manufacturing, steel manufacturing, concrete manufacturing. There's a lot.

This could really revitalize a lot of coastal places up and down the Atlantic Coast. Now, we haven't got the final ruling yet, the final green light from the feds. But if the ruling is favorable, which seems likely, Vineyard Wind could start offshore construction next year and deliver power by when? Late 2023 is their plan. Wow. That's pretty fast. Yeah, yeah, it's huge. And, you know, there are a lot of other projects right in the pipeline behind them.

And the Biden administration has pledged to get 30 gigawatts of offshore wind. in the next couple of decades. And Vineyard Wind is 800 megawatts, and there are 1,000 megawatts and a gigawatt. So you can extrapolate out just how big this is going to be. Wow. Thank you, Miriam. We'll be watching. Thank you. Miriam Wasser, a reporter for WBUR's environment team.

Wind power is just one element of a plan to shift to green energy. This week, the White House is hosting a climate summit with leaders from around the world. And as part of that summit, President Biden announced a national goal of a 50% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030. And European Union nations outlined a commitment to become climate neutral by 2050. Here to talk about the summit and other climate policy issues is climate journalist Emily Atkin. She writes the newsletter, Heated. Welcome back to Science Friday. Thank you for having me, Ira. I'm always really happy to be here.

Can you detect anything different about this climate summit than just a meeting of world leaders like before? It's on Zoom. But I think to your actual question, I think what's significant about this is really that it's a shift. It probably could not be a starker shift from what the last four years have been like in terms of global cooperation at climate summits. the U.S.'s presence at climate summits internationally for the last four years has been antagonistic, to put it mildly. You know, the Trump administration was sending representatives to talk about how coal is a climate solution. So that's certainly different. That is a lot different. How realistic is this goal of 50% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030? Because there's not a lot of

detail how to get there? It's very realistic in terms of can it be done. And it's realistic in terms of do we want to effectively address this crisis to save millions of lives? So it's realistic in that sense. What it's going to take, though, is just serious, sustained, dramatic, almost radical action of the type that we as a country have really. been unable to muster. What examples of radical action come to mind when you say that? I mean, we have to green the power sector. So that means that we have to make the electricity grid run on mostly, if not eventually,

entirely renewable energy. And that's the most important thing to do. Transportation is our number one source of greenhouse gas emissions in the country, followed by the power sector. but transportation is from, you know, a lot of gas powered cars, number one. And you can't switch to electric cars and have that really make a difference until the electricity sector is greened. So that's going to take not just regulations from the executive side from Biden, but also probably domestic climate programs and policies that include legislation, that include input from Congress. So you're going to want to see investments in renewable power and electric vehicles, along with,

regulations. Well, that big infrastructure package moving through Congress now, doesn't that target major sources and major resources like wind and solar development? Yeah, one of the huge things in the infrastructure plan is a renewable electricity standard. So it gets a little wonky sometimes explaining it, but basically something that says companies basically that deliver you power to your home, there's a standard that they have to use a certain amount of their power generation source from renewable sources. The Biden administration hasn't said exactly what will count as renewable. Sometimes it's just wind and solar. Sometimes it includes hydropower or nuclear. But the idea is that every single year, that required percentage would increase over time.

And utilities are actually, they're actually kind of into that because right now they have to deal with this patchwork of state regulations. They're different in every single state. So that's a big incentive for renewable energy development. There are other provisions to invest in wind and solar. And then there's also a provision to end subsidies for fossil fuels, which is one reason why renewables haven't been able to be as competitive as fossil fuels in the past. Do you think the Biden administration is shooting a, little too conservatively? I mean, because Biden is calling at the same time for that 50% reduction, the European Union is saying, whoa, not just a reduction. We're aiming to become totally climate

neutral by 2050. It's a good point. And I think another thing you have to think of is when the Biden administration says halving emissions, half of what? The baseline that they're talking about is cutting half of emissions from 2005. The European Union is basing their reductions on 1990. So the European Union has pledged this 55% reduction by 2030 from 1990 emissions levels. The UK has set out this 78% reduction by 2035. And so our pledge, even though it sounds like it's the same, you know, 50% by 2030, when you compare it to their pledges, it really only amounts to about a 40% cut for the U.S. if you recalibrate it to that same 1990 baseline. I know that that's all super wonky, but it reinforces your point that our pledge,

though aggressive, though it will require radical action, is not as aggressive as other leading emitters. And I think that just kind of goes to show you the massive nature of the problem we're dealing with. I think that for a lot of people, they're like, you know, it sounds like nothing we ever do will be enough to really meaningfully slow climate change. And that's because it's, it really is a huge problem that takes more effort than one might think would be reasonable, but it's for, it's for a good cause. Yeah. And it's interesting to see how recently over 300 big business leaders released a statement calling for the U.S. to strengthen the

climate goals even more. I mean, business understands where the country is heading. Oh, business understands where the country's consumers are heading in terms of what they'll buy. I wonder how many of those businesses have stopped donating money to politicians who deny climate change and who are working against climate regulation at any cost. A lot of companies call on officials to do a lot of things and then have incredibly unsustainable business practices and use their power in the political system. They use their money to fund the very politicians that are obstructing climate action.

I'm always very skeptical and I see those things because I know on the public-facing side, big businesses, you know, they want to be seen as the green leaders because that makes customers, you and me, more likely to buy from them. but in the short term, being environmentally progressive, that can have a lot of upfront costs that businesses don't like. So I don't know. On my beat, specifically, I see a lot of it. I see a lot of greenwashing. I see a lot of talking out of both sides of their mouths on climate when it comes

to businesses. So color me skeptical. Okay. That's a good point. You make a very good point. I'm Ira Flato, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Speaking of businesses, when he took office, President Biden made news. I remember this by shutting down the approval for the Keystone Pipeline Project, but you have other pipelines that are still in the works. Is Biden signaling anything here? I mean, is this a skeptical part of you also? It's hard not to be skeptical having just come back

from Northern Minnesota for a couple of weeks reporting on the Line 3 pipeline, which is one of the pipelines in progress that a lot of indigenous people in Northern Minnesota were really hoping that Biden would take action on, but he has not. And hasn't made any public statement about it. And I guess it's hard not to be skeptical when you haven't seen even any statement. on these other pipelines. You know, Keystone XL was absolutely a big deal. But in the question of climate change, it's not just about one pipeline. It's about the system of fossil fuel infrastructure in the United States. And we have a bunch of new pipelines being built. One includes line three, which is a tar sands expansion pipeline estimated by some environmental groups to that will add about 50 coal plants worth of carbon

pollution to the atmosphere for the next 30 to 50 years if it's completed. That pipeline will go underneath a couple crossings of the Mississippi River. Biden has the opportunity to either stop it, pause it, put a review on it, say something about it, right? Why cancel Keystone, a tar sands pipeline and not line three at Tarsan's pipeline. These are just questions that we do not have answers to. And it's hard to not be skeptical when you're not getting transparency. And so that's what I would hope just to see more of. I know there's a lot going on with the Biden White House.

They have a lot to deal with. But, you know, I would argue that the climate crisis is among the most important. Yeah. He said that was as he was campaigning, and even after he took office, that that would be one of the top issues that he tackled. So now we just have to wait and see whether he lives up to that. Yeah. And I don't want to, I have a habit, of course, as a reporter of sounding overly cynical, I don't want to make it sound like the Biden administration isn't doing anything. I've talked to a lot of environmental justice leaders over the last couple days talking to them about.

the verdict and the Derek Chauvin trial and, you know, how that relates to climate justice and the things that they care about. And overall, what I see from them is an appreciation for what has been done by the Biden administration so far, but still a sustained need for more. Because the problems facing, you know, the injustice is facing, especially black and brown people from the climate crisis, from aggressive policing, from systemic racism in the United States. You know, we've allowed them all to bundle and bundle for so many years that, you know, what they're saying is the only thing that's going to help is action that meets that level of threat that they've been under for so long. Of course, the U.S. has now reentered the Paris Agreement after

the Trump administration backed out. What if anything did our time out of the agreement do? Do we still have credibility problems about that internationally? Yes. We absolutely do. And I think that's going to be one of the biggest challenges of this summit and of all international summits moving forward is going to be whether we can follow through on pledges and stick with them or whether or not, we're just going to be a country that yo-yo's around and brings the rest of the world with us on our string. Climate change is the long-term problem. It's the test on whether we can be committed to something. And the Biden administration in this particular summit, it's the first summit.

We haven't seen any indication yet that we know how to make this a long-term thing rather than, you know, basically Paris Agreement number two. but like you said, we'll see. That's the beauty of all of the climate change. It's like, I don't know, I guess we'll see. We'll see. And we'll have you along with us to look at it, Emily. Thanks. I'd be honored. Emily Atkin writes the newsletter, Heeded.

Thanks for taking time to join us today. Thank you for having me. When we come back, the Flight of the Hummingbird, very talented and larsinous hummingbird. Stay with this. to Science Friday, I'm I Refleto. I have two bird feeders in my backyard, one stocked with bird seed, another filled with a syrupy solution, four parts water, one part sugar. That second one, my favorite. It's designed to attract hummingbirds. I've had my hummingbird feeder in my yard for

years, and, you know, it almost feels like the same birds keep returning to sip nectar from it year after year, and every time I catch one hovering nearby, it's exciting. My next guest, I think, shares my fascination with these bejeweled birds. In fact, he spent several years traveling around the Americas photographing all 300 species, and he's documented that journey in a new book. John Dunn, Natural History Writer and Photographer, author of the book The Glitter in the Green in Search of Hummingbirds. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira. Thanks ever so much for for having me on the show. Do you have a feeder in your backyard? Well, I live in the Shetland Islands, so I'm halfway between the Scottish mainland and Norway.

So I don't have hummingbirds, but I do have feeders for all the other birds. Well, let me begin right with that, because you write in your book that hummingbirds are native to the Americas. Why are there none where you live? Well, if you'd seen the weather in the last week, you'd perhaps understand why here in Shetland. lizards, it's still winter here. Originally, hummingbirds didn't actually evolve in the Americas. They're from Europe. The oldest fossils, hummingbird fossils, which have been found in South America, around 1 to 2 million years old, which sounds pretty old. But in 2004, a German paleontologist, a guy called Gerald Meyer, found a couple of hummingbird fossils, which had been

dug up from a clay pit in Germany. And they were around 30 million years old. So the the original ancestral hummingbirds actually evolved in Europe. And at some point, they crossed into the Americas. And once they got to the Americas and the Andes were rising, they found themselves in, I guess, what was hummingbird heaven. But what we don't know is in the intervening 30 million years, what happened back in Europe. You know, it became, there would have been an extinction event back here. It must have got very cold and unsuitable for them. But thank goodness they'd found their way to you guys.

Not only have they found a way to us over here, you talk about journeying to a small volcanic island, some 400 miles out into the Pacific to track an endangered Humbigberg. So they're even out there in the Pacific. Yeah, they certainly are. And of course, in the Caribbean as well. So really, I mean, well, goodness, they're found from Alaska in the far north, right the way down to Tierra del Fuego and the southern tip of Argentina and Chile. So they've conquered every imaginable habitat found throughout the Americas, from deserts to above the tree line, high in the Andes, and as you rightly say, out on remote Pacific islands and in the Caribbean as well.

So they're really tenacious and adaptable birds. And boy, can they fly. You talk about a very famous hummingbird, a rufus that flew 3,500 miles from Tallahassee to Alaska, the longest known migration. of a hummingbird. Yeah, that's right. I mean, more than that even, I mean, three and a half thousand miles is a heck of a migration by any bird standard. But length for length, it's the longest bird migration of any bird in the world. I mean, the most famous long distance migrants are Arctic turns, which migrate every year

from the Antarctic where they spend our northern hemisphere winter, up here to the northern hemisphere, up to the Arctic to breed in the summer. And that's a, what, a 12.5,000 miles. migration, that's huge. They're quite big birds. And if you look at a Rufus hummingbird, that's tiny. I mean, they weigh approximately the same as a British penny around about three grams, which is next to nothing. So a migration for a bird that tiny of that distance, it's just spectacular. And how long would that take? I would imagine, I'm asking, that for a 3,500 mile journey, the bird is spending a lot of time searching and eating food.

I mean, to make that kind of journey and wait next to nothing. Absolutely. They time their journey to be just at the cusp of the spring rolling north through America. They're right on the cusp of that. It'll take them some time. That bird, it was several months between it being banded in Tallahassee and being recovered up in Alaska. And so they resort to Larsonie.

They find the wells drilled in trees by sapsuckers. and when the sap sucker's not looking, they dive in and have a little sip of the tree sap. That's where they get their sugar hit. No kidding. Yeah, they're little thieves. What surprises most people is that you can actually find hummingbirds, as you mentioned, close to the Arctic and Antarctic circles. What is then the coldest temperature a hummingbird can survive?

Because I'm always wondering what time of the year should I put my feeder out? too cold for them? Well, if you look at the hummingbirds which are found in the Andes, the ones which are really high altitude up at what, 3,800 meters, it was a fabulous study done a couple of years ago where scientists were looking at six montane, high montane hummingbird species. And they found one particular species, the black metal tail, was existing at temperatures, which overnight were dropping to just above freezing, 2.4 degrees Celsius. And to do that, those hummingbirds were entering a state of torpor at night. And they were actually dropping their body temperature from a daytime internal temperature of around 40 degrees Celsius and to 3.3 degrees Celsius. So just

above the ambient air temperature. And yeah, that's just that's staggering. I mean, I've heard someone describe that as controlled hypothermia, which I think is a really cool way of, of describing that. And they slow the heart rate as well at the same time. So they're dropping from a sort of a daytime active heart rate of around 1,000 to 1,200 heartbeats per minute and to 100. Wow. Wow. Does that make them sort of unique among all birds then to be to have that talent? Pretty much. I think I read somewhere that whippoor wills can sustain very low temperatures. But I mean, I think the hummingbirds really have have got that trick down. Pat, again, this is something which wasn't in the book. I was reading this only the other day.

Apparently NASA were looking at hummingbirds and their ability to enter torpor, quite seriously thinking, would it be possible to put astronauts into a state of torpor for the long-distance space travel? So these are really inspiring birds. What is the definition of a hummingbird to make it different than all the other birds? What kinds of things must it do? Okay, well, the really obvious one is they hover, but actually that hovering flight defines the very being of a hummingbird. They're physiologically distinct to enable that hovering flight. So there's a host of adaptations.

They've got their pectoral, their breast muscles, the muscles which power their wings make up about a third of their body weight. In most other birds, it's around 15%. So there's almost twice as much muscle mass driving those wings. And those wings are connected to their sternum, to their breastbone in an almost unique way. Only hummingbirds and their kind of distant relatives, the Swifts, have a little tiny ball and socket joint which connects the wings to the body. And what that lets them do is move their wings in a completely different way to normal birds, which, to make this really, sort of basically, they flap up and down, yeah? But hummingbirds, they actually rotate their wings in flight

in approximately a figure of eight motion. And what this does, it means that they're getting lift, not just on the downbeat of the wing, but also on the upbeat. So they're getting about 75% of their lift from the conventional downbeat, but on the upbeat, they're still getting about 25% lift, which is really efficient. But of course, what they're having to do to power all of this, and I've mentioned the heartbeat, which, you know, is the motor of the hummingbird, which is beating at about 1,200 beats per minute.

It takes an awful lot of energy. And so, hence, they've evolved to use nectar as their fuel. It's like a high-octane fuel for hummingbirds. And speaking of nectar, let's talk about that special forked tongue and how it's specially built to capture nectar. Oh, I love this. Yeah, I mean, if you look at some photos of hummingbirds and in the past people obviously were examining hummingbird specimens, the tongues appear to have little tubes in them. And for years, people postulated that this must mean that they were feeding by some sort of capillary action. But, I mean, that doesn't really make sense.

You know, nectar, as you were saying about your feeders in your yard with the syrupy sort of in the nectar substitute you put in them. nectar's pretty thick, gloopy stuff. And for the amount of time a hummingbird's tongue is in a flower, capillary action couldn't work. And this is so cool. Someone got a hummingbird feeder and some high-speed cameras. So we had effectively a transparent flower, which they had the cameras trained on.

And the hummingbirds came in, stuck their tongues into the feeder. And what they saw was amazing. The tongues actually blossom when they're immersed in the nectar. so the tongues unfold and they've actually got tiny little flaps which also unfold from the edges of the tongues. And when they pull the tongue back into their bill, all of the flaps and the folds close and trap nectar within them, into the hummingbird it goes. And the very act of retracting the tongue into the hummingbird draws the nectar in.

And as its tongue is flicked back out again, all the nectar is released back into the hummingbird. It's an entirely passive feeding technique. All they've got to do is dip their tongue in and out and nectar is drawn into them. In writing this book and taking the photographs of hummingbirds, you went after 300 species. Did you get all 300? Yeah, I blushed a little when you introduced me like that. I didn't. No, no, I didn't.

Actually, I didn't set out to see all 300 species. I wanted to see as many as I could. I'm not a lister. I'm not that kind of birder who's all about ticking off, you know, lots of species on a list. But at the same time, you know, I love the natural world. And obviously, I want to see as many wonderful things as I possibly can. Gosh, I've never actually counted up.

There must have been a couple of hundred species I've seen. But kind of that's one of the pleasures of having things to still go and see. Talking with John Dunn, Natural History, writer and photographer, author of The Glitter in the Green in Search of Hummingbirds. on Science Friday from WNYC Studios. How much were you aware of the endangered or threatened situation of hummingbirds before embarking on this journey to document them? Because so many hummingbirds have very localized ranges

and are found in one particular area of the Andes, or we were talking earlier about the one that's found on an island just out in the Pacific and nowhere else, you know, some of those birds have really tiny populations. They've been reasonably well monitored. And, yeah, I knew that they were classified as redlisted by BirdLife International. So I knew some of them were down to a few hundred individuals left in the wild. But I suppose what was more shocking was to sort of discover that some of the ones which we would take for granted,

like going back to that Rufus hummingbird, the long distance. migrant, you know, that's a pretty common hummingbird in North America. And yet, their population is in colossal, catastrophically fast decline. It's dropped by an order of 62% between 1966 and 2014. Wow, that is a drop. It's huge, isn't it? And I suppose they're, in a sense, they're the most colorful canary in the coal mine, because actually, that's just emblem. of a decline of biodiversity of all kinds. There was a really big study in the US looking at your Ava Fauna as a whole. And since 1970, this statistic shocked me.

And once I'd heard about the hummingbirds, I was leaning deeper into this. Your bird life has actually dropped by a third of 29%, to be specific, which is a net loss of 3 billion birds since 1970. And that's really shocking. And actually, you've got it better than we have here in Britain. In the same period, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds did a study and actually found that our farmland birds have dropped 48%. So we're not proving to be terribly great custodians of biodiversity. And we kind of know that, but to see hard black and white figures, you know, flesh put on the bones, that's really chastening.

I thought there was some really interesting things I never knew about hummingbirds. There's so much to know. For example, people who keep hummingbirds as pets, they sort of take care of them. Some people specialize in caring for injured hummingbirds. They seem to bring out an emotional connection in people, which perhaps other birds don't. And I find that really interesting. And I wonder if it's because a lot of them anyway are pretty tame. You know, they approach us really closely.

I mean, they're a wild animal. They're not really tame, but they're very tolerant of us, aren't they? And they'll come to the feeders right outside our window. When I was in Cuba, I had that big lens, you know, the big telephoto lens on my camera. And I was looking for bee hummingbirds. And there was this great little male bee hummingbird, the smallest bird in the world. I was trying to track him in flight, and he was zipping around. He was really fast.

And then you can hear, of course, you can hear the flight. They really do buzz when their wings are beating so quickly. And suddenly that buzzing got really loud. I couldn't focus on him. And I realized he'd actually come inside the hood that shades the lens. He was right inside the hood and he was hovering inside there. And it was his own reflection which had brought him in. He'd seen another hummingbird.

And he was there for a few seconds. And then he sort chattered angrily and shot off again. again because it met a, I guess, a rival who wouldn't back down and fly away from his challenge. You must be very disappointed that you can't put a feeder in your own yard and get a hummingbird there. Absolutely gutted. But the reason I moved to Shetland, oh gosh, some 20 years ago now, was because it's a really great place to see bird migration in action every spring and autumn.

And we get vagrant birds blown here from all four corners of the world. we get Siberian birds, which should be heading to Southeast Asia for the winter. They turn up here. And we get American birds, too. They get blown across the Atlantic and they turn up here in Shetland. So it's a really famous place to see birds. Wow. So it's a fair trade-off, I would say.

Oh, it's a fair trade-off. I mean, don't get me wrong. If a ruby-throated hummingbird turned off in my yard, I'd be, but it's not likely to happen. Thank you, John. My absolute pleasure, Ira. Fascinating stories. John Dunn, Natural History Writer, a writer, photographer, and author of the book, The Glitter in the Green in Search of Hummingbirds.

One last thing before we go, April is Citizen Science Month, and we are celebrating with a springtime showdown. Join us for our live stream event on Monday, April 26th, at 1 p.m. Eastern. Three scientists will rep their favorite pollinator, and our virtual audience will ultimately decide. You can RSVP on our website, ScienceFriday.com slash citizen science. That's science friday.com slash citizen science. That's all the time we have.

Charles Berkwurst is our director, our producers are Christy Taylor, Katie Feather, and Kathleen Davis. Senior producer Alexa Lim, contributing editor John Dan Koski, B.J. Leiterman, composed our theme music. Of course, if you missed any part of this program or you'd like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato.