Short Wave - Mapping The Birds Of Bougainville Island

Episode Date: September 22, 2021

In the early 1900s, the Whitney South Sea expedition gathered 40,000 bird specimens for the American Museum of Natural History. The collection is an irreplaceable snapshot of avian diversity in the South Pacific, but is missing key geographic data. To solve this mystery, student researchers dug into field journals to determine where birds from one island came from.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Okay, so growing up, my family and I took a lot of trips to the American Museum of Natural History. We would stand there gawking at the dinosaur bones, at the gemstones, at that giant replica of a big blue whale, if you know, you know. But what I didn't know as a kid is that some of the museum's most staggering stuff is actually behind closed doors. Deep in the archives, the museum's got 40,000 birds. specimens from the Pacific Islands, collected during the Whitney South Sea expedition in the early 1900s. And it's one of the longest ornithological expeditions in history. Can you turn on your camera and get one of those birds that you showed me? Oh, sure. Hold on. This is Paul Sweet.

He's the collection manager in the Ornithology Department in the American Museum of Natural History. We chatted over Zoom. Okay. Here are a couple of birds collected on the Whitney, South Sea Expedition. The Whitney Collection is one of the earliest records of avian diversity in the Pacific Islands. And these birds, by the way, are very dead, like 100 years dead. Paul holds up an Oriol Whistler specimen to the camera. They are essentially a bird that's been, had all the internal parts removed and then replaced usually with a substance like cotton.

And attached to their legs is a... a paper label containing the specimen data. Now, some of these birds are from Bougainville, an island between Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. And the labels tell you some stuff, like when the birds were collected and by whom. But it doesn't tell you exactly where on Bougainville Island the birds were found. And that is far from perfect because an island like Bougainville is large. And it also has significant differences in topography, meaning there are high mountains and lowlands and different habitats, lagoons, swamps, etc. Meaning one of the biggest bird collections in the world isn't super well documented.

And that's a problem for Paul, because this collection is an irreplaceable snapshot of bird life in the South Pacific. before climate change really took effect, before agriculture and logging and non-native species altered the environment. Since the expedition, many, many species have actually gone extinct because of these things. So this collection could provide a baseline of biodiversity on Bougainville from 100 years ago. If only, the collectors had been more detailed in their labeling. Now, during their travels, they did keep diaries. You know who's the best person to excavate missing details from a diary? A teenager.

Near the end, apparently the typewriter didn't work anymore, so they had to use their own handwriting, which now in this day and age, I'm like, really? Really, they couldn't fix their handwriting even a little, but that was a norm back then. Today on the show, student researchers take us on a journey to Bougainville Island in the South Pacific, bringing new life to a very old collection of birds, and giving credit to the indigenous researchers who made this work possible.

You're listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science Podcast from NPR. Took a whole crew to plot the birds of Boganville. Over Zoom, I talked to ornithologist Paul Sweet and three students who are part of the museum's science research mentoring program. They are Hans Sungulki. I am 16. I currently go to school at MLK campus at Lincoln Center. Jennifer Dominguez.

I'm 16. I go to a Bronx Center for Science and Mathematics in the Bronx. And Miranda La Cardo. I'm 18. I'm in my first full day at Tulane University right now. And under Paul's guidance, these students spent months researching the Whitney South Sea expedition, which none of them had ever heard of before. Here's Hans.

I used to say Whitney Houston, I think, in one of the early meetings. But yeah, it stuck with me. So you were calling it the Whitney Houston expedition? Yeah. Now, at the time of the Whitney expedition, science was in a weird place. Okay, this was post-Darwin, and Western scientists were running all over the world, collecting and categorizing different species. And some of the birds of Bougainville, this one island in the South Pacific,

are found nowhere else in the world. And we can look at some of these groups like monarchs or whistlers, that have a different form on almost every island, in a similar way to Darwin's finches or the mockingbirds of the Galapagos. But the scientists who studied the birds of Bougainville Island during the Whitney expedition left some key questions unanswered. And to figure out where exactly these birds were found on the island, these students went right to the primary literature,

reading digital and paper copies of field journals. Here's Miranda. Well, when I heard the term field journals, I was expecting just some pretty basic location, time, weather, stuff like that. But the collectors really use the journals to vent about personal disagreements on the ship. The ship broke down a lot. They would just be stuck on an island for many days on end, waiting for the right parts to arrive. Yeah, you all, as I understand it, cross-referenced what you read in the diaries with the bird tags of the same date, right? And using satellite and elevation maps, you were able to plot on like a visual model where the bird samples came from.

Which, I mean, what's so amazing to me about this project is that you took qualitative data, like these descriptive passages about the boat breaking down and the weather and squabbles on the ship. And you turned it into quantitative data, into numbers. So what was it like to do that? Well, just like the collectors, we took it day by day. We read the journals one page at a time. And there were a few locations. There were more than a few locations that were definitely hard to associate coordinates with. Like what?

Well, a lot of the town names, they may be misheard from the indigenous people or just, those names 100 years later are not in use or you can't find them on any maps. So, yeah, we use context, clues, stuff like elevation and location around bays or like plantations, some of that too. We would go on the topographical map just using Google Earth and trace a path that we thought they took that would match that elevation and the same time period that they were able to hike up to that spot and then plot those. coordinates and associate them with any of the specimens that were collected on that day. Not only were you scouring the journals for information about the birds, but you were looking for people, too. So, Paul, tell me about some of the Pacific Islanders who were a part of the expedition and never got credit. There were several members of the expedition who were frequently mentioned

in the texts, and they were actually with the expedition for a really long time. So they were actually heavily involved with the collecting efforts. And many of the labels of the specimens bear their names, but unfortunately, none of that information made it into our catalog. So I learned from your project video that David and Charlie were from Samoa, Tjura was from Tahiti, and Hicks was from Tonga. Why was it important to you to elevate their work? Personally, giving credit, I feel it's a major important thing,

not only for just the discovery of all these issues, but just in general for the scientific community, these people did so much to help the main explorers in the South Sea Expedition that it would be kind of unfair to, you know, decline them of the credit that they deserve. They've essentially helped collect these specimens. They gave locations for where they could find these species, even repair and maintenance of the boat. It's also just a reminder that science can be inclusive and that it should be inclusive.

The catalog now includes the names of collectors from across the Pacific Islands who took part in the Whitney South Sea Expedition. Paul has led five other student groups through the journals as part of the science mentoring research program at the museum, and together they're transforming this 100-year-old data set. Preeti Gupta, the senior director of children and youth programs at the museum, is pretty excited about it. A place like ours can engage students with chunks of data that no one's ever looked at and add to the story. And that's exactly as you know what happened here.

They were adding to the story, and they discovered an aspect of the story that we had no idea before. This is real research these students did, contributing to this body of knowledge by going back in time, giving credit to locals and making that part of the work. Though the project is over, I mean, Miranda just started at Tulane University and Hans and Jennifer are in a new year of school. Subsequent generations will build on their work. Because the birds of Bougainville have more to say. This recording was made by an ornithologist who's studying these birds. in this century. And for a future expedition, Miranda has another research question.

If I were to sort of propose a future experiment idea for someone else, I would, I'd want them to go to Bougainville and do a similar survey of the avian biodiversity there right now. It's been 100 years, and I'm sure a lot has changed with the population. This episode was masterfully produced, by Thomas Liu, edited by Viet Le and Sarah Saracen, and fact-checked by Indy Kara, who also contributed reporting to this episode. The audio engineer was Alex Drewenskis. Our sincere thanks to Ian Vauxvold, who recorded these birdsongs from Bougainville and to the Bird Sound website, Zeno Canto. Also, thanks to Scott Rowan for coordinating these interviews, as well as Tramia Jackson, Maria Strongass, and Abby Perez at the American Museum.

of natural history. I'm Emily Kwong. Thanks for listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science podcast from NPR.