The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 470: Identifying Tweety Birds With the Merlin App

Episode Date: August 21, 2023

Steven Rinella talks with Jessie Barry, Chris Wood, and Orin Robinson. Topics discussed: Trying to beat the Merlin app with human bird calls; how it’s all in the “hwaaah”; the earliest recordings of bird sounds; a collection of extinct bird specimens; mapping the tapestry and complexity of bird population declines; when you’ve kept a bird watching list since you were 9-years-old; Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology’s competitive birding team; permits for sampling; the birds that have done well because of humans; Steve’s persecution complex; citizen science; relative abundance; two categories: game birds and tweety birds; how Merlin doesn’t spy on people; bird call trivia; and more.  Connect with Steve and MeatEater Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop MeatEater MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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meat eater auction house of oddities is up live and running right now probably the most impressive slate of auction items to ever be compiled in the history of Western civilization. You can go right now and bid on a hunt at the Dern family farm with bubbly Doug Dern himself. It's the winner's choice. You do a buck hunt for one or a deer hunt for one, opening day of rifle season. So opening weekend of rifle for one, or three people do a turkey hunt on Doug's place, hanging out with Doug, cruising around with Doug. We have a custom log trapper's cabin from Naughty Log Homes. So this is a totally built trapper's cabin that you can have get shipped out and you get assembled where you want it. We have a art commission, an original art commission of your choosing.

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I killed a bull with it on a meat eater episode. A lot of meat eater episodes. A left-handed Weatherby Mark 5 and 300 win mag. That exact rifle. We have a Carolina custom rifle that I use in a bunch Meat Eater episodes, including the famous Moose Charge episode. That rifle is available for auction. And there is a dinner for four at my house. So the winning bidder and three guests will, at a time that we pick together, will come to my house to be wined and dined for auction. Doug Duren was bragging up how his auction item was kicking my dinner's ass.

But I have to point out right now that it's probably humiliating to Doug the degree to which my dinner is kicking his farm's ass. So you better go help Bubbly out before he gets sad. You got to go to themeateater.com and find, you know, there's all kinds of links and stuff. Auction House of Oddities. Or go to at Steven Rinella on Instagram and we will put the Auction House of Oddities link in my bio. You'll find it. Thank you, everybody.

Now, back to regular programming. Okay, we're at the Cornell Lab of O. You know, that's what they call you guys over in the disease part? Oh, yeah. You're the Lab of O. Nice. The Lab of Ornithology. And we are seated with someone who we've inadvertently talked about a whole bunch.

That's not right. We talked about without naming your name because we have again and again and again on the show on social media and otherwise brought up the um the merlin bird app and have often said we all get the person that made the merlin bird app on the podcast and here she is jesse berry hey it's great to be here yeah uh joined as well by an ornithologist chris wood and if you are into um ebird top we've i'm going to go back around on merlin and explain ebird yeah so the idea of ebird is there's thousands tens of thousands millions of people around the world that like birds like watching them this is a place for those all your observations of birds to go into a centralized database. You can see that information,

but even more importantly, then a team of scientists can analyze that information. That information is then used by groups like Fish and Wildlife Service and others for policy action. And Chris is going to explain how you can exploit eBird to get better bag limits on ducks. Oren's going to talk about that. I'm joking, but we're going to get into eBird. And then Oren Robinson, another ornithologist.

Yeah, so I work with the data after it comes through eBird and all the filters. We can create these distribution maps for thousands and thousands of species and we can take that eBird data and use it in conservation or management applications. And you're a duck hunter? Yes. Where'd you grow up? Grew up in Mobile, Alabama. You still hunt there? Not very often. No? Where do you grow up? Grew up in Mobile, Alabama. Okay. You still hunt there? Not very often.

No? Where do you mainly hunt ducks now? Arkansas. We've got some good family friends in Arkansas. Okay. So I go over there once a year. Do you often meet other ornithologists who are disappointed to hear that you're a duck hunter? Or is that pretty common? In the duck world, most of the folks that study ducks are also duck hunters.

Yeah. I can picture that. I found the ducks hunt ducks. Yeah. You know, but, uh, no,

I haven't really gotten any, any pushback on the fact that I, I enjoy duck hunting. It makes sense to people. Yeah. All right. Um, we got,

see, so I'm gonna explain Merlin real quick, or you could probably do a better job explaining Merlin, but I'll explain my, how it came to me. Giannis Poutelis, who's on the show all the time, used to be on every episode of the show. He found out about it and told me about it. And I got into it. It's an app.

You open up the app, you can go to sound ID and it just starts populating with whatever birds are going on. I got a lot of questions about how this functions and some other problems, but then we started having a lot of fun of rating each other's turkey calls whether you can trick merlin um getting into trying to fool merlin in other ways and also a sort of a slight a little bit of a contest about who can get the most birds going at any one time um and i'm not that high i had nine going in eastern kansas this year which i thought was pretty good i've met many people who've been who've had in the teens and anyone sitting but i had nine and i don't know you know 20 30 minutes leaning against one tree which i thought was pretty impressive uh i've also found it helpful for when you're somewhere

and you, like in Southeast Alaska, there's this bird I'm always hearing. I can't remember what the hell it was even though I looked it up. You never in a million years are going to get a chance to see it because it's in the canopy of old growth and able to like figure out what you're listening to.

So if you get Merlin, it's free still? Yeah, still free. You guys probably steal people's data. No, no. figure out what you're listening to. So if you get Merlin, it's free still? Mm-hmm. Yep, still free. You guys probably steal people's data. No, no. It doesn't feed back? It doesn't feed back, no. What's the whole point?

It's still totally separate. So we get people excited about watching birds, and then hopefully some of them start contributing data to eBird, and that's where we can really use it. We can't just steal whatever anybody's hearing. Yeah, you know, we're still trying to be above the line on some of these things. And when we make that shift, make it very intentional that we're not just listening in. We're not eavesdropping on you.

Oh, no, but I would like, so this doesn't report back to you? I thought that'd be the only thing you have to gain from it. It doesn't right now. We'll make that step coming up in the next few years. No, I've been just assuming. And that's why I felt a little bad when we're messing with it, i would throw off some data no it's okay yeah okay we want people to have fun just enjoying the app and then when we're collecting real data for science we want you know that's a different thing and when people know that too yeah uh hunting turkeys you know it's humiliating

if someone has merlin open and someone calls and it doesn't recognize it as a wild turkey, it's humiliating. Yeah. Then we got into this spring trying to do a barred owl, an owl hoot, which it's humbling. Pileated woodpecker calls, humbling. Crow. Crow. Tough. Tough.

Yeah. Raven. Tough. You can beat it on a barred owl i can yeah can i test you yeah it doesn't like you know what it doesn't like noises in rooms though have you noticed that yeah there it's um you know really tuned in for the outdoors so all the data that merlin has used to learn these sounds is coming from outside so yeah it yeah, it's not as good on the inside. Do you dare try to do a test? Yeah, sure. You'll do it? Yeah, I'll play.

Okay, got it on. I can see my voice bouncing up and down. Okay, you ready? Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo! Oh, nice! Alright!

Right there. Now uh my buddy seth he we had one in southeast alaska this year going nuts coupleman tree and he for two nights sat out with merlin open it calling merlin binging it he couldn't get it he eventually got it and he and he feels it. It's in the... Yeah. The... You got to get the modulations in there. Yeah, it's very picky. Now, here... Yeah, that's where he had to work on that. And once he worked on that, he was able to get it.

But he wasn't quite clear on what he did. But all of a sudden, he got it where it would trick it. But here's the thing I don't get. I have the Birdsong Bible. Are you familiar with the Birdsong Bible? song bible yeah yeah team here put that out yep those you guys our sounds are in there yes well weirdly my kids like the mess of the bird song bible um the bird song bible can't fool the app but it must be something going through recording and coming out the other side it loses some essential element so um the sounds in that particular you know book with the little speaker

are really compressed and that was you know 10 15 years ago when there just wasn't the technology to put a good speaker next to a book so yeah those sounds have been shrunk down so much that merlin can't really see the signal i got so it. So that's what it is. I think so. I didn't know this was you, but I came into contact years ago with, and I want you to start by explaining the Macaulay Library, but years ago,

I was trying to figure out a game call for a blue grouse, which leads me, I got to digress because it leads me to another question. Do you guys know how they try to make the blue grouse into two different grouse? Do you believe that? I mean, do you buy that?

Like who gets to decide? Yeah, so there's like, it seems like it'd be up to God. That's one perspective. You know what? I mean, I think the thing is, there's really no such thing as a species, right? It's an artificial construct that people have invented to try to make sense of the natural world.

And there are certain things that are really, you know, obviously differentiated and other things that are very, very close and it's hard to understand. And so in the case of what's now these two different species of, of grouse, they're separated, you know, a little bit, but basically one of them is in the Pacific Northwest, the other's in the Rockies. The Sooty. Sooty and Dusky.

The Sooty in the Pacific Northwest, the Dusky in the Rockies. Yeah. And, and so there've been a series of studies, and right now usually what scientists are looking for is they're looking for a combination of vocal differences. And so those two species, as we're considering them now, do have very distinct vocal differences. Yeah, the number of who is different. Exactly, and one of them, you know, sooties will sit up in trees to give those.

Dusky grouse basically sit very, very low to deliver those vocalizations. Or right on the ground. Exactly. At most, like a foot up. And so that mating behavior is a very strong sexual selection pressure that sort of, as that happens over hundreds and thousands of years, they really start to become distinct populations and species. Is the idea that they're, um, is the, is the split widening with them? Like the connectivity diminishing with them?

You know, I don't know i don't know the specifics of that but what's likely to happen is is as you're seeing sort of the combined effects of climate change and then just human cause changes in in forests it's likely for that to to shift over time and so that's something that we're increasingly seeing with a lot of kind of species limits. I don't know the specifics of, of those, of those two individuals, but. One of them has a different color eye comb, right? Or they, one of them has, tends to have an orange and one has

the tens to have a yellow eye comb. Yeah. And there's some differences in the tail band as well, but, but part of that gets confusing because there's different subspecies within each of those populations as well, but part of that gets confusing because there's different subspecies within each of those populations as well. And so there's subspecies of dusky grouse that have broad tail bands, others that have narrow tail bands. And so it actually does end up getting to be quite a bit more confusing.

And what happens is grouse in general don't travel very long distances. They may migrate, but they're elevational migrants, particularly those in the Rockies. They're not moving, you know, thousands of miles like Swainson's thrush. And so what that means is that there's, it's more likely for those birds to sort of diverge and not come into contact as much as other... Sorry, the lights just went out. I don't know what happened. Looks fine, but... There we are.

There it is. And Warren said, let there be light. There we go. So go on. And yeah, I mean, so because of that, there's a whole bunch of different things that, that come at play at sort of how things end up, end up diverging into separate species, but it's a very, very dynamic process. Um, our fish and game agency, they have not made the switch. So they are still blue grouse.

They've not moved them to dusky grouse. They have, when you go in to do bison, they do bison but not buffalo. Pronghorn are antelope but not pronghorn. And blue grouse are blue grouse but not dusky grouse. I made the switch but then I switched back. Now I'm thinking about switching back again.

I think you should. I'll continue with switching. I wanted to make a sooty grouse call because in Alaska you can hunt sooty grouse in the spring but they're hard to find up in the tree but they'll call. It's the male up there.

Right? And I thought you could hide and then They're hard to find up in the tree, but they'll call. And it's the mail up there, right? Who, who, who, who. And I thought you could hide and then draw it down. So I had a guy I knew that's a game call maker, and I was sending him all, I was trying to find good vocalizations. And I went up sending him all the Macaulay Library, Blue Grouse, excuse me, Sooty Grouse Records. And I had no, until the day I had no idea that that was you guys.

Yeah. So the Macaulay Library started back in 1929. The very first bird songs were recorded right here in Ithaca. And so, yeah, it was the collaboration between Arthur Allen and Peter Paul Kellogg. And Arthur Allen was an ornithologist, Peter Paul Kellogg, an engineer. And they were just trying to figure out how they could study you know birds you know more carefully and so they're using the technology of the day to go out and record those behaviors which ended up being a bunch of

equipment used for films so that early film technology enabled us to start to document these wildlife sounds and you know we're still have folks all over the world who are going out and recording birds and other wildlife and bringing them to the archive here does anyone have uh they must but earlier we got to go hold uh you know the extinct you have three was it two or three ivory billed woodpeckers three two males and a females in your collections so uh we were able to hold the extinct ivory bill woodpecker um the extinct carolina parakeet um observed but did not hold the heath hen which was like a basically uh oh man it'd be like a sharp tail grouse that lived in Martha's Vineyard, you know?

Are there recordings of their calls? So there are recordings of ivory-billed woodpecker and a little bit of motion picture film too, which we have in the back room as well. Those from the Singer Forest, wasn't it? Yeah. We don't have any heathens or Eskimo curlew was never recorded. I don't think Carolina parakeet was either.

So yeah, a lot of those species that went extinct in the early 1900s missed that window of being recorded. Ivory build's one of the few that we were able to capture. Yeah. So walk me through from starting from the Macaulay library, how many bird sounds are in Merlin? Merlin can cover a thousand species in the sound ID feature where you can hit record and Merlin can identify them. And then there's now 10,500 species of birds that you can explore and listen to right from the app now. So basically all the birds.

But it can recognize a thousand. Yep. And as we get more data coming into the archive, we'll be able to add more species. So it takes a lot of example recordings and experts to help Merlin really dig into learning what that species sounds like. Yeah. Like many people, I'm reflexively anti-AI, but this is very much AI, right? Yeah.

This is definitely machine learning this is we're uh 10 plus years into really trying to understand how to incorporate machine learning into ornithological research and ways to engage people with birds so we try to think like we're the good guys in the ai side of things so explain like how it works and how you ever populated it and how it can sort through all the background noise or that you could be in a room i i realized it doesn't like a ton of unusual background noise but you can be in a room where people are conversing or on a patio with people conversing and it's picking out some bird off in the distance and like it's just so hard to picture how it's sorting out right like you can sit because you have a you know your ears have kind of a 360 sense of what's going

on around you and you're able to sort things by distance. But when it's coming through into a microphone, like something's losing track of, well, that's to my left, right? It gets flattened. You know, all the sound is flattened into a single sphere, and it's not like, oh, no, that's a thing that has nothing to do with this way over there, but the person talking to me is right here.

I just can't even picture how you'd begin to get a thing that could pluck it out. Yeah. So one way to think about it is, you know, sounds can be converted into a picture. So we basically take, you know, that recording and it turns into a graph where you've got the time and the frequency and that will, and that will produce a signal. So if a cardinal's got those introductory notes, you can see exactly where all the notes are in the cardinal song. And so what we did is basically look at all the recordings

in the Macaulay Library archive, or a subset, and then essentially train Merlin to identify those recordings by having experts draw boxes around all of the times that a bird sings in that particular recording. So, again, we're taking the sound, we're moving it into a picture, and then going online and annotating every time a cardinal sings, every time a chickadee sings in the background. And originally we were just, you know, picking out, okay, if we're trying to teach it how to identify cardinals, we'll just draw boxes around the cardinals. But then we realized that if we drew boxes and labeled everything in that soundscape, then Merlin was able to figure out exactly what was going on in that landscape. That was a jump we didn't really expect, but it's really thanks to all the folks who put those recordings into the archive,

and then the experts who took hours and hours, in a very time-consuming way, making those annotations, and then it goes into the machine learning system. And so Grant Van Horn is the leading computer scientist on this project and he's really figured out how you can you know tweak this system to put those real-time predictions back out. So part of the fun is that Merlin's like lighting up and as any species starts to vocalize it's picking that up and that's really Grant's hard work testing out how to make a system that will do that and also run on a phone.

So that's the other really cool thing is that we've been able to leverage Apple's hardware to put these algorithms right on a device that can work without a connection to the internet. Have you guys been surprised by how many like it's rate of adoption

with users yeah pleasantly surprised yeah like how can you say how many people are out there using it um three and a half million in july um yeah on a given weekend how many turkey hunters oh i don't know turkey was like a little lower on the list of frequently identified birds than i might have guessed but yeah oh really yeah oh okay so it's not all turkey hunters um so what i this is the thing that really surprised me i just assumed that the whole point of merlin was that it would allow ornithologists to get these location-specific, time-specific snapshots of bird sounds. And that any time I was using,

I was just like everybody, you never read terms of service. You just are like, okay. I just assumed that when I had it open and it was listening, that it went into some database somewhere of at you know, at blank date, at blank time, at blank location, here's what was going on.

But you're not doing that. Not yet. That is the next step. Okay. Because that ability to monitor a landscape for like three minutes of a nice recording is going to give us a tremendous amount of information about the species that are there.

And so we're going to soon be preparing kind of the eBird data model and how all that, those observations are handled and incorporate this kind of different type of data into that system. But it's a pretty big jump to go from birdwatchers putting in a sighting to now here's basically an automated system collecting that information so we've got a lot of research and experiments to do but uh certainly that's where it's heading um and you can imagine in years to come you know putting devices out on the landscape to really monitor oh yeah and spots where you know people don't go very often and but that's going on right

now right yeah because i know people do it turkey researchers will just put stuff off to pick up gobbles yep and you know I think it's going to become something that more people can do and hopefully it doesn't have to be like a

researcher putting those devices out but you know somebody backpacking up into the high peaks would be able to do it too and get yourself one of them Chinese spy

balloons man and just float that thing around sucking up bird sounds it'd be great uh one thing that we had dinner last night we talked and and i've seen it in some of the stuff you guys do uh that with with the with the stuff you gather through ebird and maybe it'll be demonstrated in Merlin, that it's just, it seems like you guys say that bird numbers are just declining. And just, that's it. Is that true?

There's a lot more complexity to it. And I think one of the things that we're able to see now is we have people all around the world. There's almost a million people who have contributed their sightings to eBird. They're in every country in the world. And is necessarily declining, but the sort of tapestry and complexity of how that decline might be taking place. And so it might be that some birds, a pattern is that, you know, some birds are shifting their populations to the north with climate change. And so that's part of what is really interesting for us to figure out is just exactly how that's happened, because then we can start to understand what the drivers or what the causes of these decl you will, and that they're really good proxies for understanding natural systems overall, because natural systems are very, very complicated. And we wanted to think about how do you kind of measure the heartbeat of the planet and an

ecosystem? And it turns out that birds end up being a really, really good way to do that because you have hundreds of thousands of people that are watching birds. They can report the sightings that they see. Then we can take that information, sort of like Oren was talking about, and link that information with remote-sensed imagery. So since we know where you are, we can link that and then understand information about the habitat at a variety of scales. We can understand what the habitat's like within, you know, a hundred meters of where you were, within a mile of where you were, and within 10 miles. And then we can start to say like, okay, it seems like this bird during the breeding season requires this type of habitat. During another type of, you know, maybe post breeding, you know, after the young leave the nest and are moving around, they may switch to a slightly different type of habitat and being able to understand how

those connections happen can be really important for conservation. But I mean, are there, you know, I mean, are there as many birds in the U S as there was 25 years ago? No, they're not. Okay. That's what I'm trying. That's what I'm trying to ask but you know overall there's there's basically um based on some of the the work that teams here

and others others did three billion birds have been lost in like the last 40 years three billion with a b of all sorts of all sorts and i mean it's a a very, very common, it's the most species are declining. You know, if you go onto our website, we have a science section on there and you can basically go through and for more than 400 species, see exactly what's happening and where those birds are declining, where they might be increasing. So it is complex and there are areas that birds are increasing and there are certain species and groups of birds that can that are increasing but the overall pattern right now is one where birds are are really declining particularly things that might be um migrants that are traveling long distances um shorebirds grassland birds um those are are some of the major groups of birds

that have very, very significant declines. I was surprised to learn recently that there's only five species of birds that have a global population of one billion. Where did you read that? I read it in a book called Wild New World by the historian Dan Flores. The English Sparrow.

A goal, which surprised me. I can't remember what goal it was. What else was in there? The European Starling, maybe? Yeah, there's five species of birds that they think have a global population more than one billion. Yeah, it's measuring the absolute number of birds ends up being a very, very difficult thing. You're not buying this? All I'm saying is it's a very difficult thing to figure out.

You know, it's actually easier to understand the percent decline in a total population of birds. Yeah. understand the percent decline in a total population of birds because you're looking at the relative difference than saying sort of the absolute number of birds. Because if you think about some birds like a bald eagle, they tend to sit out in the open or they're flying around. They're big. They're easily detectable. But something like a red-eyed vireo or a Swainson's thrush, I think that's the example of a bird that's sort of hiding up in the woods.

If you're an expert bird watcher, maybe you're hearing that and identifying it as a Swainson's thrush, but a lot of other people wouldn't see those birds. Because of those detection differences, it can be really difficult to sort of compare one species to another species and some other birds you know if you think about red-winged blackbird they can have very clumped distribution so around marshes they're very very abundant but if you get away from their habitats they're much less common at certain times of the year then they gather in massive flocks of you know tens of thousands to millions of birds and so it just it's a very difficult thing to sort of say this is the absolute number of any species yeah but that's like you know it's rough though over a billion over a billion can you uh i'm gonna look this up

but just to ask are you surprised because you would think that it would be more than that are you surprised to hear there are birds that might have a global population? Or do you just think that anyone saying that is overreaching? Anytime that there's a definitive statement that there are X number of species that meet some threshold that's in comparison to others is often something where I would kind of pause and raise my eyebrows and think about just because of the difficulty in understanding that there's also a lot of systems that may not be heavily covered or where there's a lot of people that are actually going and looking at birds. And so just to sort of be able to figure that out is a complicated, you know, it's something that, I mean, that is difficult to do with a level of confidence that, you know, I'd be comfortable making a statement like that. You'd be comfortable writing into a book.

Yeah, I probably wouldn't. I probably wouldn't do that. Well, I'm going to follow up with you because we've talked about it. That was even a trivia, one of Spencer's trivia questions, if I remember right. It was. Maybe I wasn't on that one. Something about that. No, no.

I think I maybe suggested it to him as a trivia question. I'll get back to you on that. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada.

The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service.

That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps. com slash meet on x maps dot com slash meet welcome to the to the on x club y'all with ebird you feel that ebird where people from around the world how many people use ebird

a million there's yeah there's about a million people who have used e-bird and in you know any year about a quarter million people so prior to e-bird and it seems like you guys are really optimistic about um what you can garner from that prior to e-bird how was anyone ever taking a stab at what's going on with bird populations yeah that's a really good question there's a there's a survey that's been going on in the u.s for a long a long time called the breeding bird survey which is basically a series of of um of points that people are doing along roads where they go out every spring and they are able to infer what's happening with bird populations during the breeding season. And so that's one

way that people have been doing it. One of the longest citizen science projects is something called the Christmas Bird Count that's been going on for over a hundred years. So the idea that, you know, citizen scientists and people can contribute to science is not a new idea at all. I mean, it's something that's been happening for a long time, but with the advent of the internet and the ability to exchange information very quickly, it's been a lot easier for us to very quickly be able to amass over one and a half billion records from all over the world. And that scale of large amounts of data then allows us to get much more insight than we would be able to get with other methods. And one of the things that's exciting now is it's

not necessarily that we're only using eBird data. We're often integrating that data with other data sets as well. So we're able to bring in some of the information that Fish and Wildlife Service may have gathered and then bring that together with information that we have. But it turns out one of the things that's a little surprising that people may not appreciate is usually people are doing surveys where birds are. And so if you're doing a survey for bald eagles, there tends to be an emphasis on saying, okay, these are places where eagles are. We're going to do my survey where the eagles are. What happens then is if you're trying to extrapolate that across everywhere and you have no information on where eagles are not, then the models basically

fall apart because you don't have that information. eBird ends up being a really good resource for this because we're asking people to record all the birds that they're able to detect and identify and then put an account for. And that gives us sort of not just information about where birds are, but where they're not. Because you've asked them to enter all birds. Exactly. And we know that there's differences between people, right? Like we know if you go out with Jessie, you're going to detect and identify way, way more birds

than if you just, you know, go out on your own because she's one of the best bird people in the world. Really? One of the best? Do you have a life list? Yeah, yeah. Oh. I've been keeping a life list since I was nine.

Yeah. How many birds are on the life list? It's not a really impressive number it's a couple thousand but i think the thing that we've done that's been how many are there 20 000 i don't know 10 500 there's like one guy who's almost made it to 10 000 um but yeah like he throws a lot of money at it yeah his life is dedicated to traveling um but the thing we do that's kind of fun is try to figure out how many species we can see in 24 hours. And so, you know, for example, we went down to Texas in April.

Who's we? So the Cornell Lab of Ornithology actually has a birding team. You guys compete. We do compete. But, you know, conservation always wins. We're raising money for conservation. Okay. So donors pledge, you know, traditionally by the number of species that we would see.

And we would spend, you know, a week planning a route to like pick up as many birds and then take 24 hours to run that route. Time down to the minute to see how many birds we could get. And you get a lot of coastal areas probably, right? So you're getting the coastal areas, you're going to get the grasslands, any habitat you can put on that route. It's kind of the goal because different habitats, you're going to get different species. You got to see them or hear them?

Either is good. And one of the other rules is that 95% of the species, all team members need to see. So if you've got five people on the team, you're trying to make sure everybody's picking up all the birds all day long. So it's not just like one guy can find them all. And what's a good 24-hour period?

A good total anywhere, I mean, 200 or something like that is something people work towards in most regions. But there's one day in Texas, we pulled off 294 species and set the record for North America. That's a work in your ass is all. Yeah. How many?

294. Yeah. In one day in Texas? One day in Texas. On a really epic migration day. So we had watched the weather. We knew that a front was coming in, which was dropping birds on the Texas coast.

But the conditions were really good that year. We had some lingering waterfall that wasn't expected to be in the region. And then just a lot of practice. But on those days you get to put your birding skills to the test by like finding things that weren't expected on the route and just being the first guy to like pick the Merlin

flying over the unexpected peregrine is part of the fun. It's really similar to hunting in a lot of ways, because what you do is, you know, the, you spend this time scouting and understanding exactly what, you know, in this case, about 300 species of birds are doing sometimes to the level of that individual. Like if it's something that's rare in a region, you know, maybe there's a cinnamon teal that's, that's lingering that wouldn't usually be in that area. You know, it's not just that it's there you kind of need to figure out well like when is it actually like swimming out where you can see it versus hiding in the in the reeds and so you have people that are basically trying to get these very intimate understandings of exactly what's happening sometimes with individual birds and then there's also kind of the magic that

happens you know like like when you're hunting that's just completely unexpected like something that you didn't know was there happens and so there's this element where you sort of know there's some things about these birds at a place that that you're you're trying to put those birds together on a route but then there's also you know that you can create almost opportunities around dusk and dawn in particular where you know things are moving more, you know that there's these different factors. And so you're trying to sort of fit these things together

and pull together a route that, you know, you see how many birds you can see. You should, we should do one of these together, see if we can have you see 200 species of birds in a day. I'd like it. But I'm trying to think of some things. Have you gotten all ptarmigans? Like in a lifetime?

Yeah. Okay. We did in our Alaska big day. Yeah. You got all in one day? Uh-huh. Yeah. I know friends that have gotten one all in one day

collected does anybody is that still a thing like when people used to go out with their fowling piece and like shotgun birds yeah that's still there's a limited amount of scientific collecting that goes on a limited amount

what would be a circumstance where that's still like an acceptable thing to do like back in the old audubon or darwin days and they just run around with their fowling piece and like collect birds so these days museums tend to pick up more salvage birds so birds hit a window roadkill those are going to museums um but there are certain species where there's some really interesting questions around what is driving the changes in their population, where, you know, if you collect, you know, 10 individuals or even something like that can really start to unlock those questions of how those populations are changing and why, for example. Have you ever been out with someone doing that? Yeah, yeah. It feels like real kind of naughty, I feel like. It kind of does, because it's like you've got this very specific permit

for just a little bit of sampling, and you kind of know in the back of your head, you know, it's been hundreds of years in some of those species since they've been targeted in that way. Oh, yeah, for sure. Several years ago when I was doing my master's, we had a permit to kill brown pelicans.

Uh-huh. And that was pretty intense. It's a big bird and they were collecting them for what purpose collecting them for to look for uh environmental toxins in them so they're still toxins so they would take you know a little piece of breast tissue a little liver and some brain tissue the only way to get that is to you know you know go to go shoot them. Have to be like some mortal. What birds right now, or like in the U.S., what classifications of birds are most imperiled? You hear a lot about grassland, which is, I guess, obvious because of loss of grassland habitat.

But are there classifications of birds were just not like clearly understood things that you guys look at that you're that you're puzzled about shorebirds are are declining pretty rapidly um we have uh we've done some studies on shorebirds in the pacific flyway and it's And it's almost all bad news there. And it's hard to know why. It could be loss of habitat on the overwintering grounds down in South America. That is a definite possibility. Crowding on the beaches, things like that.

And it could be, you know, breeding habitat. You know, a lot of these shorebirds breed up in the boreal regions. And that's, you know, being affected these shorebirds breed up in the boreal regions um and that's you know being affected by climate change things like that um but shorebirds i would say along with the grassland birds are are pretty imperiled the ones that are more alarming yep you know there was a um there was a 10,000 year period when basically from the end of the Pleistocene extinctions, there was a 10,000 year period where only one creature that they know about in what is now the U.S. went extinct.

And it was some like coastal goose in California. And then we had, oh, you know, with European arrival in the new world, we then launched into this whole other epic of extinctions. But do you think things like, do you see things that would suggest that we're headed for more extinctions

in the US with bird species? Oh, man, that's hard to say. There's a lot of species for which we do these trends, these long-term trends that are declining. Very few are increasing. And it does seem like more bad news than good. That's for sure. You know, there are, we see, so one of the things you see in, you know, when you do these studies on population trends,

is that you'll see that it's not all decline or all growth. They'll be, you know, it's spatially, you know, different, the declines and the growth. So they'll be growing in one region and declining in another. You know, maybe that's evidence of a range shift. Maybe they're declining in one region and growing in another, not because they're dying over here, but because they're moving from one place to the other. So you see more over here. So sometimes it's hard to tease that apart, just looking at this population data. And then of course, things that are super reliant on people like snow geese. We looked at snow geese earlier, white-fronted geese. those populations are exploding because of farms.

They can exploit farms, things like that. Whereas other waterfowl aren't doing so well. You know, so it's, it's hard to say like that we're heading towards another mass extinction, but more bird species than not are definitely in decline right now. Yeah. When you hear about climate, you guys have mentioned climate change a couple of times, and it's easy to picture how things can lose from climate changes because shifting habitats, and it takes them a long time to adjust to shifting habitats but does wouldn't it have to be that i mean there's got to be like birds who are

having new area opened up to them who like who's on the winning end i mean imagine you know you talk about all these birds that that have worn out from human activity, meaning like Canada geese, have really done well thanks to humans. English sparrows have done really well thanks to humans. Starlings, crows have done well thanks to humans. Are there things that you'd see on the increase? Because there used to be areas that they had a northern limit that's now opening up to them. Yeah, I think northern mockingbird is one.

Oh, really? That has pushed north in the last 20 years or so. And it's likely due to, you know, it can now tolerate what's going on further north than its previous range limit. So it's opening up habitat. Yeah. Part of it also is that it's often not just climate change and isolation, but also other human land use. So the,

the, what, what can happen is when you have sort of changes in climate and the connectivity between habitat has been altered. And so that there isn't that connectivity that there may have, that there may have once been, um, that creates a different type of, of problem for, for birds and other, and particularly less mobile animals to be able to respond to. Um, explain that, like give, give that in terms of a particular bird. Yeah, so if you think about, let me think if I can come up with something.

If you're a grassland bird, I'll be sort of general so it applies more than sort of any specific. But if you're a grassland bird and things are getting warmer, so generally what would happen is you would be shifting to the north. And you may be doing pretty well in things like Pawnee National Grasslands or Comanche National Grasslands or some of these different grasslands that have been set aside. What happens is as things become more warmer and warmer, that habitat and that place may not be right for them anymore. You always have some percentage of birds that are quote-unquote making mistakes maybe, or going to places where

they're wandering around to varying degrees. And it really varies depending on the species, the degree to which that happens. But what happens is if there are fewer places nearby for those birds to find, if those are all corn and soybean farms now, they may not disperse to another area that has sort of the appropriate habitat that you might move to. So it might be like, you know, maybe there is this other habitat that would be, you know, work out really well for them, but they have to get through a whole bunch of other stuff in order

to reach there. And there just aren't enough individuals that would sort of quote unquote, figure out that this other place exists. Yeah. I got you. What generally is, uh, do you guys look at roughed grouse much? Do we have roughed grouse on there? Because here's the thing that just, it's one of those kind of frustrating things where you have this bird, it's widely recognized, or the bobwhite quail. It's widely understood that its distribution is shrinking states that used to have great quail hunting aren't having it now states that used to have great rough grouse hunting aren't having it now and you talk to people in pennsylvania about it right um and then when you ask someone

what's going on uh and i'm not saying people should clean it up but you say what's going on it's like it's too many things or so many things it's unknown you know uh is there any way to kind of like tackle with rough grouse for instance between what you hear about not is it uh what's the what uh what's the mosquito-borne pathogen that seems to kill them? West Nile kills a lot. Habitat, right? You get into quail and some people will tell you. Fire ants, habitat destruction, whatever. Is that a thing you guys can speak to at all? With some of these birds that just have bad news

after bad news after bad news. And it's like death by a thousand cuts yeah i mean that's exactly right i mean and usually at least in the u.s and and i think broadly across the world loss of habitat or changes in habitat tend to be the major driver for loss of number, either abundance or in range shifts, then you have additive effects. So as forests in the east are maturing, basically what you're having is a lot of loss of that early successional habitats that things like American woodcock and rough grouse are using. And there's also a lot of need to have connectivity between different types of habitats that you may not have to the same degree that you once had. And so what happens is at different

stages in a bird's life, they need different types of habitat. The reality is that that information, we still don't have that for most species. It's really hard to understand exactly what birds need and then how that varies across both space and time. Most studies tend to be done when birds are most detectable. So, you know, you might be able to go out and do surveys for when ruffed grouse are drumming, you understand a lot about the needs for what rough grouse needs when they're displaying. But then to go and put radio, whether it's radio telemetry

or newer methods of monitoring individual birds is a much more expensive, time intensive to really understand what's happening. And then there's a question of to what extent does does what you found out in that study area with maybe 13 15 birds apply to other areas are they using that same thing or is it that that's already a an area that the birds are limited and maybe not doing exactly what they want, but they're doing something that they can. And so that's kind of the idea behind eBird is to get enough people that are in every

habitat at every time of the year that we can start to understand sort of how these things are playing out and how birds are responding, and then figuring out how to link that with other types of data and these integrated population models, which is really what Oren does a lot. But when people are using Ebert, are you asking them about, is it a juvenile or not a juvenile, or are you just going by the time of year? So we're mostly using the time of year, but people are able, you know, they can take photographs, upload those photographs in the Macaulay Library. So there's researchers that have used the photos in the Macaulay Library to look at

things like what are the percentage of juveniles? How does it compare to the year before? Understanding that the idea is that the relative percentages of what people are photographing from one year to the next should probably be pretty similar. There shouldn't be a reason that one year people are really deciding to just photograph juveniles and the next year they're just photographing adults. There should be some ratio that's consistent. And so trying to look at that over time is something that people can do. And then people that are interested, there's an age and sex grid where people can put how many adult males, how many adult females, how many juveniles. There's breeding codes that people can enter.

So they can say that this is an area where a bird had a brood of young that were with it. There's a lot of different information that people can put in beyond just sort of the species and number of individuals. And there are specific surveys run through eBirds. So various states will have their breeding bird surveys done through eBirds. So they will be putting in, you know, we saw a black-throated blue warbler breeding on a nest, you know, or something. We saw this bird with chicks, things like that. And those individual projects that use ebird

for that data will absolutely use that stuff to uh you know in their in their studies there's an annual bird there's an annual raptor count in a mountain range near our house i can't remember what date it is but it's a migratory raptor count my kids have gone out to participate in it so that's the kind of thing that gives you like an annual snapshot and they probably measure some kind of like thing like effort yep you know uh i was asking you guys before is there ever a birder who's so bad they get 86 off ebird if i haven't gotten booted then i don't know if anybody will mean you're like there's no way you saw that you know there's no cock of the rock you can't keep saying you saw that no there's no cock of

the rocks in ithaca um usually it's very very rare that that we end up um booting somebody and usually it's it's for the same reasons that somebody might get, you know, booted from a social media site, right? It's not that it's an intentional error that somebody's making. If they're trying to, you know, if somebody says that they saw a rare bird and then they take a photograph that they snatched off the internet of that bird at a different place, you know, in that case, you know, we'll figure it out if it's a kid or somebody that's kind of screwing around and just messing around. But that's really, really rare. Usually the mistakes that people are making are kind of honest mistakes. And we have methods that allow us to just understand the differences and understand that people are learning. And what people sometimes forget is these same challenges apply to basically any

professional survey too. You're going to have people that maybe they all are experts, but for whatever reason, people might be more tuned in and really know certain vocalizations of certain birds. They may focus more on forests. They may understand the grasslands a little bit more. And so we're able to, because there's one and a half billion records, we can start to understand those differences and not say, well, dude, this guy's an idiot. We got to get him off, right? We can still be a pretty inclusive place where just about everybody can participate. And then we can have different weights in terms of how we use that data. Yeah, we learn about the individual eBird users by, you know, the time it takes them

to accumulate so many species in a particular habitat, in a particular region. And we can use that in these models, just like we do effort to determine, you know, the, the, the expertise essentially of, of an individual e-birder. So you can tier it out to be, you can tier it out to be people who are like high consistent users scoring a lot and then, and then like audit those individuals in some way or not audit them, but go and look at what they're up to. Yes. And we, we can also do that regionally and seasonally.

Like I'm, I would be a pretty decent birder in the Northeastern United States, but if I went to Spain, I would be terrible. And we would account for that. Meaning cause you'd lose familiarity. Right. I would not know most of the birds over there.

Are you guys aware of the Himalayan snowcock? Yeah. Okay. So they live in the Ruby range of Nevada. And some years ago I was, uh, thinking about going hunting for one. It's a high effort, low reward kind of thing um fairly low success rates but i wound up finding online this little birder club and i don't think they would have done this if they knew there's people like me out there but there's this little birder

club that would talk about where exactly people over the years had seen Himalayan snowcocks, which was gold. Um, I, I haven't gone into eBird and looked, but, but would that be helpful for someone trying to find a Himalayan snowcock in the Ruby mountains? Yeah. I mean, you can, you can be like, oh man, two days ago, there was one right there. Yeah. And I mean, I think, I think the thing is, is in the U S you know, hunting is a highly regulated, um, pursuit. People understand what's happening with these birds. And

you know, if anything, what we need is more hunters, more people that are out fishing the, you know, we were talking about Merlin a little bit earlier about, you know, what are, what are you really using that for? For us, it's this huge engagement window. You know, if one in 70 people in the U.S. have used Merlin in the last year, that's a lot of people that are being exposed to birds, being exposed to natural systems. And sometimes it's easy to focus on maybe differences that exist either within the birding community, within the hunting community, or between those and say, like, there could be points of friction. You know, that's certainly true.

There also can be incredible points of overlap because at the end of the day, we're interested in the same thing. You know, we want there to be natural systems that can support vibrant population of birds and mammals and have natural places and so so this is a there's a lot of benefit i think to thinking about you know just what are the ways that we can get more people interested in the natural world yeah see i have persecution complex so when we were talking you're talking about as As your database grows and Cornell Ornithology Lab and eBird would share information with management agencies, right? Where my head went right away is there's a thing that'll happen now. And then, for instance, there was one of the times recently when it looked like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will now and then petition to get the grizzly bear delisted.

So the agency that manages the grizzly bear as an endangered species will occasionally actually move to unload their management, meaning they're saying, as the management agency, we suggest that these be removed from federal oversight.

And it'll get litigated. One of the times it seems so close to be moving to state management that a couple states did a draw. They were going to issue, I think Wyoming was going to issue 20 grizzly bear tags um idaho was going to issue one grizzly bear tag to hunters montana um chicken shitted out wasn't going to do any and there was a movement for people to it was like, go and put in for these. So within the non-hunting world, they were encouraging people to apply for the tags, try to get the tags so that they don't fall into hunters' hands. I immediately thought those sons of bitches are going to under-report game birds in order to deprive opportunity. Yeah.

You know, luckily the, you know, the, just like the hunting community, there can be friendly competition, you know, the, the birding community kind of has the same thing. People want to be the person who's seen a lot of different species. They want to have high counts. And so there's often enough, enough pressure. And I, I mean, I do think that there's a sincere belief too, that when you have better information and can do better science, you're going to have better decisions that people can, that

people can make. And I mean, that's kind of the idea of what we're trying to do and that all these people are trying to help with is, you know, right now state agencies don't have the information that they need. You know, if Rawa passes, how are state agencies going to figure out exactly where they want to make the investment to have the biggest impact. As we have data sets like eBird, I can look at this at sort of comprehensive levels. You can really start identifying like, well, these are the places that, you know, if you want to bring back populations of birds, these are the places where you could focus on and really have impact. And it's a way of figuring out

how we take the sort of scarce resources that we have within the conservation community and really use the most effectively. I would just think that like, as I think about it from a citizen scientist tool, it just seems to me that the sound recordings are somehow more valuable. Do you know what I mean? Because you're not running it through, you're not running it through, it's just less fallible than running it through people. And I'm not trying,

and I don't want anyone to criticize like Ebert as a tool, but let's say Ebert had total adoption in America. Okay. So 300 some million americans are making a daily chore of of chronicling what birds they see around them i think that you'd hit like such at that point you'd hit that there was just so much information that any that mistakes and things would be drowned out right but I can't picture in its current form, how it could be,

um, and you know, better me, but I can't picture in its current form spread globally. That number of people that you could actually like really with confidence, make management decisions about it by like, you even mentioned to me one time, there was a,

what was the bird you were saying? We were talking last night that flies down the center of a waterway and that they would they would not be reported because they're flying well the limitations to the aerial surveys and monitoring okay yeah yeah so i get that question all the time um you know how can we trust yeah this yeah that's a that's? Yeah, that's a quicker way of saying is like, how would you ever get to where you trusted enough that you're really looking at bird populations and not that you're looking at human habits? Yeah, right.

So that's almost exactly how I phrase it. We got to make sure we're modeling the birds and not the birders, right? And we do that with all of the effort that's put in. So we know that if you go out for two and a half hours and you travel three miles, you're far more likely to see a given species than if I'm just sitting on my porch and make a checklist for five minutes. We account for that. We account for the expertise like we talked about. You'll notice on our maps, these are

relative abundance. We're not estimating actual abundance. That's a huge ask of eBird data because in general, people are bad at counting. Yeah. I get where you're like, dive in a little bit when you say relative abundance. So relative abundance as- Just so people understand this better.

Yeah, as we have defined it, it is the average number of individuals of a given species an expert e-birder would expect to see in one of these 3x3 pixels at the optimal time of day for detection, and that's defined by the model, traveling one kilometer and birding for one hour. So that's a long definition of relative abundance, but that's what it is. Hit me with one. Let's take the red-breasted robin in June.

Or just give me any kind of example of what the number might be. So for rough grouse here, we're looking at it. This ranges from almost nothing to 14 is the darkest purple we can see on this map. So that would be... Man, I grew up in a really good grouse spot.

Yeah. I knew it. Yeah. You know, so that's... And again, relative abundance, you can think about that as there are more here than there are here. Yeah, yeah. And this puts numbers to just how many more there are in a given spot.

So if we look at- What's interesting about this is you could have, you could uniformly reduce by 50% rough grouse populations, and that stays the same. Because it's relative, right? Yes. If you just cut it in half. So we can look at one. This is hooded merganser.

So rough grouse are not migratory. Hooded merganser is. So we can see this change across the year. And that's what we're looking at here is relative abundance at each week of the year. You want to lean back a foot, Steve, so we can get a shot? Thank you. Man, this is the thing.

So I want to explain to people what we're looking at. We're looking at, this is the court. We're looking at, this is all off eBird. So this is run through some very sophisticated models that account for all those things we've talked about as far as effort and account for environmental variables, different land cover. We have more than 84 variables in this model that account for things like elevation, weather. We have hourly weather in this model attached to a checklist. We've got various water layers. We have tidal layers, mudflaps, those kinds of things.

We have all kinds of things that are accounted for in this to make sure that we're not just modeling where people go but where they're actually seeing these birds yeah what you can watch here and so if people go to eber they can find all this yes yeah what you're watching here is is like a color-coded map showing bird densities as they migrate across the continent. And a thing I like about when I talk about human error is when they're all gone, they're all gone. Meaning when everything migrates north, you're not seeing little mistakes pop up.

Or is that because they've been filtered out? They may have been filtered out by the modeling process because at you know where we are here in uh you know june or july end of june is where we are now you're not going to see any hooded mergansers on the texas gulf coast yeah you shouldn't um that that's the thing that surprises me is that the migrations are so complete that you don't have more where just like some for some weird reason

hangs around, you know? And there may be a report or two from there. Yeah. But if it's just a report or two, the way the modeling works, there's all this spatial filtering that goes on to make sure that, you know, because if there is a hooded merganser there at this time of year, a lot of people are going to go see it.

And a lot of people are going to put that on their checklist. So in the raw eBird data, it's going to look like, you know, several hundred people saw a hooded merganser in that one spot that day. We're only going to use one of those checklists across that week so we filter that stuff out okay right that makes sense yeah so remember what was it a few years ago last year some bird showed up off the northeast that stellar sea eagle yeah the stellar sea eagle everybody was going to see yeah yeah and what so were people when that stellar sea like he took a wrong turn or screwed something up right and he wound up off the north he wound up off new england

or something yeah bird a bird in japan probably jumped over went into alaska kept going going across and then wound up in the northeast maybe went down to texas maybe went back up that bird then is something that you know there's only one of them in the U.S. Were you guys seeing that bird a lot on eBird? Yeah, I mean, at times, hundreds of reports of that individual bird. I mean, our team was like gone. Like half the team just left. Oh, you guys went to look.

Oh, hell yeah. Did you really? We actually didn't because we had to manage a bunch of stuff, so we weren't able to go. But most people on our team. So you know people that left to go see that bird. Oh, yeah. Like got in their car right away as soon as it was found.

And then when it changed states, not only did they want to see it in Massachusetts, they wanted to make sure that they saw it in Maine. Yeah. Because what's the advantage of that? Because you have different state lists. It's cool. It's different lists. It's the same thing like why would you, why would you want to, you know, maybe shoot different

species of animals? Like it's the cave. In different states? I don't know. Well, maybe. Maybe. I mean, different subspecies. Coos whitetail.

We can sponsor. We can initiate the sport of pro competitive bird watching. Oh, you know what? What am I saying? It's a huge thing because, yeah, I am guilty of that. I'm real interested in what states I got a turkey in. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you're right.

Same thing. I thought it was dumb, but now I think it's smart. What happens is we can start to understand something about the sensor network, so the group of people that are going there, and how their lists are different between them. So they're all there. They all are focused on Stellar Seagull, but we're asking them to give us a complete list of all the birds that they see. So we can start to tease about those differences that are between the observers to understand the actual natural biological signal by having people go and see those. So what we try to do is think strategically, like,

how do we use some of these unusual circumstances to our advantage to be able to tease apart the differences between biology and human behavior. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're

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OnX club, y'all. So have you... I feel that that would be a great example of somewhere where you could really spend a lot of time um on demographics human demographics okay so let's say you didn't follow the news all right you don't follow the news at all and and all of a sudden it's just that there's this huge sudden population of stellar sea eagles in maine okay would you look at that in uh it's kind of two different questions but would you look at that and immediately think that's got to be a single bird you just would you you you would because we we understand basically with an e-bird you know we

have all we have all this data now to tell us where birds are across time and space we know what the maximum count ends up being and so when when we look at something like that, we can see the difference between when something might be a phenomenon caused by weather or something like that. So there's been other cases where there's birds, like shorebirds, let's say, where there have been several different individuals, all of a bird that's usually pretty rare. In this case, we could say something like northern lapwing. It's a European species that's usually migratory there. Very, very rare that it makes it over to

the US, but sometimes you can have these storm systems that can blow those birds over here. In that case, what we can see is that there might be counts of three birds at one place, five birds at another place, and we can understand sort of how those birds are moving. And so if, and because they're rare and unusual events, people want to take pictures of them because they're noteworthy. And so then we can actually go in and really dive in and say, okay, like, let's look at the molt pattern on this bird and look at the exact wear on the tertials. And so we've been able to look at, you know, in the case of that sea eagle, as people were seeing at different places, you know, we didn't just sort of make the assumption that it was the same bird. People looked at the exact feather wear to understand like, okay, it looks like this is the same bird because look at this scapular feather and this weird pattern

that it has. It's very unusual, just in the the same way that you know we we can do with people you know it's a lot harder to do with birds but when you're just looking at sort of one or two individuals all of a sudden you can really you know given the photographic equipment that people have available we can really understand that with a lot of detail now which is pretty cool uh how many have you ever looked how many individuals logged that bird you know i haven't i haven't looked yeah do you feel it'd be hundreds of thousands thousands of users yeah gotta hit off that bird yeah has you guys ever seen that you didn't go look but is that bird on your bird list no it's not which is even more that's makes, I mean, this is not a, this would be like,

it's, you know, I have seen snow cock. Oh yeah. Yeah. In the Ruby Mountains. In the Ruby Mountains. You did? Yeah, cause it's a, you know, part of it is- Tell me where later on.

We'll compare dates. Was it close or flying away? It was, it ended up getting close. Yeah. And what's, I mean, part of it is, you know, whether it's birding or hunting, like it's an excuse to go and spend some time in kind of a magical place. And, you know, the focus might be there on some specific thing, but sometimes what you remember the most from that may not even be related to that so you know going up to that you know glacial lake seeing rosy finches and pine gross beaks and i mean it's just that it's a pretty cool magical place and you know whether it's hunting or fishing or birds like you it's just this excuse to go and spend some time in a natural

system and smell the crisp air in the morning and and you know listen to the the natural world and sort of detach from the the the day to day, which, you know, sometimes isn't great. Uh, my dad had, he ranked all birds into two rough categories. Uh,

there was game birds and there was Tweety birds and just the, uh, and that was the thing. Like we growing up, man, you knew some birds birds but it was just there was yeah there was the ones that you hunt for you know and then the ones that you didn't and um and man i list i missed so many good opportunities to learn birds and i still struggle

with like identifying all the hawks up high, you know, and people that can do that. I'm jealous of that shit bad. You know, do you guys allow, uh, do you allow yourselves as professional ornithologists to have favorite birds? Yeah,

of course. Yeah. What's your favorite? My favorite is a long tailed duck. Oh yeah. I mean they, yeah, I grew up on the shore of Lake Ontario

and there were just hundreds of them out there all winter long. So I just loved that experience watching them throughout the winter. And then knowing that they were traveling

all the way to the Arctic and completely changing their plumage over, getting those all blackheads and everything, just, you know, even as a 10-year-old, I was like thinking,

man, wouldn't it be cool to go all the way to their breeding grounds and imagining the migrations that they do. And so that's, that's my favorite bird. as a 10 year old, I was like thinking, man, wouldn't it be cool to go all the way to their breeding grounds and imagining the migrations that they do. And so that's, that's my favorite bird. Did you grow up knowing that bird by a different name?

Oh yeah. Yeah. My family still, it's like old squad coming over. Yeah, for sure. It's, uh,

um, that we know we had quite a few of those in some areas in Michigan. You'd have quite a few of them. And, uh, adoption of the new name is not widespread. Yeah. It's mixed, very mixed few of those. In some areas in Michigan, you'd have quite a few of them. Adoption of the new name is not widespread. Yeah, it's a very mixed rate of adoption. So that's one you like.

What one do you like? Favorite. It's tough for me. I tend to be whatever I'm looking at is special. It's like, who's your favorite kid, right? There's something. Who is it depends what one i'm talking to they always ask what no i mean if today there's a there's a big owl great gray owl yeah i know that one yeah it's it's just you know it's a it's an indicator of some of the really nice boreal forests.

Really, really cool bird. You don't see them very often. Sometimes they stage these eruptions into Michigan or Minnesota, Wisconsin. I was fortunate one year to go up there during one of these big eruptions and saw over 200 in a day. And, you know, just birds and, you know, anytime you see things, it has you ask these questions. Like, you know, what's driving that? Are they mostly young birds? Are they one-year-old birds?

And, you know, you just start looking at things and thinking about things in a different way. Mention that. I remember one time I could even tell you the owner of the field and the there was a there was a farm family the zeldon rust family and one day there was a snowy owl so this is a michigan you know a snowy owl sitting in their field and like that was the thing people went to watch you know oh yeah and then i remember um my brother danny hitting a great horn he hit him and did real damage on a car like broke the grill out of the car and stuff you know

hitting that thing yeah and like you it's funny the way you get certain like bird interactions burned into your head i remember being a little kid one day and even though we had a lot of rough grouse, like just seeing a rough grouse in the yard, which is the least rough grousey looking, you know, like on a, like on a mowed lawn, right? Yeah. And it burns in your head in a weird way. Totally. Yeah.

We had this, um, right when COVID started, I remember the lab basically had just closed everybody brought their stuff home we knew we were entering this sort of new space and and i was like you know at least we've got this rough grass right outside our house that's drumming and it was just like you know the world is a bunch of terrible stuff that's happening right now. But we have this grouse and then the next day it's morning, we're drinking coffee and we hear this. And on the second story, we go up there and there's this roughed grouse that's sitting there. Well, of course, Jessie,

she's pretty excited. It's dead. It is dead on the roof. um why on the roof well it hit there's sort of a you know there's the bottom level of the the roof and then an upper roof and so it hit the the window on the second story oh yeah i got you and um and so jesse was also you know we were traumatized but she was also pretty excited that we would be able to have the rough grouse for the rough grouse for dinner because times are getting hard society might society might have dissolved exactly that was the week you couldn't find onions in the store but it was you know it was this thing it was just like crushing i was like the world really is

you know and and then the next day luckily there was a it wasn't our roughed grouse it was another bird that was moving through there so then i was like okay jesse we can i'm okay eating that eating the grass tonight no what's your favorite bird you know i love waterfowl um but i i would say my favorite bird is probably reddish egret really Really? Growing up on the Gulf Coast, seeing them was special because they're, I'm not going to say they're rare where I was in Alabama on the Gulf Coast, but you're not going to see a ton of them when you're out. And they'll run like wind sprints to stir up the water, confuse fish, and then they'll shade the water with their wings and do this weird little

dance and then pick fish out. It's just, there's a blast to watch. We used to have a, when we were kids, my dad would use a, for a live well, he'd use the washing machine agitator. Like the, like, so it's a, those old steel perforated tanks. It was inside old washing machines and it had that center at that center piece in it but he just take those out and set them in the water because they're perforated in steel and that would be the live well so when you caught bluegills we'd

throw our bluegills in this perforated tank that just sat in the water and then when there got to be enough of them in there you'd go clean all the bluegills and we used to watch um blue herons and they would never figure out that those things couldn't get away and they would stalk that tank you know from 50 yards away like every morning he'd land there and stalk that tank and look up over the edge and so careful. And you might be like, he's just sitting there. Just grab it. You know, but he'd make his strike and grab it, you know. But my favorite bird, man, I think it transcends birdness, but it's a turkey.

Yeah. Wild turkey. Yeah. Almost the national symbol. Yeah. Well, you know what's funny? We just talked about this today. Yeah.

And it wasn't. No, it wasn't really, but. Oh, you know that it was. It's about this today yeah and it wasn't no it wasn't really but oh you know you know it's a good it's a good story it's a good story it's a good story so you know that whole deal that he was being like a little bit he was being cute yeah yeah so um ebird's free participation's free merlin's free uh We were with, I told you this, but we were with a famous documentarian the other day and I was talking about how much I liked Merlin and he asked how much it was. I told him it was free and he said,

well, I'm going to get it because I don't buy anything on the internet. So it's free. And you don't even spy on people. No people no no we just want people to go out and look at birds and enjoy the natural world and care more about this stuff yeah it's effective man i have um it is uh yeah i've learned a ton about birds man from from doing it i need to start remembering them better but i've learned i've learned about birds. Yeah, it's easy to kind of get those answers from Merlin and then not really think about it again.

So we're thinking about features that would be fun to test those skills over time. To help you actually get it and stick it in your head. I'll tell you what, though. It is so satisfying, even though you don't recall the name. It scratches the biggest itch yeah to hear something off in the trees and then finally be able to put a name to it and a lot of times it's some bird you heard about yeah you know but you just you just didn't know oh that's what that sounds like you

didn't know what it was so it's great and i love um you guys put out so much great stuff no thanks at the ornithology Lab. Yeah, it's impressive. So I encourage people to go and get and participate in iBird. eBird? eBird, not iBird. Participate in eBird and over log stuff you like to hunt. I'm joking. Don't over log stuff you like to hunt.

Don't mess with the science. We need the science to stay true. And for you Nevada Ruby Mountain Hunters, keep logging them in because someday I'm going to come look for one. Did you log yours? Yeah, they're in there. It's in there? Yeah. I think there might be a photo. Dude, you might regret

that, man, because people want to know where those birds are. They're non-native, though. Non-native. Any of you guys want to throw in that I failed to ask about that you think I should have asked about? You haven't been playing as much trivia lately, so Corinne and I thought it'd be fun to just toss in some extra

questions for you. So you're going to throw me bird sounds? We're going to throw you some bird sounds. Audience, play along. Yep, play along. There's a couple of warm-ups for you. Like easy ones? Yeah, easy ones. Like a mallard? Hit me with a mallard. There you go that's actually really tough because they sound a lot like a black duck she would have played like black duck yeah don't do don't do any kind of trick stuff

i know this one. You totally know that one. Yeah, why do I know that one? Most frequently heard in June. Northern region bird. I mean, I know it, but I can't tell you what it is. I don't know. Think about caribou.

Yeah. You're on a caribou hunt. A jaeger? A little tarpigan. A little tarpigan. That's right. Yeah, because we used to, remember the three stooges and Curly to have that

nyak, nyak, nyak. Yeah, we used to talk about sounds like Curly, like nyak, nyak, nyak, nyak. Yeah, I forgot about that one. I told you I wasn't going to do that. Yeah, okay. All right.

I know that bird. I know that one because that's the one up high in the treetops. Yep, that's that one. It's a, yeah, he lives up in the canopy in the old girl's forest. The Vireo? Swainson's Thrush. Swainson's Thrush. Okay, Swainson's Thrush.

Yeah, so Swainson's Thrush is in the old growth and across the North America and the breeding grounds, and then they go all the way to South America for the winters. They do? Yeah. So they're going to be flying. So that one is the one that when you're bear hunting in Southeast Alaska, it's always doing that?

And that's one of the ones I wanted to zap with merlin right because i wanted to zap with merlin to find out what it was and i was totally satisfied but then forgot what his name was but yeah these guys are going into the andes for the winter so you imagine them flying at night almost non-stop all the way uh down to those spots so you know when we're thinking about protecting habitat is not just you know where they're breeding up in north america but also working with groups in colombia and ecuador and peru to make sure that the wintering grounds are protected for these species and the stops that they have in between so a lot of those birds you're listening to in southeast alaska are going to South America.

Yeah. Yeah. One of the things to notice that Jesse was talking about is you can see how small the wintering range is. And when they come back to breed, you see how huge it is. Yeah. They really disperse. Yeah. Yeah, they really disperse. Yeah, so that's why it's important to get this full annual cycle picture so we can really pinpoint where they are down here to help conserve habitat and whatnot.

Steve, for listeners at home, what are you seeing? Oh, so it goes along the face of the Andes. So it's all across the, you know, all across the north. A little bit north of the boreal forest, right? But like from coastal Alaska, all across Canada. But then when they migrate, they consolidate around the Andes in South America. Is that down the spine of the Andes or the east face? It's the spine of the Andes in South America. Is that down the spine of the Andes or the east face? It's the spine of the Andes.

It's some more north, but they really concentrate down there. And then they're Pacific to Atlantic across the Arctic, or across the north. God, man, they're like a global, not global, but just using huge amounts of territory. Yeah, that's really impressive. There's a lot of opportunities for vulnerability. Exactly, yep.

And you think about a bird like that migrating, they've got all those challenges along the way, whether it's window strikes or big storms or not having enough food before they take off on a long flight. There's lots of things that are contributing to major challenges. Yeah, a lot has to go right to get from the southern end of that range to the north. Okay, I'm going to memorize that bird on the Swainson's Thrush. Swainson's Thrush. Okay, so this one, just guess what state it was recorded.

Just pick a state. Nevada. So this one is Hawaii. And it's a pretty special song. So you can hear it's kind of jazzy, bubbly. There's some pauses in there that's kind of interesting and so this is a recording of a kawaii oo oh okay and oo's um were family birds that lived on the hawaiian islands but they were hunted by the polynesian emperors because they liked their feathers for the robes they lost their habitat to cattle ranching and pretty soon there was only one species of O'o left, the quio.

And that bird that we were listening to was the last quio. Oh, it is? The last male to ever live. And so he would sing. Want to play him again? Yep. That's the last of its kind. Who recorded that?

This was Thanee pratt 1988 and when you hear it again it takes on this whole new meaning right it's kind of melancholy and you hear those spaces in between the notes and that's where the female would have completed the duet so o's were a duetting species and we're only hearing half the song. We don't really know what the whole song looks like. In 88? 88, yep.

1988? Yep. I don't know. I didn't know a bird went extinct in 88. Yeah, this isn't a bird that's well known. There's still a lot of stories out there that are, you know the axolimocerulone extinct in you know probably the mid 1900s but um yeah these are all sad stories that we're losing these species but they're really meant to be inspiring that there's still an opportunity to save some of the species that are declining now. Well, and that Kauai, you know,

as people figured this out and this bird was kind of rediscovered in this area, it really did start to focus on conservation of both in Kauai and other Hawaiian islands and trying to figure out how you pull together these partnerships of groups like the Nature conservancies states um to think about and you know how you how you can set aside habitat create connectivity to move um for birds to to be able to move um and oftentimes you know it's it's

birds that are the things that first highlight that there's something that could be going wrong in a system. And so while Kauai O'o is, you know, it's the first family of birds that we've lost, you know, really in modern times where it's not just that individual species, but as you go up and it's not just, you know, the genus that those birds were in, but a fairly long lineage of, of birds that, you know, all of the representatives of them are now gone. Um, that, that power that birds have, you know, now when you hear that sound and that bit of knowledge that you have, that it's human actions that have caused that to take place, you know, really has this change, you know, that I think when you hear that sound now is the power of birds and the ability to say like, oh my gosh, this is not a sustainable way that we're living. This isn't going to be, it's certainly not sustainable for them. They're gone. It's probably not sustainable for us. We really need to change our behavior. And then you can look at things like bald eagle, you know, that the same thing was happening to populations of bald eagle, or, you know, you may find this hard to believe, but Canada goose,

you know, you look at maximum Canada goose, the success, or maybe even over success of the effect that human action can have when we understand sort of what's happening. You know, people are, people are pretty amazing. We can screw things up real well, but we also have the power to change our actions. Um, you know, protect natural places, restore the places that we've lost and then change the way that we're living with natural systems yeah my uh you know my dad was a hunter in the late 40s early 50s and their ideas and attitudes about geese were so different and it's for a long time there was a goose on a sand county almanac yeah i mean it was like a special thing yeah and he wrote all about like the call the goose and now was like a special thing yeah and he wrote all about

like the call the goose you know and now people like just go golfing dude it's all you hear right exactly is there more yeah we got here's one uh i haven't got any right yeah it's branching out So you can hear the Swainson's thrush in there. There's lots of stuff. I'll give you a hint. It's not a bird. Jess is trying to... Oh, it's not a bird. She's trying to trick you.

Like a porcupine? I don't know. A beaver. Oh, it is? Really? Yeah. So I dropped that microphone on the top of a beaver lodge. Oh, you could hear them in there.

And then you're hearing the kits in the lodge. Yeah. My wife was telling me about the, yeah. My wife was listening to recordings of what they sound like. I was like, that's not true. She's like, no, man, they're vocal. Yeah. Like for the whole hour, they just kept doing that.

Let me hear that again. My wife was playing that. She's playing that for me. Where is that? That's about 300 miles north of Toronto. Okay. Yeah, my wife was talking about how much noise beavers make, and I was like, no, they don't.

I didn't know until I dropped a microphone on the top of the lodge uh but then like one more kind of out there that's a bomb falling not quite i thought it was a spaceship it's the ufos they've been talking about Not quite. I thought it was a spaceship. It's the UFOs they've been talking about. Oh, man, I have no idea. That's crazy, though. So this is a bearded seal. Oh, that's a bearded seal. Recorded with a hydrophone.

Yep, underwater. Oh, that's awesome. That is crazy. Turns out they're starting to sing louder. Now that there's more industrial noise under water, the seals are increasing their volume to try to compensate. Good. That's great noise.

Be loud and proud. What did I get, zero? it's great noise be loud and proud what i get zero but are you glad you played no i'm glad i played i got a zero and i think that there's a problem in my brain with um like there's a problem my brain with remembering uh you know like assigning noise well you know might help you to look at the spectrograms in the Merlin app. Cause if you're more visual, you can kind of start to see the pattern of notes like in a picture, which really helps me remember. So yeah.

But, but I can do, I can listen to FM radio and tell you what song it is. Three, three beats in. More practice. It's just practice. Familiarity.

Just swab out your like, your music while you're driving around and just put on bird sounds. That's what I did. That's great. Thanks for doing that. Well, thank you very much

for coming on. I hope people keep, I hope people go and get the tools and start logging their bird stuff and be like a citizen scientist, man. Yeah. Well, we'll see you on there. Will you?

Yeah. Will you be able to look up my stuff and check my work? Yeah. Okay. We'll check. Give you some feedback. You're doing it wrong.

We got a team in montana that'll probably be in touch oh really yeah if you report if you report that cock of the rock they will definitely flag you oh really though this so they monitor it we we keep we do keep a list of um we do keep a list of the birds we see in certain areas and we keep a good list of the birds we see in our yard yeah and what's funny is the other day i heard um i was on the phone with someone i was on a work call and i was hearing this bird i was like man i don't think that's like it was like a hawk in a tree but it didn't quite sound like a red tail but doing that like again and again.

And I actually at one point said, I have to go for a minute. I'll call you right back. Hung up the call, opened up Merlin because I couldn't, weirdly, I couldn't open it up while I was on the phone. Oh yeah. That was irritating. The audio cuts out. Yeah, I know.

Just tell me. Yeah. Yeah. I was pissed about that. So I hung up my call, turned turned it on that bird quit doing that noise called the person back the minute i got him back on the phone it started up again hung up turned it back on the bird quit after the call i took i told my kid to take that phone and i said i want you to go over in the neighbor's yard and find out that bird and he came back a while later

said he never did it again so to this day it's still a mystery. But I was going to add it to the Rinella family list but wasn't able to do it. Alright, but thank you guys very much. I appreciate it, man. Yeah, thank you. I hope that you're able to solve problems

and help us make good habitat decisions. Yeah, well it takes a team. Yeah, to save America's birds. So thank you very much. Oh, ride on, ride on, let it run on. I want to see your gray hair shine like silver in the sun. Ride on, ride on, ride on, my love, my sweetheart.

We're done, beat this damn horse to death. Take a new one and ride on. We're done beat this damn horse to death. So take your new one and ride on. OnXHunt.com now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that

include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service as a special tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free

three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com meet.