The Science of Birds - From the Field: How My Life Became All About Birds

Episode Date: November 14, 2024

From a hotel in Vietnam, Ivan tells the tale of how he created a career centered on birds and birding. ~~ Leave me a review using Podchaser ~~Link to this episode on the Science of Birds website Support the show

Right now, I am sitting in a hotel room in Katzien National Park in Vietnam. It's the middle of the afternoon. It's pretty hot and humid out there because this national park is in a low-elevation tropical rainforest ecosystem. There's a good chance it's actually going to rain here in an hour or two, as it so often does in the afternoon. This is unusual. I have never recorded a Science of Birds podcast. episode outside of my little closet at home that I use as a recording studio. So the audio quality and character is going to be different. I will of course process it after

I record, but it's going to be different. And another major difference here with this episode and the next few, and I'll explain in a moment, is that they are unscripted. Normally, you may know that I write a full script for each of my podcast episodes. Word for word. Because I'm traveling here in Vietnam and I'll also be visiting several other Asian countries, I want to keep putting out podcast episodes, but I don't have my usual way of producing them. So this is a little bit of an experiment. I'm kind of interested to see how it goes and interested to hear from you guys, my listeners,

what you think about this. Because I do a lot of traveling for my work and it would be kind of cool if I could do this every so often and if you guys actually enjoy it. And if I enjoy it. So I'm expecting that I will produce several shorter episodes like this sort of in the field as I'm on this particular travel adventure. And then when I get home, I will resume my normal way of doing things because I really like the process that I have and it seems to work for you guys. So why am I in Vietnam and why do I have this larger trip in Asia. It's because I lead birding tours. I have a small business that I co-own with my buddy Steve called Wild Latitudes, and we've been running that for about seven or eight

years now, and we have destinations to various places around the world. This is the first tour I've personally led for a while here in Vietnam, and it's going to continue into Cambodia in a week or so, which is very exciting. But I have other tours coming up like early next year. I'll be doing a tour in Patagonia and then later in the year, China. So lots of cool stuff. It's a pretty cool gig. And until I did the podcast, that was my only means of income. That was my only job. But since about 2020, when I started the podcast, the podcast has ever so slowly become a significant portion of the work I do, and it gives me about half of my income now. So it's very much a real career, and so I definitely want to keep it going when I have these more extended

trips. And this is a very extended trip. This is the longest trip I've ever taken in my entire life. It's going to be a little over two and a half months, thus the reason the need for producing podcast episodes in the field. Right. So I'm again in Vietnam. Outside, there's a little little roof, a little restaurant covered with a thatched roof right by the Dongnai River, which is completely brown with sediment, very much a tropical river lined with bamboo and all kinds of large tropical trees. Lots of good birds out there. And I'll probably be producing at least one episode, if not a couple, about the actual birding experiences and the kinds of birds you can see in this part of the world in Southeast Asia and beyond. Because after Cambodia,

I'll be spending several weeks in China, then I'm going to go spend a short time in Nepal, and then eventually a couple weeks in Bhutan. So here we go. This is our first episode in the field for the Science of Birds. And of course, what would a Science of Birds podcast episode be without the intro? Hello and welcome. This is the Science of Birds.

I am your host, Ivan Philipson. The Science of Birds podcast is a lighthearted exploration of bird biology for lifelong learners. This episode, which is going to be relatively short, this in the field episode, this unscripted episode, is going to be about my journey to how I got here. How did I, Ivan Philipson, end up becoming someone whose entire life is devoted to birds? And I've told this story in various bits and pieces over the years in the podcast and in various ways, but I thought I would just kind of do it all here, and in again in a relatively short way, and just tell you my story. I hope you find it interesting and maybe inspiring if you, you know, dream of doing work that is based around something that you are very passionate about. One bit of advice we sometimes get is to follow your passion in your career. And that can be really cool and really end work for many of us.

But sometimes you have to be more practical and you just have to kind of leverage the skills you have and do what you can and your job is just kind of a nine to five or whatever. It's just a means to an end. But I feel very lucky that through a series of circumstances, some of it luck and some of it intentional, I ended up doing this work that is something that I feel very excited about, passionate about. It brings me a lot of joy. And yes, it's still work. It's still hard sometimes, but it is, I just feel very fortunate to be doing what I'm doing. So I am going to be telling a story. Again, it doesn't have a script, so it probably won't flow as smoothly as I think my

podcast episodes normally do. So if we start at the beginning of the story when I was a little kid, I had a inborn, what feels like an inborn interest in nature and science. And I'm going to guess that that might be true for many of you listening right now, that you too have just this inborn, ingrained desire to learn about animals and plants and the natural world and how it all works. And that was me as a little kid. I really loved all that stuff. And my dad was really into nature.

He wasn't a professional biologist or anything like that. But he loved learning. He was a lifelong learner and not just in science, but all kinds of things. And he and I were very close. And yeah, he just took me out to places to go for walks and go to the zoo. I have a lot of really fond memories of going to the Los Angeles Zoo because I grew up in Southern California. And so dad would take me over there and we'd see all kinds of cool stuff.

And that eventually flowered into just this full. on love of animals, and that became more specific as I hit about seven or eight years old when my passion was really concentrated on reptiles and amphibians. Those were my critters, and I would have the guidebooks and all these books on how to take care of them because I had all of the terrariums and aquariums full of frogs and snakes and salamanders and turtles and lizards, all of them. I had them all. And interestingly, we did have at least one pet bird that I remember actually a couple we had a budgie a budger his name was buddy which you know wasn't very creative of us but that was his name so I did have a

couple birds along the way but I was just very fixated on reptiles and amphibians and I even thought when I was seven eight nine years old that I was going to be a pet store owner when I grew up that was the career that I envisioned for myself but then I sort of grew out of that and kind of got a little more realistic and a little more ambitious. So fast forward to high school. I'm still interested in reptiles and amphibians. That's still sort of my thing. But I'm a teenager now. So of course now I'm learning how to play bass guitar and being a rock and roll band and I've got my girlfriend and my buddies. And so I'm a little bit disconnected from nature at that time. I was a little more involved in social

stuff. And then it was time to go to college to pick my major. What was I going to study in school? Very big decision. right when you're 17 years old well I decided to go into science the other alternative would have been art I always enjoyed drawing and painting and I used to take lessons and stuff and I was often considered kind of the artist kid to an extent not that I was ever like super amazing but but I was an artist but I decided to go what I thought with was the practical route and go into science now did I go off to some big you know prestigious university right away no

Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I went to community college. And this is all again in Southern California. So I went to Riverside Community College, RCC, and I moved out of the house, live with some buddies and gotten in a bunch of trouble being a bunch of idiots, but I went to community college

and took all kinds of stuff. And my first semester at Community College, though, I took zoology, starting off with invertebrate zoology, then vertebrate zoology. And I gotta tell you, I was in heaven, absolute heaven. Being able to sit in there and just, you know, geek out with

the professor and my classmates about all these weird invertebrates like squid and jellyfish and worms and stuff and then get into the vertebrates and just it was just really right of my alley. I loved it. I love science. I love natural history. So I kicked around in community college for a few years and I wasn't really super serious because again I was kind of more focused on my friends and girls and rocks and rock and roll. Not rocks. Rock and roll. And this, stuff that we did was all pretty tame by most people's standards. We were pretty good kids, but yeah, and I had some, you know, little jobs and things and just made my way through community college. And then I went off to university. I did go to a university. I actually

moved back in with my parents and I started commuting to a school, Cal Poly Pomona, which I know I've talked about, I think I talked about some of my experiences there on the Wrens episode. Because one of my first and most formative bird experiences happened at Cal Polypomona. Mona, when I volunteered to work with a professor on a campus project studying the cactus wren. As I described in the, I believe the Wrens episode, I talked about this small patch of habitat that was just on the edge of the campus. And we did these nest surveys for cactus wrens. And so I got really into that. I thought it was just really cool going out early in the morning, collecting data. And it got me out there when the birds were active and really

starting to open my eyes and my ears to the wonderful world of birds and birding. And I made some friends who were, who self-identified as birders, which I still didn't at the time, but I started to become interested and I had really fun experiences out there. And the bird that I credit as my spark bird is the California Tohi, Melazone Chrysalis. I was walking on campus one day with my friend, and he was more of a birder than I was, more knowledgeable, and he stopped us in mid-conversation, and he said, hey, do you hear that? Hear that? There's something in the bushes there. Something kicking around. And I was like, yeah, yeah, I hear it. And there was just little scratching sound in the leaves. And he said, that's a California tohi. That's what they do. They kick the leaves, and they forage for whatever little invertebrates are underneath the leaves. And it's just this kind of brown, scrappy bird. It's nothing, you know, super colorful or whatever. But I was just really impressed with my friend's ability to hear that sound and understand what was going on, know the name of the species and a little bit about its behavior. And that just stuck with me. And so I give that bird

the credit for being my spark bird. And if you've never heard that term, in birding, it means it's the species or the individual bird that you first fell in love with that just made you become ultimately a birder. It created the spark that eventually would become a raging inferno. So yeah, California Tohee, that was my sparkbird. And I'm just going to pause here for a second because, you know, I'm not sure how I'm going to process this audio in this episode, whether or not I'm going to try to remove all the background noise, but you may hear that there are voices outside. There are a bunch of Vietnamese people in the restaurant. Outside, it's this open-air restaurant that's part of the National Park.

headquarters here. So anyway, there's just this ambient sound, and maybe that's just part of the fun here. I'm not going to try to go crazy, trying to get rid of every little ambient sound. Okay, so now I've had some experiences with birds, and, you know, I'm interested, but I'm still kind of on the reptile and amphibian track in my mind, if ever I was going to focus on something. And that is exactly what ended up happening, was that I eventually, once I graduated as an undergraduate, I got a job working as a field biologist in San Bernardino County, California. There was a museum there that was doing a reptile and amphibian survey for habitat conservation. Then I got this cool job where I had a county truck, this big orange truck,

and I got to drive it around to maybe five or six or maybe even ten sites every morning from the spring through the summer to check these live traps for wild reptiles and amphibians. So these traps were set up in these arrays in some natural habitat, these drift fences and buckets and things or little traps. And again, these are live traps. The animals aren't being harmed. So I would show up in my county truck and I'd go over there and I'd have all my tools and I'd open up these buckets and I'd look in and there'd be snakes and lizards and frogs and all kinds of stuff that fell in there overnight because you'd check these things every day. And I would put my gloves on and reach in and pull stuff out. and it's, you know, wiggling and kicking little animals.

And I would measure them their lengths and their weight and take all kinds of recordings, all kinds of data from each individual, put it on a data sheet on paper, because that's what we used to do. We used to use paper kids. And then I'd release the critter, and off I'd go to the next site. And it was really cool because I would get up early in the morning and I'd have my coffee on the way over there, and I'd listen to the radio, and then I'd get out there in the cool, crisp,

morning and walk around to many of these sites that were quite pretty and interesting habitats. And it was like, kind of like Christmas every day, or my birthday every day. You need to open these presents with all these interesting reptiles and amphibians. Some of which you would just never find, or it would be very, very difficult to find if you were just to go out and look for them. So the fact that they're in these traps, they're kind of, you know, just wandering around at night and they end up in these traps, you just get to see really cool stuff. So that was, that was kind of a dream come true.

It was a really cool job. it was never meant to be forever and it certainly wasn't it lasted less than a year before the program was basically finished or shut down or whatever it was the funding ran out basically sadly so then i decided to go ahead and go on to um you know continue on to grad school so back to school so i went on to get a master's at cal state sam meridino and because you know you go to grad school you want to get a degree in biology then you get to choose what your research project is going to be. What is your thesis project? So little Ivan Philipson who loved frogs as a kid and snakes and lizards and all that, well, he decided to study frogs. I did my project on the California

tree frog, which is this cool little species that lives in rocky streams in Southern California and in northern Mexico. So yeah, that's what I did for four years. I did a genetic study of the California tree fog looking at sort of its recent evolutionary history, looking at the different populations and relating their genetic relatedness to each other. And it was really cool. And I had a really great time doing that. And some of my friends along the way in both, you know, again, undergraduate, but also in my master's program, were birders, including my advisor. He was a really great birder. And so that kind of opened my eyes and ears again even further to this world of birding. But I still was not converted 100% yet. I still didn't call myself a birder. I was still going to

keep studying frogs and amphibians, and that's what I did. I moved to Oregon, and I went to Oregon State University to do my Ph.D. So now I'm going to get a doctorate, and guess what? I'm going to keep on studying frogs, different frogs, but still frogs, and that's exactly what I did. And that program lasted about five years, and I was in the lab a lot, sitting at the computer analyzing data. I also did get to do some really cool field work, hiking around in the mountains, looking for frogs. But once again, I had my colleagues, my friends, fellow grad students, many of which were birders, and so we would go out birding. And so it just became this thing, you know, just yeah, just kind of always in the background, just birds, birds, birds.

And then after my PhD, I went ahead and got a job as a postdoc, also at Oregon State University, studying other things. I studied aquatic insects for a while, which was pretty cool. And then when that was all over, I made the big decision to, instead of going on to be a professor, which was the original plan that was plan A and had been for a long time, I decided, you know what, this has all been great. It's been great to do science and to be in academia and all of that jazz. But in the end, I decided it wasn't quite for me. It wasn't the best fit. I'd spent, you know, 12 years of my life or whatever in that world, got some fun research papers published in good journals and things and I felt fairly accomplished. But I didn't want to go on and keep doing the whole.

whole thing. So I bailed. I left academia and started a business with a friend doing local nature tours. And this was after a lot of sort of brainstorming and thinking about the pros and cons of this decision, but it was a big one. And it was one that I feel very happy that I made. I have no regrets about doing that. It's really one of the best things I ever did. So we had a van and we bought a van and used that to pick up groups of people, either from two to ten people, and take them off into the wild parts of Oregon and Washington, and show them all the things, right? So not just frogs, not just birds, but everything. The plants, the insects, the geology, talk about the climate, environmental issues, whatever, just everything, which is really fun. I really enjoyed being

just a general naturalist, a naturalist guide for these mostly tourists visiting portals. Portland, Oregon, where I live. So that was fairly successful and only lasted a couple years, but, you know, the business eventually after that first year or so really picked up and we had, you know, kind of, I was working basically every day in the spring and summer out hiking with people, so I was in pretty good shape. And the thing is, every time I went out, no matter where I was, even if I never found any insects or any frogs, I always had birds to show people. There were always birds. You could hear them. You could see them. They were just so, so satisfying and so reliable. And I was always taking notes and recording the species I was seeing. And so I got really

good at knowing my local birds, knowing, you know, not just their names, but also their calls and their songs and a lot about their biology. And that was very satisfying. And so it just, it just, I became a birder at that point. That's where that transition happened. I can't tell you, there was one particular day where I'm like, dun-da, I am a birder now. But, you know, you You know, it definitely happened, and I felt comfortable calling myself that, you know. And then that business, we kind of folded up shop on that business. My business partner and I had some disagreements, and so we just dissolved that business and then moved on. And in the meantime, though, I started working as a naturalist aboard ships.

I got this kind of gig where I worked maybe, you know, a few weeks a year, working on National Geographic ships for a company called Lindblatt Expeditions. And I started going to Alaska and then Baja, California, Mexico. And I was always seeing birds and talking to the tour guests about birds on those voyages. And then I got connected with the local Audubon Society in Portland and started leading multi-day tours with them. So I started doing day tours, right, these kind of general nature day tours. And now, working with Audubon, I'm doing these multi-day trips that are much more focused on birds, and some of those are domestic, and many of them started to be international.

And while I was there, I made friends with my now business partner, Steve. And so when Steve left that organization, we decided to start our own business, and that is wild latitudes, and that is what I'm doing to this very day. And of course, you know, after just a couple years of being in business, that's when COVID hit 2020, right? And so it was just like we had this fairly new business. We were just getting it off the ground. We were having some success, patting ourselves on the back.

And what do you know? We get this global catastrophe that totally ends travel for most of us. So we just kind of had to hunker down and ride it out before we could get back to business. But thankfully, we didn't have to go bankrupt or shutter the business, close it all down. We were able to just stay lean and mean because we really had very low overhead. We didn't have employees. We didn't have office space or vehicles or anything that we had to put in money on a regular monthly basis, pretty low overhead.

So that's what really, I think, allowed us to survive. But as you may know, well, see, there's a motorcycle. Yeah, there's always motorcycles. If you come to Vietnam, you're going to see a lot of motorcycles. Let me tell you that. And even here in this national park, these little motorbikes just zipping up. and down. I think a lot of the rangers actually use these little motorbikes. Anyway, so the business survives 2020, but in that same year, that's when I started the podcast because I was like,

man, what do I do? I don't have this tour business. I don't know if I'm ever going to even be able to lead tours again with this business may totally fail because, you know, early in the pandemic, we didn't know, we didn't know how long it was going to last. It could have been a year. It could have been five years before things sort of return to normal. So I started the podcast, not necessarily, because I thought it was going to become a career, but because it was something I was interested in. I just have this general drive to create things and then put them out there in the world. I was always having some kind of blog or another going back to the early 2000s. And so it was a good excuse because I had nothing but time. So I started recording this podcast and here we are

106 episodes later. And as I was saying, the podcast, The Science of Birds, gives me a significant portion of my income. It feeds me. It houses me. It's really quite important to me now. It's essential. And I love that. I absolutely love that this is a viable job for me and really for anyone that it's so cool. And I just feel so honored, you know, that you guys enjoy listening to the show learning about birds with me, which is great. So yeah, so that's kind of connecting the dots for me, for how it worked. And, you know, probably if you talk to a birding guy, you know any other birding guide everybody's going to have a unique story right and you know sometimes I I don't know if embarrassed is the right word but almost like you know there's this idea

of imposter syndrome where you know I've met many people who have been just out of their minds for birds since they were like seven years old like I was kind of out of my mind for frogs and for reptiles as a kid so I have kind of come to birds and birding later in life even though it was very sort of a gradual increase over 25 years. Certainly isn't a new thing. But yeah, I think that, you know, you're going to talk to some folks and they're going to be like, yeah, you know, I basically came out of the womb, a birder. But for me, yeah, it was more gradual. But I love that. I love that it's the unpredictability of life. Because if you had asked Ivan at a 12-year-old Ivan, what kind of animals might he be focusing on?

as a 45-plus-year-old man, I would probably not have said birds. But I just, now I just can't get enough of them. I think it's just the greatest thing ever. And I just feel so happy that I ended up doing work with birds and, you know, just totally immersing myself in ornithology in the natural history of birds. I love teaching. I love being an educator. So I love that I can put this podcast out there to the world,

that anybody can listen to it and learn along with me, learn about birds, and feel the joy about birds that I have, because, man, I am just, they just make me so happy. I mean, the things I've been seeing here in this National Park in Vietnam, it's like, just today I saw this Siamese fireback, which is this gorgeous pheasant, and it's one I've been wanting to see for years. I saw one in a zoo a number of years ago, and it was just like this really cool bird, and sure enough, there it was today in the wild, strutting around in the wild, strutting around in the Vietnamese jungle. You know, and the stories go on and on and on. I mean, it's not just, ooh, that's a, you know, a beautiful bird, but, you know, watching their behaviors,

watching the responses of my tour participants, how excited they get, the questions they ask about the biology of the animals. Like, there's just, there's just so much to it. And so I think coming up, there'll be a couple, you know, we'll do some more of these shorter episodes while I'm in the field. And I think maybe one episode could be something about birding travel, you know, what, what that involves and, you know, the pros and cons of all different things, kind of the ins and outs of that, because I do a lot of it, and I'm sure a lot of you do as well, but some of you may be curious as to, you know, kind of some of the best practices and tips and all that kind of stuff, things to avoid, whatever. So if I can speak to that as a quote-unquote expert,

I think that might be interesting. I would certainly enjoy talking about it. So I want to wrap this episode up, I think, you know, again, I try to, when I teach things, I love to try to back out and look at the bigger picture, right? The bigger picture. And, you know, we're talking about birds. We're talking about me specifically in my path. But again, what I think my story illustrates is the idea that, you know, you might be 15 years old and you might have interest and you might think this is where your life is going, or you might be 40 years old and have similar ideas about where the future is going to take you. And yes, some of that may come true. And there are a lot of things that are in our control. We can make decisions and we could do

research and make plans and all that stuff. But sometimes, sometimes and maybe often, life will throw a curveball at you. And maybe that's something that even is not really good, doesn't seem good at the time when it happens. It might even be painful, really, really unfortunate but if you can pick yourself back up and look at what you've got in front of you and look at the opportunities that arise maybe because that unfortunate thing happened then you can go off on a whole new path one that you never predicted you would go down and looking back years later you might realize yeah that was that was the best thing that was amazing that that thing

happened and here I am doing this now so you know like I say when I connect the dots it's just like, yeah, I really love what I'm doing now. I feel incredibly fortunate. I just feel like it's, you know, in many ways, a dream life, at least when it comes to the work I'm doing. And so, you know, if anything, I think it's just looking for opportunities, questioning the sort of standard thinking about things, right? The idea that, oh, you know, this is kind of how everybody does it.

So this is what I got to do, too. It's like, yeah, maybe. maybe that's how you should do it. There's wisdom in that. But can't hurt to just question and just think, well, what if? What if I did this? You know, for me, the big one was, yeah, I've been on this academic path with the undergraduate master's PhD, postdoc. Well, the natural progression is then you go become a professor somewhere. That's what all my friends are doing. That was what I thought I was going to do. That was the playbook, right? But I took a moment to take a breath. and really think about what did I want in my life? Did I want to go down that path? You know, because there's the sunk cost fallacy, right? You're like, oh, I've already spent all these years to get to this point. So I must stay on this path.

But it's like, no, no, you don't. It's like, yeah, just go do something else. I mean, do, you know, you only have one life, right? And, you know, we don't always have all kinds of options, but when you have options, maybe just go for it. Oh, you know what? The power just went out. So again, I'm in this hotel room here in Vietnam, and it got all quiet.

I can still hear people outside, but the AC went off. So I'm going to die pretty soon because it's like 90 degrees out there and very humid. Anyway, I'm just kidding. Anyway, just to wrap up, I don't know, I'm just trying to be inspirational. I just, I hope for you, depending on where you're at in your journey, that you can realize that there may be a path for you to be doing something that you're really excited about. And that doesn't necessarily mean it has to be your job that you go get paid for. But a hobby or whatever it is, is like, man, you have one life. It's relatively short.

Do what you can to do things that bring you joy and that maybe make the world a better place even in a small way. So with that, I am going to start sweating now because the power is off and the AC is off. And I'm going to say goodbye to you for now from Vietnam. I think that I will produce maybe an episode about the bird life of Vietnam and Cambodia or Southeast Asia, something like that. So stay tuned for that. I hope you enjoyed this kind of off-the-cuff, just me rambling episode. It's very different from my normal MO, and I feel like I'm definitely outside of my comfort zone, and I don't have my process all, you know, sort of the kinks worked out.

This is all very experimental, so I hope I can make it something that you find interesting. If you're, if you hate it, if this, you're like, oh, this guy, this sucks. Don't worry, it's only going to be just for a couple months. And then after that, it'll be back to our usual programming. Okay, so hang in there. You can do it. And I'm going to sign off now. And I'll talk to you later.

Peace. Thank you.