Show notes
Bird song is so much more than just bird-song. In this episode, we’ll learn all about birds, their songs, and what we can do to keep them around.
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TRANSCRIPT:
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Catherine Devine 00:03 Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Sea to Trees. I'm your host, Catherine Devine. Let's get started. This episode starts with a story about my family's chickens. I promise you, it's irrelevant. A few years ago, my family got some chickens, we only got three, we heard they could be a bit of a handful. I'll never forget the day they came. It was the middle of COVID. They arrived super early in the morning for some reason, around 6am at our local post office, I stayed up all night, waiting and waiting and waiting for the call from the post office saying that they had come in, I didn't want to leave them alone, I felt some sort of parental responsibility to them. To be clear, these chickens were not supposed to be pets, more like farm animals, were really just planning on using them for eggs. But as these things tend to go, that changed pretty quickly. They were so so cute, really small and super fluffy. They could fit right in the palm of your hand. And they're chirping. It was this little fragile sound. My whole family fell in love with them. Especially my dad,
Catherine's Dad 01:39 I would set up my chair next to the bushes and they would hide into the bushes most of the day and peck away. And then they would come to me and sit on my lap and climb on my shoulders from time to time. While I was working on them. And talking a little they just loved me they thought I was their mother. I would cut up fruit, melon, berries, cut up walnuts. They really like walnuts, bananas, you know, go out there from time to time and call them and they come running to me and eat out of my hand.
Catherine Devine 02:14 The point is that I never thought I could care about a chicken in the same way people care for their dogs and cats and even family. I just never thought of birds that way. Like many people, I spent my whole life surrounded by birds, but very little time paying attention to them, seeing how they're more like me, or more like us than I could have imagined today, a story all about birds, their songs and what we can do to keep them around. This is part one of our two part episode. Wild Bird Chase. My first time birding was a few months ago. It was with naturalist Laura Sebastianeli. We met super early around 530 In the morning, which I learned was fairly typical in the Birding world. birds tend to make the most noise early in the morning. The early bird catches the worm right. So there I was at 5:30 am standing on the side of the road by Great Meadow in Maine's Acadia National Park, looking for Laura. I was with science communication intern, Catherine Wong. We were exhausted. We spotted Laura almost immediately. She was holding this huge bowl shaped recording contraption and kind of waving it around in the air. It's called a parabolic microphone. It's used to capture distant long room sounds. She hit the record button and pointed her mouth at the receiver.
Laura Sebastianelli 03:58 We're at Great Meadow at Acadia National Park. It is Friday, June 9 at 5:53 in the morning. It's about 50 degrees, no wind, foggy. I'm using a mix pre three two, a Sennheiser ME 62 A telinga parabola
Catherine Devine 04:28 Laura has spent her last six summers recording the bird sounds in and around the park. Her recordings have been archived at the McCauley library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. It will be used to help chronicle the evolution of the park's ecosystem. Now before we get too in the weeds, though, something I have to make super super clear. Laura is a naturalist. She doesn't just study birds. She studies lots of things in this has given her a bit of a reputation
Laura Sebastianelli 04:59 I've been known as the Lynx lady, the wolf lady, and I was like, I don't want to be the bird lady next, you know what I'm just I'm just following my passions and they lead. And I, you know, my personal mission statement is actually and I do this. I seek out opportunities, you know, to do these things, and to share that with other people in hopes of empowering and inspiring them, and in hopes also that they will be in service to the natural world.
Catherine Devine 05:37 One thing that really amazed me about Laura was her sharp ear. Sometimes they wouldn't even notice the distant sound. And Laura would turn to me and say,
Laura Sebastianelli 05:49 from the distance too far, really to be recording. The Alder Flycatcher is telling everyone free beer, free beer. That's the mnemonic for that species. Yeah.
Catherine Devine 06:04 Free beer. That's a pneumonic. A trick used by birders to remember certain bird calls. The mnemonics match the cause of birds with a phrase that rhythmically matches the birds vocalization. Like free beer, free beer, or Peter, Peter, Peter. Laura knows her mnemonics well, but she tries not to get too caught up in them
Laura Sebastianelli 06:28 Because while they might help you memorize it, you know, they don't really describe the sound.
Catherine Devine 06:36 Something that took a moment for me to realize about Laura was that she wasn't interested in capturing as many birds as she possibly could. She was thoughtful. She cared about the sound to her. It's not really about recording birds. It's about capturing the landscape, like an ecological time capsule. It's like capturing individual birds.
06:57 It's like the landscape. It's absolutely the landscape. Yeah. And then that's why their voice is a part of the landscape when you talk about the landscape here. I mean, it's like they're a part of this landscape and their voices. This is the story in their own words, you know, and they're living and dying here.
Catherine Devine 07:20 Bird song is so much more than just bird-song. It's communication, warning signals and mating calls. It has region specific dialects passed on from generations of birds, and can be used to assess the birds health and vigor. Just like us birds sing for so many different reasons. And people birdwatch for so many different reasons too.
Bridget Butler 07:42 My name is Bridget Butler, and I am known as the bird diva, and I live in northwestern Vermont near Lake Champlain and the Canadian border.
Catherine Devine 07:52 Bridget is a birder though it took her a while to claim that title.
Bridget Butler 07:57 The way I got into birding is a little bit backwards. I don't have one of those idyllic stories of birding since I was a child. I actually didn't like birders when I first met them. And this was through my work. When I was with Audubon. I was living out on Cape Cod and I found the birding community really intense, and a little bit arrogant and competitive. And I was just like, I don't want to hang out with those people.
Catherine Devine 08:29 I talked to Bridget a lot about accessibility in the birding world. What's great about birding is that it offers a tangible way for people to get outside and connect with their environments. But it seems like the bird community can be pretty intense and intimidating for beginners. And that's how Bridget felt. Birders just weren’t her thing. But that all started to change when she started doing point counts when she was working as an educator at Audubon Vermont back in 2006. And by the way, for our non ecologist listeners, a point count is a tally of all birds detected by sight and sound by a single observer located at a fixed position during a specified period of time.
Bridget Butler 09:11 I was working for Audubon, Vermont at the time, and really getting into the conservation aspect of connecting people with birds in order to protect the birds in the landscape and all of that. And so, I was learning very quickly how to identify birds and help other people identify birds, how to look at the land and think about what birds need and how we can be better stewards of the land. And so while I wasn't a traditional birder in the sense that I was chasing birds or trying to build a life list. I still was very focused on this kind of conservation role and connecting people in a way that was going to be good for the land. And it wasn't, what I started to discover was that I didn't want only to chase birds and see as many birds as possible or help people see as many birds as possible. I think that work with landowners, and connecting people with forest birds really brought this kind of land bird connection together for me. And I really wanted to slow down and just sit in a space and be with the birds and understand them at a deeper level. At the time, I was doing a lot of different point counts, and I was involved in a lot of different projects like mountain birdwatch, or forest bird monitoring that was happening here in Vermont. And so these were projects where I got to hike to a mountaintop and then sit at these different points and listen to birds for an extended period of time. So each point count was like 15 minutes, and then you moved on to the next spot. And the same thing with the forest bird monitoring. And I think that grounded me in what later became a sit spot practice. And the other layer to that was the bird behavior, and noticing what birds were doing and wondering why they were doing it. And this wasn't something that I saw reflected in traditional bird outings, or bird walks that were being held, right, the bird walk had a purpose to get from point A to point B and see as many birds as possible in that time. And what I really wanted to do was stop and watch what they were doing, and kind of make those different types of observations that were really beyond identification. And I wasn't getting that from the broader community. So I started to explore that myself. And I used to sit spot practice of returning to a place over and over again, and sitting for an extended period of time, a little bit of journaling, in capturing my observations and really allowing myself the time to get to know birds in that place over and over again. And there's a name for this practice of slowing down and noticing the birds in your environment. It's called slow birding. And as the name suggests, it's slow. Slow burning is much more than just checking birds off a list. It's exploration, connection with nature, an exercise in attention. And it's super accessible. Anyone of any ability can be a slow birder. And this way of accessible connection is key to conservation movements everywhere. A few months ago, I sat down with Seth Benz's, the bird ecology director at Schoodic Institute, and we chatted about bird conservation, the threat climate change plays to bird populations. As the climate warms, the migration ranges of birds pushes northwards towards cooler temperatures and towards habitats that might not be there. Take the boreal chickadee, for example.
Seth Benz 13:07 So we know that a bird like the boreal chickadee that was here for quite some time. Since the 1800s into the 1990s. It was a breeding bird in Acadia National Park. And since the mid 1990s, it hasn't been verified, we have not been able to document a boreal chickadee moving northward. And so their range is now gone. You know, it's disappeared from this far south, for an Oriole bird and they are advancing to the north or changing their range northward. And so they're vacating our habitats. And that's happening with some of these other birds. So for instance, our Black Capped Chickadee, the state bird of Maine, is one that it's very common right now. But predictive models tell us that if we can't curb the temperature rise having to do with climate change, as long as that persists, or ratchets up, you know, a couple of degrees, Black Capped chickadees will also vacate our area heading farther north.
Catherine Devine 14:28 Right now, because of these temperature changes, the birds in your direct environment aren't disappearing per se, but they're being replaced with different birds as overall migration patterns shift. Now, this is a huge problem.
Seth Benz 14:45 Now. There's only so many birds and so much space for birds to continue northward. What happens when they run out of viable habitat? Those are the kinds of questions that we're, you know, we're participating in In this data gathering to try to answer those kinds of questions.
Catherine Devine 15:05 we're not exactly sure what will happen to birds. Once they run out of space to push northwards, and all likelihood it's a pretty dire outcome. We're already seeing some pretty drastic changes. According to researchers at Schoodic Institute, Acadia, national parks winter bird populations have declined by nearly half since 1971. But to me, it seems like this is the type of thing that probably flies under the radar to the general public. Most people probably wouldn't notice if the birds in their backyard were changing, or that there are fewer of them. That's where the importance of slow birding comes in. In the world of conservation, we have often missed the mark by portraying birding as an exclusive club. For those who can rattle off bird names and Ids without missing a beat, and not inviting others in might have some dire consequences. If people are unaware that the birds in their environment are changing, they're probably not going to do much about it. The first step in environmental activism is simply noticing.
Bridget Butler 16:12 And that's where slow burning grew from was this desire to kind of slow down in the moment and go beyond identification.
Catherine Devine 16:22 Slow birding, it's about letting birds lead us into deeper conversations about conservation, through mindfulness, reflection, and community. By embracing this approach, we're not just inviting a broader audience into the conversation, we're forging deeper connections with nature itself. Opening doors to a world with a sound of nature is accessible to all. Thanks so much for listening to Sea to Trees. A podcast from Schoodic Institute at Acadia National Park. Acadia National Park is on traditional lands at the Wabanaki, people of the dawn. In our next episode, our wild bird case continues. A big thanks to this episode's guests Laura Sebastianelli, Seth Benz and Bridget Butler. See to Trees is hosted, produced and edited by me, Catherine Devine, Catherine Wang provided production support and Catherine Scmitt is our senior editor. Our music was written by Eric Green, performed with Ryan Curless and Stu Mahan, and recorded at North Blood studios in mid-coast, Maine. The cover art was created by Sarah Luchini. Sea to Trees is possible through generous support by the Cathy and Jim Gero Acadia Early Career Fellowship, the National Park Foundation, National Park Service and Schoodic Institute.
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