BirdCast: Revealing the Mysteries of Bird Migration

Introduction

Andrew: Even 10 years ago, when you looked at a scientific sort of general audience, just kind of basic information about how many birds are migrating… “Well, it’s 10 million.” “It’s 100 million.” “It’s a couple billion.” “It’s…” I mean, like many orders of magnitude off. You know, like, well, what is it? How many is it? That first understanding of quantifying, “Well, okay, how many birds are on the move over a season?” That was one of the biggest, I think, breakthroughs for BirdCast.

Shannon: Nature isn’t just “out there” in some pristine, far-off location. It’s all around us, including right outside our doors.

Hi, my name is Shannon Trimboli and I help busy homeowners in the eastern U.S. create thriving backyard ecosystems they can enjoy and be proud of.

Welcome to the Backyard Ecology podcast. In today’s episode, we’re talking with Dr. Andrew Farnsworth, who is a visiting scientist at Cornell Lab of Ornithology and a member of the Bird Cast Team, which is using radar to track and study bird migrations over the U.S.

Hi, Andrew. Welcome to the podcast.

Andrew: Nice to see you. Thank you for having me.

Shannon: I am really excited about this because migrating birds are so much fun, and it’s so interesting to learn about them. So, this is going to be a fun discussion.

Andrew: Good topic. it’s an easy one to easy one to talk about too, because it’s not particularly polarizing. Most people, even if they don’t know anything about birds, they are very excited about migration. And even if you do know a lot about birds, sometimes some of the stuff we learned about migration is pretty amazing and new and a little bit mysterious and solving that kind of mystery is pretty wonderful.

Shannon: Yes.

What Sparked Your Interest?

Shannon: So, I’m curious, how did you get interested in bird migration, and why did you decide to study it?

Andrew: So, I started watching birds when I was very young, around age five. My grandfather had a pair of binoculars in the house and a field guide, a book. Novelty these days. The fascination with birds was immediate.

I was very fortunate to grow up in a suburb of New York City, where there’s a lot of green space, and at the time, a lot of insects, a lot of birds, wonderful vegetation and plants. And so the fascination with birds first started because they look cool, they sound cool, they do cool stuff. And having binoculars and that sort of aha moment of like, whoa, I can see something and then use this tool and suddenly it’s like right up in your face and you can see details of feathers.

And the spark bird for me that really did it was wood duck. This incredibly ornate, especially the males, incredibly ornate tree nesting duck, that’s not super common on the coast of Westchester County. Um, one winter there was one in a local pond just down the street from us. And that was it. I was hooked, especially with the binoculars. That was like a mind blowing experience.

And then from that, having access to, and also some support from, you know, a family that was interested in science, to dig in deeper and to be an observer and to be sort of blessed with good eyes and ears, and a musical ear. And then understanding that, you know, you may go out and go birding in a particular place in, April and May and the diversity is just wonderful and all this dynamic song. Then, you know, another two months later you go out and there’s still wonderful birds there, but it’s a totally different community. Fast forward another three months. It’s very different still.

That dynamism was really attractive to kind of understand. And of course, it didn’t take long to realize doing a little bit of reading and also asking a lot of questions that migration was one of that, um, sort of that integrating feature of, well, why do you see this pattern of changing diversity over the course of a year in the same place?

That was just fascinating to me that you have these periods where massive numbers of birds are moving. And at the time I had no idea how massive. I just knew it was a lot because there were times when I would go out and see large numbers of geese or double crested cormorants fly over or, or even big hawk movements, that was all during the day, right? I knew about birds migrating at night at that point, but I had no idea of the scale. So just the dynamism was the thing that drew me into it and the change.

And also, you know, a huge moment for me was, uh, there was this wonderful map that National Geographic published, uh, probably around the time I was maybe like, eight or nine, maybe a little bit later than that. And it was, you know, this fold out from the magazine, uh, print magazine. And it was a map of bird migration, right? And a lot of people, a lot of people my age and maybe a little older have seen this map and go, “Oh, that was the thing that did it for me.”

And I was already really interested at that point, but seeing that, and the fact that, you know, you have these routes that birds, well, what we thought were the routes that birds were traveling. It was just, there were a lot of guesses involved at that point that connected, you know, Alaska with the, uh, tropical forest and the Amazon and the southern cone of South America with the prairies and farther north in Canada. And, and also like just internally in the U.S. That map was what crystallized it for me as if it hasn’t already happened already.

That was one of the things that just really sort of captured like “Wow, this is massive scale and this is happening for a lot of birds, you know, twice every year.” We don’t even know where they go necessarily at that point. Um, there’s still some mysteries like that. Uh, we certainly knew nothing about the magnitude of how many birds were moving at night and it just was so cool.

So those two elements, that kind of dynamic nature from experience, like being outside and just observing and pondering that and then seeing these kinds of graphics that represented the best data at the time. The two things together have really been a lifelong sort of inspiration to study this.

It’s still that way now, you know. Going out in the field and being able to see migration in this incredible way and also now see it at night from a whole different perspective and understanding that. And still, you know, being fascinated by sort of summarizing this information and seeing maps and seeing graphics and patterns and that kind of thing. Both in the field and “in the lab,” that’s really cool and continues to be the thread that’s inspiring about it.

Sharing the Joy of Birdwatching

Shannon: Yeah, anybody who likes to watch birds and goes out in the field knows just how exciting it can be when you have one of those warbler fallouts in the spring and it’s just like all of a sudden all these birds and all these species and it’s like, oh my gosh, there’s this and there’s that.

You’re just like, especially if you’ve got anybody with you a friend with you or somebody, and then you’re both calling out birds and usually you’re calling out birds in the same tree, but you’re on two separate birds and you’re like, “no, it doesn’t have an eye ring” or “no, it doesn’t have…” “It’s not blue. It’s yellow.” “What’s wrong with you?” And then you realize after they fly away that you are on two different birds.

Andrew: It’s a wonderful experience. And you know, there are a couple of amazing, I mean, there are many amazing elements about it. But one, the fact that you can, you know, you can share that collective experience with people that have never met one another. And you sort of get what it means to have that sort of joy. And just the, you know, inspiration and the awe.

And the knowledge to understand when that’s happening and where it’s going to happen and even predict like, “oh, okay, in a couple of weeks, I’m going to plan to go to this spot and it’s going to be great.” And often it is. Then at the same time, you know, the fact that you have that kind of predictability of it; that you can share that with people. And there’s this collective sort of understanding about it.

Uh, there’s also this element of like if you’re very lucky, you know, and you get to be 110 or something like that, and you’re blessed with great eyes and ears. Maybe you get to see a hundred seasons of that or something along those lines. You may not see it all the time and everywhere you go. Despite that, it’s this collective experience or can be, and that you can predict where it is, that it’s really ephemeral.

I think the combination of those two things make it, uh, make it more exciting when you realize, not to be morbid, but just, “oh, like, I don’t have an infinite number of springs and falls to do this. Um, but I can go out and experience this and all these other people are.” You know, it’s a cool balance, sort of a cool yin and yang.

When Do Birds Migrate?

Shannon: And you’ve brought up multiple points that I want to really dig into deeper. Um, but let’s kind of start with… Let’s start with the basics and then go deeper, because you’re involved with a project that is so cool and we want to make sure we talk about a little bit later.

But before we get to that level of detail, let’s talk a little bit about migration, because everybody’s coming to this at different levels and at different stages. And we’ve got some people that are just getting started. So, this might be their first year of really going out and looking for birds. And we don’t want to make assumptions about migration that they might not have caught on to yet.

And so, you mentioned migrating at night and, um, we often think… I mean, we’ve got the birds that we think about as nighttime birds – your whip-poor-wills, nightjars, chuck-wills-widows, owls – your nightbirds. And you’ve got your day birds – the warblers, and the vireos, and all the pretty birds that we like to look at.

And oftentimes we just kind of make assumptions. Or at least I know before I started studying birds and really started getting into this, that I made assumptions, um. And I still hear people making them, so I know I’m not the only one that did that. Okay, nighttime birds are nighttime birds; daytime birds are daytime birds.

Let’s blow some people’s minds here. When do our birds migrate?

Andrew: Ok, so most bird migration happens at night. And when I say most, I mean, we’re talking about in the U. S., on an average season. Every spring, it’s about two and a half to three and a half billion birds with a capital B. Uh, in the fall, it’s maybe four to five billion. So the amount of movement that’s happening at night is just staggering.

And that is not just a handful of species. That’s, depending on where you are, 200 species, 300 species, you know, 400 to 500 in total that are regularly doing that in the U.S. And in North America more broadly. Around the globe, it’s an even larger number. So, the primary time and, um, really sort of one of the defining features of migration is that it often happens at night.

Yeah, there are plenty of birds that do migrate during the day. And oftentimes we can obviously see those very well. Many hawks, turkey vultures, um, soaring birds, that are using thermals, you know, rising air to get higher and higher and then sort of streaming off of those. Pelicans, storks, things like that, are often migrating during the day and really are defined by that. And we see lots of waterfowl, you know, skeins of geese, swans, ducks that are moving by day. Lots of swallows and blackbirds and some songbirds, you know, as well.

But by and large, they are the small percentage of actually what’s on the move at night. It really just dwarfs what happens during the day. Like I said, that’s a common feature around the planet. The numbers of birds migrating may vary from place to place, but the fact that many are doing so at night is really something that kind of unifies the migration systems around the world.

Why Birds Migrate at Night

Andrew: And there’s some good reasons for that. As is usually the case with something that is a very kind of simple pattern, of like, “Oh, there’s a lot happening at night. So, there must be an easy explanation that’s well defined with science.” Well, there are some very good hypotheses out there. I would not say that any of them, anybody would say, they are all 100 percent correct, but we’re pretty confident that they’re right for why birds are migrating at night.

Well, it’s energy efficient, right? The sun’s not beating down on them constantly. They’re not overheating. They can maximize their feeding during the day because for birds sleep is a whole different thing than it is for humans. So, the idea of migrating at night and foraging during the day when you can perceive your world with your eyes and see where different food sources are. So that, you know, fly at night; feed during the day.

Generally speaking, reducing predation. When birds are in the air, they are vulnerable to all sorts of things like merlins, and sharp-shinned hawks, and Cooper’s hawks, and other things. When they’re on the ground during the day feeding, they are not so vulnerable to such things necessarily.

Then also, you know, you think about when you fly. For example, when a human flies, you board a plane. Flying by day and flying by night, they’re generally very different experiences. That whole notion that I mentioned of thermals of air rising and turbulence where air is moving around in sort of these vertical spaces. That turbulence is something that can be beneficial when you’re migrating during the day if you’re soaring on it. But when you’re trying to fly straight through it, as you do in an aircraft as a human, it can be kind of bumpy and uncomfortable and be costly in terms of energy.

The same thing is true for birds. And the idea of flying at night is that there’s also this opportunity to, even if there’s turbulence, it tends to be a little bit more regular and something that birds can predict. But generally speaking, because there isn’t that thermal activity, because the sun is not heating the planet and that energy isn’t rising as warm air at night. So, it just kind of makes the atmosphere a little bit more even, a little bit more laminar, smoother. So that’s one of the other reasons.

So, these things are working in concert. I expect that there are many out there that want a single answer, but it really is kind of like a combination of elements here. And like I said, that’s what we think. These are the best-case scenarios for why we think this is the case. It’s not a hundred percent, but they’re good explanations. And we’ve really yet after many, many years, yet to find something that sort of captures like, “Well, is it something else that we’re missing?” Actually? Like, no, we feel pretty good about that combination of explanations.

Shannon: And they make sense, too. Because what in life is one thing all the time? There’s usually multiple different factors that play in. So, yeah, that really makes sense, and it’s really interesting too, I think, when you stop and think about the “Why?” Just one, that they do it, and then two, why do they do it?

Andrew: Yeah. And the fact that this is something that presumably, I mean, obviously it didn’t just evolve because all of these different explanations were necessarily operating at a particular space.

What gets a primarily diurnal bird like, any one of an array of warblers, that are mostly active during the day when they’re nesting, when they’re feeding young, when they’re in some sort of area during the northern hemisphere winter and they’re moving around in the tropics. They’re active during the day and that there’s this switch that suddenly, oh, like, wait, they’re going to be active during the day and then make these long distance jumps, relatively speaking, at night. The idea of how that evolves. That is yet a different explanation from why we think it’s maintained, right?

And there are some good theories, I think, about that. That primarily has to do way back in the evolutionary history of that when birds are looking for resources, in particular like food, that there are these periods where if there aren’t good resources around and birds are low on those resources. So, they’re looking for food. They may be sort of low on energy, so to speak. That during nocturnal periods, during those really low energy phases, birds start to get this restless behavior. This whole series of behaviors that are, we now know many, many years later, many, many, many years later and millennia later, that they’re likely associated with this kind of migratory behavior.

So, the idea that it evolved from an ancestor that maybe it was not migratory. But in terms of trying to survive and looking for food and needing to find resources have developed this pattern of being active at night and dispersing to different places. And then obviously feeding during the day and being sort of more stationary. That those kind of explorations were beneficial, natural selection’s in play, etc. All this evolutionary history passes and suddenly we go from a resident bird that starts exploring at night in order to find food, to this full blown migration system tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years later. It’s pretty fascinating.

That one’s still… it’s not lunatic fringe. It’s definitely a good hypothesis to test, but that one has less confidence than some of these discussions about why nocturnal migration is happening and how birds are navigating and orienting during it and the fact that it exists and why is it maintained at all. Why do they keep doing it?

Shannon: And that one’s a little bit harder of a hypothesis to test too, since we don’t have time machines to go back and look.

Andrew: Yeah, it’s a little bit more complicated. There are ways to get at it, in terms of experimenting with birds and the way they behave. I mean, anybody that’s a pet owner, frankly, and that either has birds or any other kinds of animals, you know your animal cycles and how they behave when there’s food around and when there’s not. If you forget a feeding or something like that, you notice very different behaviors. So, there are some ways to get at testing it, but it’s not that easy. And the time machine is certainly not that easy.

Triggers for Bird Migration

Shannon: So, what does trigger migration nowadays? Because, I mean, that’s another area of migration that I think there’s sometimes a lot of misconceptions about. What tells a bird that now’s the right time to start that journey?

Andrew: Yeah, that’s a really good question. And broadly speaking, we can sort of look at it in a couple of simple ways. Generally for these birds that are migrating by night in these large numbers, they’re kind of two classes of birds.

There are birds that base their migration systems on the calendar. We know that as we go through the calendar year, day length changes. Birds are very sensitive to changes in day length, which we call photo period – how much daylight is there – because birds can track that very well. Light is an incredibly powerful stimulus and all sorts of different biology in birds, and many animals, is tied to the pattern of light and dark and how that changes. Basically, one of the cues for when migration is going to happen is very much dependent on the photo period. We call those calendar migrants.

So, at a certain time of the year when day length is a certain duration, various physiological changes will start to happen in birds. They’ll start to feed more to sort of fuel up. They’ll start to become a little bit more restless. They’ll start orienting in a particular direction. That’s all associated with these changes in day length, both in the northern hemisphere spring in March or April, or even a little bit earlier, and then, so too in the fall, sort of thinking about August, September. That calendar period is an important one. So, that’s on the one hand.

On the other hand, you have birds that are really cueing on the very local conditions. Was there a massive drop in temperature? Is the lake that I used suddenly frozen? Did all the berries disappear? And we call these facultative migrants. Basically, they’re using very local cues with what’s happening at a particular place in time where they are that will determine, “Oh, this is sort of the onset of migration.” It’s quite a lot more flexible, if you will, and it’s kind of a different pattern.

There are some species that use both, but really it’s a pretty important division broadly speaking, when we think about birds migrating, that whole notion of the calendar and the day length versus what’s happening very locally. And obviously you can sort of think through like, “Oh, well, if that’s the case, then certain birds are going to respond to their environments in very different ways if they use those different cues, right?” It’s sort of an interesting thought experiment. So that’s on the one hand.

And then on the other, say, “Okay, well, if birds are going to migrate or not, there’s some other decisions that go into that, right?” There’s literally the birds on the ground and a bird is taking flight and flying 2, 4, 10, 24 hours, and that decision making about, not so much when to migrate over the course of the season, but literally is there going to be migration tonight or not. There are some cues around that they’re taking that they’re using for that.

One of them, at least based on the modeling that some colleagues of mine and I have done, is temperature. Temperature is a really, really good cue. So, in the spring, warming temperatures are associated with migration. We think of that often because when we think about warming temperatures, we generally think about nice high pressure and and clearer skies. Maybe nice humid air. You know, sort of what’s happening in the spring as we transition from winter to summer, right?

And then the reverse in the fall, dropping temperatures associated again with clear skies, like the passage of frontal systems, where you have these boundaries between warm and cold air masses. And in the fall, you have with cold air, tailwinds coming from the north to south that are helping birds go from north to south. In the spring it’s the reverse, there’s warm air south to north. So the weather, if you will, the really local meteorology, is a huge cue when it comes to, are birds going to move tonight or not.

And that sort of nests within, is it the right season for a bird to move, looking at broadly the annual cycle. So, there are kind of these nested reasons for how birds are on the move and what information they’re using to make that decision and to behave that way.

Shannon: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense because yeah, there’s the “Okay. It’s time.” But then it’s “today or not” or “tonight or not.”

Andrew: That’s right. It may well be time, but when it’s pouring rain and some severe weather is occurring, that’s not time. So, the balance of being in the peak window when often migration occurs, but having none because there’s some very poor weather. That’s the sort of intersection of when birds migrate during the course of the year and whether they migrate during the course of a particular night or week period or something like that. It’s all about scale.

Climate Change and Bird Migration

Shannon: Yeah, I was gonna say at the bigger scale of “Is this the right time frame to migrate in?” that’s where we can get potential mismatches in the bigger picture, especially with climate change. If you’ve got a bird that’s programmed to migrate based on day length – your photo period – and then the resources that it relies on, say the plants or the insects, when it gets there, those are based on temperature or something on the local scale, then things can change a lot. So, that’s one of the reasons why migration is so important and understanding these different pieces, I think, is important.

Andrew: Yeah, for sure. The fact that the other piece of migration that goes even farther back than “is it the right time of year,” or “are the conditions right on this particular night?” There’s, “Well, why is it there in the first place?” And that has everything to do with climate and the changing climate of the planet.

And when one thinks about a particular continent, for example, let’s think about North America and the way that we understand that the climate of North America has changed. We think about ice ages. We think about coming out of ice ages. We think about a place that’s covered in some enormous amount of ice and that is suddenly subtropical. “Suddenly” from the geological perspective – you know, a few thousand years later – “suddenly” subtropical.

The idea that goes along with those kinds of changes is that, obviously, the plant communities, the landscape, the ecosystems, those change as well. And when those change there are opportunities for animals to exploit those changes. And they move around. Again, because if an animal is going to survive and reproduce, it’s going to need resources like food.

And tracking those resources, and in particular tracking resources like… let’s think about the boreal forest and the tundra, that as you approach summer this incredible explosion of warming that, maybe it’s not tropical conditions, but warming enough to melt ice. So, that suddenly you have an explosion of insects. There’s this incredible resource for birds to take advantage of this enormous food supply.

So, the idea of the dynamics of climate change influencing where the resources are in space and time. And that changes over time and birds are tracking that, both obviously at the individual level and populations over many, many generations. The successful ones that are obviously making more and more and whose populations are growing are tracking those changes better.

That whole notion of climate and the translation of it into tracking the way the climate works. And kind of like almost first principles of where is the energy going on the planet. And birds tracking that, that’s all about why there is migration.

So, the idea that when there’s really rapid climate change, human induced climate change, birds are a great resource to think about, “Well, how are they responding to this?” Because the fact that there’s migration at all is all about that climates exist and that we think about the planet circling the sun on its axis and it’s not perfectly obviously vertical. It’s tilted. So, we have seasonality and that means all of these different kinds of realizations of how animals are moving around to take advantage of that. Successfully or not.

So, it’s a great system for thinking about what might we expect if temperatures warm by one and a half degrees Celsius or two and a half degrees Celsius. What does that mean for the distribution of the various resources we’re interested in on the planet? Birds are a great system to think about, “Well, how do they respond to that?”

They respond in ways certainly that humans can’t, in some respects, and other organisms can’t. But it’s a great system for thinking about, “How do organisms respond, and then how do just bigger systems respond, when you have these kinds of changes?” It really unifies where we are in the present with these historical changes that have happened over geologic epochs and longer.

How Do We Know What We Know about Bird Migration?

Shannon: And so, how do we know what we know about migration? Because you talked about that first map for National Geographic and what we knew back then. And then alluded to kind of what we’re learning now, or have learned more recently, and continue to learn. So let’s just start with how do we know what we know or think we know?

Andrew: There were some fascinating ideas several 1000 years ago about where birds went when people didn’t see them anymore. I mean, literally like going into the bottom of ponds and hibernating in the mud. And then they’d come out in the spring and like some really fanciful… yeah, that’s a hypothesis. Like, okay. Like, um. Whereas others at that time, several thousand years ago, recognized “Oh, I see these changes and birds have wings and they’re using them.”

So, a good part of what we know – the foundation – is clearly careful observation. Those kinds of careful observations relate to, at the core, naturalists in a particular place recognizing, “Well, I see birds at a particular time of year and then I don’t.” And I’m going to think, “Well, why might that be?” Uh, yeah, okay, I can hypothesize they go to the bottom of the pond, and I can test that and not find them there, ever. Or I can think, “Well, actually they’re going somewhere else and then they’re coming back.”

So, you have that concept. And then you have the concept as soon as humans start to travel more and start to move around and you have these observers that are moving around thinking, “Wait. I see this bird that I know from a particular place at this time of year. I also see it here at this other time of the year.” So, you sort of develop this connection in time. But it’s all about the natural history observation that’s kind of the fundamental about what we know of birds on the move and how, right.

So that’s a baseline. Now, the thing that really sort of changes the game about more knowledge is that as the pursuit of science and information and exploration, these things really start to expand post industrial revolution. And humans are moving around the planet and they’re characterizing things and categorizing and classifying, and all that technology is evolving to allow for that. And some major innovations include optics, like having a spotting scope, having binoculars, being able to see more about birds. Being able to travel farther distances to study them, and recognize that the same birds that I see in one place are actually in another place at a different time of year, and starting to collect data on those using some of these new technological tools. Okay, now you’re starting to get more information about what’s where on the planet.

Same thing with the evolution of museums and collecting trips, which seems archaic now to think about going out and shooting birds to collect specimens so that you have a representative sample. But that kind of information, those are data points of, “Oh, I collected this bird in New York state. I collected it again in Florida and I collected it again on this wild expedition that I went on in Brazil, and these were all at different times of the year.” So, there’s a lot of connecting of dots of this baseline information. And really, this is evolving from the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th centuries.

When we get to the 20th century and suddenly we’ve electrified and all sorts of different electromagnetic kind of technological advances happen. We have the evolution of monitoring the skies with electromagnetic radiation from radar. We have the ability to monitor sound and record sound. And then we also have the ability to create these little devices that we can put onto birds and track them wherever they move. And we can track them with these sort of hair brained, wild goose chase kinds of rides in a car, chasing birds with an antenna, trying to track the signal of where that bird is, or increasingly use electronic turnstiles and that kind of stuff.

This evolution of technology and its integration with basic observation is all about why we know what we do about bird migration. Yes, today we know from a transmitter that’s on a bird exactly where it goes over the course of its annual life cycle and how long it takes to get there, when it comes back, when the transmitter stops, and where that bird meets an untimely end, or what happens. We know that. We can use radar to track birds passing through a particular place, quantify the numbers, and suddenly realize, “oh, every fall, it’s four to five billion birds.”

Like, actually be able to put a number on that for that many birds are passing over or passing by transects that we can set up and monitor with radar. And so too, we can know what birds are migrating at night from recording sounds. All things that we could do as humans, as individuals, but really things that become powerful as soon as you can kind of make extensible those human senses in the technological sense. You can monitor much bigger scales than I ever could, or any of my colleagues as just a person.

You know, it’s one thing to go from place to place and point to point and be limited in time and space to what you can see and hear around you. It’s a whole other thing to populate that same area of space and time with all these monitoring sensors that are collecting information all the time, basically sort of cloning your capabilities. It’s all about this kind of connection of natural history with technology to learn all this stuff about a dynamic period and these dynamic behaviors that birds have that get us to where we are with migration.

Shannon: Yes, and what you’re doing with the technology right now is amazing because, yeah, back in the day, I was one of those that was carrying around the receiver looking for the birds and trying to track them back to their nest and doing it all just by hand.

Andrew: Yep, and you think about these different breakthroughs in technology. Think about how far we’ve come just in the last 25 years in terms of what our experience with the world is and some of these kinds of technologies that suddenly allow you to… oh, miniaturize some kind of device that you can track and get telemetry on where a bird is and its orientation and its speed.

That’s information that just by eye, yeah, you can get a fraction of that, but you can’t quantify that very easily. And then you can’t really sort of further the ideas very far in the science of understanding how birds are and where they’re going and various different things without being able to gather that information in some kind of way that you can then wrap your head around the system and start to understand it in greater detail.

Those changes, they’re really important. And, I think birders and ornithologists have been really fortunate to have some incredibly smart people when it comes to thinking like, “Oh wait, like I could use that technology to study birds.” Or the good fortune of people that are studying birds, or know about birds, being put in a situation where they’re using a technology where they think, “Whoa, this is telling me something.”

Like radar, for example. I mean, the evolution of radar from sort of a physicist’s game and studying the atmosphere and sending out this new scientific concept of electromagnetism and electromagnetic radiation at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. And that you can send that out and it’ll bounce back.

And when you get people to sort of help you study that, that are birders that are realizing like, “Wait. That thing that you’re detecting out there, that’s not a plane. There’s no rain out there. That’s birds.” Like that’s a very fortuitous… it’s sort of like ironic, sort of fortuitous, sort of like well thought out. It’s somewhere in between.

That the application of radar in military uses employed all of these people that were really interested in birds. Of course, because they’re the observers that you put out there to try to help truth, like what the radar is telling you. You want people that are looking and observing the world, and birders are great at that, to tell you what’s the radar detecting when that pulse of energy goes out and comes back. Is it just something as simple as a storm? Is it actually a plane that we want to detect in World War II? Or is it something inexplicable that, when you put birders there, they realize that’s birds. They’re not angels.

It’s really amazing the intersection of how these things evolved, but that there were very smart people and very fortunate people at the origins of these technologies that had this synergy of collaboration and understanding.

Relating Radar Data to Bird Migrations

Shannon: And can you tell us some more about that intersection of the radar and the birds and tracking birds and migration, how that all fits together? Because, I’ve read some of it on the website and stuff, but that’s pretty fascinating. That’s something that I would have…. I’m not one of those smart people that works with radar all the time that would have said, “Oh, wait a minute! One plus one equals two.”

Andrew: Yeah, the whole idea that you can sense the atmosphere with radar and that it’s evolution primarily from military uses in World War II to more civilian kinds of uses to study weather and meteorology in the atmosphere. And then very quickly after that, that you can actually study biology in the atmosphere. It’s all about connecting kind of those first principles of physics, that when you send a pulse of energy out, and if you know what that is and where it’s going, and where it hits something that scatters back. I mean, birds are like big raindrops. Insects are like big raindrops. Things that scatter that energy back.

Then suddenly you have this sensor that’s incredible at detecting things in the atmosphere and potentially quantifying them and sort of characterizing the time, where birds are when, how many are there, what speed are they traveling relative to the radar, how high are they.

All this stuff is possible, largely because when that military to civilian application transition happened in the U.S. in particular, let’s talk about that, in the 1950s, and the first weather surveillance radar network was beginning at the end of the 50s and into the 60s. That opened up a door to studying the atmosphere in some really special and unique ways that were very different than anything that had come before for the meteorologists and for the ornithologists.

And the idea that you could relate with the binoculars you have and going out into the field near a radar and looking up and seeing birds. And then being able to have the radar data that we’re monitoring the same things and connecting those two sources of information to correlate like, “Oh, okay, when I see large numbers of birds above, the radar detects a particular kind of pattern. And when I see a more diffuse array of birds, it’s different still. And when there are more birds farther away from the radar, there’s generally more migration versus whether there are smaller numbers closer. Like, okay, it’s a little bit sparser.” These kinds of patterns are some of the first things that we learned.

One of my mentors, an incredible, incredible scientist and ornithologist, Dr. Sidney Gautreaux, as a high school student, was visiting the first weather surveillance radars in Louisiana and making this connection. He’s a birder and he thinks, “Ah, I bet the radar is detecting this stuff.” And so, that kind of connection, and the realization that you can correlate what you see with your eyes as a human, and what your big brain and computer in here is processing as numbers, and species, and patterns, and when this is happening, correlating that with what the sensor and radar is telling you, that’s all about what evolves to where we are today.

Which is now this automated process where we can use machine learning to teach computers how to recognize certain patterns in the radar data that are detecting both meteorology in the atmosphere and where rain is and snow, but also where all these birds are and where insects are and where bats are. And use all that information we have up here to train computers all based on the natural history that we can compute and then share and organize to help build models that understand the radar data. That allows us to do some really powerful stuff and create these migration dashboards that within like 10 minutes of a radar detecting something in the atmosphere that we can classify as birds, is reporting on the BirdCast website, here’s how many birds there are, here’s the direction they’re moving and here’s the speed, and the altitude. Really, really fascinating, evolution of how do you integrate different kinds of information.

The observational natural history data with the technological advanced data, the remote sensing data that we’re not directly seeing, but sensors are collecting for us. The intersection of those two things and the relationship is all about why we can use the technology now to do all that without necessarily going out and having to look at it every time. We have confidence in that we understand that relationship very well, and we could use that technology to do all this kind of monitoring, because we have that deep understanding.

Using BirdCast as a Birder

Shannon: and I think it’s just fascinating. I love the BirdCast website because during migration you can go on there and you can see where things are moving, how things are moving, you can have the predictions of, “Okay, yeah, things should be moving a lot tonight in my area, so I want to make sure I’m out early tomorrow morning and go look for things because there’s a good chance that there’ll be a lot of new species and a lot of new birds down,” or “Okay, yeah, I can sleep in a little. It doesn’t look like it’s going to be that big of a deal.”

Andrew: For sure. The idea that… I mean, you think about sort of our abilities to predict things. I mean, the Farmer’s Almanac works in many amazing ways, because again, people observe things carefully and humans are good at recognizing patterns of various different kinds.

And so, the idea that you have some general understanding because of your knowledge about the way the annual cycle goes and when you expect to see a lot of birds and when you don’t, when certain species are on the move, and when you don’t expect to see those species. That you can then inform these automated approaches, these technological advances to gather that kind of information and then to enhance your predictions. So, they become even farther from the “just so stories” to “okay, we can actually put some confidence on this.” Like 85 percent of the time we can explain how much variation we see in the numbers of birds, the intensity of migration based on a very small number of weather factors of what the temperature is going to be, what the wind direction and speed is going to be, and the time of the year.

And as soon as you go there, the idea of using those models and thinking about those models to sort of bring back in here and ask new questions and think a little bit more carefully about like, “yeah, I can sleep in for the next couple of days. I’m going to get a lot of rest because there’s something big and cool that’s going to happen in five days. And I’m going to get enough work done so I can skip out of work that day or school and go see this amazing thing.” And have high confidence that that’s going to happen and that you’re going to be able to do it. It’s awesome. Really fun.

Shannon: Yes, and I know before BirdCast existed, I’d already heard you can track them on radar, and there was already that start. I mean, there was a gap in time between, when we knew we could track things on radar and BirdCast existing.

Andrew: Truly esoteric knowledge. Like, the esoteric of esoteric knowledge. Like, the 1 percent of 1 percent of esoteric trivial stuff. Yeah.

Shannon: But, so, I’d watch the weather at night and watch the radar, and I’m looking at it going, “That doesn’t look any different.” And I never could “see it.” I mean, I knew it was supposed to be able to be shown on weather radar and stuff, but I can never see it. And so, I love the fact that now with BirdCast, I don’t have to try and look for it. I just go to BirdCast and let it do its thing.

Andrew: Yeah, it’s really, I mean, the, like anything else, right? When you’re in some kind of a niche of understanding and you spend time in it all the time, suddenly, you start to, again, because our brains are good at recognizing patterns. You start to be able to make sense of like, “okay, these are pixels. And they’re colored pixels on a computer screen that represent the returned energy from something that’s out in the atmosphere that the radar is detecting.”

And there are all these assumptions that go into that. And you could dig down the rabbit hole of thinking like, “okay, why is this that way?” Okay, let’s not worry about that. And let’s just think about the pixels and the colors and what they mean. And let’s relate that to that we could go out on a clear night when it’s a full moon and put the telescope up on the full moon and count the number of birds flying across the moon and do some not so fancy math with trigonometry and multiplication and various sort of orders of operation to come up with how many birds are passing a kilometer per hour. And then we can look back at the pixels on the radar and say, “Oh, okay, I can understand that.”

And then recognize as you look at more and more of those pixels, like, “Oh, these are the patterns where we’re talking about birds. Here’s the pattern where we’re talking about precipitation.” And you start to get comfortable with those, right? But that comfort is like limited information, right? There aren’t very many people that do that or really care to do that.

So the idea of then being able to take that and kind of generalize it so that no longer is it about pixels, but we can talk about what they imply and in terms of the numbers of birds and how that pattern changes over the course of the season, and in particular over the course of the night in a particular county. The level of understanding of having to go down the rabbit hole of like, “wait a minute, how do we know what that one pixel is and what assumptions are needed” to like, “Oh, I understand that pattern of peaking and change.” And, “Oh yeah, I remember that was a night that the warm air arrived in the spring.” Like, “oh yeah, I can look at these other patterns on BirdCast and see over the season, the last couple times when that warm air pattern has happened, there’s this big pulse of birds.”

That kind of stuff is the stuff you want to be understanding as an observer. And, and is sort of like providing the information. I mean, sure, it’d be wonderful if everybody was a radar ornithologist and would dig in deep to the radar data and the imagery and talk about the pixels and what that means and the different fine points. Like, is that snow? Is that birds at that particular place? Like only at that one time of the year.

I’m very happy that people are beyond that and are accessing it at the point from like, “Oh, okay, we understand. You’ve told us these are birds and if we want to understand why, we could go read about that, but we believe you that they’re birds. Okay. And you’ve published on that. And so we’re gonna take that and we’re just gonna look at the patterns and understand that.”

Wonderful. That’s great. Very happy that that’s happened because it engages a whole array of people that might otherwise, I don’t think rightfully so, might be frightened of data they don’t understand. Or like “wait, we have to do physics to understand this” or like math or you know. No need to be scared of those things, but if we don’t have to do those and we can engage at a point where, “okay if you don’t know that, you can still understand what the patterns are.” That’s really wonderful.

And that’s been I think maybe one of the most wonderful aspects of BirdCast is that yeah, it’s a great tool for the experts that are in the top of the knowledge, you know, percentiles of understanding migration and they’re using it as a tool and in ways that really enhance their birding or their science hypotheses or whatever. But it also speaks to people that were like, “Wait! A hundred million birds flew over my state last night?!? I didn’t even know birds migrated at night.” It’s like the access point for all different kinds of knowledge and experiences. It’s a wonderful thing to be able to do that. And, I think it’s one of the coolest and most important things about BirdCast.

It may not be the perfect visualizations to draw everybody in. The website’s still a little bit 2000s. But still, the information is there and it actually is quite easy to understand as soon as you make the connection. “Okay, I understand what this graph is showing me and what these numbers mean” and be able to interpret that with very little time between “I know nothing” to “wow like I know a lot more.”

Shannon: I think anyone who is interested in birding and wants to be able to go and see more birds or know when to go see, more birds or have a good potential, we’ll say to go see more birds in their area, even if it’s just their backyard, because the birds are flying over and if you’ve got the right conditions, they’re going to land and they’re going to feed through your yard during the day.

It’s pretty easy to be able to go onto BirdCast and like you said, just accept, “okay, they know what they’re doing with all the fancy science in the background,” the physics, the radar, the stuff, that not everybody’s going to understand. Or want to understand, let’s be honest. And to say, “okay, yeah, this map where it’s the brightest, there’s lots of birds. Where it’s the cooler, darker colors, there’s probably not going to be a lot of birds.” I mean, it’s really that simple and that easy. So, I mean, like you said, it engages people from all different levels.

Andrew: I think the idea that you can, if you’re a map person and you sort of think about things geographically, you can look at that scale and think about, the forecast, like the predictions about where birds are going to be and where intense movements are happening. Or you’re interested in the map from like, “Well, where did that stuff happen? And, and where is it now?” Or, you want to stay up all night and see like, “how is it changing over where I am right now.” And “Oh, like, okay, I’m going to go out and listen right now. Cause I see the pattern and altitude is descending, but the numbers of birds are going up. That’s a good time to go out and listen to see if I can hear birds.”

That level of connecting those scales to the true biology of what’s happening and how birds are on the move or how they will be, and that sort of ecology with how we can perceive that and how we can go experience it and that there are a lot of different ways to engage.

It takes its cue from the meteorological community. The same thing that’s happened… you think about over the course of the last 50 years. Yeah, everybody talks about the weather for sure, but very few people at the beginning were going to look for weather data for their particular weather station to see every day, “Oh, okay, what’s the temperature and what’s the wind speed?”

And now you’ve evolved this community where you have personal weather stations. You have this enormous industry of providing information to all different parts of society about weather and about climate and so on. The evolution of that and the evolution of the imagery that really inspired people to engage and the tables and dig down if you want, but look at this basic level if you don’t. That really inspired the way that BirdCast has evolved tracking that same kind of, how do you pull people in? How do you engage people?

Scientific Discoveries with BirdCast

Shannon: What have you guys learned from BirdCast that you’re most excited about? Because I mean, it’s a really cool tool for people who are birders to look, but I know there’s a lot of science going on behind this too. And it wasn’t built for just us birders to be able to go, “Oh, cool, fun.” What’s the data and the science that you’re excited about learning

Andrew: Yeah, there’s a lot. But to me, one of the most basic elements, and I’ve talked a little bit about this, so far. The idea of going out and collecting information on natural history and understanding patterns of when birds are where and what that looks like over the night and over the annual cycle. You know, even 10 years ago, when you looked at a scientific sort of general audience, just kind of basic information about how many birds are migrating. “Well, it’s 10 million.” “It’s 100 million.” “It’s a couple billion.” “It’s…” I mean, like many orders of magnitude off. Well, what is it? How many is it?

That first understanding of quantifying how many birds are on the move over a season. That was one of the biggest, I think, breakthroughs for BirdCast – being able to do that and get to the point of understanding how to work with the radar data and then have the machinery to do it, and the data to do it, and the good fortune that those things came together.

And suddenly recognizing that, okay, we’re talking about billions with a capital B! And that this happens each year and that even on some individual nights that that number is over a billion birds aloft over the United States. That was just mind boggling.

So, from the perspective of even the most fundamental science, which even though it’s remote sensing using technology, it’s still natural history. That information, I think, is probably the biggest breakthrough of BirdCast in terms of the science we learned. And from it comes all sorts of really cool applied stuff that okay, once you know that, yeah, then you can make predictions.

And, and I think the cool science of building models that do a really good job of predicting how are those numbers moving over the course of the season through the U.S., like the forecasting component. The science around that’s super, super cool. Then it connects them to conservation actions you might want to do and teaching people when can you do certain things that will be beneficial or costly to birds? When should you avoid doing certain things? When should you do certain things?

I think looking at the science from being able to quantify – create a number and understand and have confidence in that number – to the things you can do with that number in terms of understanding, like, how does the system work? When are birds migrating? Where are their large numbers? And oh yeah, what kind of habitats are they associated with like on the ground? Where are they coming from and where are they going to?

And then that you can connect it to education and conservation. Like there’s this incredible arc just from that number. I think that is very powerful. There’s also a lot of other cool, much deeper, derived kinds of science that we can do.

I talk about the natural history like just how many of something are there at a particular place in time and kind of an observational sort of data set. Then there’s that whole notion of testing hypotheses like, “Oh, is there?” “Do we see any relationships between changing climate and the timing of peak movements?” “Are there relationships in the way that birds behave when there’s a lot of light pollution? And because birds are very sensitive to light as a stimulus, in particular artificial light at night.” “Is there a relationship between the way birds move when there’s a lot of light versus when there’s not a lot of light?”

That kind of understanding from the radar data that we’re working with, that’s where you start to get into the more derived science of hypothesis testing, and learning these relationships, and expanding your understanding.

And so, beyond just that number as kind of like the big breakthrough, I think some of the other ones in particular are relating the way birds behave under certain conditions, whether it’s weather, or whether it’s these anthropogenic influences – impacts like light pollution or changes in where habitat is over time.

And looking over these big timescales of how is the pattern and timing of migration changing with climate change? Those are other really cool breakthroughs. Basically, being able to relate the numbers to other patterns that we see. So, it’s really kind of those two classes, I think, that have been the most exciting.

But it did start, really, with the first understanding of, “Whoa, that’s a lot of birds migrating at night!” That was the eureka moment of like, “We can do this, and we can talk about it, and people love numbers, and people love birds, and wow, this is going to be great! It’s going to be huge!”

Shannon: Yeah. Billion with a B. And not one, but multiples. I mean, that’s just mind blowing.

Andrew: I know. It’s sort of unfathomable. I mean when you go out as an observer, if you are lucky when you’re a birder, you may be able to go to a few places on the planet and regularly see what does 10 million of something look like, right? You go to some enormous blackbird or starling roost in Louisiana in the winter, or you go to Africa and see a red billed quelea flock, or you go to Australia and see like some gigantic flock of budgerigars coming into a desert pool. And you can understand, “Oh, that’s a big number.”

And that number may only be in the millions, and thinking that you need to go, “Oh, okay, we need to go 10 times, a hundred times, a thousand times that to get to this other number.” And that’s where you start to realize like, “Oh, that’s a lot.”

Adding Context to These Enormous Numbers

Shannon: Timeout. As I was editing this, I realized that I couldn’t even fathom having 10 million birds in one place. I mean, I’ve seen several thousand duck skis and other waterfall in one spot, and I’ve seen several thousand sandhill cranes in one spot, but 10 million. I have a hard time even imagining what that would look like.

It’s just too. Big of a number.

So I thought to myself, what’s something that I can use to give me some kind of context to make this almost impossibly huge number more real to myself?

Obviously, it would need to be something that was relatively small. And I wanted it to be something that would be pretty familiar to a lot of people because I’m guessing I’m not the only one that is having a hard time imagining what 10 million birds might look like.

What I came up with was a grain of rice. So I asked Google how many grains of rice are in a one pound bag?

Well, there wasn’t really a straightforward answer because different types of rice have slightly different sizes, and even within the same type of rice, not every single grain is going to be exactly identical, kind of like birds and how different species are different shapes and sizes, but even within a single species, not every single bird is exactly the same. However, most of the answers that I found range between roughly 15,000 and 30,000 grains per pound.

So for this thought experiment, I decided to use an average of 20,000 grains per pound of rice. That means I would need to buy 500, 1 pound bags to get 10 million grains of rice.

Wow! I expected it to be a lot, but I didn’t expect it to be that much and well, no, I’m not going to go buy 500 bags of rice. At least now I have a little bit better perspective of what that might look like.

And the idea that we commonly have 400, 500, 600 million birds, or the equivalent of between 7.5 and 15 tons of rice, flying over the U.S. at the same time during migration is just completely mind blowing to me.

And of course, that number can go higher during peak migration. I’ve seen numbers on BirdCast as high as 700 million before. Again, all those birds being in flight over the U.S. at the same exact moment in time.

All those hundreds of millions of birds can quickly add up over the course of a season or a year, which gets us into those billions of birds with that capital B that Andrew was talking about.

Okay. Now that I’ve completely blown my mind and possibly yours, let’s go back to the original conversation.

Conservation Actions

Shannon: Yes, exactly. And you mentioned conservation actions that people could take, um, and learning more about those. Can you tell us some about those conservation actions?

Andrew: Yeah. So, one of the things that I think, and this just doesn’t apply just to people that study bird migration, but just generally, I think. Ecologists, climate scientists, conservationists, we realize that there are certain activities that humans do that are not great for the planet, to put it mildly.

And so we understand, for example, that there’s a relationship between birds that are migrating at night and that light pollution attracts them? There’s this, very much a sort of an ancestral function of like, when there’s light at night, you orient towards it and you go to it, if you’re a bird. Sort of differentially depending on what species you are. But still there’s this attraction. And that it, for lack of a better term, it really interferes with the bird’s machinery to orient and navigate at night, to do these migrations and to behave properly when it comes to going from point A to point B under the cover of darkness.

Recognizing that there’s a connection between that light pollution and that you can study the way birds behave. And that you can very clearly show that when you remove the light pollution, that birds start behaving in ways that are very much more typical of what happens when there isn’t light around. They migrate in a very particular direction. They travel at a rather high speed. They sort of dissociate. Whereas opposed to when there’s light, they aggregate into these big groups, they start circling, the speeds decline, they decrease in altitude, they put themselves into hazardous positions because of this attraction and disorientation.

As soon as you can start to make those kinds of connections, the kinds of conservation action you can do are, “Oh, okay, I understand. Light pollution impacts these nocturnally migrating birds by the billions in some cases.” So, if we can remove that light pollution, wherever we can, if it’s not essential, like let’s turn off the lights. That has a direct impact from the perspective of birds that are present in that particular place. And obviously it has a much bigger impact from the perspective of all the birds that are going to pass over that particular area. That you’ll be able to have some kind of very positive conservation impact from the sense of eliminating this thing that is disorienting and attracting birds into places where they’re going to collide with buildings or where they’re going to be subjected to various toxins, whether chemical or sensory, or maybe that there are a large number of outdoor cats.

And, these kinds of things, being able to make that relationship between what you know about birds migrating, what you know about the way they behave when they interact with things that humans do and build, and that simply by controlling that thing, like light for example, that you can positively impact the way that birds are behaving – sort of kick it back to the state that allows them to behave more typically, and doesn’t put them in harm’s way. That’s one of the very basic kinds of conservation action that comes from the particular ways that we study migration.

There are other things too, for sure. Just understanding that timing – when is peak migration going to occur. The idea of being able to educate people to go out and study at a particular time and make connections with nature at a particular time when the largest numbers of birds are going to be present. That has all sorts of positive benefits, right?

Applications Related to Human Health and Safety

Andrew: And so too, we can think about it even from the applied perspective of knowing when there are going to be large numbers of birds around versus when is like emergency air traffic – medevac helicopters and emergency response – when are they going to be in really challenging situations when there are large numbers of birds in particular areas? And how can they alter the way that they operate to save people in a way that’s going to allow them to do their job more efficiently.

So, there are all kinds of different ways that we can think about those sort of things. The kind of the broad classes of the conservation action, like the light pollution and the control of that, but then also the applications that are a little bit more toward… we can operate better as humans if we take into account these kinds of behaviors that we can study.

So, you kind of have those two different interesting things that are the end point of the arc of starting with the science, figuring out how to really analyze that to the best of your capabilities, and then turning that into information that then you can use to do other cool stuff, necessary stuff, inspire people to act. All of those different things.

Shannon: And I mean, I’ve thought about the light pollution stuff before, but I’m a wildlife biologist by training. Yeah, of course, light pollution’s something that I do think about. But I hadn’t ever thought about the safety perspective of like you said, medevacs and stuff. And it allows them to do their job more safely too, if we’ve got that knowledge and can incorporate it into it, because they’re trying to save lives and we don’t want to put their lives at risk.

Andrew: For sure. And, and one of the interesting places… it’s hard to say where exactly how it fits into the bigger picture. But when you think about, we’re in the midst of an evolving crisis around avian influenza, bird flu, right? And so, the understanding of when certain species and large numbers of birds are going to be in a particular place at a particular time, relative to where do you see these kinds of transmission events from wild birds to poultry, or from poultry back, or from cows to birds, whatever it’s going to be.

Like some baseline knowledge of understanding the movements of organisms in the world. It can relate to these kinds of patterns that, as humans, obviously we have an incredible, human health concern when it comes to understanding these. It may only be a fraction of the story. There may be much more of the story when it comes to bird flue that relates to human interactions with various farm animals and mass production on farms and so on. That may be a much bigger part of the equation, but there is some part of the equation that relates to an understanding of what’s the dynamic and what’s the distribution of certain animals on the planet that may be responsible or related or somehow connected to these kinds of transmission events.

So, there are lots of different ways to think about, how you might study a particular aspect of, in particular migration for me, and how that relates to other different things that you might want to know, or that might be interesting to study, or that you might be required to study because you want to get ahead of the understanding when the next pandemic is coming, or how it’s going to evolve.

Shannon: Yeah, it’s fascinating. I mean. There’s just so many different ways that you can go with this and the longer we talk the more I’m like, “Oh, yeah I hadn’t made that connection. I haven’t made that… Oh, there’s a rabbit hole we could go down.”

Andrew: Sure, there are lots.

The Importance of Observation in Ornithology

Shannon: Yes. Oh my gosh, this has been really fascinating. If there is one thing and one thing only that people took away from listening to this conversation – I’m sure they’re going to take lots of things away, but if they could only take one thing away – what would you want to make sure that was?

Andrew: I think, to me, it’s still about the ability to be observant in the world, and to think about patterns, to study them, to open your eyes and ears, and look at these dynamic changes that are going on, and understand that that underlies this functional pulse of the planet. And at the core, for humans, it’s about staying connected to that ability to observe that is fundamental to all of this. I think that’s critical, right?

It’s hilarious. I mean, most of the day I spend thinking about migration. It’s often looking at maps and radar data and audio data and not at birds per se. The reason I can do that is because of this underlying, and very fundamental, information that I know, and that standing on the shoulders of the observer giants that maybe I knew or wish I knew, and what they’ve learned that’s from this and this and, being able to think, that’s really important.

So, I think the idea of being observant and recognizing that with those observations, you have literally a whole world of understanding to investigate. I think that’s really important. Aside from the technology. Use the technology to expand on this. Don’t use it as a crutch. I think that’s a key. The observation is key.

I mean, really we are in kind of a golden age of it right now. Where it’s easy to move around the planet, relatively speaking. It’s easy to collect information. It’s easy to think about that in different ways. But at the core, it’s still that as humans we’re observers, and we have certain skills and using those skills, I think, is really important.

Resources

Shannon: Thanks so much for being a guest on the Backyard Ecology Podcast and for sharing your knowledge about birds and migration activities, and BirdCast, and all that fun stuff. I will definitely have a link in the show notes for BirdCast so that any of our listeners who want to check it out can go there. And I really highly encourage you to check it out because it is a lot of fun. There’s a lot of information.

And like you were saying, Andrew, you can dig so far into it. Or you can just stay at the basic level. And I’ll be honest, there are days when I get all geeky and I go into the data, and there’s days that I just go, “Oh, okay, lots of birds tomorrow. Getting up early. Setting the alarm.”

Andrew: Well, thank you so much, Shannon, for your interest and for your audience’s interest. I really, really appreciate it and am happy to answer any kind of questions that come up and hopefully come back in the future. There’s a lot to talk about always.

Shannon: Oh, we would love to have you back. But yeah, thanks so much and take care.

Andrew: All right. Thank you so much.

Shannon: As always, I want to thank our Patrons and other financial supporters who go above and beyond to help us produce free content focused on creating and enjoying thriving backyard ecosystems.

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Until next time, don’t forget to take some time to enjoy the nature in your backyard.