What bird conservation successes can teach us with Scott Weidensaul

As is the case with many beautiful things in this world, some of the biggest successes in conservation result from the toughest challenges that birds and wildlife face. Pulitzer-prize finalist Scott Weidensaul is with us today to share stories he's gathered from near and far to share a message of hope for conservation. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_05 0:00

Welcome to Life List, a birding podcast.

SPEAKER_04 0:06

Hello, hello, welcome, welcome, everyone. This is Life List, a birding podcast with Alvaro Haramillo, Molly Brown, and me, George Armistead today. How are you guys doing? What's happening?

SPEAKER_03 0:24

Hello, doing well today. Uh saw a black turn, three of them actually, in the for the yard, which is a a new one. So that was that was good.

SPEAKER_04 0:35

Excellent. Excellent. I think uh Molly, I know, has a deer with fawn right outside her cabin that is very much exciting her pups. Right?

SPEAKER_05 0:48

Yes. It's been a while since the dogs made a guest appearance on the podcast, so I suppose they're due. I bet they will this time. Um yeah, we've had uh storms passing through, so I'm recording from the bedroom instead of the separate cabin that is dog-free. Um, but I also got a new property, not bird, but uh animal. I got a green snake, uh smooth green snake, just a little while ago. So we were just chatting about that. And uh things are good here. You know, I was thinking this is right at the point where it just feels like everything around is at the growth stage or close to peak growth. Nothing is on the downhill slope yet. It's like my favorite time of year in this part of the country. I love it.

SPEAKER_04 1:34

Yeah, same here. Gardens going big. My latest yard triumph were hundreds of birds that I failed to identify entirely. I had I had multiple flocks of shorebirds flying over, very distant at takeoff from uh their feeding areas, probably along the Delaware Bay, New Jersey coast, maybe even further south. Some looked like Wimbrel, too far for me to tell. Some might have been black-bellied plovers, turnstones, douchers, hard to be sure, but it was just thrilling to see flocks of shorebirds heading north, knowing kind of what they were doing. And uh, I would say we will jump in now to talk to our guest, introduce our guest, who is somebody who knows a little something about bird migration. Scott Weidensall is an acclaimed American naturalist, author, and ornithologist, renowned for his extensive work on bird migration and wildlife conservation. Over a career spanning more than four decades, he's written over 30 books, tracked thousands of migratory birds, and co-founded major global research initiatives. His Wikipedia page describes him as a Pennsylvania-based naturalist. And while I like that very much, as I've always said, all the best ones come out of Pennsylvania. He is, in fact, currently, I know, in New Hampshire. He is also a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his book, Living on the Wind. His latest book, The Return of the Oyster Catcher, Saving Birds to Save the Planet, was just released this past April of 2026. It offers a hopeful roadmap for global bird conservation by highlighting a variety of success stories from around the world. It is our honor to have with us today a national treasure among us birders, Scott Weidensall. Scott, welcome. We're so glad to have you with us.

SPEAKER_00 3:29

Oh, good heavens. My the sound you hear is my head exploding. Thank you for that, George. And I have to say what a pleasure it is to be with um with three of the best birders in the country. And I had a chance to be in real life with Molly not all that long ago in Texas, which was a real thrill. Not in a little Zoom box. We actually got to go out and do some birding together. It was a lot of fun. So um, yeah, thank you. Thank you so much for having me here. This is this is uh trust me, the honor is mine.

SPEAKER_04 3:59

It's very nice of you to say. We uh we're big fans of Scott Weidensall, and uh it's really it's an honor to be with you today. And we would be remiss, Scott, to not find out what you have been seeing of late. I know you've been buzzing around all over the place. It's spring migration. What do you what do you what birds have you communed with of late?

SPEAKER_00 4:20

It's been it's been fun. I've been I I hit I hit biggest week for uh for a couple of days. I was at um and then I was over in Cape May for the Cape May Springfest. Um was a lot of fun. I got to spend um part of a morning with New Jersey Audubon's shorebird banding team, which and the birds were great. They were banding um dowchers and and semi-palm sandpipers and occasional semi-palm plover. But what was really cool was to spend the morning with this um international team of um Latin American and Caribbean, you know, like early career ornithologists who were learning all of these techniques to take back to their home countries. Um, because you know these birds are spending time in places far from our shores, as you as you all know. Um and they need all the friends they can get in all those far-flung places. And so yeah, it was really cool. I mean, the bugs were bad. I used to do a lot of shorebird banding on the Delaware Bay, and I'd kind of forgotten how bad the midges can be at that time of the year. It was a bad noceum morning, but that was that was fun. Um I want to share if I can share like what was for me a really profound, kind of not directly birding moment. My most recent trip, I was last week, late last week, I was in um Chicago, and then I was up in Wisconsin. And Chicago was fun. I was I did a talk at the Field Museum, and I spent an afternoon in their bird collection, which is the fourth largest bird collection in the world with Doug Stotz, who's like a legendary Amazonian ornithologist. But then I went up to do a talk in um in conjunction with the International Crane Foundation and got to have lunch with George Archibald, he who dances with cranes, you know, one of the world's great crane biologists. And George asked if I had ever been to Aldo Leopold's shack. And if you've ever read a Sand County Almanac, and if you haven't read a Sand County Almanac, shame on you, because it's one of the foundational books of modern American conservation, Aldo Leopold wrote that book at this little reformed chicken coop that he and his family bought in the 1930s and that used as their family cabin. And it's kind of hallowed ground. And so George was kind enough to arrange an impromptu visit for me to the shack with um the head of the Leopold Foundation. Um, and it was a just a it was a deeply, it was a deeply emotional experience for me. I mean, I read a San County Almanac, I was probably about 13 or 14 years old, and it absolutely changed my life and and changed the way I perceive our human connection to the to the natural world and our responsibilities to it, you know, the land ethic that Aldo Leopold articulated in a Sand County Almanac. And to be in that space, and um Joe Fassette, who's the the direct executive director of Illinois Audubon Society, was with us, and she handed me a copy of a Sand County Almanac and asked me to read the opening paragraphs of his essay, Thinking Like a Mountain, and I made it to the end of the second paragraph before I was too choked up to read anymore. Um and to see what the Leopold family did with that land and to think about what Aldo Leopold did for conservation um in the you know coming coming up on almost a century since he since he f laid those foundations. Yeah, it just it still kind of gives me goosebumps to think that, you know, I was I was walking that same ground as him under under pine trees that he planted before his death in 1948. Um I mean I I I got to do some great birding on that trip. I was, you know, birded Montrose Park in in Chicago, you know, saw where the magic hedge was, um Lakefront Park, a few other things. Um but that that was really just kind of the that was the that was a life red letter day for me.

SPEAKER_04 8:32

Hallowed ground indeed. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:34

Wow.

SPEAKER_04 8:36

Well, tell us about the return of the oyster catcher. The uh it's a bird, and by the way, I I totally uh vibed off of you mentioning the noceums. Uh because I I was just in at at Brig at Forsyth National Wildlife Refuge in on the coast of New Jersey just a couple of days ago, day before yesterday, I guess. And um and man, we took a beating from those noceums. Uh our friend Josh Covell was in uh from Montana and seeing some of the coastal birds was big for him. And and we got to see some American oyster catchers and spending time with him, and I was like, look looking forward to our chat knowing it was coming up. Um so how did this latest book come to the forefront? How did it uh what was the inspiration for you and how did it evolve?

SPEAKER_00 9:29

Somebody handed it to me on a plate. A friend of mine had read my last book about bird migration, A World on the Wing, and he said, All right, you've done this book about all the challenges facing migratory birds. He said, Why don't you do a book about what's actually going right for bird conservation? And look, I I recognize a good idea when it's when it's handed to me, and that was a good idea. Um, I have to tell you that by the time I turned in the manuscript in March of 2025, the notion of an optimistic book about bird conservation seemed perhaps spectacularly ill-timed. Aaron Ross Powell A little grandiose. Well, just I mean, it was it was clear by March of 2025 that, you know, we were we were going to be facing a storm of problems for conservation. And I don't think I don't think we we understood how bad it was gonna get and how bad it has gotten. And I thought at the time, my God, this is like the worst possible time for an optimistic book about bird conservation. Because I'm not suggesting that everything's great for birds, it's it's not. But I also think that there's a real issue with Doomerism, whether we're talking about climate doomerism or bird doomerism, where people just kind of throw up their hands and say, you know what, it's it's just it's just useless. There's nothing we can do. You know, we're we're all completely screwed here. And the fact of the matter is, there is a lot we can do. And we've, you know, and we've done it in the past. The first couple of chapters of the book are a look backwards at how we saved waterfowl and how we saved raptors. Um, you know, and uh one of the points I've been making as I've been going around talking about this book is that I graduated from high school in 1976, the bicentennial year. There were maybe a thousand bald eagles left in the lower 48 in 1976. If if you had told me then that 50 years later, when we're celebrating the 250th anniversary of the country, that there'd be 400,000 bald eagles in the contiguous United States, I mean, that would just have seemed illusional. You know, that was it would have incomprehensible. And yet, here we are. You know, that's that's what we were able to do. So, you know, saving birds, it's, you know, it is a huge challenge, but there are roadmaps out there, other species that have that people have recovered that provide a map for us to follow for for wider recovery. And, you know, oyster catchers, you know, that's that's the example we've picked because in part, and I'll be honest here, um, the book is published in the U.S. by Norton, but it's also published in the U.S. by Piccadore. So whatever species we pulled out as an exemplar had to be something that's found on both sides of the Atlantic. Now, Eurasian oyster catchers have never been threatened the way American oyster catchers have. Their population's never really declined. Um but yeah, I mean, oyster catchers and piping plovers are two great examples of a group of birds, shorebirds, that are probably in steeper trouble than any other group other than perhaps grassland birds, and particularly shorebirds that are migrating along the Atlantic seaboard, and yet the bird, you know, in that flyway, we've seen dramatic recoveries of piping plovers and American oyster catchers. Oyster catcher populations are up 45% since 2008, at a time when we're seeing accelerating declines in other species of shorebirds. And the reason that they turned, we were we were able to turn that around is because everybody involved in oyster catcher conservation got together under the auspices of the American Oyster Catcher Working Group, about 40 agencies and institutions and NGOs. They pulled together all the latest research that showed the main problems were beach disturbance, nest predation. Um, those were those are the two big ones. And they figured out if we can increase the productivity of American oyster catchers by an average of just half a chick per pair per year, we could take what was going to be another like 10 or 12 percent decline over the next decade or so and turn it into about a 30% increase. And that's exactly what they did. So they did started doing um, you know, accelerated beach outreach, you know, to people who are going to the beach, you know, make sure your dog's on a leash, you know, you don't, you know, watch, you know, don't drive where you're not supposed to drive. Um also very targeted predator control. They're not whacking every predator on the beach, but you know, when we go to the beach, we leave a lot of trash behind. And so that creates these subsidized populations of foxes and raccoons and skunks and other nest predators, and you've got free-running dogs, and you've got feral cats. You get rid of the ones, the the bad actors that are causing problems in the beach. You trap them and euthanize them, or in some cases they go out and shoot them at night with, you know, with night vision scopes, the ones that are actively out on the beach looking for bird nests. And it worked. There's a you know, dramatic increase. I mean, piping plover populations are up like 500 percent in the state of Massachusetts, which is astonishing. Um, you know, now they've got the Endangered Species Act behind them, so there's a little bit more in the way of regulatory muscle, but even for a species like American Oyster Catcher that's not federally listed. You know, if you've got the time, also the money, there was um $500,000 a year for 10 years from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Um, if if we put the money and the resources and the expertise behind this, we can make big changes for birds. So we've done it before. Yeah, we've done it before. I wish your catchers are thinking a pretty good standard bearer for that.

SPEAKER_03 15:20

Yeah. I was I was reading um uh Asian um shorebirds out of Bangladesh that were being tracked and also followed in terms of numbers. It's interesting that the birds, the species that migrated uh along the coast and used um stopover sites and muddy bays and so forth were all the ones that were showing declines. And then the ones that were going inland and actually migrating in through into steppe and grassland habitats were doing quite well. So they were getting increases in in wimbrels and broadbill sandpipers, well, and you know, um some of the sand plovers, real decreases, of course, the things like spoonbill sandpiper. And it's interesting to sort of something so basic, um, just to understand what who is uh going down in numbers, who isn't, is the first step in figuring out okay, what do you do, right?

SPEAKER_00 16:13

And uh it's obviously different than here, but your point, Al, is a really good one, which is the more information we have, the more we're able to pinpoint where the problems are. I mean, I think it's pretty clear that for some species that are in trouble in the Atlantic flyway, like lesser yellow legs, a big part of that problem is legal and illegal shooting in c in the Caribbean and on the coast of South America. Um, y lesser yellow legs has been hit hard. And there have been there have been moratoriums put in place on shooting them, although they've been, they've those moratoriums have been walked back in a few places, and there's also issues with, you know, how many of these gunners are actually paying attention to what's legal and what's not legal, um, you know, particularly in places like Suriname and and the coast of Guyana, where again, you've got these birds that are that are wintering in big mud-flat areas. Um, you know, and uh in Guyana, you know, there's a lot of birds that are being killed illegally, they're being shot, they're being there's actually using, there's like this crazy wire technique they have where they lash this, they lash thin wires up and down as the flocks are flying and it cripples the birds and then they can just go out and pick them up. But what's also happening is that fewer and fewer people in those places are interested in eating those birds. And so it's like what we're seeing to an extent in parts of Europe where the tradition of eating songbirds in places like Cyprus, where they're, you know, they've been illegally killing millions of songbirds for years, younger, younger, more urbanized generations don't see the appeal to that. You know, why would they pay money to go into a restaurant and eat an entire little bird with no feathers, um, you know, just because that was the tradition for years and years and years. So we we we take our victories where we can find them because um you know, it's it's there's there's a lot going wrong for these birds out there, but there's a lot of people in their corner. And I'm I'm absolutely convinced that the the ra a rapidly increasing ability to know, to understand where these birds are at any given moment in their life cycle and understand what the threats are during those during that portion of their life cycle is is that's going to be the most potent tool that we have for protecting them, stopping and then reversing these declines. You know, once we can figure out where the problems are, we've we've shown ourselves to be pretty good at figuring out um workarounds and and and and ways of getting past those those threats and addressing those threats.

SPEAKER_05 18:58

Talking about different stages of life cycles, um it's been several years ago now. I did some work on a forestry program in Appalachia that was about um it was called enhancing future forests. And the idea was that it was a support program for private landowners when they had a clear cut or had some other forest removed to help successive vegetation. And golden winged warblers were always the hook that they would talk about. There was some work with Audubon, Pennsylvania on that too, um, to help Golden Winged warblers at specific points in their life cycle. And I they talked about in this like very high-level pitch to landowners that golden wing warblers needed different forest types at different points in their life cycle, and that this program was kind of looking at that. And I remember thinking at the time that I knew very little about these different types of uh habitat needs at different parts in birds' life cycles, too. But that's something else that you touched on in this book that I thought was really interesting because it seems like there are still a lot of unknowns and that there's a lot of potential to look at not just stop oversights on migrations, but habitat types at different points in a bird's life cycle, different sexes, different ages, and putting all that together and looking at that as pieces of the puzzle as well.

SPEAKER_00 20:17

Absolutely. I think I think we grossly overestimate how much we actually know about the intricacies of these birds' lives. We know a fair bit about their lives on the breeding grounds, because that's kind of, you know, these temperate breeding birds is kind of in our backyard. We know a little bit more than we did about their their stopover use and techniques like um using Doppler radar just as they're taking off on their migratory flights. And looking at, like I just saw a map of the state of Illinois that when I was when I was out there last week that showed um how important the bottomland forests along the river systems in Illinois are in terms of like that's where the biggest concentration of these birds are taking off, right at sunset as they're as they're lifting off on their migration. And you know, that gives you a map, a literal map, of like where to save habitat or where to restore habitat. Um, but we know so little about, you know, once they leave the continental United States, once they leave North America north of the Mexican border, a lot of these birds just kind of, you know, drop into a black hole. And, you know, that's where they're spending most of their time. Um, I for several years I had a research project with friends of mine in the National Park Service in Denali National Park up in Alaska. We were s we were using geolocators and pinpoint GPS tags to study like Swainson's thrushing and gray cheek thrush migration. And you know, we found that the Swainson's thrushes from Denali National Park and uh Wrangle St. Elias National Park were flying. Almost 9,000 miles to winter on the Bolivian-Argentinian border. It's probably, I mean, I would argue it's the longest documented migration of any North American songbird. The scary part is they're wintering in this really narrow elevational forest zone on the eastern slope of the Andes. And when you look at it and Google Earth, what you see is how much agriculture is chewing into that landscape. So, you know, here we've got birds that are breeding in six million extraordinarily well-protected acres of subarctic land, subarctic wilderness land in North America. But the vast majority of their life is traveling to and from literally the other ends of the earth. And if things go south down there, it doesn't matter how much land you have in Alaska that's protected for them. I mean, right now the Swainson's thrush population in Denali is increasing because their nesting habitat is increasing. But it's it's studies like that that show how really tenuous this all this all may be. But with information, with knowledge, comes power. And you know, you mentioned the work you did with uh you were doing with with golden winged warblers, but you know, just to give an example of how we can turn things around. I've been involved in bird conservation for 40 years, and for much of those 40 years, the poster child for Eastern Forest songbird conservation were wood thrushes. Well, take a look at eBird's status and trend map for wood thrushes. The whole practically the whole freaking map is blue because wood thrush populations are up like 12% range-wide, and in some places like West Virginia and parts of Ohio, they're up by like 20%. Now, sadly, up here in the Northeast, wood thrush populations are still in decline. We don't really know why, but but hey, you know, um, Sarah Kendrick at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service just finished spearheading this huge multinational nanotagging project on wood thrushes to find out exactly where all these different regional populations are going. What migration routes are they using, what habitats are they using, tagging birds across the breeding range in the north, tagging wood thrushes across the wintering range in Mesoamerica. You know, we we have the ability now to pull together the information we need to determine where the problems are. I suspect the problem for our wood thrushes here in the Northeast is that those poor birds are migrating through the most urbanized part of the eastern seaboard. You know, they're flying down through the Boston, New York, Washington, megalopolis, and all the inherent attendant problems there. But elsewhere, we've we've turned things around. Decades and decades of habitat management and conservation work have paid off for wood thrushes. I mean, and a lot of that was very intentional. I mean, like the Appalachian Joint Venture, they've been working across millions of acres in um, you know, like from New York on south on habitat restoration, creating the kind of early successional habitat that we know a lot of these birds need. Um, you know, we used to think that all wood thrushes needed were big closed canopy, unfragmented forests, and they like to nest there, but we also know now that as soon as their chicks fledge, they move them into early successional habitat, and that those, that all of their age groups are moving into early successional habitat before before migration because that's where the food is. So, you know, anything that increases that early successional habitat is is great news for birds. And did you guys see that study that came out of Tufts about in the last year or so about the working forests in northern Maine?

SPEAKER_04 25:54

No.

SPEAKER_00 25:55

Oh, this is amazing. So I'm gonna I I may get some of the details wrong here, so forgive me if I'm not exactly right on this. But about 30 years ago, um, a research team went up into the forests of northern Maine and conducted hundreds and hundreds, I want to say it's like 280 point counts across the industrial forests of northern Maine. And they recorded um, you know, what species were there and at what density. And 30 years later, researchers from Tufts went back and resurveyed all of those original points, and they discovered that almost uniformly the numbers and density of migrant, neotropical migrant birds in those areas had increased dramatically. And the reason for that is that that's a that's a working forest, so there's a lot of logging going on in there, but they're not clear-cutting massive areas like they used to do. Um, they're they're going in, they're taking out some trees here, some trees there. It's creating a patchwork forest. And it turns out it is spectacularly good for birds. Now, there have been some species that were there 30 years ago that aren't there now, some species that weren't there 30 years ago that have moved in. It's not exactly the same roster, but they've it's this enormous area of largely undeveloped but not untouched land where the logging industry, probably without intending to, has created really ideal s uh an ideal situation for these birds. It's just it's just the perfect habitat because it's a it's it creates the kind of habitat complexity that birds need. So you have like a mosaic. It's a mosaic, yeah. So you've got, you know, you've got some older, some older stands of trees close to stuff that's been nearly cleared and stuff that's regenerating, and beaver ponds, and wetlands, and all that stuff. And it's just it's proven to be this gigantic bird factory. And you can actually see some of the downstream effects because uh there's been a there's been songbird banding going on on Block Island in Rhode Island for, gosh, more than 50 years. And when they analyzed their long-term data set, what they found was in the 70s and 80s, it was a really steep decline in the numbers of birds that they were catching there, kind of across many species. But for a lot of those species in the last 25 or 30 years, those the trends are going upwards. Those many of those birds, they're in the numbers that they're catching at Block Island are increasing. And you look at a map, where are those birds coming from? A lot of them are probably coming down out of these big working forests in northern Maine. Um, and interestingly, you don't see the same positive effects on bird populations across the border in Canada in places like New Brunswick and southern Quebec because they're still doing old-fashioned, like take down a gigantic block of, you know, clear-cut a huge block of wood and let it all come back at once. So, you know, again, you know, there's we're we're we're finding we're finding that there are plenty of ways to address these these declines. Now you have to do it at scale, and you know, what's replicable, you know, what what they've done in northern Maine may not be replicable in other areas. But you know, it's the basic story about habitat. If you build it, they will come. If you if you create good habitat, birds are resilient. I mean, we we we for we forget that at our peril, because again, if we if we give if we the only way restoring bird populations is impossible is if we don't try. So let's try.

SPEAKER_03 29:45

Aaron Ross Powell So what um what do you think was the original um situation in these forests before there were lots of people in in North America. Let's say let's go back 400 years ago and Well, there were a lot of people in North America.

SPEAKER_00 30:00

There were millions of people in North America. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_03 30:02

Well, let's go back uh two thousand years ago. Let's go back 10,000 years ago, and these birds evolved.

SPEAKER_00 30:10

Trevor Burrus, Jr. Al, there were there were a lot of people in North America 10,000 years ago. Aaron Ross Powell Well, let's go 40,000 years ago. Okay.

SPEAKER_03 30:18

I guess I'm trying to get at the point.

SPEAKER_00 30:20

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I know you're trying to get past You're trying to get past the um the human the human footprint here.

SPEAKER_03 30:26

Trevor Burrus The human footprint, because these birds are older than that, right? They're they're they actually predate the time that that humans got to to the Americas. So in the the habitat types that that are really good for warblers when or you know birds when they're after they bred and so forth, this mosaic, what created that, do you think, historically? Was it storms? Was it mammals? Was it fire.

SPEAKER_00 30:51

Fires, beavers. Beavers did a lot of it. I mean, we we again I I don't think those of us in the modern era really quite comprehend how many freaking beavers there were out there. I mean, even in pre-colonial times, because you know, the the the you know, the pre-settler landscape had a lot of beavers. You know, the beavers didn't disappear until the Europeans created a market for them, and you know, and a lot of indigenous groups began, you know, specifically trapping beaver for the for the pelt trade. Um, the the number of beavers and the impact they had on the landscape. And all of those beaver marshes, all of those beaver ponds became marshes, all of those marshes became thickets, all of those thickets became forests. And I think you had this constantly shifting mosaic, like George said, of habitats, you know, heterogeneity, um, to use the scientific term, where and you had deadfalls and you had light gaps, and you had, you know, here on the East Coast, you had hurricanes, you know, you had these big hurricanes that would come through and dock down enormous areas of forest. That's why the East never had the kind of like truly majestic old-growth forests that the West Coast does, because we have we have hurricanes. Um, you know, an old tree here was probably four or five hundred years rather than a couple thousand years. And I just think all of that, and then when humans arrived, I have no doubt that humans were changing the landscape. And the other thing I that I think is probably true, and we don't really have a good sense of this, is we had Ice Age megafauna. I mean, can you imagine what elephants did to the landscape? We had mammoths and mastodons and giant ground sloths, and they were, you know, some of these things were feeding in trees.

SPEAKER_04 32:42

Aaron Ross Powell We've talked about American Serengeti on this podcast once or twice before. Such a cool book as well. Talks about some of that.

SPEAKER_00 32:48

Aaron Powell Exactly. So, I mean, the notion that, you know, that those big mammals were having that impact, and of course, they disappeared pretty quickly after after humans arrived here, but then you know, you had 10,000 years of sophisticated habitat management by people, um, especially by using fire. Um, you know, there was just such a long history of indigenous communities using fire in in really targeted intentional ways. So, yeah, I mean I I think I think all of those things together, I i it would be it'd really be cool to know you know how bird life circa 1400 A.D. compared with bird life circa you know 20,000 BC. Um the height of the last ice age, you know, also don't forget most of northern North America was under mile-thick sheets of ice. So there was, you know, that that huge you know, there was a there was it was a there was a lot of the continent that was just unavailable to most birds. Um and but boy, as soon as it melted, they they recolonized it.

SPEAKER_03 34:01

You know, one of the the things I've kind of uh let's say thought a lot about is warblers. We have all of these warblers that have some of them have some really odd, distinct habitat choices when they're when they're breeding, you know, some of them very specific, like Kirtland's warbler, and others that are you know, these forest birds that have, you know, funny, like to me, hooded warbler has a has a real sort of shrub understory, Kentucky's. And I've always kind of thought like, how did all these things evolve? It's you know, sparrows make more sense to me than warblers. Warblers are a really complicated history. And then you look at the phylogeny and you look at so many of them that are strictly on conifers, you know, not you know, not on anything else. And and I've I've wondered kind of in my original question, like piece back together when these things evolved, what was around and what did they um what happened at that time? And I think we sort of there's something that's missing. Like we may have, you know, there's there's probably elements of this that are not here anymore that we can't understand, or maybe set the sand that was created by multiple um, you know, glacial episodes might be the reason why we have Kirtland's warbers in pine trees and so forth. And um there's all of this stuff that I've I've I've I've been fascinated that nobody's ever kind of put together the history of the warblers in a way that makes sense in terms of the what the environment looked like because they have such weird habitat choices, some of them.

SPEAKER_00 35:37

And right. And and you know, and and also as as we were saying, you know, at the at the the height of the last glacial maximum, a lot of those habitats, I don't know if they were gone. They certainly must have been reduced in size and in extent. Um, the supposedly the the Kirtlands warbler, the jackpine, you know, that was a glacial refugia species that we got pushed way down to the south and and actually in some cases out, you know, into the, you know, places like the Bahamas, um and then m migrated north on those sandy soils where they're where they're fire dependent. But yeah, I mean, how much how much temperate, hard, you know, broadly f shrubby forest was out there for hooded warblers 30,000 years ago, you know, 50,000 years ago. I'd I'd love I'd I'm with you, man. I'd love to know. You know, with somebody, please invent a time machine.

SPEAKER_04 36:34

Aaron Powell That's what I was saying. So there is a time machine. If there's a heaven, it's a time machine, and we could go back and we could be surrounded by passenger pigeons and Carolina paragates and and hear double knocking ivoryveilled woodpeckers and then just figure out what the heck the warblers are doing. You know there you go.

SPEAKER_05 36:52

You know, Scott, I I picked up this book and I read the title and I thought, okay, I'm I'm about to learn a lot about oyster catchers. And I did. But um, but you know, the book spans the globe, right? So you have these case studies from all over that you're talking about. And a lot takes place in Europe. And this has served as my my formal introduction to rewilding efforts, which is really exciting. And I'm I'm excited to dive into it more. But there are efforts to replicate some of these conditions that that you dove into, right?

SPEAKER_00 37:26

Correct. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And it's funny because uh Americans don't seem to know a whole lot about rewilding as it's being done in Europe, where they're they're working at landscape scale. And yeah, trying to that's really a per thank you, Maul. That's a really perfect segue, trying to replicate some of these sort of primeval European conditions, like hearkening, if not all the way back to the Pleistocene, at least to like maybe the Neolithic, um, by employing the closest thing they can find to the original kind of Ice Age megafauna of Europe, um, or or at least post-Pleistocene megafauna of Europe, um, and create landscapes that are ecologically stable and self-perpetuating without a lot of direct human interference. And so what what they've been trying to do is like in in the United in North America, rewilding has mostly been what they call the three C's: cores, corridors, and carnivores. So like protecting core habitat, core wild areas, reconnecting them with um with corridors where wildlife is is free to move, and either protecting or restoring lost large carnivores like grizzly bears and wolves. What they're doing in Europe is a little bit different. They're not focusing on the carnivores. I mean, for one thing, wolves have pretty much taken over most of continental Europe. They've come back really well on their own to the extent that the European Union just relaxed a lot of their legal protections on wolves because there are now so many of them. What they're trying to do in Europe is bring back large ungulates. The problem is, with the exception of the European bison, which almost went extinct, most of the other large ungulates that were present in, you know, from the Bronze Age on are extinct. So, like the Arox, the wild ox of Europe, that became extinct in 1600. Well, but you know, the aux was the progenitor of all domestic cattle breeds, and so if you don't have 1600-pound wild oxes, you do have, you know, hardy heritage breeds of cattle that can survive on the land on their own 12 months of the year. Um, the tarpan, the Ice Age horse of Europe, has been extinct for thousands and thousands of years, but there are, again, a variety of um heritage breeds of horses and ponies that can live on the land. And so they're basically releasing these animals in places, and the idea being that their hooves and their teeth and their appetites will mold the landscape in ways that will benefit biodiversity. Because what's happening across a lot of Europe is that millions of people are leaving the land. They're abandoning farms, they're moving to the cities, they're in many cases moving abroad. And so, in places like the Southern Carpathian Mountains in eastern Romania, which is one of the places I visited for the book, landscapes that have been farming landscapes since the early Middle Ages, if not earlier, are reverting to forest. And that's great for forest birds. The problem is there are many species of birds like red-backed shrikes and Eurasian turtled doves and common nightingales that depend on that landscape of small-scale agriculture and pasture and orchards and small woodlots. And if there aren't people there, that all goes away. And so what they're doing in the Southern Carpathians, um, they're bringing back European bison, which had been extinct there for the better part of 250 years. And European bison are not a grassland species the way our American bison are. They're more an animal of the ecotone. So forest edges, glades, um, small pastures, things like that. And they're also really effective landscape engineers because, like in the wintertime, when they're hungry, they'll strip the bark off trees and keep themselves alive, but kill the trees. So they'll open up areas of forest land. They wallow and they create meadows and they trample and they graze. And they've now brought, I think they've got a herd of about almost 300 wild European bison roaming in the southern Carpathian Mountains. And the hope is that they will be able to provide enough of that landscape mosaic to protect these birds. Because, you know, that part of um that part of Eastern Europe, um, especially for species like redback shrikes and common nightingales that are essentially gone from Central and Western Europe, that's still a stronghold for them. They're still incredibly abundant there. And so, you know, they're hoping that this will provide a way to maintain that landscape without a lot of direct um intervention by people. Because frankly, uh there's just not enough, there's not enough people in the world to do that work. So you try to harness these animals to do it to do it for you. And whether it will work or not, I don't know. Um you know, the the experiment is running, we're gonna find out.

SPEAKER_02 42:50

But they're trying.

SPEAKER_00 42:52

They're trying. Got to be in the game to win the game. Aaron Powell, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Um, in other parts of Europe, um like in in the UK, you know, you've got rewilding at places like the Nepp Wildlands in Sussex in the south of England, where you know you had this 3,500-acre hereditary estate that was owned by Charles Burrell and his wife Isabella Tree, where they were basically going bankrupt trying to farm that land with traditional agriculture. And they they realized they literally were gonna they were gonna go broke, and so they stopped and they decided that they would apply the principles of rewilding to this land. They they got rid of their dairy herds, they sold off all of their farming equipment, they replanted what had been crop fields with native vegetation, and they just kind of let the land relax. And they did it with old English longhorn cattle, Xmoor ponies, um, red deer, roe deer, fallow deer that are just kind of roaming the landscape. And they're they're very meticulous about keeping the animals in in check. Um the nice thing in Europe as opposed to the U.S. is that if you own a property, you own the wildlife on that property. And so if they've got, you know, if their red deer population gets too high, you can just go out and shoot as many red deer as you need to to bring them back in balance with the land. But what's happened in the 20-some years that they've been doing this is that the land has grown rich with thorn scrub, with hawthorn and blackthorn, English oaks, all kinds of native wildflowers, and they've seen this amazing renaissance in biodiversity across the 3,500 acres, bees and beetles and butterflies and bats and birds. And so if you want to see a nightingale, or even better yet, hear a nightingale singing at midnight, you can go to NEP. They run nightingale safaris, where they'll take you out at night. And it's amazing. You've got four or five nightingales singing around you. It's crazy. It's not wilderness. You're like under the, you're under the landing pattern for Gatwick Airport. So every couple of minutes, you know, there's a jet coming through. But it's got the healthiest population of Eurasian turtle doves and common nightingales and purple emperor butterflies and dozens of other species that are found anywhere in England. And it has sparked similar moves at rewilding, especially in the neighborhood, in that part of Sussex, where they're hoping to get something like 250,000 acres of rewilded land along the river system there to create, you know, just a network of rewilded land for these birds. Because you can't just you can't just have them at 3,500 acres. There's got to be, you've got to have some spillover there. And it's it's I will say it is not without controversy. Um there are a lot of people in the agricultural community who see rewilding as a threat to Britain's food security. You know, they keep saying, with some justification, that you can't take all this land out of production. But um, from a from a biodiversity perspective, it's been it's been a huge home run. Gonna be interesting. You know, we talked about beavers before. They just got permission. England has finally allowed the release of beavers into the wild. And Charlie and Issey are over the moon about this.

SPEAKER_05 46:25

And I'm sure that's controversial too.

SPEAKER_00 46:28

It is controversial. And I said, you know, um, my wife manages sanctuaries for the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and one of their biggest issues are dealing with with complaints from neighbors and abutters about beaver damage and beaver flooding. Um be careful what you wish for, because beavers, beavers have a way of making their presence known. About as industrious as it gets. They are. But again, fantastic landscape engineers, and they're already making a difference on some of these degraded river systems where beavers have come back in and done all the great things that beavers do to the local ecology. So um but they'll they'll find out that there's it's a double-edged sword. Beavers beavers have a way of ticking people off.

SPEAKER_03 47:15

So if you if from what you've learned and what you've seen and what you have written about, let's say somebody said, Okay, Scott, uh, we give you a bunch of money and a team of scientists and people and bulldozers and and uh and and also you win the lottery.

SPEAKER_04 47:30

You win the lottery at the same very moment. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 47:33

But uh where would you put your um project to do this kind of European-style rewilding in North America for your biggest bang, or at least not your biggest, or maybe what you would like to see?

SPEAKER_04 47:45

We have some wealthy donors that m that are listeners, guys. So you know, just uh echo uh candy call. Tell them where to you know, put their money where their mouth is.

SPEAKER_00 47:54

Well, so that's an interest that's a really interesting question. I hadn't, to be honest with you, I hadn't really thought about that. Um I have a checkbook right here, that's why I'm saying this. Oh well. No, I'll be getting my invoiced after after the talk. Because really the only place where this is happening that I'm aware of, where this is happening at scale in the U.S. is in Montana, with what's known as American Prairie, where you have a private NGO that is trying to assemble a huge area of private land or federal land whose leases they control to recreate, as George said earlier, you know, the American Serengeti or the Buffalo Commons, you know, to bring back to bring back bison and grizzlies and elk and pronghorn across a huge area. And it's it does not sit well with the neighbors. Um there's a lot of ranchers in that part of Montana who see it as a an existential threat to their way of life. Um you've got a lot of tribal governments that are working with with bison on their land. Um, many really stupid things the Trump administration has done, you know, they just announced within the last week or two that they're gonna kick bison off federal lands, that that we're gonna, you know, bison don't belong on these, on these, on these, you know, BLM land and National Forest Service land, that that that you know, the rightful the rightful species that belongs there are cows, for the love of God. Um, the the rank stupidity of it and short-sightedness, um, and and threat to tribal communities who have have spent generations trying to build back relationships with the land and and spiritual and cultural relationships with bison. Um I I'm hoping I'm hoping some tribal government takes them takes them to court because that's a that's a decision that should not stand. Um but it to circle back to your question. That's a that's a good one. I would I would say where we would get the most bang from the bunk, frankly, is in grassland protection and restoration. Um because we know, I think all of us know that grassland birds are the group that are in the single worst shape in North America. And the irony is we're not going to save grassland birds in this country unless we figure out a way to work with ranching communities. Um there's a couple of chapters, there's a chapter in the book that deals with um mountain plovers and grassland conservation in southeastern Colorado, where you've got, you know, a couple of ranchers that I profile in there that kind of had had a song on the road to Damascus moment about the importance of grassland bird and grassland conservation. Um but they're a tiny minority, and there's still an awful lot of there's a lot of ranchers that are trying to do the right thing because you know the the the land is their the land is their money, the the land is their wealth. And I think they're recognizing that the way we've the way we have traditionally managed cattle, especially on federal lands out west, has not always been the best. But you know, even programs like National Audubon's Conservation Ranch Certification Program, it's like three million acres, but that's like 114 ranches. I mean, that is not even a drop in the bucket. Um and from a grassland bird perspective, of all the other uses that prairie can be put to, ranching is probably the best if it's done right. Um, it's it's it's way better than development, it's way better than plowing it up. I mean, every year um World Wildlife Federation maps out what's called plow print, which is the amount of grassland in North America that's lost to plowing, and it's not an insignificant amount, year after year after year, just whittling away at this. So, you know, figuring out a way to work with ranchers, and one of the people I profile, this um Colorado rancher named Russell Davis, who back in 2001 was horrified to find out that he had mountain plovers on his property, and then was really scared to find out that mountain plovers were being considered for listing under the Endangered Species Act. Um, he's done this incredible 180 on understanding how it's possible to manage your land in a way that produces a financial profit for you and your family and a decent life, but also a benefit in biodiversity and richness. Um it was not it was not an easy journey for for Russell, but he's now a leader in a national group called Partnerscapes, which is landowners talking to landowners about how to manage their property for wildlife as well as for agriculture. Um so you know there's there's some some real strides that are being made out there. But yeah, if I had an unlimited budget, man, I'd figure out a way to restore grassland habitat out there at, you know, at scale. Because scale's the hardest thing. I mean, you know, we we we kind of dink around the edges for a long time, but we need we need to do more than that. We need to we need to kind of kind of wrap our arms around big projects at really breathtaking scale. Um that's why I think the the single most optimistic story in this book is about indigenous-led conservation in the Boreal Forest of Canada, where you have conservation happening at an almost unbelievable scale, where indigenous communities from the Northwest Territories all the way to the Atlantic Maritimes are putting hundreds of millions of acres of land into formal or pledged protection under their own management. Wow. And it's taken generations for them to be in a position to start to assert their rights under Canadian treaty with um both the Canadian federal government and the um and the governments of the various provinces and territories. But they're doing it. And I mean, again, the scale is just incredible. For example, in the Northwest Territories, um, I visited a place called Thidene Nene, which means land of the ancestors in in Dene. Uh Thidene Nene in Indigenous Protected Areas, which is six and a half million acres. So it's you know bigger than Denali on the east arm of Great Slave Lake. And this is a place where the local indigenous communities had spent generations fighting the Canadian government's attempts to try to create a national park because they knew if a park was declared there, they wouldn't be able to hunt, they wouldn't be able to fish, they wouldn't be able to trap, they wouldn't be able to lead the lifestyle that they've been following there since the end of the last ice age. And so they spent years and years and years in these delicate negotiations with Parks Canada and the government of the Northwest Territories, and finally came up with a framework that allowed for the formal protection of that area with the understanding that it would be managed and stewarded by the people that have lived there since time immemorial. And they did that by getting around the main roadblock, which was that the Canadian government said, this is Crown land, this belongs to us. And the indigenous community said, no, no, no, this is our land, we never ceded this under treaty rights. And they finally just said, you know what? Let's agree to disagree. Um, doesn't matter who owns the land, we can argue about that. As long as we agree on how to manage manage it, that's all that matters. And so once they got past that, it was kind of like this, again, a roadmap for all of these other indigenous communities to create additional Indigenous protected areas. You know, there's a God, there's one in in um northern Manitoba, the Seal River watershed Indigenous Protected Area. That's 12 million acres. It's the size of Nova Scotia. It's the biggest pristine, the largest and arguably the most pristine river left in North America. And the folks that are that are managing Seal River, the indigenous Dene and Cree communities that are that are managing it, are working in cooperation with Western science. They're working with people like Jeff Wells at the National Audubon Society and employing what some indigenous leaders call two-eyed seeing, which is using traditional ecological knowledge and Western science as two different ways of looking at the landscape that complement each other. And a really good example of that is um a few years ago, Jeff went up there and deployed um ARUs, autonomous recording units, across this, because it's a huge area. I mean, there's no way you can do serious bird surveys because it's it's just so damn big. But he put out ARUs in the places that he thought looked good for birds, and then pulled them out at the end of the season and analyzed them and tallied up the number of different species and individuals and what the densities were. But then he went back a couple of years later and he sat down with the elders of the community and said, where do you think the best places would be to put these ARUs? And what do you know? He got so many more birds. Because, again, the people who've lived there for 10,000 years know that land better than anybody else. So, you know, I guess the upshot here is that by the end of this decade, the estimate is that about one billion acres of the Canadian boreal forest is going to be in some form of formalized or um or or pledged conservation protection. So it's like this huge twin victory for social justice and and conservation. And given that we've got more than 300 species of birds that breed in the boreal forest, billions and billions and billions of individuals, the importance of that for bird conservation simply cannot be overstated.

SPEAKER_05 58:34

The the scale is just so hard to fathom at that point. I guess especially as an American, too. But you know, going back to uh what you were talking about with ranchers, and I'm I'm from a farming family. My family has several hundred head of cattle, which is unusual in West Virginia, but we do. And it has always just burned me to my core. And I'll I'll I'll get emotional if I talk about it too much. But that I feel like I have straddled these two different lives from how I grew up and how I've spent my adult life on the environmental side of things because there is so much common ground at core values for people who care about the land and landowners who care about the land and depend on it for their lives and have for generations, and that's all that they know. And I these these things that you're talking about in the book happen at scale. They're very complicated. As you said, a lot of these most successful case studies have all sorts of different organizations and types of organizations that are working in conjunction somehow to make it happen. But the the message of hope that I took away from it is that when you're feeling hopeless and you look at these incredibly massive, complicated things, it really, really does boil down to individuals, whether that's landowners, whether that's people in forestry or agriculture or research or other forms of conservation. And it everybody has their opinions on what to do and how they are carrying it out in their own way. And it's a I mean, that's a mosaic of efforts.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:18

And I I really loved the conversations that you had throughout the book that that showcase that, how much it boiled down to individuals.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:27

Well, and to go back to Russell Davis, I mean, the other really cool thing that Russell did, and and I think this is in t in terms of like building relationships between communities that have not always seen eye to eye, Russell it's a long story and I won't get into it, but I mean Russell, in his efforts to protect the mountain plovers on his ranch, put the ranch under a conservation easement, which included a requirement that the Weinegar-Davis Ranch protect 500 acres of prairie dog habitat, because mountain plovers love to nest in prairie dog towns. And if there's one thing most Western ranchers hate more than the federal government, it's prairie dogs. And he was frozen out of the community. I mean, members of his family stopped talking to him. It took years for that social ice to break, but when it did, he was invited to take part in discussions in the little tiny town of Carville, just to the north of the ranch, about ways to invigorate the community, which is population 39. So, I mean the tiniest of tiny towns. And Russell told his wife what he was planning on saying at this next committee meeting, and she said, Are you sure you want to kick that hornet nest again? Because his suggestion was, you know, these birdwatchers will pay money to come see rare birds, and we've got rare birds here. We could do one of these birding festivals about mountain plovers, and people could pay to come see mountain plovers. Well, somebody pointed out that Carville does not have a hotel, does not have a restaurant, does not have a gas station, has no tourist infrastructure at all. And they said, so where would these people stay? And he said, Well, we would open up our homes and people would stay with us for the weekend. And that's what they did. And they've been doing it for 20 years, the Carville Mountain Pluffer Festival. It's the I I would I would say it is it is the most singular bird festival um in the country.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:30

Aaron Powell Are there black-footed ferrets there?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:33

Not that I'm aware of. No one. I know. Sadly, no. Sadly, no. Um not that I'm not that I'm aware of. Not that I'm aware of. But there certainly are burrowing owls, no doubt about that. Um But what's happened is it's created this line of communication between birders and ranchers that for so many years were just kind of talking past each other. And and Russell told me, he said, you know, he couldn't really understand why, as he put it, these Audubon ladies kept coming down from Denver every year for the festival. He said, we're taking them out and showing them the same birds every year. And he finally said something to him, and one of the women said, Well, Russell, we're not coming for the birds. We're coming for you. You've you've all become family to us. Um so, you know, just the the the the way, the way individuals, as Molly said, the way individuals make make a difference and create these bridges and move wider communities in in in better and more positive ways. You never know where that transformation's gonna occur.

SPEAKER_05 1:03:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:03:44

Sounds like my grandma talking about Audubon ladies. That's the way that she describes them too. And then she talks about the hats, and then she's like, I don't know how you fit into that. But but to that note, too, just the diversity of individuals that you spoke with in this book, too. Um, I I mean, I think uh another thing that gets me excited about conservation in this day and age is that there is room for more diverse voices in all sorts of ways to come to the table. And it creates solutions that range all over the place, clear up to the massive rewilding efforts in Europe, right? So I I think that's really exciting too.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:26

Yeah, we've all got a role to play. I mean, and and you never know where a good idea is going to come from. And I think I think we we forget that at our we forget that our at our peril and to our detriment. Um, you know, it is it's not just professional wild, you know, wildlife professionals that have the good ideas. I mean sometimes sometimes it's it's a 60-some-year-old rancher who'd never thought about conservation before and realizes that, you know, there's there are opportunities there for the community and and opportunities for the for the birds as well. Yeah, this this spring was the, I I think it was the 20th, the 20th anniversary of the Carvel Mountain Plumber Festival. I went out there two years ago. It's a hoot. There's like 50 people. Um, you know, some people, not everybody stays with the ranch family. Um some people camp, some people bring in RV, some people drive in every day from a hotel, you know, in La Junta or Pueblo or someplace like that. But I mean, like the first person I saw when the when on the first day was my old friend Greg Butcher, was with National Audubon for years, the Forest Service. He was there with his wife. Neither of us had any idea the other was going to be there. Um, it's like of all the gin joints in all the world, he walked into that one. Um it's just it's crazy. You know, the the you yeah. It's go people listening to this, go to Carville. It's like small town. You you know, the the um the festival headquarters is the old CCC. Barracks from the 1930s that had gotten moved down in the 1950s as the local dance hall. And they'll feed you a big chuck wagon dinner and take you out the next day in a in a school bus that has a Mountain Plover Express and a big sign across the back. It's a pretty cool experience. It's not like going to biggest week, let me tell you that. It's like the opposite extreme of going to biggest week.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:28

Maybe if they renamed Mountain Plover the Plains Daughteral. Maybe maybe that would uh that would help with the I mean Mountain Plover is a pretty romantic name, but I feel like uh Prairie Ghost. Yeah, there you go Oh, that's nice. That's got some real romance to it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:43

Hey Molly, you were you were gonna ask about New Zealand. I'm gonna hear the answer.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:49

Oh yeah. All right. Well we're gonna I I just saved this page. We're gonna have to bring this back up because this is not a high note. Uh you know, another thing that struck me, Scott, is just thinking about how you must have found these places. And I always do like thinking, you you bounced around a lot gathering these studies. So you you spent some time out there. But I mean, some of the most inspiring stories of recovery start with the most terrible cases of demise, right? So there's a lot of that. Okay. I asked before we started recording if Scott would help me understand this because I looked at the math. I looked at the size of New Zealand relative to the United States. I looked at data on um cat-related deaths in the United States and how that compares and just the density of death. So the sentence in New Zealand says um the need on New Zealand is urgent with introduced mammals estimated to kill sixty-eight thousand native New Zealand birds each night.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:56

Yep.

SPEAKER_05 1:07:57

How is that possible?

SPEAKER_00 1:08:00

Lots and lots and lots of invasive mammals. Rats, cats, brush-tailed possens, stoats, uh it's you know, dogs, the list just goes on and on and on. Um it's astonishing. But here's the here's the really amazing part. New Zealand is making huge progress against that. Um they uh some years ago, the Premier of New Zealand, the Prime Minister, announced an uh an initiative called Predator Free 2050, where he set the goal of eliminating all non-native mammalian predators. Because remember, New Zealand never had any mammals except a couple of species of bats. So there were there were no land mammals at all. The birds had absolutely no protection against that. And then European settlers brought in, you know, well, I mean the the Maori also brought in rats. They Polynesian rats came in with them. But, you know, the real danger the real problem was when when the Europeans arrived. Rabbits and I mean just so many different things. And so they're just methodically trapping and poisoning these animals. They've eliminated mammals on about two-thirds of the offshore islands. There's about 500 islands off the sh off the coast of New Zealand. They've eliminated mammals, mostly rats from about 300 of them. Um, and they're working on the mainland. And even in places like Wellington, where you have, you know, just enormous numbers of volunteer trappers who are monitoring rat traps and snap traps and po and po you know poison poison baits. Um it's it's bloody, it's nasty work, but they've cleared most of the city of Wellington, some of the surrounding areas. They've been able to reintroduce Kiwis. Kiwis are are nesting again in in the city limits of Wellington. Um I, you know, I quote a news report in there where people were complaining, not complaining, about how if they now if they want to sleep in on a Saturday morning, they have to close the windows because there's so much bird song. There was I mean, Wellington was silent. The native birds were essentially gone. They had like one reservoir property that was fenced against predators, where they were able to reintroduce native pigeons and parrots and and and a number of other species. But now they're spilling out because they've eliminated so many of these predators out there. And you know, uh it's it's a lot to do. It's uh, you know, New Zealand is not it's an island nation, but it's not a small island nation. But they seem absolutely determined to do this. And it's been um given how much pushback we have in this country about like even controlling feral cats, it's really kind of astonishing to see that the the the New Zealanders have just said, screw it, we're going for it. We're gonna too bad. You know, we're you know save us save us your platitudes about about um you know it's not the cat's fault. You know, we you we're we're losing we're losing our national patrimony here and we're gonna do something about it. And they're they're they're not taken prisoners. Um it's it's been it's been ruthlessly effective in many areas. And they've got a long way to go, but um they seem determined to do it. They're pouring billions of dollars into this. And as I said, a lot of it is just volunteer labor. Um it's interesting. At one point, New Zealand had a real a f a per capita one of the higher um rates of cat pet cat ownership in the world. And the number of people who are deciding not to replace their pet cat when it when it passes on is increasing. So, you know, cat ownership is going down. I mean, people are just, I think, finally realizing that um these are animals that just that just do not belong there.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:06

They should get turtles instead, right, Scott?

unknown 1:12:09

Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:10

Well, you know, but there's uh you gotta be you gotta be careful. I mean, they were really careful about um biosecurity in New Zealand. They they're not messing around with that at the airports. I mean, you can't bring in they're trying to keep all sorts of endangered invasive species out. So I they uh I'm not sure what the regulations are about owning exotic herbs, but I'd be really surprised if that was legal in the Trevor Burrus.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:34

I was just thinking that from uh as uh you were telling us about your turtle and your tortoise.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:38

Wait, you didn't travel with your tortoise on these assignments?

SPEAKER_00 1:12:43

Actually, so first of all, she's my wife's pet tortoise. So I don't I only have partial custody here. Um Yeah. Um no, don't we we both travel enough that we need a pet that only has to eat once a week and only defecutes once a week. Cold-blooded is the way to go with us. Nice.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:07

Nice. Yeah. Well, Al Alvaro and I do the subantarctic cruise of the islands of New Zealand, and uh we've and we've there's a there's always, I think, two now Department of Conservation representatives on that from New Zealand on that cruise, and it's pretty fascinating to see what they have done on those islands, starting, I think, with Campbell Island. Um the story there is incredible. Uh the first time I went there many years ago, we found like a baby duckling of a Campbell Island teal, and I think that was like the first time they'd been seen in evidence of breeding in like many decades. And now, you know, you know, Al, you can get the Campbell Island teal right at the at the dock as you're pulling up because they've done such good work, those birds are really coming back.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:50

I I also, you know, uh went into New Zealand, the airport with George, and I I told him he was an invasive species, but they still let him in, obviously. But anyway.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:00

They said it was with Al. Look at that face.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:02

Would you would you turn that face award? It's an invasive species. Look at him. No, it's really quite amazing. New Zealand's really quite amazing. And I I'm so saddened that you know, where I I used to live in Hapoom Bay, we would take these trips to the Farallon Islands, and the the Farallons just could never get uh the the work it needed to eradicate the mammals. And I don't think it's gonna happen at this point in time. So, you know, we have Ashy Storm Petrols, the biggest population on earth on that one island, that now is in in peril long term uh because people didn't act. Um people wanted to act, but a lot of people said no. You know, we don't want you to do this control here on this island. And I I can't even imagine uh that people think that way.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:49

But anyway, that's uh Well, I mean look at look at what happened on Guff Island in the in the South P in the South Atlantic, um, you know, which for those who who aren't familiar with Guff, they've um in the 19th century house mice escaped from from whaling ships, sealing sealing ships there. And over time they've grown into the biggest house mice on earth, and they're eating albatrosses alive. And yet when the Brits raised several million dollars to do mouse eradication on Guff, you had a save the mouse campaign in the U.K. Because it's not the fault of the mice. Oh, but it's also not the not the not the fault of the albatrosses. I mean, Jesus, look at the pictures of young albatrosses that are sitting there because they have no fear of mammals, so they would just sit there, they have no natural defense, as mice are swarming them and eating them alive. I mean, how can you look at that and you think, how can anybody think that's a good thing?

SPEAKER_04 1:15:49

Aaron Powell Humaniacs are a problem all over the world.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:55

Anyway. So my blood pressure's all up again.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:58

So Well, one thing I wanted to raise for because our listeners would appreciate it if is that the I certainly noticed the dedication right away uh to uh Thomas Brody Johnson. Um and uh I I think everybody would appreciate that. And uh and along uh something that Tom would appreciate is me asking you about some of your favorite bird migration spots. Maybe that's a good way for us to jump off here is maybe I don't know if you have a favorite bird migration spot. Like if someone said, All right, Scott, you got the next two weeks off, you know, you got two weeks off sometime this year, and you get to go plop yourself some down someplace. Where would you get?

SPEAKER_03 1:16:40

Scott, like money, vacation time, clean thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:46

Best podcast ever. Well, I mean, I have to say the the place that is the migration place that is closest to my heart is Hawk Mountain. I mean, I got I got hooked on Raptors, I got hooked on migration, I got hooked on the Appalachian Mountains at Hawk Mountain when I was twelve. Um when I when I die, there are three places that will, I hope, get my ashes. Hawk Mountain is one of them, Hawk Island on the coast of Maine, where I've been teaching for 26 years, where I met my wife where we got married, and Denali National Park. Um those are kind of the three anchor points on my life. And any time I get to spend at any of those places is time well spent. And and I get to I'm gonna be spending time in Denali in by the time this airs, I will have been and back again. And I'll and when this when this airs, if it's if Molly's schedule is right, I'll be up on Hog Island running a f a field ornithology session. So I'll be I'll be in a couple of my happy places in the next few weeks. And this fall I'm gonna be back down at Hawk Mountain a bunch because I'm I'm back on the board of directors there after after an absence of a couple of years and um back with back at one of my favorite places with some of my favorite people. So Perfect. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:04

Nice. Well, Scott, we can't thank you enough for doing this. Really appreciate you taking the time today. And we learned a lot. I feel like we all have like 12 more questions each, at least, that we would love to uh pick your brain about. But uh maybe we'll we'll find another time to do that. But thanks so much for doing it.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:23

Such a pleasure. Thank you so much for having. I've really I've enjoyed this immensely.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:27

Thank you. All right. Yeah, thanks. Thanks everybody for listening. We will be back again soon with another episode of Life List, a birding podcast. Good burden, everybody.

SPEAKER_05 1:18:39

Thanks, everyone.