Land Food Life
Calling all farmers, ranchers, and conscious eaters! Welcome to the LAND, FOOD, LIFE Podcast, where host Kara Kroeger takes you on a transformative journey designed to enhance the quality of life for all beings, YES, THAT INCLUDES YOU! Immerse yourself in the world of regenerative agriculture, nutrition, holistic healthcare, and advocacy for food and healthcare justice. Discover invaluable insights on how together we can heal the land, our ecosystems, and uplift our physical, mental, financial, creative, and spiritual health and well-being. Connect with the life giving soil beneath your feet, understand the origins and medicinal value (or lack thereof) of your food, and embrace the interconnectedness of all that surrounds you. Get ready, because this podcast is specifically crafted to change your outlook and sow the seeds of positive transformation within you and beyond. So listen up and together we will co-create a thriving planet!
Land Food Life
What Do Birds Have to Do With It? Regenerative Agriculture through the Eyes of Ecology & Wildlife Biologist Michael McGraw
Did you know birds navigate more habitats than almost any other species and are key indicators of planetary and human health? Join us on the Land Food Life podcast with Michael McGraw, an ecology and wildlife biologist, as he shares his journey from herpetology and ornithology to regenerative agriculture. Michael discusses conducting wildlife surveys and how grazing practices affect bird populations, biodiversity, and the nutrient density of our food.
This episode is packed with inspiring stories and practical insights. Michael talks about his passion for birdwatching, which was sparked during Timber Rattlesnake observation in the New Jersey Pine Barrens and the use of tools like the Merlin app for bird identification. He explores bird song identification, its insights into ecosystems, and its therapeutic effects on human well-being.
Michael also discusses the documentary Roots So Deep by Peter Byck, in which he appears, highlighting adaptive multi-paddock grazing and its ecological benefits. We examine how mindful grazing impacts ranchers, soil health, and bird diversity. We conclude with an emphasis on increasing BIPOC agricultural land ownership to create a diverse, just, and equitable food system.
Resources:
https://princetonhydro.com/staff/michael-mcgraw/
https://rootssodeep.org/
Welcome to the Land Food Life podcast. I'm your host, cara Kroger. In each episode, I'm dedicated to enlightening you with invaluable insights on how we can heal the land, our ecosystems and improve our overall health and well-being. My goal is to raise your awareness about caring for nature as a whole and the life-giving breathing soil beneath your feet, help you understand the origins and medicinal value of your food and embrace the interconnectedness of everything that surrounds you. I am so grateful to have you here today. If you like what you hear, please rate, review and help me spread this information to as many people as possible. Let's get started. Hello, my friends, welcome back to the Land Food Life podcast. This is your host, kara Kroger. After a three-month hiatus, I'm very excited to publish this episode.
Speaker 1:For the last 10 months, I was hired as the event director for the Carolina Meat Conference, which was put on by NC Choices, a program at North Carolina State University, and at the culmination of that event, I met today's guest, michael McGraw.
Speaker 1:And Michael is a certified senior ecology and wildlife biologist with a wealth of experience in herpetology and ornithology aka studying snakes and birds, if you don't know what those words mean. This work has led Michael to study how grazing practices can help or hinder bird populations and biodiversity in general, and is documented in Peter Bick's regenerative agriculture film, roots so Deep, and Michael joined us as a speaker at the conference to show clips of the film and share his experience working on this awesome, awesome project. And also, michael teaches avifonal ecology in the MES program at the University of Pennsylvania and his full-time work is at Princeton Hydro where he designs and performs custom ecological assessments and wildlife surveys for site master planning and site restoration. And I really gravitated towards Michael at the conference. He has a larger than life demeanor and just a really great personality and I hope that you enjoy this fast-paced, exciting conversation as much as I enjoyed recording it. I'm excited to have you here, michael. Thank you for joining us, glad to be here.
Speaker 2:Thank you, excellent.
Speaker 1:Excellent, let's just go ahead and dive right in. I want to start by kind of just setting the stage of letting listeners know what a day in the life of a wildlife ecologist looks like. And so can you give us like a little description of, say, you are assigned a project to go out and do a wildlife survey or potentially do a plan for land restoration with the thought of improving ecology? What would that look like? How would you begin?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, thanks for the question. As one might expect, there's a whole range. There's a wide diversity of different types of survey methods that we will enact and they're tied towards whatever questions we're asking. Or we want to create trails, or we just want to improve biodiversity. The first thing they need to do is understand what they have right. What's out there now? What's the current condition? What's the trajectory? Are things stable? Are things declining, are they improving? So we tend to try to look at as many different faunal metrics. As a wildlife biologist, I'll focus on the faunal metrics that are good indicators of ecosystem health or ecosystem condition. So the legwork up front is the study design right. We'll determine. Okay, well, in this area it's really important to understand what the birds are doing or, based on your goals, I think it's really important to know not just what amphibians you have on site, but where they are right, their relative distribution within the site. So we'll have all those methods already ironed out ahead of time, set up survey points and then the fun part is getting in the field.
Speaker 2:I might try to stack multiple taxa within a trip. Let's say I'm doing a project in that's a seven hour commute from my space, or I have to fly there. I would need to be cognizant of budget, so I'll make sure that the timing is overlapped well, to maximize the probability detection for a variety of species. You know, for birds, especially during the breeding season, I'm out before the sun comes up right. So if it's on the East Coast that sun hits the sky early in June, so I'll be standing in the middle of a field or the middle of a forest before first light, which is sometimes, you know, before 4 am or you know 4.10.
Speaker 2:I'm out there waiting for the sun to come up to conduct breeding bird surveys, where I'm listening and looking for birds. Anyone can learn these methods. It does help when you have a stupid passion for it, like me and a lot of my colleagues do. You pretty much have to know all the birds by song and by sight and understand their habitat types. Have that as best of an ecological knowledge you can before entering the space. And if you have that you can learn a ton of information about a space within just a few minutes of listening and looking right. So we document the direction and distance of the observation, the abundance, the behavior and obviously the species and we can use those data later to do statistical analysis right.
Speaker 1:I have a question. When you say that you can learn a lot of different information, tell me a little bit more about that. Like one of the things that I'm thinking of is like when I'm walking through a forest or a river in Texas. I can literally close my eyes and I can kind of know what plants are around me, because I've become so attuned to the smells, the aerosols that are coming off of those plants Right.
Speaker 1:I can be walking past a cypress tree and I'm like I'm under a cypress. I can go under and be like I'm under a sycamore. I know the smell of a persimmon, you know. It's just like I kind of feel like that's what you're talking about and I want to know like what can you find out?
Speaker 2:Love that. First I got to pause and just celebrate how you just shared that experience because, like, that is amazing and I'm not there with the olfactory sense. There's certain things I could pick up one from an olfactory sense, I mean it's such a powerful one and I love that you can tie into botany with just smelling the space, which is amazing. I also I teach ornithology at Penn in a master's program and one of the first things I try to explain to folks is connecting birds to ecology. You could blindfold me and drop me off anywhere in North America and just by hearing the bird song it's very likely that I can tell you the ecosystem that I'm in, right, and not only the ecosystem but, like the vegetative community and, to some extent, the condition of it, like, oh, this I'm in a palustrine emergent wetland and it's not a great one. Or this is a really robust sedge meadow based on the birds. I'm hearing there's humility and credit here, right, humility, and that we can. We try to understand what we can, but we're never true masters, right, we're never going to fully understand and document everything, nor do we necessarily have to going to fully understand and document everything, nor do we necessarily have to Also give ourselves credit as these sentient, amazing bipedal hominids. Right, we have all these senses and they all play important roles, right? So like when I'm out listening for birds, obviously, being able to hear those birds and to know that you know tea kettle, tea kettle, tea kettle means that there's a Carolina wren, right. And know that with confidence. Right, if I hear tea kettle, tea kettle, then it's something like, okay, that's a mimic, right, that's a brown thrasher, right. Or having the confidence as a human being, whether you've been formally trained or you're just interested or you've never tried this before know that you have the innate capacity to learn these things and to better understand and potentially appreciate your landscape by making some of those connections. Right, I'm now very interested. I'm going to be walking around sniffing and trying to make connections because I know, I, you know, I do wetland delineations, I do botanical transects, I know enough in botany to be dangerous, but I don't call myself a botanist, right? So, but I, and I do know what Monarda fistulosis smells like. I do know, obviously, what pycnanthemum smell like you know. So, like, I need to try and lean into that a little more. That's going to be fun homework for me, but, like for anyone else, like even if you've never tried this before, just curiosity and your innate ability as a bipedal hominid to understand your landscape. You can start tomorrow, you could start today.
Speaker 2:I was really interested in herpetology so like I got into wildlife biology formally in academia through studying spatial ecology of pine snakes and timber rattlesnakes in New Jersey. In doing so I started getting exposed to birds more. I never would have thought that I would have got hooked on birding, but I did. So it wasn't a conscious decision to make myself a, you know, a professional bird biologist, I just got really into it. So I found myself birding on the weekends and after work and taking field notes like what the hell is that you know? Like there's a lot of confusion and curiosity. The combination of those two things results in learning. Right, I kind of learned how to do bird surveys by just being interested in birds and birdwatching and now it's like 80% of my work, which is kind of crazy.
Speaker 1:Very cool. What do birds tell you about snakes, if anything?
Speaker 2:I'll share one great behavioral. I'll share an experience I had in the woods while out snake hunting. When I say hunting, I'm taking photographs. Right, I'm not actually hunting or collecting anything, and this is a testament to wow so many things. We deconstruct this and it could be you could have a whole podcast just on the marvel of this one experience.
Speaker 2:Birds are these highly intelligent animals Like, for example, prunus serotin. A black cherry doesn't put out a lot of toxins to prevent herbivory by caterpillars, so a lot of caterpillars end up on it. So there's a tritrophic relationship. Birds cherry and know that the dinner bell's ringing. So there's this evolutional relationship where cherry trees rely on birds to eat the caterpillars so they don't defoliate the tree right. Similarly, birds communicate with each other across species, right, it almost.
Speaker 2:This principle is peculiar in nature because often species protect their own right, but in birds you could have, let's say, carolina chickadee is foraging and it sees a predator, it sees a threat. It has etymology, right, the paridae group, the group that titmice and chickadees and the tits in Europe are in. They communicate with each other with language. There's stop, there's a predator. It's from below, right, or stop, hide, there's a predator. Like you know, they have these instructions that they can understand. But the other birds around them know these universal mobbing calls where they'll start freaking out like hey, I found something that's a problem for us, and the local titmouse and the local woodpecker and the local nuthatch, they all come in and they also start freaking out and bringing attention to that predator. Right, They'll make it obvious so the community is safer, which is pretty cool.
Speaker 2:That doesn't typically happen in a lot of interspecific groups, right? So I'm walking along these train tracks in the Pine Barrens and I'm hoping to photograph pine snakes and I'm hearing these chickadees and they're they're freaking out a little bit. And then I hear a couple more species come in. They're mobbing a predator, right. So I stop, I look, I listen, I'm just taking it in. Obviously I have binoculars with me too, so I lift up my binoculars, I'm looking around and I can see all these birds flitting and they're looking down. They're like flying, like like they're buzzing something on the ground.
Speaker 2:So I get a little closer, a little closer, I stock up and I jump over the tracks onto the ground and I'm like, ah, and all the birds flush. And I'm looking around, I'm like damn. Like in my mind, I'm like this is going to be amazing. There's going to be this gorgeous snake. They just led me to this animal. And I'm like, damn, you know, I'm like I'm crestfallen, like there's no snake here. And then I hear a little bit of movement on the ground. I'm literally straddling a six foot pine snake and it's so blended well into the landscape I didn't see it, even though I was literally standing above it. So they did, in fact, lead me right to this potential predator. Right Pine snakes are these large, amazing colubrids that do hunt a lot of small mammals, but they'll also raid bird nests, so they're a threat to these birds. There's one example of how birds can tell us about snakes.
Speaker 2:Literally yeah right, there's a, yeah, there's a literal one.
Speaker 1:I just want to make one other comment here real quick about the whole birding thing and getting into birding, because there's this tool out there now that is just so amazing, and the Merlin app. I'm sure you've heard of it and, as somebody who knows nothing about birds whatsoever, I've downloaded it. And now you know, when I'm in the forest or just at my house, I turn it on. It's recording all the bird song and then as soon as one song hits, it shows you what it is, and then you get this little list of all the birds that are in your area, which I think is just phenomenal and amazing. I still find it very, very hard, though, to pick out sounds, even after I learn what that one sounds like. How many tips for that, cause it's so complex.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yep, sure, so well. First I'll share my comments on the Merlin app itself. I love that it's free and available. Cornell Lab of Ornithology has done amazing things for making birding more accessible to people and really elevating the citizen science platform. There's a culture of sharing knowledge within the bird world, not so much with herps, because somebody could come collective, you know you get a bad actor in there and they, you know they could cause actual. It's a lot harder to snag a bird out of the sky, right. So there's a culture of information sharing and Cornell has done such an amazing job at elevating that, really revolutionizing it to the next level.
Speaker 2:Leaning on technology, this is another one Merlin's, kind of a gateway drug for interesting people that are interested in birding. It's good and bad, though, like most things in life. Right, it's not just clearly one thing or another, unfortunately. Yeah, right, so the tech has limitations. Right, there's a there's still a pretty significant amount of error. Right, if I ran the Merlin app standing outside here, it's going to pick up my Carolina Chickadee, my Downy Woodpecker, the brown headed nuthatch. I mean, I'm in a part of Maryland like the northern range for brown headed nuthatch, which is exciting, but like it might hear a combination of things or like a distant lawnmower or something, and can accidentally say, oh, there's a yellow-breasted chat there, when there is in fact not a yellow-breasted chat here, right? Or it'll pop up and say there's a scissortail flycatcher or something that's just not here, right? So you have to take it with a grain of salt. It's technology. It technology it's basically overlaying a library of sonograms and it has an algorithm to tease out the ones that are unique to certain species. But there is a lot of overlap. Pine warbler, dark-eyed junco, chipping sparrow can all sound similar and can all be present in the same habitat in this region at certain times of year.
Speaker 2:Again, ecology helps Knowing where you are. If I'm standing in a pine woods in June at this latitude, I know that that's very likely not a dark-eyed junco, but it could be a chipping sparrow or a pine warbler. Am I deep in the woods? If so, it's probably a pine warbler. If I'm in a suburban landscape, it could be either. Right. So having some of that life history knowledge helps. So that's where you're in a curiosity about these things. You're building a library of knowledge within your own mindset so you can interpret these things more easily. But here's how Merlin is great. Well, hold on. One more tough thing.
Speaker 2:So, as someone who teaches ornithology and tries to encourage people to get into learning birds, I think confusion and having to earn an answer in person, like achieving that now, like I'm curious about something, I'm confused by it, learn it. When I finally see that bird that's making a weird sound and I look at it and I go. That bird is small and brown and it has this like cream colored eye stripe and it keeps holding its tail up in the air. Right, those simple morphological notes will then help me determine what that species is and I'll never forget it. I remember, like my life bird for almost every single species I've seen.
Speaker 2:I've seen many hundreds of species, right, because of that confusion, when something is spoon fed to you, you're much more likely to forget it, right? So people will go out with Merlin and just walk around with that and then write down all the things they say and they go, oh, I saw these 25 species. But if you said, tell me about that yellow-breasted chat, they're going to be like, well, I don't know. I was standing on a trail and the thing told me I saw it. It's like, well, how rewarding is that it might be rewarding. I'm not poo-pooing that, but if you really want to learn, I think you can use that as a tool. That's something of interest, and then start looking for it, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Well, it's like you know, I'm an herbalist and I studied at the Rocky mountain center of botanical studies for two years. Back in the night.
Speaker 2:And it was amazing.
Speaker 1:You know it was an amazing program. We traveled all over the nation, you know, the Rocky mountains, down into the Chiricahuas, into the old growth forest of the Pacific Northwest, and we learned the plants. And you know, now there's so many folks and I'm not knocking this because just learning knowledge in whatever capacity you can is great but you know there's a lot of folks that are like, well, I'm doing an online herbal program and it's like that's great, but you need to be sitting with the plants, smelling the plant, seeing the habitat, working with the plant, spirit medicine and literally like letting it talk to you.
Speaker 2:I love that. I agree with you entirely. I think we can't be old, stodgy folks that are pre-technology and be like don't you know? Don't use technology, use these amazing resources, but find a way to bring it in to your humanity, right Bring it into your existence as a physical human that's connected to all these other living things around you. Now, help it, facilitate where you're going to go or when, or help you know, help you guide where you think your interests might be. But yeah, one's not a replacement for the other, without question.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, absolutely so. So let's kind of some of my listeners may be wondering, since this podcast is really about you know how we raise the quality of life for all beings. This podcast is really about you know how we raise the quality of life for all beings or contribute to improving the quality of life for plants, animals, land, humans.
Speaker 2:Man, that's a tough question, right? Yeah, man, it's hard to not get too deep right off the bat. But, like, here's the thing, I work for a for-profit consulting company and they're an amazing group and we have a strong conservation ethic. People genuinely care about the landscape. We care about our clients, we care about Mother Earth right, but we also care about our kids and have mortgages and phone bills and stuff to pay. So we've married professionality with passion. But this is a really interesting thing in ecological restoration what are we restoring to right, what are our goals and how does that inform how we interact with the landscape? And that goes beyond just the for-profit world. Like, look at US Fish and Wildlife Service and all these state agencies. In one state people may care very much about golden wing warblers and so because of that, they're willing to work with logging industries to do successional habitat right To cause disturbance within a landscape that's otherwise been left alone, which maybe isn't necessarily the healthiest of an ecosystem.
Speaker 2:Right, their disturbance is natural and we basically deforested. All of you know almost all of North America. Your average forest in the Northeast is 80 to 120 years old and it's even aged, typically lower quality trees Because of overpopulations of deer and prevalence of invasive species, we don't get this regeneration. We had a national campaign to prevent forest fires. In certain places it's a very, very important tool for disturbance natural disturbance regimes. We see that in evolutionary ecology Certain plants only benefit really well with that cycle. Flooding beavers, right, all these natural disturbance. We almost eradicated beavers. We constantly fight forest fires.
Speaker 2:Like, what are we doing? Why are we not interacting with this landscape to understand or maximize its biodiversity? But then that question is like well, what are we doing it for? Is this a selfish thing? Am I just designing and selecting for things that I'm interested in? And what are my interests as somebody who's a mid-frees dude, who grew up in the Philadelphia area? Like, how can I appropriately incorporate pre-colonialism habitat into the landscape? Right, and what does that mean? It's a deep question and a challenging one that I find myself always asking, and I'll probably die still pondering this and not having some final answer. Right, how do we best interact with the landscape?
Speaker 2:And so now, getting back to your question, with that preset of humility and knowing that I'm just this simple human being that has to balance my id, who I am as a person in this world and what's important to me with, like the bigger picture, ontogeny versus phylogeny here, right, I do actively promote ecological diversity through my work right Studying birds and all these other animals and plants to interpret them, to further promote their presence, physical space within this world and then connecting people to it. I care a lot especially about urban ecology, bringing these diverse natural systems into cities and also bringing folks that live in concentrated areas like urban centers to these spaces right, creating. We all should have that connectivity. That's important to me, so like I feel like I'm actively participating in the ecological movement right To some extent by trying to save and interpret and appreciate wildlife. Also, I think it's probably been one of the most rewarding aspects of my job.
Speaker 1:So I wanted to get to this concept of how birdsong affects the neural regulation within our human bodies and mental health, and I know that this isn't your specialty. You may have a little bit to share on that. I had heard this podcast on how, when we are raised around the song of birds and the more interaction that we have with the bird song that we actually regulates our nervous system and improves our mental health. So can you speak to that at all?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I'm going to speak to it wearing the hat of just being a human being, just organically, like. Obviously, I focus on birds from a scientific perspective and from a professional standpoint, but the true joy for me, one of the things that what restores, what fills my Zelda hearts, if you will, and one of the reasons I love my job, is because not only am I out collecting data, which honestly, can be stressful, right, it's these time things as you've experienced you walk into a morning bird song chorus and there could be 15 different species and multiple individuals of different species all sing at the same time. I have to tease that out. Right, it's really analytical work, but in between, when I start and stop those points, I take a deep breath and I just soak in the magic of the bird song around me and it's deeply therapeutic, right. So, like I know, for me that's one of the things that keeps bringing me back into nature and hearing different bird songs and, honestly, even hearing the same bird songs every day, even hearing the same bird songs every day, like I'd go out and have morning coffee on my porch and listen to my local catbirds and wrens and and Northern Cardinals, just you know, fighting amongst each other and foraging, and brings real delight to me, right it? It definitely thins my blood, it lowers my blood pressure.
Speaker 2:But, like it all makes sense, right, we are bipedal hominids, we're mammals, we came from this earth. We're certainly going back to it, right, and so our co-evolution within the landscape. Definitely, we intermingled with birds. We've had a relationship with birds ever since we've been a species, right, and because they communicate in a similar way that we do, right, with sound and with sight, those are things that we can intrinsically relate to. Like, for example, timber rattlesnakes use chemoreception, right. So like they communicate in ways that are wildly cryptic to us, right, so we can't understand and appreciate those as organically and as readily as we do birds, like, seeing male indigo bunting in full breeding plumage is just stunning, and to hear it sing its song brings joy to us, right, music is huge for humans, right. Well, it's also pretty huge for birds.
Speaker 2:So, you know, it makes sense that we have this intrinsic connection that I, you know, respectfully, I can't begin to tap into why it is, but I know that it certainly is. And another great thing is again going back to my urban ecology and the right, the birthright of every single human being to enjoy and feel that connection to other living things. I would challenge somebody to go through their day without hearing a bird, and that's whether you work in a high-rise downtown, you commute on the subway or you live out in the woods, anywhere in between like you're not going to go one full day without hearing a bird sing. Right, it's, it's, it's, I would argue, potentially impossible, unless you live under the sea or in Antarctica. And even if you live in Antarctica, you're probably near where the penguin colonies are and the seabirds are right.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So you know, birds literally are living dinosaurs. They're an extension of the theropod lineage of dinosaurs and they've proliferated on the landscape. They've occupied every single niche except for the deep ocean. But they fly above the deep ocean. There's birds that dive and swim hundreds of meters down and spend 10 minutes swimming around like fish hunting fish. Right, you can find birds flying over 10,000 feet over the Himalayan mountains. Right and everywhere in between, from sea to sky, from land to water, birds are there.
Speaker 1:Could you tell us a little bit about Roots so Deep and your experience with that and what you came to learn from some of the ranchers that you worked with when you were working as an ecologist on that film?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure. So Roots so Deep is a documentary that's specifically about a particular grazing practice called adaptive multi-paddock grazing. So the filmmaker I think you had mentioned he's a pretty amazing guy. So the filmmaker I think you had mentioned he's a pretty amazing guy. He did the Carbon Cowboys series, so a whole bunch of shorter documentaries but there's enough content for a feature length. He ended up deciding to do four one-hour episodes. So Roots so Deep is a four-episode docuseries and basically Peter followed around myself and a number of other scientists collecting data, really comparing this grazing practice adaptive multi-paddock grazing to more conventional continuously grazed pasture strategy. And for those that aren't familiar with that, continuous grazing is where you have a perimeter fence. Let's just use the 2,000 acres. Right, you have 200 cattle, 2,000 acres. You let the cattle kind of go wherever they want within that space. You might move them once a year or twice a year, but for the most part they're out of the land. They're choosing where they want to spend their time all year round.
Speaker 2:And adaptive multi-paddock grazing. You basically take that same head of cattle, same acreage, but you break it up into smaller, let's say 20 acre paddocks using temporary fence. They graze down heavy for a day. You move them every day, sometimes more than once a day, and it's adaptive, so the paddocks can be bigger or smaller depending on the time of year, the productivity, et cetera, to make sure the animals have enough food for the day. So you move them like that and essentially what you're doing is restricting them from just trampling anywhere they want, spending too much time in an area, et cetera, and just that physical change in how the animals move through the landscape. We suspect that as a team, may have some serious ecological benefits and potentially some economic benefits to the farmers too. So that was like the premise of the study. Peter put together this group of really prolific scientists, mostly from the Americas, but also internationally.
Speaker 2:The way I got plugged in was through a mentor of mine, Steve Affelbaum. He was the founder of Applied Ecological Services, where I worked, and eventually became a part owner of Steve's an amazing guy. I've learned a ton from him and he's a dear friend. Owner of Steve's an amazing guy. I've learned a ton from him and he's a dear friend, you know. So he brought me in. He focused on the vegetation and he also collected bird data, but he allowed me to take the lead on a lot of the bird data collection and so, yeah, that's how I fit into that and, as we were saying before, like you know, the whole process was amazing, you know, and I was using methods that I know very well in areas that I have been around. But you know, and I was using methods that I know very well in areas that I have been around, but you know, it's pretty cool to get on these private lands, right, Unless there's a reason to be there. You don't just go roaming around people's pastures unless you want to get shot in the ass. So it was really cool to just gain access to private land and to meet these farmers. I mean, what an amazing group of folks. You know I've been doing wildlife biology professionally for over 20 years now. I meet lots of folks, but I don't get to meet a lot of farmers. In the last six, seven years I've been doing research in working lands and, without question, like I fell in love with farming families, just amazing people. It was kind of interesting because the data that we felt like it was night and day.
Speaker 2:You could tell the difference in these pastures, at least from a bird perspective and even anecdotally, just from a vegetation perspective. You walk into an amp grazed field and there's grass up to your belt line on average. Right, Some of the amp guys. They like to have non-native forage so they'll overseed with particular species that they like that may not be native. You know where. Other ones are just native prairie Right, they're just. You know, it's just. They don't do anything at all, including any overseeding, and they just have robust warm season and cool season grasses and just a wide. They have flowering plants from April to November. You know, like, there's just, there's always something flowering in the meadow Right. And then the average continuously grazed pasture. It genuinely looked like a mowed lawn here in the suburbs. Right, it's just monoculture. It's chewed down to the nub. The only things that aren't eaten are the things that the cows chose they don't want. So you get like old growth thistle right, there's just like stalks of thistle in an otherwise mowed landscape.
Speaker 1:Which they will eat, though in an adaptive paddock, they will pick it out and eat it. You know small quantities, right?
Speaker 2:I'm glad you mentioned that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Without question. So and also. So that's some of the fringe benefits. That is likely part of the co-evolutionary magic of having grazing large herds of grazing ungulates like bison or elk or something on the landscape. There'd be a competition for good food. These animals in it's not like inhumane packing but like it's a tighter space. They're going after the grass, they're shoulder to shoulder they're. They're mowing with their teeth and tongue right and they're pooping and peeing as they go. So there's this inherent competition where they're far less choosy and because of that, you're right, you get a more balanced result. Everything gets mowed down or trampled right. The things that they're not eating just get stomped down. So you get a mechanical mixing of organic material into that upper horizon of the soil layer, which is great for soil microbiology and a whole bunch of other positive feedback loop of positivity within the soil system. So yeah, and also you get nutrient distribution. You get a whole bunch of benefits.
Speaker 2:But so you know, keeping my hat on as a wildlife biologist, I was studying birds. I mean night and day. The first morning I went to a site, I went to the AMP site first and I had 15 or more counter singing eastern meadowlarks at my bird points. Right, it's just chock-a-block with obligate native grassland birds. They're everywhere. We had, you know, on average I think at that particular site there was six obligate grassland bird species in one pasture. Particular site, there was six obligate grassland bird species in one pasture, plus, you know, summer tanagers and blue grosbeak and yellow-breasted chat and northern bobwhite, these ecotonal thrashers and stuff these birds that need meadow or pasture, but also some forest or shrubby, scrubby stuff. It was just, yeah, I mean, really it reminded me of being on like a nature preserve, you know, like a tnc has a, you know a fire managed meadow or you know whatever, like it was high quality bird habitat, right.
Speaker 2:And then I went over to the next site and it was crickets. I had one eastern bluebird. I had one lonely meadowlark singing. Didn't look like there was any partnership right with the other ones. I'm I'm seeing action right, like there's running. This was earlier in the season, so running materials, right, they're actively building nests and singing and fighting. And you know, at this other site it was crickets. You know, it was just-.
Speaker 1:And these farms are within a few miles of each other, is that-?
Speaker 2:No, there's literally a fence between them.
Speaker 1:Okay, so they found that were that close yeah.
Speaker 2:It took years to line this project up because we had to isolate all so many variables to do a study in the external environment. So the soil had to be the exact same soil beds right.
Speaker 2:We tried to get the same exact aspect right. So we're we're getting same sunlight, same rainfalls. You know, really try and minimize all the variables. So we're really just looking at the management practice as the difference and I think four out of five of the pairs, or three out of five of the pairs, it was literally just one fence between them. So like you know, here's Teddy Gentry's, here's Randy Owens. There's literally one fence between them.
Speaker 1:Right right.
Speaker 2:So so that was cool and really just showed night and day, you know this, this immediate value by having, by allowing the ground to have rest, and the magic associated with that. And our goal was not to write a fantasy story with magicians in it. So we had to have hard science. So there was soil, microbiologists and people doing greenhouse gas and animal wellness stuff, insect studies, vegetation. You know I think there was eight metrics that we studied and so, yeah, that was, it was a great pleasure. And you know, I think there was eight metrics that we we studied and so, yeah, that, yeah, that was, um, it was a great pleasure and you know, it was interesting.
Speaker 2:I really didn't think I'd be in the film at all. I remember meeting Peter and him asking me to sign a little waiver, saying like, hey, you know, you know I'd be okay with him using footage, and I was like whatever, like I'll sign this, you're not going to use this, you know, and, uh, you know I'm a bit of a goofy guy, but like it really wasn't me, it was the birds that made it. So I ended up playing a role in the film. You know the bird story and how the birds, how important birds were to the farmers, to the ranchers, like that's. That was key and I didn't see it coming. I don't think anybody did you know.
Speaker 1:Well, you are a very gregarious person and you're very passionate about what you do, and that generally makes for a good story. So I can see, I can see how it happened, right on Well.
Speaker 2:I think that's a compliment, so thank you.
Speaker 1:That's a compliment for sure, right on.
Speaker 2:But yeah, so but like, one of the things that was kind of hard, tara was like okay, like, for example, talk about Marie lavasque and her husband billy, or partner billy I don't know if they're married, not my business, but uh, um, they are these amazing people. When I first met marie, she has all she like rehabs animals, she has all these cool farm animals and she fosters at-risk children. She's just this hands-down amazing, like really really amazing person. And uh, billy, I didn't really get to know him because he was so damn busy. He like I was children. She's just this hands down amazing, like really really amazing person.
Speaker 2:And Billy, I didn't really get to know him because he was so damn busy. He like I was opening a gate and he's like get out of the way, like he was running hay and was super stressed out and busy, right, typical farm life, just always busy, right. So I didn't take it personal but we didn't get a chance to really chat. When I studied her site, there was zero obligate grassland birds on her property and precious few ecotonal birds, ones that are much more generalist, like brown thrasher, but no bobwhite or chat or blue grosbeak. None of these like more interesting, dynamic species that really rely on that functional grassland component of their territory.
Speaker 1:Well, and they've taken major declines just in their quantities across.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, and yeah, and that's well, published in one of the most prolific scientific journals, in, probably globally yeah, rosenberg et al. It was like, I think, 2014 or something. It's like the decline of North American birds or American birds, so it shows, you know, that we've lost billions of birds, right, and they explain it better. You should read the paper. I highly recommend it. It's easily accessible.
Speaker 2:But one of the hip shots, the take-homes, rather, without question, the group of birds, the guild, right, a guild is just a gathering of likenesses, right, the guild of birds that is, hands down, in the most precipitous decline in all of the Americas is grassland birds.
Speaker 2:You know we've lost more than half of our grassland bird overall population and this is based on 50 years of qualified data. Right, and we were talking earlier about how birders share information and how groups like Cornell, which is where Ken Rosenberg is out of, has really revolutionized ways to share vetted citizen science data. There's quality, quality data, sets on abundance and diversity and distribution, range-wise population dynamics, biogeography all of that and this paper put all of those together and found that within the last 50 years, grassland birds have gone extinct in North America. We've lost grassland birds and it's very likely we're going to lose others unless something changes, because the declines are just so precipitous. Right Three in five meadowlarks are gone right. So that's why and I know that before I collected these data so like standing in a field where there's a literally a robust like, imagine like a bustling downtown city street of meadowlarks doing their thing, versus like a ghost town.
Speaker 2:You know like it opened my eyes and my heart very quickly. Oh my God, these ranchers, these working lands. This is going to be the way that we save North American grassland birds, and no one can do this work better than existing ranchers, right, even if they've never done ant grazing before, nobody's better suited to do this work than them.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:So, so like I think they're a key, a key key partner in saving grassland birds globally, frankly, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, you know we look at this trend in eating beyond burgers and meatless lab meats and that type of thing. It's like, unfortunately not possible. When you have a big piece of land, in general, you have to in some way be able to have enterprises on it that allow you to pay for that land in the long run. Sure, without question. Yeah, and as we. If we, if we don't have the ungulates on there, then the land does start to degrade and we start having issues. Or if we just let them go and just do whatever, then we come to these continuous grazing scenarios, and so ultimately, you know, this management is the key If we're staying in the, in the type of society and economy that we're in now, which I don't see it going anywhere anytime soon, not that it can't change, and I would like to see the next economy come. However, this is something that we have to consider, and it's also taking more land out of grasslands and into croplands that are sprayed and tilled. Yeah, not necessarily the answer either.
Speaker 2:Not at all, and so I'm working on another working lands research project in annual crop systems in multiple biomes. So I'm in the Northern Great Plains and Southern Great Plains and dairy areas in Michigan and Quebec and it's I mean, it's very clear that even some of the most forward-thinking current regenerative annual row cropping is still harsher on the landscape than any perennials, than a decently managed perennial system, right Now. That said, we rely on food production and I love eating grains. I'm super stoked that we're leaning on Gabe Brown's soil health principles. Right, you know keeping live roots in the ground all the time, cover crops, mechanical termination or, even better, you know graze your cover crop down right. Bring your cattle or your sheep or your neighbor's cattle or sheep in to graze down your cover crop before your cash crop comes up. Polycultural, like there's, people are doing really cool stuff and, like again, I've had the pleasure of meeting at this point hundreds of ranchers and farmers and people are doing some cool shit.
Speaker 2:Pardon my language you know, and it's so like, it's really heartening. However, like that vegetarian burger, that Beyond Burger, it's what has a lot of like soy in it, right, like I don't even know exactly what the contents are, but that's annual row crop production that's going to be tilling. So, like you, and 90, more than 90 percent of your soy production is going to include active tilling of the landscape, which then requires you to have to try and restore all the things that you've just destroyed. So you're putting nitrogen or lime or phosphorus, um, you're spraying insecticides that are literally illegal for you and me. Right, there's agricultural waivers. You can use these chemicals that are damn scary, the herbicides, right. So, like you're having all these, you're killing and fighting the system and even the ones that are doing it organic and stuff. It's still very harsh on the landscape to produce these large scale monocultures of soybean. I would argue and I'm glad there's some voices like, I don't know if you know Chef Molly. So a friend of mine introduced me to her digitally.
Speaker 2:We've been planning to connect, but like, I mean her world exploded when she faced facts and was like look, it became clear to me once I she bought a farm, so and she's still vegan, by the way, or vegetarian, right like. But like in having a farm and trying to produce foods for sage and her other family restaurants, she learned quickly like oh my god, there's a lot of death in this process, and integrating livestock into the system greatly reduces the amount of death and us eating meat as omnivorous beings. It really. It checks so many boxes. Naturally, it really fills this ecological niche. But, like I, you know, she's fighting a good fight right now and unfortunately, it's at personal cost.
Speaker 1:Right, she's getting threats and being harassed and losing money and well, for the listeners who don't know, she and her partner were the go-to and the originators of both raw food and vegan restaurants on the East Coast that have just carried, you know, huge amounts of followers for many years. I mean over 20 years.
Speaker 2:West Coast right yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, on the West Coast. Ultimately, when she made the decision to start serving regenerative meat, it just blew up and ultimately, rattled some serious change there's change.
Speaker 1:She's getting death threats. It's a lot, and you know, and I want to just say right now, right here, that, yes, confined animal feeding operations, the amount of feeding, the way we're deforesting, you know it is not sustainable and so I personally am not advocating that. You know, this is all good and we just need to eat as much meat as we can. We do need to reconsider how we are eating meat and choose wisely, but the answer is not stop allowing the animals to be a part of the ecosystem in a way that they have been for hundreds of thousands of years.
Speaker 2:Right, and thank you for making that important clarification. I sometimes forget because we're like same team here, right, like it's. I've seen it with my own eyes as a skeptical scientist who has a very strong conservation ethic right, very much so Like that's. A strong part of my identity is giving a good goddamn about the landscape and animals, especially wildlife, and I've seen the atrocities, the tragedy of the commons on BLM land, with people just overgrazing and you know like there's really disastrous. Certain types of animal food production, confinementement, animal feed operations are scary places, right, and that goes for hogs, chickens, all of it, right. So you're right, this hyper corporate version of meat production is insane and it's not okay and that's not what we're advocating here. I've literally seen cattle and sheep and goats and pigs that are food products, ultimately be active agents of ecological restoration. Yes, I literally have a freezer full of beef from a landscape where I did bird studies. I gotta hunt over 100 bird species during the breeding season and for any birder that knows like that's a frigging lot, like here in the Northeast in the woods, if you got 35 species during the breeding season, that's a good day.
Speaker 2:Now some of it's geography right. This is Southern North Dakota. So there's killer prairie potholes but the neighboring landscape did had 40, some species to, compared to 103. I think it was 103 speed, like what. It's unbelievable that land is managed by cows a couple right cody, indiana sand. You know their company is prairie soul meats. They let the cows. Obviously they have to make decisions on how and when and where to move the cows, but like they're just, they're backing off and they're letting nature unfold. And man, it was so impressive I was like I think I had to figure out how to, how to come up with some extra cash and and fill my my coolers. I went, bought a cooler and filled it with frozen meat and brought it home and I'm sharing with everyone out here, because I want exactly, with all the birds on it.
Speaker 2:I've never felt better about being an omnivore right. And not only that, they've gotten nutrient studies and they're doing the same things that we see in other regions and with other producers that have had detailed nutrient studies. The phytonutrients are through the roof. All the good minerals and vitamins and stuff are up. I'm not a nutritionist. I watched Stefan Van Vliet and was just blown away and I've seen some of these reports and, like I, I get it. I can see the clear difference from like your average store-bought meat that's, at the very least, grain finished, even if it says grass fed, right If it's only grass fed for six months and then gets shipped to a feedlot to be force fed grains shoulder to shoulder in a facility's not the same right so anyway, really need to know where your meat's coming from.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and like so sorry and one of the reasons I get fired up about that in particular is because, like I'm from philly and del delaware county, so like it's very urban, suburban, right I didn't grow up on a farm, I didn't grow up with access to farms. There's no local farmer where we can get raw milk from or buy chickens from, like that's not a thing where I'm from.
Speaker 2:You go to the grocery store to buy your meat. So what's in there is what you got right and there's very few people that have that, are doing that, have animals that are agents of ecological restoration, that have the capacity, frankly, the money and the scale to play with the big dogs and so like. Will harris is a great example. He had some generational wealth. He's a badass cowboys and he brought that attitude into his marketing once he scaled up and he sent publics. I was so delighted when I was in south carolina with my girlfriend and her family to see will harris's meat in the grocery store. You know, but that's, that's not the norm. And when, when Will Harris and others like that showed up into the market, the corporate guys said oh, wow, Okay, we can adjust, make a couple adjustments to what grass fed is or what American beef is and have a hack Right. So you know they don't.
Speaker 1:they don't only make the adjustments there, they also make the adjustments in the legislature, through lobbying, unfortunately as well. So it's not just a little bit of a market, you know like, oh, let's just one-up them in a marketing standpoint.
Speaker 2:No, this is very, very powerful. This is a very powerful multi-billion dollar annual thing machine that's rolling.
Speaker 2:So that's not what we're talking about here, right? We're talking about these smaller families that are producing meat this way and kind of going against the grain. It's much easier to be just the first link in that chain and that's how that corporation wants it, because they can get you to be really good at one thing and do that one thing for them. Here's your paycheck. Thank you very much. And in the process you're degrading your land, raiding the hen house of equity for your family in the future, right?
Speaker 1:And we've seen this legacy through.
Speaker 2:I mean, you name it how many ways, like Dust Bowl or just family farming just disappearing and corporate farming getting bigger. So that's the type of thing that I want to support. And now I'm blessed, I'm lucky, that I got to travel to the Northern Great Plains and through the Southeast and literally be invited and get paid to go on these landscapes and meet these people. Now they're friends, right, and now I'm bringing that meat home and I'm having a barbecue in two weeks and we're going to go through an eighth of a cow. Right, I'm cooking steaks and burgers and I'm telling everybody about, I'm sharing this story and I'm sharing. I want to make this type of food more accessible to people in in urban centers and places that aren't down the street from. You know you can't I can't just walk into a farmer's market and find this. You know so. And I know there's people doing it closer to home, right, I know that, like there's the Cotton family in New Jersey, they're doing some pretty rad stuff.
Speaker 2:That's amp-ish right and I know there's other folks, but I want to try and use what little platform I have to elevate this, and grew up with a diverse background of friends and people that I consider brothers and ladies that I call mom and stuff, are from all different walks of life, and I want them to eat healthy meat too, so I'm stoked about sharing this and hopefully trying to get people hooked on the good stuff you know. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, and I think it's also important to clarify that you don't have to be an amp grazer to see improvements in biodiversity on your property. You can do straight up rotational grazing, which is maybe. Maybe you move the cattle into six different paddocks over the course of a year. You don't have as long of a rest period, but, that being said, you can still make improvements right, so like the context in which they're working and you've got to.
Speaker 1:You know, start somewhere and then go from there. And yes, can you potentially get better improvements quicker by way of doing more paddocks? Yes, but not always either. There's a lot of people who have been doing amp grazing for a very long time and there's a lot of people who have seen success, and then there are some who have really struggled. You know, it's not just a panacea, but it is something that takes a little bit of time and building. You know it's like as a nutritionist, I don't always tell people who are drinking 12 Cokes a day to just stop. Just stop cold turkey drinking those 12 Cokes a day. I mean, it doesn't really work that way, right?
Speaker 2:So sometimes you have to take that journey. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. You know, in order to reach certain levels of ecological sustainability on your property, you might have to get beyond that, but no one's going to. You're not just going to take that 2000 acres and break it up into 200 paddocks, first season, right. And actually if you did, you'd starve your animals, because if your land is degraded it needs to be rebuilt.
Speaker 2:So just cutting a paddock in half and creating two paddocks, and that one paddock gets a little bit of rest, so it gets to grow a little bit more. Give it one season of rest, if you can, or you know whatever. Give it a couple months here and there. That's going to start to allow that process to where your bank account is filling up. It's almost like interest in an endowment account, right.
Speaker 2:Once that starts to work more, your land that might look like a mowed lawn two, three seasons from now, is going to have more biomass, so then you can afford, you'll have enough food that then you can cut it up into four smaller pieces and by then you'll have already figured out how to move fence and reestablish that relationship with your cows so they're not flighty if you don't see them as much because you're a continuous grazer. Right, you start to rebuild that relationship and then you go. Damn, I was able to catch that. You know number B42 has pink eye and I could address that before it affects others in the herd. Or you know like there's all kinds of little benefits to spending more time with your animals and moving. There's a magic in there, there, really is Everybody loves being around cows.
Speaker 1:If you're a rancher like, no matter how you're, no matter how you're doing it you love going out to check the cows Right on. Yeah, yeah, so let's take this back a little bit to. I want to continue on with the birds and equate a little bit to how. How the birds are reflection of our ability as humans to be healthy, or since the decreasing of bird species, right, like when we look at species reduction, whether it's insects or birds or all of bird species. Right, like when we look at species reduction, whether it's insects or birds or all of the above, right, we're not just losing birds. We're losing in many different animals insects, birds, and so, as those degrading is happening, we also see declines in human health, right, and so I wanted you to share I know that we talked when we were preparing for this call about your friend who has a podcast, and can you tell us her name and her podcast and ultimately just kind of how birds can help humans, just in general.
Speaker 2:Yeah, gladly so. Dear friend of mine, holly Merker, one of the best birders I've ever met in my life. Her and a friend of hers also named Holly started a podcast called the Mindful Birding Podcast, and so Holly is one of the most special human beings I've ever met. She's a cancer survivor, she's a mother, she's just sweet and funny, she's got great taste in music, right, and a great friend, a true, true friend. She's so thoughtful and she published a book called Ornotherapy and I highly highly recommend it.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's basically about that right, About how birdsong and the presence of birds in our lives can bring us great joy and can be deeply therapeutic, especially when enduring tougher things in life. You know, through that podcast they've interviewed some really amazing folks in, you know, psychology, psychiatry, physiology, to look at some of these effects of how birdsong or being around birds can have some great benefits. And they go well beyond birds, as one should. Right, you know, birds are a reflection of a functional system, so you're in an ecosystem that they often are good indicators of. So there's also plants and other animals, and you know, as you I love that you've mentioned this olfactory you know there's different smells. So, like you know, going out to see birds, being interested in birding. You don't have to be a professional bird watcher. You could never have looked through binoculars in your life and still be a birder. You can be birder, curious and start tomorrow, and you're just as much a birder as I am. You know, it doesn't matter when you start. You can reap these benefits. I get real fired up thinking about this. Like it makes sense that we have these intrinsic and beautiful connections to birds.
Speaker 2:You know, for those that aren't aware, birds are theropods. They're a confirmed lineage of a group of dinosaurs. So you know, not all the dinosaurs went extinct. We got them here. We eat their eggs all the time. Right, they're all around us. It just amazes me when you look at like vertebrates specifically. Right, they're all around us. It just amazes me when you look at like vertebrates specifically right. Let's look at mammals, fish, birds, right. All these vertebrates, how many of them have functionally and effectively mastered every single biome within our atmosphere short of the deep, deep sea? Right, that's the fish domain. Mammals have done pretty well down there too. Right, there's some pretty amazing mammals like sperm whales and stuff, and bats can fly, but they don't get 50,000 feet up, right?
Speaker 1:Well, you were saying earlier that there's even some birds that do dive deep into the ocean Big time.
Speaker 2:And not just flightless birds like penguins. Right, penguins are amazing, clearly right, they've given up the magic of flight in order to be excellent. They're kind of seals they're like bird seals, right, um weird, I forget. I don't quote me on it, but like I think some penguins could spend like 30 minutes underwater you know, like unbelievable.
Speaker 2:But also like northern gannets, they will hover up and they both use olfactory they can smell A lot of seabirds use smell as well. They'll smell fish up. You know there'll be downwind of fish hundreds of miles away and find the fish right. It's unbelievable. But they'll start diving. They will dive down and then actively swim, sometimes 100 meters deep, chasing fish around right, which is just astounding to me. And there's a whole group of pelagic birds, these seabirds that they sleep on the just on ocean, on currents above the water. You know their entire morphology is adjusted. There's an albatross named wisdom that's 60 some years old and is still laying eggs. What? That's insane to me. Your average passerine, your forest songbirds, live four to five years old. You know 65 year old bird that's still producing young every year, like where?
Speaker 1:where does that albatross live?
Speaker 2:um, and actually there's another steve affelbaum thing. During, I think, grad school, I think he had the great pleasure of helping band Wisdom. So it's maybe Pribilof Island, it's one of the atolls, maybe Midway Atoll. So off of Alaska, that amazing and peculiar archipelago of islands, off of.
Speaker 1:Alaska.
Speaker 2:Wow, yeah, so like those seabirds, right, they hatch out. They're much more altricial, right, they need a lot of care. So, like they'll be in these, these burrows on, like volcanic cliff faces, for a year or so, and then they'll fledge and disappear for years, they just they're out over the open ocean, you know, and then eventually we'll come back only when they're of breeding age, which could be five, six years later.
Speaker 2:You know, it just blows my mind. So sorry. That's just one facet of diversity for birds. Birds have conquered and mastered pretty much all landscapes. So and with we know that there was indigenous humans, bipedal hominids in most places, tens of or hundreds of thousands of years ago, you know, possibly farther back, I don't know. Like let's got to insert some humility here, right, but humans have been a part of this landscape a very long time and we've been looking to birds for guidance, for spiritual, spiritual stuff. We've been eating them for a long time. The flightless birds, like the Moa they made ostrich look like you know peanuts, right, these massive, massive birds those were the birds in new zealand that have gone extinct.
Speaker 2:Right, that is correct okay right, yeah, now there's, there's a the kiwi is. It is within, I think, the same family group. They're these greatly reduced and I've amazingly and I think steven j gould has a good like little essay on this they're really peculiar from an evolutionary perspective because they came from these giant birds and they reduced in size and we see plasticity in birds, pretty much darwin's finches, right or like crossbills.
Speaker 2:You know, sorry, I'm getting excited here um apapane, like the hawaiian honeycreepers we've. You know, not only have we culturally kind of really screwed things up in hawaii with colonialism, but also we've introduced Japanese black rats, mongoose barn owls, pigs and sheep and deer and all those crazy things that are causing disaster in literally the most remote island archipelago. The highest percentage of endemism in plants, insects, birds, you name it, it's all there. You know it's 2,000 miles from anything else, right, and it's all there. You know it's 2 000 miles from anything else, right, and it's organic orogeny, so like it takes so long for things to get there and the ones that do figure it out. It's a very niche thing and we're screwing it up, you know, unfortunately, so like the honey creepers are going away.
Speaker 2:They talk about extinction. I think another one is formally listed as extinct this year, like just a couple months ago. Right, it's just heartbreaking. Well, the Apopanae is the one that is the closest, is the most abundant, right, it's kind of getting along, we're seeing its bill is straightening, right, all these birds had these adaptations to feed on lobelia trees and other peculiar trees that had these amazing flowers and their bills followed that shape so they could drink nectar from them. They can't survive. Now they have these highly specialized bills and nowhere they can't eat with them.
Speaker 1:Apapani's bill is actually straightening out they're becoming more because the lobelia are because most of the relied on yeah are extinct. Yeah, yeah, well just so, um our listeners know, we might need to create a glossary for this episode oh, definitions.
Speaker 2:It's funny. But one of my now best friends, tony crowsdale, he he said after he first met me and he met me through music. We got friends that are musicians and he's, he's a musician too. He was like yo, is that guy mike full of shit? He like was he just making up words the whole time? And then like Googled all these things. It was like, oh damn, no, he's just. I apologize.
Speaker 1:No, it's good. It keeps you on your toes. You know you want to keep learning, and etymology is amazing, right. It's really where words come from, and especially when you're in the realm of plants and species, and it's just fascinating.
Speaker 2:If you want to have a fun time, look at the glossary of a botanical book a vascular plants of Pennsylvania, like Tim Rhodes and, and I'm sorry, ann Rhodes and Tim Block. If you look at their glossary, just like oh my God, you know there's 40 different words for hair on a stem.
Speaker 1:It's amazing, it's amazing.
Speaker 2:I'm sure there's a drinking game in there somewhere.
Speaker 1:I'm sure, absolutely. I'll have to make that up next time we're in person with each other, okay, so I do want to ask one other question. Ultimately, I'd really like to know you know you've had a lot of very intimate reactions with a lot of different types of creatures on this earth, whether it's a bird or a snake or an insect, or salamanders, which I think you said was your first highlight, right your? Or salamanders, which I think you said was your first highlight, right your spark credit the red salamander. Is that what it was?
Speaker 2:Northern red Pseudotriton rubra. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you've had all these interactions and I'm just wondering how do you feel this really sets you apart from how others view the world? What do you take the most out of all of this, and how does it differentiate you?
Speaker 2:I appreciate the question. I would actually say that I've learned more about what makes me most similar to other human beings through it. I mean, I'm lucky and you know it's not just luck, there's work involved and drive but like being immersed in natural systems and just constantly questioning. Having a culture of humility, confusion and education has been a really amazing journey. And the more I get into minutiae and I'm able to connect those pieces and then scale back and see the web and understand it better, it's given me a much deeper appreciation for us as a species and how we truly belong within it. That creates this grace.
Speaker 2:Now, by default, I'm a lover. You know I've always loved humanity. People can suck. You know I've headbutt more than one person in my life. You know, and you know there's a lot of people that have agendas that are sad to me because, whether it's in religion or politics or business, when they're preying on other people or stepping on the heads of some to gain for a few others, that's not cool to me. But even those people deserve grace.
Speaker 2:We as human beings, we belong in this really complex and crazy natural system. Life is not only not guaranteed, but is short in the scheme of things. Right. One human lifetime is a world, it's an ocean, but it's really nothing. It's a the scheme of things, right? One human lifetime is a world, it's an ocean, but it's really nothing. It's a drop in the bucket.
Speaker 2:Right, life and death are very real and the more I can, the more I see nature unfold, the more I realize how much I love humans and how, how we all deserve grace and like. I don't care where you came from, what your background is, you have an entitlement to enjoying nature. It's a birthright to be able to explore, understand, not understand, be confused, be amazed, but like be a part of this tangled web of existence. And every time I would say every time I've seen people's enhanced exposure to other animals and cool plants and stuff. That's where that common bond hits. There's like a frequency that's just like zing, like it's there and so that's probably not the answer you expected. You know it's like that.
Speaker 1:I wasn't expecting anything. I love it. I think that it makes complete sense to me. I 100% agree. It's like the more time you have on land and seeing these webs, it really does create just a huge understanding of our interconnectedness and our need for each other, right, like we are all in need of each other and I really do fully understand that Right.
Speaker 2:And if we want large scale genuine stewardship of this, let's use just this country right. Let's say for the United States of America. If we want to actually be genuine stewards of our land and create a legacy of wealth for future generations, we can't just put a fence around everything. I was just reading this conserved land thing update. I love it. There's there's 69 land trusts in here. I've worked with 27 of them, right, they're doing good work, but their their numbers are a couple hundred thousand acres. The private land is millions and millions of acres, right, and we need food to survive.
Speaker 2:It's not lost on me that really the beauty of working with these ranchers and farmers and seeing how completely different backgrounds right we can very quickly fall on the same common values and see a solution for literally all people in how we're managing our land and producing food at the same time. I really think the profane versus pristine has to stop right. Working lands are conservation lands if we manage them in a certain way, and there's champions out there that are showing us how to do it. You know I'm honestly I shouldn't even share this yet, but you know I'm a very much an urban dude and a suburban dude, but and I'm 44 years old and I'm a life or wildlife biologist. But don't be surprised if, within the next five years, I own a farm and I'm starting to move animals around and start doing weird stuff, because I've never I feel like it's I don't know, that's the move you've got.
Speaker 1:You's the move. You've gotten bit. You've gotten bit by the farming bug, and I get that. And I just want to make a point here as well. While we're talking about the interconnectedness of all things and needing each other, another piece of this that I think is very important to mention and you've mentioned colonialism and some of the destruction that has been caused by that A huge piece of this is that we need more land ownership distribution between Black Brown people and really, no matter what we do, until we can cross those thresholds and stop the decrease of Black and Brown land ownership and take those numbers back up, we are not doing anybody, yeah.
Speaker 2:And well said, not only without question, but I think people are trying to water down the importance of this. But, like actual equity right, not equality equity wrecking, we wrecking injustice, without question. For decades the post-Civil War agenda has carried on and, through federal programs, actively excluded black business owners, black landowners, while incentivizing other groups. That's not cool, right. And I mean look, there's federal organizations that have said like, hey, our bad, sorry for the last 60 years of pain. And you know they've tried to roll out a program recently and immediately certain farmers started to say, oh well, that's racist for you to do that. It's like God damn it. No, it's not. You pause for a second and allow somebody else to reap some of the benefits that you have literally five generations of benefits from. You know like?
Speaker 1:so you're not wrong at all.
Speaker 2:There's a huge social justice component to this and I don't know how to tackle it all.
Speaker 1:It's big stuff to tackle and I just downloaded a book today called we Are Each Other's Harvest. It is written by Natalie Basile and she wrote Queen Sugar. I don't know if you watched that documentary series. I have not it's a really good documentary.
Speaker 2:Okay, I'll check it out series. I have not.
Speaker 1:It's a really good documentary and anyway, the book is really goes into all the different stories of a lot of the injustices that have happened to black farmers and you know how so much of our farming in this country literally developed because of the knowledge of black farmers and what they brought with them from Africa. And so ultimately it's. I just started the book. It's amazing, and I also spoke with her today and I think I'll be doing a podcast with her in a few episodes in a few months Love that that's amazing, and but I, in talking about that, you kind of opened up another topic.
Speaker 2:I just have to also say, though, like what we're talking about, not only is it wildly valuable and a super important topic, but this is also still post-colonial topic, right, I mean, we're the elephant in the room is systematic genocide, removal of indigenous people from the landscape and a cultural cleansing which I don't know how that gets rectified, right, and, uh, you know there's. I was again like being in southeastern PA. There's little postage stamps, there's vestige. The most common indigenous cultural thing, you see, is the names of streets and the names of towns out here Conchahokan, wissahikin, tulpahokan, like, there's all these names that are from the original, not even owners, right, the original residents of this landscape, but there's not much access or exposure to it.
Speaker 2:When I'm doing work in Manitoba, like Winnipeg has, first nations, people like a lot, right, like you can, you can meet and talk to people and understand stories.
Speaker 2:You know both current stuff that's pretty hard, right, just the hard legacy of abject poverty, but then also, you know, see these vestiges of cultures that they're holding on to and trying to keep alive, and the same thing in the Dakotas man, like the Dakota, nakota and Lakota nations. They're alive culturally out there and you know they have a postage stamp of land left and how do we find a way to rectify? And there's people that are doing it. Honestly, I feel like this type of grazing practice is one of those things that kind of brings together pieces of knowledge from different groups, without it being like a cultural assimilation or like some weird stuff. It feels like it's a rising tide and it's lifting these ships and I don't know how yet, but I'm sure there's an element of some sort of cultural resolution or rectifying how the people that are here now, that live on this land, can work together and appreciate and respect each other through respecting the land.
Speaker 2:Like I feel like that's a key to solving some of these pre and post-colonial issues that are inherently, you know, foundationally racist.
Speaker 1:You know yeah, well, and there there's big things happening, you know. I mean there's there is land going into conservation, easements that have been given back. There is, um, you know some where just the native people are allowed to use their homelands and do what they will, regardless of not necessarily owning it again. There is, you know, commons land trusts, where people are coming together and buying land together and have it for as long as they want until they decide they don't want to do agriculture on it anymore, and then then they hand it off to the next producer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you know there's all these things happening. It's a small step-by-step, having the conversations. It's not easy and brings up a lot for a lot of people, but you know we have to have the conversations.
Speaker 2:And again, I feel like it's that philosophy of working within the land instead of against it or using it as an extraction tool. That that's. I think that's part, that's a key, it's part of this part of the solution for us, as as a species, to be better to one another.
Speaker 1:Well, and you know, one of the things that was said at the conference that I think is super cool and and I've always done it from the consumer perspective, instead of calling consumers consumers, I just say eaters, right, like everybody's a eater, everybody's a consumer.
Speaker 1:But that whole like concept of producer, consumer, instead of maybe like steward and eater, you know and? And how changing that language can it reframes in your brain. It's like when you walk out and you say, oh, something is making a noise, it's like, well, it's actually some body. You know a thing, it's actually a somebody. And when we just make that little switch in our language, we can start to perpetuate different feelings and so it's, it's cool.
Speaker 2:No doubt, yep, even though I haven't given them. You know names, like Bobby and Susie. I see the same families of birds in my yard and, like I know it's not, oh, that's a gray catbird. It's, that's the gray catbird that lives in that tree and is hunting over there like it normally does, and there's its young. And yeah, these are, these are beings, these are little decision-making like. There are other little amazing entities that I'm lucky enough to share my land with, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the squirrel the land with right, Like trying to get better about it yeah. Well, Mike, I think we should wrap it up. Do you want to share anything about where our audience can find information about you or get in touch with you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure. So I joined a firm called Princeton Hydro water resource engineers, biologists, ecologists, super, super rad group, strong conservation ethic. You can go on any of their social media stuff or their website. There's a bio and a link for me there Also. You know, I don't, I should probably set up a smarter social media thing, but I do have a little side. I got a little, so look for this in the near future. So my partner and I started a small company called Nature Beast, which is a silly name, but it's great. She's whatever she. It's her brilliance. I fell in love with it. I'm not doing active ecological consulting under it because I work for another consulting firm, but we got some weird ideas related to some social media stuff. So look out for that soon some nature beast weirdo social media stuff awesome, that sounds good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, thanks again, and maybe we'll have you on again to talk about nature beast once you have birthed that birth, that beast yeah, right on, right on, sounds great.
Speaker 2:Thanks, I really appreciate chatting with you. I love the ethos of this podcast and I'm super grateful for being invited. Thank you.
Speaker 1:You're welcome. Thank you All right. Well, my friends, there you have it. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Land Food Life podcast. I hope you enjoyed the show and gained some true gems of insight that will enhance your quality of life. If you're looking for personalized guidance on holistic health, nutrition or running a regenerative agriculture business, visit landfoodlifecom to explore my virtual and in-person programs. You can also join my mailing list at landfoodlifecom. I appreciate your valuable time spent here with me and if you're digging this content and you're finding it helpful, please share it with your friends and others in your network.
