Tag: ornithologist

The Color of the Environmental Movement

  • Many hope that the future generations of envionmentalists and conservationalists will include more minorities. That's why the National Wildlife Federation now has a program to encourage youth and adult minorities to learn about and adopt careers in environmental fields. (Photo by Hans-Günther Dreyer)

The environmental movement and conservation agencies tend to be very white. There are relatively few people of color involved in environmental activism or getting jobs in resource management. If one man has his way, that will change in the coming years. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

The environmental movement and conservation agencies tend to be very white. There are relatively few people of color involved in environmental activism or getting jobs in resource management. If one man has his way, that will change in the coming years. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:


If you happen to go to a national conference of environmentalists, or conservation-minded organizations, you probably wouldn’t see a lot of black faces… or Latino… or Asian. Oh sure, a few sprinkled here and there, but mostly, it’s white folks.


But that’s beginning to change. Jerome Ringo is the chair-elect of the National Wildlife Federation. He will be the first African-American to head up a major environmental organization. He says times are changing.


“We are seeing a reversal of the trend. We’re not where we want to be with respect to minority involvement in conservation, but I can guarantee you we’re not where we were. Years ago when I got into the environmental movement, there were very, very few minorities involved.”


Ringo is working to keep the trend reversed. Through the National Wildlife Federation’s youth program, Earth Tomorrow, he’s encouraging young African-Americans and other minorities to learn about the environment and conservation.


And a few young people are listening. Kenneth Anderson is a college student, studying to be an ornithologist. He’s something of a rare bird himself. He grew up in the city – in Detroit – where he says a lot of his friends and neighbors are not all that interested in nature and the environment.


“Really, I mean I can understand why people wouldn’t because throughout most of their life, they’re in this urban setting away from as much wildlife or forests or anything like that so they don’t look at the environment as something of importance because in a way it’s already been taken away or hidden from them. So, that’s why you don’t have a lot of people of color or minorities involved in environmental fields.”


Being cut off from nature is only one obstacle. There are others. Kiana Miiller is a high school student in Detroit. She says a lot of kids are worrying about more pressing problems…


“People of color are in urban areas and urban areas have a lot of different problems like financial issues, stuff like that. So, environmental issues may not be number one on their priority list.”


Kiana Miller and Kenneth Anderson are among a handful of young people of color who are at a meeting to hear from activists and people working in wildlife management about getting involved in environmental issues… and getting jobs.


Like a lot of the kids, many of the speakers at this meeting grew up in the city. For example, Monica Terrell says she didn’t know anything about nature until someone took her on a camping trip when she was a kid. Now, she’s with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources working with state parks all over. She’s at this meeting recruiting.


“People of color and also women need to be made aware of the career opportunities. When you look at different fields, you usually look at people that you know who are already in those fields. You may have a father who is a doctor, a friend who is an attorney, teachers, plumbers, what have you. But we don’t have very many people of color and women who are already in those fields. And so, that’s why it’s so important for us to go out to recruit, select, hire these folks, mentor them, make sure they have a comfortable, successful experience in natural resource management fields.”


Getting the message of environmental involvement doesn’t stop at getting young people thinking about their options. The National Wildlife Federation’s Jerome Ringo says it also means getting grown-ups, especially the poor and people of color, to get active in their community when there are environmental problems. He says he first got involved in environmental activism because he knew of chemical releases that were being emitted from a refinery, and some of those chemicals could cause health problems for the people who live nearby – most of them low-income African-Americans.


“We have to readjust our priorities from just quality of life issues like where next month’s rent is coming from, how do we feed our family. Environmental issues have to be within our top priorities because, as I tell the people in ‘Cancer Alley,’ Louisiana, what good is next month’s rent if you’re dying of cancer? So, we’ve got to be more involved in those quality of life issues and make environmental/conservation issues one of those key issues in our lives.”


Ringo says whether it’s fighting pollution, or a desire to preserve a little of the remaining wilderness, people of color need to take hold of environmental and conservation issues, and make them their own.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.

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Unraveling Mystery of Birds’ Night Calls

  • Ornithologist Bill Evans has been tracking down avian night flight calls for 17 years.

Many North American birds are in serious decline. But scientists aren’t sure what’s wrong because birds are hard to count. The problem is partly that birds often migrate long distances between wintering sites and summer breeding grounds. Usually, they fly unobserved at night, and in many cases scientists don’t know what route they take. However, a new technique promises to solve this problem. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Daniel Grossman has our story:

Transcript

Many North American birds are in serious decline. But scientists aren’t sure what’s wrong because birds are hard to count. The problem is partly that birds often migrate long distances between wintering sites and summer breeding grounds. Usually, they fly unobserved at night, and in many cases scientists don’t know what route they take. However, a new technique promises to solve this problem. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Daniel Grossman has our story:

(Sound on dock, with Evan’s whispering out bird names fades up under intro.
Continues under Grossman track, then heard in clear.)

It’s a warm spring evening on the south Texas coast. Ornithologist Bill Evans sits on a dock, listening for birds.

“Grey-cheek thrush.”

Grossman: “That high one?”

“Yeah. (makes sound). Moor hen calling behind us on the ground. Oh sorry, that’s a black-necked stilt.”

Evans has been listening to and studying these night calls since he had an epiphany at a Minnesota campground in 1985. Then a recent college dropout and avid birder, Evans was adrift, unsure what to do with his life.

“I was getting back to a campsite about two in the morning and heard an incredible flight.”

Hundreds of birds were passing overhead in nocturnal migration, including what appeared to be about 100 black-billed cuckoos.

“If you go out and look for black-billed cuckoos during the day you may see two or three. And I’m thinking, ‘wow if I had a tape recorder and could somehow document this on audiotape, I might have a pretty powerful conservation document.'”

Bill Evans got a recorder and soon was making tapes of flight calls. But his recordings were of limited use because no one knew which birds made which sounds. The melodious tunes birds perform during the day are well known. But, according to Cornell Professor Charles Walcott, the calls they make during night flights are another matter.

“If you out on an evening and listen to these birds migrating overhead you’ll hear all these twitters, most of which don’t sound anything like what a normal bird sounds like at all.”

Walcott is the former director of the Cornell Ornithology Laboratory. He says night calls may help birds keep from colliding with each other. For decades, researchers hearing these calls were frustrated knowing there were birds in flight, but unable to determine which ones.

“And to be able to recognize individual species by their calls was a dream that many people have had. And Bill is the first one that’s been able to do it on any substantial scale.”

Evans spent the next 17 years prowling migration routes to match birds with their calls. Often his only chance came in the wee morning hours, when sometimes night migrants make a single night call before settling down to eat and rest. Gradually he cracked the code.

“The herons. Amazing squawks. Black-crowned-night heron is a sort of (makes sound). Green heron is a (makes sound). Barn owl. It’s a [makes sound]. Except it’s about ten times louder than that. The dickcissel is actually a sparrow and it’s got sort of a buzzy note (makes sound).

(Sound of truck door closing and truck starting up)

The small, colorful dickcissel is why Bill Evans is here, just north of Brownsville, Texas. He’s set up a network of 15 computerized monitoring stations that listen for dickcissels in flight. It’s the first large-scale effort to track birds using night calls. The network is stretched out along a line he believes these birds cross on their way between Venezuela and the U.S. plains.

Each station has a roof-mounted microphone, connected to a computer. Most of them are at high schools – their large, flat roofs and spacious grounds reduce traffic noise – and they’re generally in a science class. And while Evans does stay up late to listen for pleasure, it’s these computers that are actually doing the work. Each day he collects the past night’s results, in a marathon drive, station by station.

(Sound of high school PA System making announcement cross fades with truck under previous track. Also mixed in sound of crowded high school corridor with students changing classes. Cross-fades with sound of classroom.)

Evans: “Come on over guys. My name is Bill, this is Dan.”

Peter: “Bill and Dan?”

Evans: “What’s your name?”

Tate: “Tate.”

Peter: “Peter.”

Bill: “Nice to meet you guys.”

Some curious students pay Evans a visit at La Ferria High School.

(Evans fades up underneath Grossman. Then heard in clear.)

Evans (to students): “…So anyway the sound comes down this audio cable into this computer. We’re just checking the data from last night…”

(Computer keyboard sounds in actuality fades under track.)

The computer has a program that distinguishes the call of the dickcissel from other birdcalls and extraneous noise. The machine records the call, and saves a picture – or spectrogram – of it. Evans trouble shoots his stations and collects data daily. First he winnows out false positives, sounds that tricked the computer, by inspecting the spectrograms.

Evans (to students): “I’m going to set up one folder to put in the dickcissels’ calls and the other I’m going to put in the noise, the false detections. So now I’ve just classified the detections from last night. We had 28 here that we classified as dickcissels…”

After checking the computer and collecting its data the researcher says he has to run. Each of the 15 stations in his network needs a checkup because this weekend might be the climax of the dickcissel migration, bringing a huge flight of birds.

Evans (to students): “…And this weekend we think there are thousands of them just in Northeast Mexico. They’re going to take off. ‘Cause last year in one night, we had over 3,000 detected at McAllen High School…”

In the end, the big flock didn’t appear until the following week. Though the arrival was delayed for several days compared to the previous year, Evans now has proof that by monitoring night calls he can predict the timing and migration route of an individual bird species.

(Sound of truck door closing and truck starting up.)

Walcott: “It’s really an extraordinary accomplishment.”

Cornell professor Charles Walcott says the migration information Evans is discovering can’t be collected any other way. It’s all the more extraordinary because Bill Evans, who once worked for Walcott, has neither a college nor any other degree.

Walcott: “With Bill’s scheme you can now say, well, this was an evening when we had a huge migration of warblers and they were of the following species. And this is very useful and very interesting information. And it gives you a sense of where the migratory paths for each species of birds might be.”

It’s detailed information like this that conservation specialists need to design plans to protect the most threatened species. In the future Evans hopes several large-scale computer networks of the sort he’s testing in Texas will monitor many species throughout the United States. He hopes the listening posts could help solve the mystery of why so many North American species are in decline. This spring, in an important first step, Evans and collaborator Michael O’Brien released a compact disc with night flight calls of most eastern land birds. Now anyone can learn the secrets Bill Evans has unlocked.

For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Daniel Grossman.

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Bald Eagle Birth for All to See

Most people surf the web for things like stock prices, chat rooms and
pornography. But a bird enthusiast in upstate New York is hoping to
catch their attention another way. He’s using a website to share the
birth of baby eagles with the rest of the world. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Karen Kelly reports.