bird watching - The Environment Report

Birder Connects With Nature

Anya Dale (pictured above) says being in nature "forces you to look at your priorities." (Photo by Kyle Norris)

Here’s the latest installment in our
occasional series about people’s connections to
the environment. Producer Kyle Norris has been
asking people if they feel close to nature. Today
she hikes with her friend Anya Dale,
an amateur bird-watcher and nature enthusiast:

Transcript

Anya and I are walking through a shady, hilly forest. And birds are
chirping everywhere. Usually when Anya hikes, it’s just her and nature.
Microphones and reporter friends usually don’t make it into the
equation, so I think Anya’s a little nervous:

“See um, yeah, that’s where it is (bird sounds) I don’t know if you can
see it. Sorry I’m totally getting distracted. Do you see, it’s like
through that tree, the one tree behind it, now it’s flying back. I
think they’re red belly woodpeckers. Let’s go down closer.”

Anya is little and feisty. She buys almost all of her clothes from
second-hand stores. I always see her in earth-toned corduroys and
fleece vests. She’s this eco-groovy chick walking down the path:

“Well, right now, we are walking through Bird Hills. Checking out the
trails. I partially try to just zone out a little bit. Coming out here to a
certain extent is an escape to do much of anything. But I also just
find myself listening to all the birds and trying to figure out what
kind they are and where they are. It’s usually not too successful, but it’s
still fun just listening and paying attention to what’s around.

Anya says that when she doesn’t spend time outside, she gets grouchy.
She recently visited New York City. Even though she had a fun time, she
says the city just doesn’t move her the way spending time in nature
does. Like the time she went backpacking with her friend:

“It forces you to look at your priorities and what does, it really
matter you don’t like your hair cut you got, does it really matter that
you don’t do all of these things. Or do you have time to focus on what
is important that you accomplish in your life? Or the people in your
life. And it forces you to slow down.”

As we walked through the woods, Anya pointed out tons of birds. We
listened to one that sounded like a monkey. Anya said that bird always
make her laugh. In fact, a lot of birds catch her attention. We
couldn’t walk for more than a few minutes without her stopping mid-
sentence to track some bird:

“Part of what the awe I have in birds is that they’re really tough. And
also just being able to survive the winters or even just the cold
nights, they essentially go into torpor, it’s sort of like a type of
hibernation not quite as deep. But they go into this every night and
lose fifty percent of their body weight and they have to shiver and
shiver and shiver to wake themselves back up. And it’s a huge stress on
their body and they truly, what they eat during the day is what’s going to keep them
alive at night. But you just hear their pretty songs and they’re flying
around playing and they’re incredibly tough.”

They’re not just tough. They have a bird’s eye view of life, literally.
Anya told me that she admires how birds can really see the big picture
of things. That’s because they migrate thousands of miles. She says
that larger view is something she strives to see in her daily life:

“And I think about them, they can just, not that there’s an infinite
number of place they can fly to, but they sort of get this more
regional or global view of the world than most other species or other
animals. So, sometimes I think that’s got to be amazing to see things
on a bigger scale like that…Sorry I always get distracted as soon as I see
a bird, so it’s hard for me to focus!”

I’m not a birder and I don’t really spend a lot of time paying
attention to birds. But after Anya and I went hiking I started to
notice them. Like the other day a cute little bird with a cherry-red
splash on its head stood next to me on the sidewalk. And I heard
woodpeckers during my morning run through the woods. Birds are
everywhere. And maybe you’re like me… you didn’t even notice them,
until somebody pointed them out.

For the Environment Report, I’m Kyle Norris.

Birders Flock to Hawk Mountain

Each fall, thousands of hawks, eagles, and other birds of prey fly hundreds of miles in search of warmer climates. And between August and December, nearly 70-thousand people will climb to the top of a bird sanctuary called Hawk Mountain to get a closer look at those birds. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Brad Linder reports:

Transcript

Each fall, about thousands of hawks, eagles, and other birds of prey fly hundreds of miles
in search of warmer climates. And between August and December, nearly 70-thousand
people will climb to the top of a bird sanctuary called Hawk Mountain to get a closer
look at those birds. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Brad Linder reports:

“Those of you haven’t found the osprey, it’s over there at owl’s head, naked eye here to
the right.”

On a clear day, the view from atop Hawk Mountain stretches for more than fifty miles.
But on this particularly hazy Saturday afternoon, bird-watchers are pushing their
binoculars and telescopes to the limits.

“Well, we’re making them out there, they’re coming in. It’s like you just gotta wait ’til
they get a little closer than what they typically do. They’ve been popping out of clouds
and haze all day for us.”

Doug Wood is a volunteer at Hawk Mountain in Eastern Pennsylvania. This afternoon,
he’s the official bird counter.

“We’re basically taking a lot of field information. Wind, weather, temperature, cloud
cover, wind direction. And then we’re basically monitoring the birds’ species, age, sex,
and recording it every hour.

“Look! An Osprey! And then fade to scene change.”

Researchers at Hawk Mountain have been keeping records of osprey and other migratory
raptors for more than seventy years, making it the oldest monitoring station in the world.

In the early twentieth century, hunters would shoot thousands of birds from the
mountainside each year. Today, people travel from all over the world to shoot birds with
their cameras.

Matt Wong came all the way from New Zealand to study at the sanctuary.

“Hawk Mountain is internationally renowned as a hawk watch site. And also a place
where big research actually happens. Now, not many of the locals around Pennsylvania
actually realize this, but it’s actually huge on the international scene. It’s world
recognized, and that’s one of the reasons why I came here.”

In Wong’s country, there are only two species of raptors. In America, he’s had a chance
to study dozens of varieties.

But even with so many different species populating North America, many people still
think of them as strangers or sometimes even as monsters.

“I still get, amazingly to me, a lot of people that think that these birds are out to get us.”

Volunteer Bob Owens has spent the last 20 years doing education programs at Hawk
Mountain.

“If you intrude into their territory when they have young in the nest, or something like
that, yeah, they’re probably going to chase you. As far as them killing babies and taking
them from baby carriages, this is all old wives tales. This just does not happen.”

Owens runs a small farm for a living, where he says hawks and barn owls help keep
rodents under control. But in a larger sense, Owens says there’s a lot people can learn
from these birds.

“Any three and a half pound bird that can apply four hundred pounds of pressure with its
talons is built to do what they’re doing. They are at the top of the food chain. And that’s
the other big thing that it shows us. It just opens up a door here as to all the reasons the
birds are either dropping or rising in population. What are we doing?”

Owens says in the seventy years researchers at Hawk Mountain have been counting birds,
they’ve seen populations rise and fall. Hawks and eagles are hardy birds. But even the
most successful predators can fall victim to environmental change.

Keith Bildstein is the sanctuary’s director of conservation programs. He says raptors are
like sensitive tools, telling researchers when something’s wrong with an ecosystem.

“Birds of prey are excellent biological indicators. In the middle of the last century they
told us that we were having a problem with our misuse of organochlorine pesticides,
specifically DDT. Today, they’re leading us in explorations of the spread of West Nile
Virus.”

Bildstein says because raptors are at the top of the food chain, when their numbers fall
it’s a pretty good sign that their food source is dwindling, their habitat could be
disappearing, or air quality might be suffering.

But for most of Hawk Mountain’s visitors, the birds are more than barometers of a
healthy ecosystem. According to birder Judy Higgs, they’re beautiful creatures,
especially when viewed from a great height.

“These birds are just majestic. And the other thing is that they go so far. You know,
some of these birds are going to South America!”

Higgs first climbed the mountain in 1970, when she was a student at nearby Kutztown
University. Before moving out of state, Higgs used to come to Hawk Mountain daily…
she stills visits on weekends whenever she can.

“I used to do work in the morning, come here in the afternoon, go home, and finish my
work at night so I could be here.”

By day’s end, Higgs and her fellow birdwatchers count more than 600 raptors. During
the fall season, as many as 70-thousand predatory birds, from vultures to falcons might
pass by on their way to distant points.

For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Brad Linder.

Counting Birds Becoming Christmas Tradition

Christmas is a time for tradition. For tens of thousands of bird lovers,
the highlight of the season is the National Audubon Society’s annual
Christmas Bird Count. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kelly
reports on how this century-old tradition has changed many people’s
perspective on birds – and Christmas: