A IS FOR ANTHROPOCENE: Living in the Age of Humanity
The Bird Episode
Declining bird populations, species and habitats that are recovering, and what you can do for birds (hint: coffee). Jonathan Rice, the museum’s Urban Bird Conservation Coordinator, joins the podcast.
Declining bird populations, species and habitats that are recovering, and what you can do for birds (hint: coffee). Jonathan Rice, the museum’s Urban Bird Conservation Coordinator, joins the podcast.
Welcome to a is for Anthropicene living in the age of humanity with Eric Dorfman, insulin McRae. Hello and welcome back to AE is for Anthropocene living in the age of humanity, the podcast of Carnegie museum of natural history. Hello salon. Hi Eric. We should talk about what the Anthropocene is at the top. All right. Yeah. Maybe not everybody knows, right? The Anthropocene is the proposed geological honk that recognizes the impact of humans activity on earth that will ultimately affect the fossil record of the future. In common parlance, it's the age of humanity. When will the proposed name be either accepted or rejected or think it's going to be in the next two years? There are a number of hoops. Geologists are looking for a global phenomenon. For instance, the easiest example is when 66 million years ago, the meteor hit the earth that created the Gulf of Mexico. It's sent a layer of a Iridium across the entire earth. So when you find rocks of that particular age, you will find this band of Iridium and somewhere on the planet. And I'm afraid, I don't know where it is. There is something what? What y'all call it, golden spike, and this is a place, in fact, I think there is a physical spike put in the ground that represents the quintessential transition in the cross that represents the rocks of that period. So this would be, if you were talking about a species, it would be the holotype of a species to which all other individuals are compared to say if it's going to be that species are not. So everything that I've been hearing the points to about 1945 as the break between the Holocene, the previous epoch and the Anthropocene, the one we're likely to have, which with the the nuclear testing and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Senta cloud of radioactive dust across the entire planet. This is something that you can find on the earth surface. Now if you dig down through the sediment to sediments of that period, and of course as more S soil is created and more things fall on the sediment, all of that will get compressed to align an event line that is either before this, which would be make it the Holocene or after it, which makes the Anthropocene. And if you think about all the activity that would affect the Earth's crust since 1945 plastics, new chicken bones, all sorts of things that that, I mean, people, human beings took off really since that period. We sure think about the statistics. So the fossil record of the future will include all of this compressed down to a tiny thin layer of sandwich and reflect, be dominated by the activities of humans on earth. Excellent. This episode you might say is for the birds. It's the bird episode. I'm very excited. In fact, did, did you know[inaudible]? I may have my statistic wrong, but more people birdwatch in the United States every year than attend sporting events. All sporting events combined. Wow. So that's a lot of birdwatching. Oh, there's a lot of[inaudible] in the United States, in the United States where you wouldn't think so. No. The Steelers maybe, but how they've been playing, you know, that probably kind of like on my back. How are they? Yeah. Does that include sports teams that are named after birds though? The Cardinals? Well you mean right? Yeah. My favorite teams. The ruffed grouse fantastical team. Yeah. The pirates farm league birds are in peril. They are really those that are ready to say that. Well, yes, and in effect, funnily enough, not to over use, uh, analogies, but there canaries in the coal mine, actually not surprising that canaries were used. Birds are very sensitive to changes in climate. Oftentimes they have very particular needs. So the quality of habitats really makes a big difference to them. So there is some dire news we'll start out with. Go ahead and talk about slow. So I study the journal science just released last week a study including partnering with Autobon society and this has been covered by national geographic, New York times, lots of sources that a one in four birds in the last 50 years has perished. What that means is we have right now, nearly 3 billion fewer birds than we did 50 years ago. This means that they died out and are not being replaced. Correct. So this if you like, the standing stock of birds in North America has decreased by that amount, right? Birds that are in threatened habitats are, you know, the, the most vulnerable, especially grasslands, aside from a few species that are fortunate and they have benefited from human intercession. The trend is pretty dire. And this is a study that was led by Ken Rosenberg conservation scientist at Cornell lab of ornithology who said that it was an astounding result even to them, which I mean we all know that birds are getting fewer, but you know these people who are working on birds and seeing them every day and counting them all the time, they and looking at national atlases of birds, they're still stunned at this result. It's very sobering and it seems that this study also has been the most comprehensive. So there's a lot of examples of different sorts of birds that have declined traumatically. So for instance, the birds that might come to your feed or in your backyard, like the dark eyed Junco, which many people who feed birds would know have declined by nearly 170 million individuals. Wow. It's stunning to think how numerous these birds can be, but to think that sort of losses, they can maintain those sorts of losses they can for a little while, but not for long. And you know, you think about the passenger pigeon, which was at one time the most numerous bird on earth. This was a bird that numbered in the billions in the United States, was shot out of the sky for several decades. And John James Audubon, the famous naturalist, described one flock of passenger pigeons passing over where he was that darkened the sky for two days. There were so many birds. This is the kind of thing that we take for granted that birds will always be around. Insects will always be around, there'll always be mosquitoes and summer there'll always be snails in my garden. Those things are changing and we really need to be thinking about what those changes mean. And speaking of that, that Autobon quote, these are previously ubiquitous birds that in our lifetime we've seen diminished in front of our eyes, like warblers sparrows, starlings, blackbirds finches, right? And the grasslands are the most hit in the center of the country. 700 million breeding birds were lost across 31 species since 1970 it really does make you pause and think what is, you know, there, there's now national bestseller, Elizabeth Kolbert's six to extinction. So runaway bestseller pointing out, and it's, it's a bit of a depressing read even though she's such a fantastic writer, but it still carries you along. But the statistics are undeniable. And even here in Pennsylvania, including included in that, in this study, uh, 40% of Pennsylvania bird species are vulnerable to climate change alone. So if the, if the temperature increases a matter of degrees, 40% of our birds may not make it. And of course every projection has shown that that's what's going to happen. And the other thing is that we can't just talk about the birds, right? It's not just the pretty singing in the, in the morning, which are the you like, you don't like depending on your inclination. But birds and insects, the pest insects, they eat insects that will harm trees. They eat insects that carry diseases that not only affect other wildlife, but affect humans as well. Think of the number of birds consuming malaria mosquitoes. For instance, there's a feedback loop that represents the ecological relationships of only species. The warming climate means insects hatch at different times or meeting migratory birds that will, they may miss out, right? Right. The fruiting and flowering seasons of plants are getting earlier, which means that the insects that time they're hatching to those plants are also getting earlier. They can adjust their migration, but the breeding isn't necessarily synchronous with the peak of insects, which also is another hit to their survivability for the survivability of the the hatchlings. So again, we're not just talking about one species or even a suite of species. We're talking about the whole interaction, the whole ecosystem being in huge trouble and birds are sort of a litmus test for the ecosystem. If they're going a whole bunch of other things have to be in real trouble before then. This is a whole integrated system of interactions, of activities of species depending on each other. And we forget how many species we actually dependent on. For instance, bumblebees specifically are used to to pollinate tomatoes, right? So no bumblebees, no tomatoes. This is the kind of thing that we take for granted. We don't even think about what use bumblebees are in our, in our lives. And they pollinate a whole bunch of other crops as well. So is this a disaster today? Not like an earthquake? No. It gets an absolute warning of the kind of concern we should have. But of course there are species that are not in trouble. Yeah, I will. And also if we, if we heed that warning, yeah, there are some examples of what we've done to turn things around. And that's true of the recent past. That's exactly true. This same study mentions some good news, yes. That not all birds declined. Waterfowl saw an increase thanks to I think some some habitat protection. Right. And also thanks to the ban on DDT back in the 70s, um, thanks to Rachel Carson, right. Raptors made significant gains, right. And things are also spreading into different sorts of habitats as ecosystems shift. So for instance, the black vulture, which didn't use to occur in Pennsylvania at all before the 1990s is now a very common species. See them all the time, really, as well as the summer tanager and yellow throated warbler. So there are species that are taking advantage of newly available habitat or spreading into habitats that have become an amenable to their existence or curator of only pathology chase Mendenhall. We will ultimately love to get him in for an interview as well and he can talk about some of his, um, his work on plantations in Costa Rica. One other just note of hope in this dire study. Um, if humans slow the rise of global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius, which is about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, that would reduce vulnerability for 76% of these vulnerable North American bird species. This is a really important point because at no point should we ever just throw up our hands and say we can't do anything. Even small improvements to the trajectory of global warming of climate change will make an enormous impact for every 10th of a degree. Thousands more species will die, more arable land will be lost and more homes along the coast all over the world, we'll be saved from inundation. Something else that you talk about song, which was uh, really important. The waterbirds in the study increasing because of human mitigation of environmental impacts is really, really important. It shows that we can make a difference. It shows that we can actually save habitat specifically for species and that they will respond. So it's actually in some ways pointing out a potential crisis is also a call to action for some really effective measures. Right, right. Speaking of habitat restoration and the trapping of invasive species has helped bring Kirtland's warbler back from the brink of extinction. And that's in central Michigan? Yes. What threatened this bird? There were two factors. One was fire suppression. They build their nests in very low branches of Jack Pines, and I understand Jack Pines have flammable resin in their cones, so we started wiping out these, these Jack Pines for fires, depression, and then there's also a non-native parasite called the Brown headed cowbird and they don't make their own nests. They're one of the bird species that kicks the eggs out of other next Cuckoo's. Yeah, and I guess the Kirtland's warbler has been very vulnerable to this nest sabotage. They're not very good at recognizing the Calbert eggs, so they'll sit on the Cal birds eggs. The cowbird will hatch, it'll kick the babies out of the nest. The Kirtland's warblers are babies and then the mother and father Kirtland's warbler will happily raise the Calbert to adulthood. The Kirtland's warblers, a very pretty little bird. It's got its back and head are gray. It's got a little speckle wings, bright yellow throat and belly and a little white ring around its eye. That's beautiful. Yeah, it is this lovely thanks to the diligence of some conservationists working over long period of time. They have two projects. They've trapped cowbirds and they've planted young Jack Pines, which increases habitat and they've been making a recovery. It's not a recent problem. This bird had low numbers during the pre-settlement era, actually in Michigan and well, the other thing is that some birds simply are just not very numerous right there. They're breeding biology makes them rare birds in any ecosystem. There are species that are very, very common and they're usually the generalists. And then there's species that are very rare and they specialize and have what is called niche differentiation. So they do something that no other species can do. They have a very narrow habitat niche and they survive just fine like that. But when there are changes, those rare birds that are dependent on a very narrow habitat are especially vulnerable. So in 1961 there was an estimated 1000 of these birds remaining in Michigan. By 1971 that population had decreased to about 400 by the 80s that population was estimated to be 200 males remaining. And this, so this project, this restoration project has been going on since the 80s and in 2001 this species reached 1000 pairs. Today we believe there are 2000 breeding pairs in the upper Midwest. Well, when you think about that, that's a 10 fold increase from their lowest number, which is amazing. Yeah. This also goes again to what you can do. We can all choose where we get our coffee. True. So Smithsonian has a migratory bird friendly coffee program that is deleting certification of bird friendly coffee. They have a list online. I'm happy to say that Pete's coffee, which is one of my favorites, which we serve in mice office. That's our coffee from my home state of California. It's on the list. That's fantastic. If you want to be happy, you want to sponsor us pizza. We love you. Petes. There are three criteria for Smithsonian's migratory bird friendly coffee program. One necessary foliage, coverage to tree height, and three biodiversity for quality bird habitat, and their certification is according to most experts, the most rigorous. So if you see that seal, that means you've gotten your responsible coffee. You can also purchase coffee from Ethiopia or Kenya because coffee is a native understory in East Africa. There's a whole field of best practice around shade, coffee, shade, growing, which is a really important part of this. We can't talk about birds and the Anthropocene without talking about chickens, right? The most common bird in the world, you might have heard of the most common wild bird in the world. It's called the red build. Kalia red build Weaver bird, they're about one and a half billion individuals. That's a lot. And you see these huge, huge flocks streaming through the sky. They come that eat people's crops in sub Saharan Africa. They're a huge concern and they're probably more numerous than they ever were because of agriculture, but they were always an incredibly numerous bird. It's an amazing thing to see a flock sort of rolling through the sky. They're sort of like, if you've ever seen starlings, they have this sort of pattern that goes through. They, these are like that, but they're just huge, huge clowns. But no, they are not the most numerous bird in the world by a lot. One and a half billion. Sounds like a lot of birds, but no, it is the chicken. There are 66 billion chickens in the world. That's a lot of chickens. It is. In fact the most numerous bird ever known. I mentioned the passenger pigeon earlier, which before the chicken was the most numerous bird, and that was only 5 billion, just a tiny little speck compared to chickens. And it's really interesting to think where those chickens are, right? They're broken down really unevenly by country. Sure. Really interesting too, to hear how that breaks down. So China, there are 9.6 billion chickens produced, by the way. These are 2016 numbers. Obviously chickens, many of them die not long after they're produced. So this is really about production, but at any one point this about the numbers that you'd likely see. So 9.6 billion chickens in China, 8.9 billion chickens and the U S Brazil is next with about 6 billion chickens. And that's kind of most of it, right? It tails off pretty quickly after that. The really interesting thing is that just 55 years ago there were only 7.5 billion chickens. So we've gone from in just over 50 years from seven and a half billion chickens to 66 billion chickens. And that's like you think about what we were talking about earlier and the drop off in numbers of wild birds is really commensurate with this huge skyrocketing of chickens. So bio mass of birds is probably about the same. Really. How many chickens is that per Wilson? In 1961 there were just over 3 billion people. So now there in 2016 there were seven, seven and a half billion people. So worldwide in 1961 there were 0.0024 chickens per person or one chicken for roughly every 400 people globally. And in 2016 when they were obviously money, more people, there were 8.82 chickens for every person. Wow. So that's just like this crazy. Do we need that many chickens? So let's think about, um, we'll compare the U S and Kenya, right? So you've got us this Uber developed world and Kenya, right? And we compare them between 1961 and 2016 and both countries increased their production of chickens about 360% between 1961 and 2016. But can you went up by 580% in its human population and America only by 176 during that period. So the population of chickens went up in the United States from 14 birds per every person to 30 birds per person. Where Kenya went down from one chicken for every person roughly to one chicken for every two people. Do you think there's a correlation with obesity and heart disease? Yes, I don't. I absolutely do. Perhaps chickens, a good meat meat, but we fry it and we, we do, we dunk it in stuff and breaded and make, put it on waffles with maple syrup recovered in chocolate even though, yes we do. Actually I like to come my way. But yes, that's the thing. Does America need 30 birds for every person in America? No, because the hound does not live in America. No, he does not. And he has two chickens. That's even too much for the house. For the ride. He could eat 30 chickens. Right. Of course. A lot of them are laying eggs too. And the other thing is, you know, we've been talking about climate change and of course the basis of this podcast is the Anthropocene. Both of these things are global phenomenon. Of course. We're based in Pittsburgh. We love Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh is in the U S and of course those problems, those us, those American problems feel more cogent to us here, but we're really talking about problems that should be considered in terms of Bangladesh and Kenya and Canada and the U K all over the world. We've got to think of America's problems in a global context. Right after the break we'll have a great conversation with Jonathan Rice, Carnegie museum of natural history's urban bird conservation coordinator. He'll be talking about another way that birds are in peril, but also looking at some technology to save them. That's right, and if this conversation has gotten you down, what she offers Hitchcock's the birds and for the birds.
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Speaker 3:We're here with John Rice, urban bird conservation coordinator, powder mill nature reserve, which was part of Carnegie museum of natural history. Hello John. Hi. Thanks for having me on today. It's great to have you here. Really. It's fantastic to have you here. Sloan, why don't you ask the next question. All right, go. Go for it. John. Say hello. Sloan hot. Hi everyone. John, can you tell us what you do as an urban bird conservation coordinator? That may take a few minutes to dissect here. That's okay. That's good. We've got time. Let's do it. Go, go. John. There's many facets to what I do. I'm a part of several projects out of powder mill, nature's[inaudible], which is the research station of Carnegie museum of natural history. The most related to urban birds would be bird safe Pittsburgh, which is a volunteer based program that looks at the issue of birds colliding with windows, specifically in the downtown Pittsburgh area. So we have several volunteers that walk around in the mornings during the migration seasons in the spring and fall. And they look for birds on the sidewalk that have either died from a window collision or are stunned and they'll collect either the specimen that makes its way back here to the museum or they take a live bird to a rehabilitation center where it would hopefully be able to be released. How many birds are successfully rehabilitated? It varies, rehabilitated to rehabilitate her. It also depends on what bird you're taking. So one bird happened to them as well. Uh, so one bird that we find specifically in March is called the American Woodcock, which kind of looks like a football with really long forceps on its face. Real wonky look converted, but it's very, they're spectacular. I love them. But they really struggle with window collisions during their migration in March. And so those birds we take to our rehabilitate or, and uh, up until recently they really struggled to get them to feed in, in house or they smashing into the glass with their beak. Like is it, uh, I mean they're hitting head on. We don't normally see broken necks. Uh, woodpeckers, we sometimes see broken mandibles, but with Woodcock they have very, very large eyes set on the sides of their head because when they feed, they take that long bill and they probe the soil for worms. They need to have large eyes set on the sides of their head to watch for predators while there, half of their head is underground. And so those eyes tend to get punctured or injured on impact outside of those sorts of injuries. It's mostly brain swelling that causes fatalities more than anything else. Or if a bird gets done, it's more likely to be predated upon or frankly picked up by a street sweeper. So birds colliding into windows. That's a problem that's bigger than Pittsburgh, isn't it? Oh yeah. Yeah. Pittsburgh's pretty small. On the scale of city to city. There's lots of programs like bird safe, Pittsburgh across the country. Baltimore, Toronto, fatal light awareness program. Flap Canada has been running for I think 20 or 30 years now. They've been, they've been at it for the longest. There's our collaborators in Cleveland, uh, New York, Washington one, uh, started this past year in Missouri. So there's, there's a ton. I mean, so like I've heard some scary statistic about how many birds collide into windows in North America. Yeah. So study tens of millions, right? More hundreds of millions. A couple of years ago there was a study done out of the Scott loss lab, university of Oklahoma. Right. I think we'll go with that. We'll go with that. That sounds good to me. They did a large study trying to estimate how many birds in the U S die alone from just the collision. So that's death on impact. And they estimated in the U S alone 366 million to a billion birds die every year in the U S just from window collisions. Wow. And he said that was the impact of loans impact that doesn't take into account birds that survive the window collision and off to die in a Bush. 20 minutes later, two weeks later try to migrate and succumb to their injuries or per data on by cats. Cats have been found to monitor windows just like we do, so they've learned that birds will, especially like in a backyard if you have an outdoor cat and you have a bird feeder outside, because lots of people who like cats also like nature and like birds and you know all that stuff and so they'll have a bird feeder outside feeding their birds, which is wonderful and great. Our birds need that, but oftentimes the birds will leave the bird feeder and actually fly into the window and then when they're stunned, the cat will go and pick them up. But cancers or listen, keep your cat inside. Yeah, cats really are our masters, right? Humans think we made all this all by ourselves, but it was really just sort of the cats screwed. Yeah, no, we won't go there. This is John will get very upset. I won't go down to too long of a keep your cats in doors rant. I know it's true, but you can see why it's best for wildlife. It's best for your cats because they can catch a lot of really bad viruses and diseases and be hit by a car be predated on by a great horned owl. There's a lot of things out there that could take your cat from you. Um, so it's best for everybody to keep it indoors. I've read that birds are tracked when they collide. Their migration drastically change, like fly off like 180 degrees the opposite direction. So we at powder mill have actually started the first study taking these live birds that have survived a collision, has survived rehabilitation and upon release we, if they meet the proper weight, because to tag a bird, the nano tag, the small radio transmitter has to be no more than 5% of the birds body weight. Now, because these birds are also coming off of an injury, we do not put a tag on a bird unless it's at least 3% or low. So the bird has to meet a lot of requirements for us to even tag it. It also has to be one of our target species. So we have a set number of species of birds that we can tag that we were permitted by the bird banding lab. So let's say that a bird collides with a window survives, goes to rehab, survives, is ready to release, meets the weight requirements, and then we go out and we tag it. Uh, so then we tagged the bird and when you release it, normally we release birds here in Pittsburgh in Schenley park. That's as close to a nice safe wooded area that we can get without having to drive them drastically far. And frankly, we don't want to drive them too far because that could potentially impact the study. We want to tag them on release and release them, you know, right there. So we've tagged six birds here in Pittsburgh and we always pair an injured rehabbed bird that we tag with a wildcard burnout at powder mill, at our banding lab. Um, so for every nano tagged bird that we have here from rehab, we have of the same, roughly the same size, and we always try to tag them on the exact same day and release them on the exact same day. So then we could track how those birds continue with their migration, sort of healthy versus not so healthy. That was our first year and then this past year we also added our collaborators that lights out Cleveland, which runs a much bigger version of bird safe Pittsburgh because Cleveland is right on Lake Erie. They get hammers with birds in one morning, October 26th I remember because it was the coordinator who's also the rehabber, it's his birthday. Oh wow. You found 255 birds in one morning. They were picking up birds off the ground and birds were hitting above them and falling on their backs. They were looking down the sidewalk at all the birds and goals were coming in and swooping up the live ones and eating from different species, different species. Yeah. Warblers thrushes sparrows, I mean, all kinds of stuff. It's, it's wa, I mean American Woodcock, that's super wonky bird. You don't find that in downtown Pittsburgh except for March when it's hit a window. When I go down there to pick them up people, they just walk right by it. And it blows my mind how you can just walk by a football shaped bird on the side, you know, it doesn't make any sense. And so not until I go over there with a net and pick it up to people, kind of pull their heads up from their phones and wonder what's going on. And when my cardboard box starts making pink sounds and things like that, people notice. So our, it is a football low football[inaudible]. So anyway, we've added out Cleveland and with their help we've tagged I think another 50. So we've, we've put out several tags, um, from rehab to birds. And then along with our banding lab at powder mill, we also tag live birds that are caught by the eerie bird observatory out of press gal. We have one more year of tagging that we're going to do. But the preliminary data based off of those birds movement is we found that there's one particular species that just seems to really succumb to the injuries. I think it's one out of eight rehab continued its migration. Great. Catbird, Oh these are wonderful. And the one that did, God blessed it. The one that did started at left Cleveland and started heading up the st Lawrence Valley on a sort of Northeast trajectory, which kind of makes sense and then it cuts straight East and hit and hit Boston and then hung around Boston for maybe a day and then went down to Cape Cod. And that was the last place it was picked up. So that was in mid June. So that bird should have been on it's breeding ground, fighting for territory, creating nest finding mate. And this bird was mucking around Cape Cod. Who knows why I needed a break. So that's one instance of altered migration. Now it's hard to say with just that one, but comparing one to the other seven that we released that were then either found again or were found dead, it's doesn't look good for those. On the other hand, we have other birds that we tag and they complete their migration up to the, you know, Northern Canada and they have their, their breeding season and they turn around and we'll hopefully catch them flying South this year continuing to their wintering grounds. It has something to do with the way they fly over the, you know, the, the way that they're shaped makes them impact the, the glass. It could be like the speed perhaps. Right. Speed that they're hitting it. Yeah. And so one thing about these different birds is most of these are pre species. They get predated on, they're not birds of prey, right? They're not rafters. These are small songbirds that are used to looking out for someone trying to eat them. Right? So they tend to have eyes more on the sides of their heads. They're, they're looking around more than forward. So their depth perception is not the best. And so they tend to realize that they're about to hit glass at the last second when it's too late. So there's potential that some of these species just based on their physiology, are able to sort of pump the brakes sooner and lessen the impact. Whereas other birds, like a Woodcock might be cruising it 18, 20 miles an hour and just clock into a window. That's not good. Um, so talk to us about the, um, the film that you put on the glass. So out at powder mill we have a flight tunnel that's based off of a flight tunnel, roughly the size and shape of the trailer that an 18 Wheeler pools. If you kind of imagine that only on like one pivot point so it spins. Um, and on one end you have two panes of glass and on the other end you send birds down that tunnel and they hit a net before they hit the glass. So we don't hurt any of the birds. Um, but uh, they, they fly down this tunnel and we have a control pane, which is just sort of your generic pane of glass that you'd buy at a hardware store, right. For your home. And the other side we have a test pain. So that might have a film like, uh, ABC bird tape. The American bird Conservancy is bird tape or a film like rain, uh, by the company collide escape, which is the one we put on our windows here. Or it might have a UV coated pane of glass that's specifically designed by a glass company. So they can, in the process of making that pane of glass, they can put UV coatings that theoretically would reflect UV light, which birds can see that we can and they would see these UV reflections and know that it's a window and not open sky or a tree or a field or what have you. And so we test birds by flying them down this tunnel and we have a camera so we can see exactly when they hit the net and there's a little led sensor light that goes off when they hit the net. So we can watch it frame by frame and see their decision making. Wow. When they hit the net, how they break at the last second, which, which side they choose. We can use that to test different types and, uh, into rate, how well certain ones to compare. So, you know, this film might work really well, but it's kind of expensive compared to this film, which did 20% better kind of a thing. Um, and so all of those findings, we only give back to, uh, the American bird Conservancy, which is our, our partner on the project and they rate things on their website sort of based on our science. And so we've used that information to start, uh, trying to mitigate issues that we have here in Pittsburgh based off of our volunteers work, walking around Pittsburgh, looking for birds that have hit windows. And so one of the many things that they do when they find the bird is they drop a GPS point that tells us exactly where the bird hit. And so a few years ago we took all of the data that we had and we, uh, we did some GIS analysis to try to figure out what about a building site makes it deadly to birds. And what we found was pretty much what we, it it supported what we thought already, which was that the larger your building site is. So if you have a, you know, 50 yards out of a building and the whole thing is glass, it's gonna cause more collisions cause it makes more sense to two more glass. Yeah. If you have nearby landscaping nearby trees of a certain size or age that are going to draw birds close to the side of the building, cause they're going to be foraging in the morning during migrations. When they're stopping over to refuel, they're going to be flying around the trees and bushes looking for bugs and bugs to eat. And if those are close enough to your, your windows, the bird will be in the tree looking at the window, seeing the tree that it's in, reflected and thinking that may have some more food. So they go to fly to that tree before realizing that it's actually a window. Right. So your nearby landscaping has an impact as well. Right. And so using that, we sort of created a heat map of different areas where window collisions would theoretically be more likely and be more detrimental to migratory birds. But so far we've, we've only put window film on the Frick environmental center, which was a green sustainable living building when it was being constructed. And one thing about green living sustainable buildings as they tend to have a lot of glass, right? So I kind of joke with my friends that green buildings, I often refer to it as red buildings because they're green for a lot of good reasons, but they also can kill birds, um, depending on, you know, the, the right situation. And so all of the staff sort of knew while it was being built. And my predecessor, Matt Webb, who was the first urban bird conservation coordinator, he was working with the architect and the designers and the contractors when the fricking environmental center was being built. And um, they took everything that he had to say and, and they tried to change the design and sometimes decisions are beyond our control. And so they built the building that they built. And it's a wonderful building. It's a beautiful building and they do a lot of great work. But the staff knew that it killed a lot of birds because they were sitting inside hearing them hit the windows. And so they worked with us and started monitoring the building and collecting birds. And so after about a year, we found a handful of windows that were particularly bad and Matt and I went out with some film and we covered the windows and ever since they've been monitoring to see if, if the birds aren't hitting any more, which they shouldn't be. And now that those windows are covered, we're wondering are they going to hit the windows next to them? So that's still ongoing and we're still collecting data based on that. But it's hopeful. It's better than nothing. That's what I tell myself. So we decided to use the same film to put on the nine 10 foot by 15 foot windows here at the museum because we have birds in our collection that were found beneath those windows going back to the 1950s by, by our past curator, Kenneth Parks. He would walk that every morning looking for birds and knowing that at the time the trees have aged quite a bit over the past 16 years. But at the time there were still, you know, young trees there and the birds use them and they would fly into those windows and now the trees are older and so now birds are nesting at them. So we have fledglings that are also flying into the windows upon first fledge. And tragically on the very last day of the installation I got called out by the guys that were putting the film up and there was a, a baby Robbin that had flown into the window. There was a window and a half left to cover it
Speaker 4:and that was where they so no tragic. Yes, they found it
Speaker 3:sidewalk and it was kind of flopping around and they thought it had been hit by a car. And I've seen enough standards to know that the way that its eyes were closed, the way it was just sitting there and I figured it had fledged, it's messed and flown directly into the windows, which is unfortunate. So
Speaker 4:people want to do something positive in their own homes. How do they find out about options available? Well,
Speaker 3:there's a couple of ways they can do that. They can go to a bird safe pgh.org which is our website and there's some information on there about what we do and how you can monitor your own home. And we have some links to the American bird conservancies bird friendly glass webpage. I can't remember the URL off the top of my head, but it's linked there. And that American bird Conservancy's webpage lists dozens of products that they suggest they're designed to be purchased and put on your kitchen window at home. And the best thing that I can say is if you even curious, just take a couple of hours out of your week and walk around your home and see if you find birds or see if you hear birds. And it's more often than not that it's, it's one problem window. We always hear about, you know, one problem, kitchen window or one problem sliding glass door and it's very cheap to remedy that. And there's so many products out there that you can make it look however you want. I'm the director of powder mill. John Wenzel has the colorless version. We put, we put that on 11 windows of his house. They had a quite a few strikes there. John, you mentioned lots of other towns and volunteer opportunities. Can you talk about how people might volunteer for an organization like bird safe Pittsburgh in their own town? Sure. And then you almost all have Facebook pages and websites. Lights out. Cleveland is one of, I think five or six lights out programs in the state of Ohio. Um, they did something different than us. We started at the city level, but Ohio, they looked at the state as a whole and looked at their brightest cities. So Toledo, Akron, Cleveland, Columbus, and they had one guy named Matt Schumer and he went around and tried to find somebody to sort of take up the mantle in that city and run a program in that city. And so they have, I think five or six running programs right now, which is awesome there. They're getting a lot done. They have really great support from the Cleveland Metro parks. And so that's, that's a great one. If you're on Ohio in Pennsylvania, it's really just Byrd safe Pittsburgh. But I would just search the web for ERD safe. Whatever city you're in. Right. Lights are a big problem at night. So, uh, one of the big issues that cities have are that we keep our lights on our skyscrapers while birds are migrating, they use the sun or though they migrate at night, uh, most are nocturnal migrants, so they use the moon and stars to orient themselves. And so at night they come across a big city with all these lights on and they get caught and they fly down and get swarming around the city when they should be flying at hundreds if not thousands of feet up. So this is a big issue with the nine 11 Memorial. That's been a big concern because for such a tragic event, it's such a great way of paying tribute to it with these two large beams of light where the twin towers once stood. But the issue is it's also September and migration is in full swing. And so it's not uncommon for probably more than a thousand birds to be swarming in those beams of light because they're confused and they can't get out. So the New York city Audubon in the city of New York and probably some other players as well that I'm not aware of, they, they worked really hard to develop a management plan that kind of keeps everybody happy. And that's a New York city odd bond goes down to those lights every nine 11 and when the lights are on, they are down there with binoculars and they estimate the count of birds. And I don't know the exact number, we'll say 250 birds. Once they estimate the 250 birds are caught in those beams, they turn them off and let the birds reorient themselves and get moving and then they turn them back on. Wow. So I have to ask this. What about the Tom cathedral of learning? Well, so that's, yeah, something in our own backyard here in Oakland where the university of Pittsburgh wanted to turn on lights and their goal was to light up the cloud cover after a victory. Now, I did not attend Pitt, but I am a very big fan, basketball and baseball and football. But I will say this, to be Frank, I was not as worried about those lights going on. Pretty rare. Yeah. But a number of people in this city came together as soon as that came out and before I could even get involved, they had decided to reevaluate the situation and they have, they've come up with a similar management plan to deal with. So, um,
Speaker 4:they just decided we're just going to lose. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And w w one other thing that I, I thought about is what is an urban bird? A lot of people think an urban bird is, uh, your, your average pigeon or a house Sparrow or a European Starling, kind of trashy, dirty birds that live on the city streets. And I would challenge that and say that an urban bird is any, any bird species that utilizes an urban space at any point in the migration season is the most dangerous thing that a bird can do is migraine one ounce or half an ounce bird flying a couple thousand kilometers every couple months. That's an insane undertaking. And they have to utilize whatever space they can. And sometimes it turns out that they're utilizing downtown Pittsburgh and we're a pretty green city, which is awesome. So they get a lot of good stuff out of our city. But we also have a lot of glass and so often they're brought in to the city for the habitat for the green spaces and they get stuck in what we call fun house effects of buildings where they can't quite find their way out. And so I would say that urban bird is any bird that utilizes any kind of urban space. Right. Especially during the migration season, which is such an important time for them. So just one question then. These trash birds, pigeons, do you ever dip them? We do not get them in. I will say this, I have seen one Kentucky warbler in, we started monitoring in 2014 and so it's been five years and I found one Kentucky warbler. I think we found three house sparrows in the same amount of time and the house sparrows are, this is where they live all year round. Right? Hundreds of thousands of these birds in this area. So we found almost as many of those as Kentucky warblers which is not a bird we find very much not in downtown Pittsburgh. So I don't know what it is. If they have just figured it out. If they've habituated to urban living,
Speaker 4:maybe it's natural selection, you know a hundred years ago and all the naive ones, their line ended tragically.
Speaker 3:Yeah I've often wondered about, and I mean it raises questions of all of our questions about avian perception. We, we don't know a lot about how birds perceive the world. We know they have an extra cone so know they seem to the UV. We can't fathom what that must look like. Right. So, you know, we see a pair of Canada geese and we think of them as non sexually dimorphic meaning the male and female look the same. But who knows. He could look bright pink like a Flamingo or she could look, you know, we need to get it right, my box big enough to stick, you know, it's uh, and so our, our attempts at understanding how they perceive the world around them and how they perceive glasses, that's why we have to use such specific tests like our flight tunnel because it, it helps us compare two things in a very controlled manner when we don't fully understand avian perception. So there's some people trying to understand that. And for us, you know, we're thinking purely about conservation and how these birds are going to get from point a to point B without hitting a window and it's all really good work. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for joining us John. Yeah, it was a pleasure to meet you John. Great to have you with us. Thanks for joining us mixed time. We will talk with Raymond gas steel. Our neighbor at Carnegie Mellon university. He's the director of remaking cities Institute.
Speaker 2:A is for Anthropocene. Living in the age of humanity is the podcast of Carnegie museum of natural history. Our producer and engineer is Tim Evans. In our webmaster is Kathleen Young. For more information, visit us@carnegiemnh.org.