Episode 8 - Reminders: Birds

MB = Michelle K Berry

EW = Emily Wakild

EW: 0:00

Hello, my name is Michelle Berry. And I'm Emily Wakild, and we are your hosts for More Than: a Podcast. We're both historians, but before you push stop, let us explain what kind of history we study. We're both environmental historians.

MB: 0:18

Oh dear, Emily, I'm not sure that that makes us seem any more interesting. How about this instead? Basically, we tell stories about the past and try to make sure that our stories include animals, plants, bugs, dirt, weather, and the like. And we have created this podcast to convince you that history and even nature are more than you ever thought they were.

EW: 0:42

We also both live and work in the U.S. Mountain West. Think of the region connected by the Rocky Mountains, where we've spent most of our lives. We met in graduate school and we've been friends for almost 25 years. In this podcast, we bring you stories about different parts of the ecosystems that you can find throughout the U.S. Mountain West, from the Sonoran Desert, where Michelle lives, to the Northern Rockies, where I live.

MB: 1:06

These stories have fascinating historical components and connections to contemporary issues. In addition to hopefully showing you how much more history can be, we also call the podcast More Than, because unlike typical history, we're going to put the morethanhuman at the center of each episode.

EW: 1:25

We are convinced that once you hear about the power the more than human has had in the past, you will love history and nature even more than you do now.

MB: 1:38

Now, each of the topics we have chosen has many histories, so we're only picking a few to focus on in each episode. But for many of the episodes, we'll also have a special guest or two to tell us even more about that particular topic. Join us as we explore more than you could ever expect to in a podcast about the environment and history.

I remember it like it was yesterday. I was a young National Park Service ranger, an interpretive ranger, just old enough to be driving my somewhat rickety Ford Tempo that was a really vague color of brown to remote locations in the desert southwest. I thought it was such a cool looking car back then. Oh, the eyes of the young. But I digress. I was just falling in love with my own freedom to travel and specifically to road trip myself to places that felt sacred and and close and familiar, yet we're arguably very far away for a 20-year-old to be headed to alone. On this trip, I was driving from my home place of Fruita, Colorado, which sits just on the edge of the Colorado Plateau, to Arches National Park. I was so excited for my day trip. 90 minutes to the trailhead, a three-hour adventure, and back by sundown. My parents wouldn't even know I'd left town. I arrived at the part of the park called the Fins, Devil's Canyon. I began to explore. If you've never been to Red Rock Country, I'll try to explain it to you. Imagine solidified sand jutting hundreds of feet up all around you. The colors are so vibrant, set against this dark blue sky, and the dark greens of the pinyon and juniper trees offer a contrast that boggles the mind and pleases the eye. When you're there, you just can't get enough of it. Depending on which part of the Colorado Plateau you are on, the colors in the rock vary. Indigenous people call the area around Capitol Reef National Park the Land of the Sleeping Rainbow, and that is a perfect description. In Moab, the colors are similar, but not as perfectly aligned as a rainbow might be. Purples, deep dark brick red, oranges, soft whites, and every now and then black striations meld together to create a landscape you can't stop wanting to see. And the rock itself, well, it's soft. And it is sand after all. crushed into some sort of solid form for millions of years, and then lifted up for all to see. But the sand part of that rock still prevails in both the appearance and the feel of it. It also explains the whimsical and powerful formations that result from eons of wind and water and ice erosion. The fins near Devil's Canyon in Arches National Park are the deep dark red, and they stretch hundreds of feet in the air. They are where the arches of National Park form, actually. Most arches were fins before they were arches. And if one follows the trail, as a former park ranger, I must say, always say on the trail. If one chooses to do that, one can weave throughout the fins on one's way to Landscape Arch and beyond that, 00 Arch, which was my official destination for the day. Now, in 2024, one can read the National Park Service description of the trail online. And I quote, End quote. But this excursion was two full years before the World Wide Web was even in our consciousness. So, you know, I sort of knew what I was doing, but not really. On this particular hot summer day, I was not paying attention. I distinctly remember following a yellow-headed collared lizard who was happily jumping along the rocks. After about a half hour or so of this folly, I looked up and realized I didn't really know where I was. Now, a good outdoors person... and a good ranger, which I was not being in this particular moment, would have had a compass, a lot of water, sun protection, and they would have told someone where they were going. I had water, but only enough for everything to go exactly as planned. I was decked out in a tank top and shorts with a baseball cap and a pre-applied layer of Coppertone 15 on my Irish-American, Southwest born-and-bred pale skin. And I had no compass because, of course, I knew where I was. I was sure I had keen senses for direction. And besides that, I was being a rebel, out on my own, stretching my young adult wings. It wasn't a fast realization, more a creeping sense that I had no idea where I was or which direction was in, out, forward, or back. Really, all I could see was up and I couldn't get up there. Of course, one can't see a horizon when you're in the middle of the fins because they're so tall. And I would like to say that I stayed calm for a long time, but the truth is I panicked almost immediately. I decided that this was where at the age of 20, I would expire. When all of a sudden I heard the familiar cry of Corvus Corvax, raven. I looked up and there was a solitary raven peering down at me from the blood red fin towering against the deep blue sky. I was hot. panicky and getting a little bit thirsty. I grumbled something about wishing I could fly. The raven then fluttered down to the ground just in front of me and hopped along the hot, sandy path, weaving its way along the fins. I decided in my delirium to follow him, if nothing else, just to be distracted by him, to forget maybe how lost I was. And he's always been a male raven in my head, though I have no idea if that designation is accurate. Long story long, he fluttered and darted and even walked in front of me for about 45 minutes, leading me back to a more familiar place where I could then find my way back to my trusty and likely rusty Ford Tempo. We are calling this episode Reminders because we think birds remind us of so much. And that is why I'm happy to share that memory with you. That day in the blazing hot Utah desert, birds reminded me I'm never alone. And of course, that ravens are darn intelligent. Brilliant wildlife biologists like Rachel Carson have long told us that birds remind humans that spring is here, that nature is around us and that life is continuing. Ornithologists have learned that birds are highly intelligent and historians have shown the ways in which birds have been responsible for some of the most innovative and earliest attempts at conservation. So I'm certainly not alone in understanding the importance of Raven and other birds. In this episode, we will center more than human beings that remind us of spring, of building homes, of caring for young, and of being both playful and fierce. Welcome to the Reminders episode. Birds.

Raven's Call

MB:

So for this particular episode, you're going to have to deal with just Emily and I. We realized as we started brainstorming for this episode that we both had so much to say that we are going to forego a guest for this episode and just talk on and on and on about birds and all that they remind us of and the ways in which they show us that when we think historically, everything, including our feathered friends, looks somewhat differently. And to get ready for this episode, Emily, I I started to read various kinds of ornithological, I said it! I said it! I pronounced it correctly, (laughter) literature just written by ornithologists about kind of birds' "nature" or their biology. And one of the things that struck me in reading The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman, (it's a really great book, especially if you're a bird lover), is that human behavior is not that far off or that far removed, really, from birds. And it's certainly not as far removed as many humans may want it to be. So according to Ackerman, birds can learn, I mean, I think we know this, but they can learn language, they feel emotion, they have this really keen sense of navigation. And then there are the less ornithological characteristics of birds that we lay folks can see every day with our own eyes if we just choose to observe and look at them. You know, they nurture their young in a nest which kind of mimics human homes and then they feed and care for their offspring in similar ways to us. I mean, some animals just, you know, have the kid and off they go, but not, not birds. They sort of nurture and they teach baby birds, their offspring, how to fly, all those kinds of little, almost parenting kinds of behaviors that look human-like to us. And we can see birds eating junk food, right? When we go to the lake and we feed the geese, which we'll talk more about a little bit.

They love the white bread, the wonder bread. We know they shouldn't be eating that. And I can so relate to that. Although I don't love wonder bread, but man, I can, I can do junk food for sure. I think birds can be raucous and annoying like so many humans and they mate right in front of our eyes. Like this is springtime for me in Tucson and there's all kinds of mating birds all over my backyard that, uh, is somewhat uncomfortable to watch at times. And of course, they have sometimes these absurd displays of attention getting, maybe not unlike some of the lustful young humans at a college party. And then, of course, they fight. And I know you and I have talked about watching our hummingbirds at our feeders. I mean, they get really pissed at each other. And it kind of sounds like me in traffic. So I just think birds are so easy for us to see and then to also see ourselves in bridging that binary between the human and the more than human.

EW: 12:21

Absolutely, Michelle. Except, of course, one of the coolest things about birds... obviously, is that they can fly. I mean, talk about a superpower, right? I mean, I would borrow that bird characteristic in a heartbeat, right? Imagine being able to just get up and go wherever you want. Like, let's go to Hawaii today. Or how about, I don't like the weather. So, you know, let's change our mind. But most of them don't. I mean, they do fly. They fly over to pick up that Cheeto that Michelle left on the picnic bench. But lots of things keep birds in certain areas and not others. And so if you had the power to just go anywhere, why wouldn't you do it? And this is one of these, I think, mysteries of birds. And some of the obstacles that stand in their way, we can understand, right? So for example, there've been really interesting scientific studies, some of them done on a fake road in a national forest right outside Boise here. So scientists wanted to understand if birds would avoid that one section of the road. And turns out they hate it. They hate the noise. And I mean, you wouldn't think that you're driving, Michelle, or that traffic in general would be an impediment because birds can always just George Jetson, right? They can just go straight up and get out of the way. But actually the noise is a huge obstacle for them. And in other places, it's not the obstacles, but it's what birds are drawn towards. And the very specific and unique content of a place that's really appealing to specific kinds of birds. So I think about this a lot because I live in a place where it's one of the best settings, one of the most charismatic settings for raptors anywhere in the world. And by raptors, I mean birds of prey, right? Or predatory birds, birds that eat other things that are not plants, essentially. One of the- Yeah, well, or birds, yeah.

MB: 14:47

So other vertebrates. Is that true? I don't know. Do raptors eat birds?

EW: 14:51

Yes, absolutely. They eat other birds. The technical word is vertebrates, right? They eat other vertebrates. They eat squirrels, they eat snakes, other birds, but they feed on them. And so raptors are the largest and sort of most conspicuous of birds because the bigger the size, the more they can eat. And they live here. in the Sagebrush Steppe, where the Snake River carves its way through the high desert. And this is a really spectacular place for raptors in particular. It has more than anywhere else in the world. And there are at least 700 pairs of breeding raptors from 15 different species, about 30 miles south of me, right? In Boise, the biggest city in Idaho. Yeah, and this habitat- So when we say big or a lot of people, it's very relative, right? But this habitat, this really special place along the Snake River is a habitat like so many in the West that's been carved by water out of stone. And it's produced this canyon that provides these raptors what raptor specialists call a bedroom, right? Right. It's this amazing raptor hotel in the side of the canyon. And the birds love to nest in the nooks and crannies on the shelves and the little cubbies of that wall because their nests are protected from all of the elements, from any other predators, from other birds. But right above... bedroom, they also have the most amazing pantry. And this pantry is the plateau with a huge high density of small burrowing animals. So the prairie dogs and the ground squirrels, the jackrabbits, all of these little critters that love to hide in the sagebrush, but that get all the nutrients they need from the plants that are up there. So the raptors eat the small ground animals and the ground animals love the plants. And it's this happy little ecosystem of parrots. Where the buffet exists for all of them. And a big reason the birds are there is because everything that they want and need is in this precise and specific place. And about half a million acres... of this canyon and this high sagebrush steppe ecosystem are protected in a national conservation area that's joint managed with all sorts of partner groups. And this was created in 1993, but the humans have been using this Stake River Canyon. The Shoshone and the Paiute have been using this area for more than 12,000 years. When pioneers came through on the Oregon Trail, they rutted their wagons right through this same conservation area. In fact, it It protects some of the most intact ruts left from that migratory period in human history. There are also abandoned gold mines in the area. But through all of it, the birds have been there, right? Because it has all the things that the birds need. And so it's this interesting and I think really neat case of a particular kind of animal that living right next to and adjacent to humans, unnoticed for a really long time. And I think it gives us a really neat way of thinking about how the birds don't really need us. In some ways, they need us to sort of get out of their way, and history goes on around them and on top of them. And a part of that that I've been thinking a lot about lately is that... There has been this commitment made in the United States by the American Ornithological Society, which is the biggest group of bird nerds in the world, right? But really they have the sort of power to make decisions about birds.

MB: 18:46

Said with so much love to the ornithologists.

EW: 18:49

As a bird nerd myself, I fully believe in this group, and I say it as a term of affection, not critique, very much so. Well, they've decided to change the names of birds in English, the common names, that are named after people. So the Cooper's hawk or the Swainson's hawk will become a different kind of raptor, a different kind of hawk. And this is a really powerful and interesting recognition of... how non-human birds are and should be, and a way to both diversify and make birding more welcoming, but also to sort of recognize that common knowledge shifts over time and responds to really important and interesting critique. Do the birds care what their names are? No. But to future generations of humans, absolutely. And I think it's an important recognition of how we can give birds their due in time and space.

MB: 19:59

Yeah, that's so cool. I did not actually know that was a movement afoot. And I think that's really cool. It will be very hard for me to unlearn. I mean, I can never learn scientific names of anything. So I really rely on knowing my common names. So now I'm going to have to relearn the common names and that's just daunting. But I'll give it my best go once this has happened for sure. I would also just add on to what you just said that we can also give birds their due if we just look at history, because birds have been so powerful at various moments in the past, and they've actually, in my opinion, have changed entire cultures, or at least started to. One movement in particular that they were really important for was the sort of early or later first wave feminist movement. And that bled a little bit into the second wave feminist movement of the mid 20th century. And every time I think about my feathered friends, I think about how important their decline and overuse was for galvanizing the public voice of female activists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. That late 1800s, early 1900s, and how of all the species out there, buffalo in the Mountain West a little bit, and on the Great Plains it was a little bit this way, but songbirds in particular really helped call attention to the overuse and sort of the thoughtless consumption that was starting to take hold in mainstream American society in the Gilded Age and in that early 20th century. In fact, middle class, but really more elite class women started to have this fashion craze. And we know all of, you know, so many of us think critically about fast fashion in the 21st century. And while this may not have been fast fashion, it was an example of trendy fashion for women that had very profound environmental ramifications that people could really see happening in real time right before their very eyes. I think sometimes fast fashion, the environmental effects of it are hidden from our view. So many of my students are really starting to think critically about it and to become more aware. But for a lot of time, it was like, oh, I can get that cute shirt and for 10 bucks and, you know, what a deal. And now we're sort of understanding that there's all these huge ecological costs and human costs in terms of labor and all that with fast fashion. But in the hat craze of the late 19th century, elite women were all about owning hats with entire birds on them. Not just like a feather here and a feather there, but like the entire head of an owl on top the hat that one wore on one's head. And if you can imagine how ridiculous, I mean, it's so ridiculous, but it was all the rage and it was so cool. At one point in 1886, an ornithologist in New York City counted 40 distinct species in the city, and those were just on women's hats. So this weird craze, (laughter) I know, right? This weird craze drew the attention of various women who began to think about it and think this is weird at the same time that various kinds of extinctions were occurring, including the passenger pigeon. and other kinds of songbirds whose numbers were really obviously diminishing. One woman in particular that I want to tell you about is a woman named Florence Miriam Bailey. And she was a young student at Smith College. And I think that's always so important to remind - I try always to remind my students - how many incredible, young people made change. And Florence wanted consumers to think about what their actions are doing to birds and to environments. And so in 1889, at the young age of 26, she writes this book called Birds Through an Opera Glass. And opera glasses are just binoculars, they used to call them opera glasses. And it's really the first field guide for amateur bird watchers. And it leads to, you know, the important pastime. We think of it as a hobby for us bird nerds. I love that. Maybe we should just title this whole episode Bird Nerd. So this bird watching that we think of as this hobby actually becomes a really crucial way of getting people common every day people to see birds. We can think of it as sort of citizen science that we do now in the 21st century. This is early citizen science where you could get people to go out and be aware of their surroundings and of the birds that were flitting about and get to understand their behavior and even learn what they were, probably learn those common names that are now going to get changed. But what it does is it leads to pretty intense lobbying on the part of privileged elite white women who begin to argue for the conservation of not just the birds themselves, but of spaces where birds lived and all kinds of conservation measures, and even the conservation movement itself, had... as part of its foundation, this activism on the part of these elite women. And this particular anecdote that I'm telling you leads directly to political change in the Lacey Act, which outlawed trade in illegally acquired wildlife. And we're actually going to think about some of those terms when we get to a later episode. But it even led really to the International Migratory Bird Treaty about 20 years later. And so Bailey, Florence's papers are at the Smithsonian Institute. And she just loved that you could learn about birds and watch birds, even in the densest urban spaces. And what's interesting, if you're wondering what and how in the heck does Florence connect it all to the Mountain West? Interestingly, like so many folks in the late 19th century, she had to come west to recover from her tuberculosis. And she went to Arizona and California, but she spent a bit of time in Utah. And she wrote a book called My Summer in a Mormon Village. And I just want to read just a little. Historians use primary sources to understand the past. These are sources that were created at the time that one is studying. And so this is a great example of a primary source is this book written by this young woman who's gone west to try to recover. She's not feeling well, and yet she goes out every day to look at plants and look at birds and do all kinds of physical activity, even though her lungs were damaged and pretty diseased at the time. She writes, "the feverish longing one has for the country in spring had possessed my blood before I even left the city. The brick horizons and squares of sky had irritated my tired spirit. The lonely groups of trees turning green on the outskirts made me only more restless. But now at last I was free. Alone on the mountainside, the sunshine of the broad heavens and the unbroken horizon and the great sweep of the landscape lines were a deep rest and refreshment. Up beyond me, the mountain swept gently toward the blue sky, its sunny slope darkened only by cloud shadows, the whole broad mountainside a solitude, its restful silence jarred by no footfall, its only suggestion of the figure of man, a lone tree against the sky. Looking up at the Wasatch, I was much impressed by its range and its sweep. From my position, its clump of oak brush were mere cushions of green moss. High above..", Emily, here comes your birds of prey. "...High above, a bird of prey came sailing down the mountain, projecting its shadow ahead. Now it would swoop close over a rocky ledge or sweep low over the side of canyon wall. A mere seam, it seemed to me. Then slowly sail across the face of the range, rising upward till it soared beyond the lofty crags at the summit. Above, below, farther, nearer, against the mountain, against the sky, it sailed and it soared." I just love the way that she depicts the movement of the bird and what that did for her soul. When she was joined by legions of other similarly minded people, she turns out to be this force of nature with which to be reckoned. Their activism for protecting birds and other parts of nature helped them create the ecosystem, the political ecosystem necessary for eventually winning the right to vote in 1920. In some ways, birds empowered women to break free, to fly away from so many constraints because they were considered a safe species for women to engage with. There is a great book called Kindred Nature written by Barbara Gates. And she talks about how birds did not necessarily require women to move beyond the private sphere, they were able to, you know, sort of look at birds and think critically about them from their yard. Birds were accessible to women who were bound by the cult of domesticity. And thus women could be kind of outdoorsy and even scientific without having to enter spaces that were at that time forbidden, including the wilderness and institutions of higher learning, et cetera. And I think we can say in a way that birds incubated women's rights and activism.

EW: 29:34

Oh, Michelle, that's such an amazing way of thinking about the more than human in these stories that we thought we knew, right? And there's the bird guiding Florence through her vision and her awakening and also opening space for the people behind her. My grandma's name was Florence, and I love that name. I hope it comes back. It's such a great one. So I also love to see the recognition of flowers, right, in that name that's There's some other really great historical work on birds and other cultures. So Nancy Jacobs' work on ornithology in Africa, The Birders of Africa, looks at the species of honeycreeper that vernacular knowledge has understood well before ornithological knowledge. And it's a brilliant example of honey guides as a way of understanding nature for other groups of people. And Marcy Norton has a new book that looks at parrots and the incorporation in Mesoamerica of parrots into families. And she actually argues that the adopting of the birds into the family is the origins of pet keeping. And those are some of the earliest ways of adopting. Yeah, right. So thinking about birds as guides, but also as these sort of emotional vessels of our understanding of the world, I think is really important. But the I think larger legacy for Florence and for the intermountain West is someone who's a little bit more familiar. And that's one of the biggest environmental heroes of the 20th century, Rachel Carson. And Rachel Carson's work is connected to birds in really powerful and important ways. And the most immediate is through the eggshells, right? And through the fragility of that piece of almost life that has been an important place where scientific knowledge has resulted in public policy that has transformed our understanding of how really the natural world works and our role within it.

MB: 31:45

Can I interrupt you and have you tell our listeners about the eggshells? Because you would be surprised, I think, at how few people really know about Rachel Carson and her early findings. So I'm wondering, maybe you were already going to talk about it, but I think I always assume people know who she is. And there's so many people who do not know who she is. So I'm wondering if you could just talk a little bit about the eggshells.

EW: 32:08

Oh my God, amazingly. Yeah, I could talk for days. I'll try to keep it brief though.

MB: You notice that I cringed when I asked because I know what I'm asking for, but you know, go ahead. You do, you, right?

EW: 32:22

So Rachel Carson was an early scientist, right? An amazing watcher of the ocean first, but also of the world around her. And her powerful book, Silent Spring, is based on this premise that the world was going quiet. And that we were starting, people in the 1960s were starting to see quiet in places where there had once been life. And the reason for this is the chemical poisoning of the world and largely through pesticides like DDT. Don't make me say what that stands for, Michelle, because I won't get it right.

MB: 33:01

I would never do that to you.

EW: 33:03

But these persistent... Organochemicals live in the environment and get passed along the larger the organism that eats them. And so for something like a raptor, it gets exposed to DDT many levels up the food web. And so it concentrates in that animal's digestive system and then gets passed around through its circulatory system. And then in the end, DDT weakened the strength of eggshells, which led to a precipitous decline in populations of birds. Everything from the bald eagle, the sort of paradigm of the US symbology around nature, to those tiny little hummingbirds, right? And Carson's book, laid the blame for this decline at the feet of the petrochemical industry and in very common language and very direct ways pointed to the removal of DDT from these systems as something that needed to happen. And it was in fact her recounting of this need that inspired people to look more carefully at the science and to start thinking about what comebacks of these declining populations Might look like. eradicating DDT, but the birds were the center of this story. And there's a place, here in Boise, where the breeding to repopulate these populations of animals happened. And the bald eagle is an important one, but the California condor and the peregrine falcon were two of the most charismatic species that were down to perilous numbers by the late 1970s before DDT was fully pushed away from the systems and the springs were made less silent. So the population of California condors was less than 22 in the wild. And at that point, the Fish and Wildlife Service of the federal government captured the remaining wild ones to see if they could and tried to breed them. What's interesting about this trial is they didn't know how to get birds to breed. Maybe they needed to take them to your college parties, Michelle, and see what they would do. But they couldn't figure it out. And so they called in another set of expertise. And these were falconers. And people who are falconers have been training birds for centuries to hunt with them. And so they had a really unique set of experiences with birds. And it was actually this sort of private knowledge set of falconers that figured out how to breed the birds and systematically made it happen. And they did a lot of that on location here in Boise. And all of the eggshells are in drawers at the Peregrine Fund International Headquarters here. I think of that history and an important archive for future historians and scientists that might want to understand the chemistry of those eggshells and ask it additional questions in the future. So there's this really interesting intersection between endangered birds and trained birds and between conservation in particular special places and restoration in scientific or a technical sense in this intertwined nature of conservation and restoration. I think, where Rachel Carson sits as this important feminist voice and also as this perspective of the more than human in the middle of that. And we're going to need more voices like that. So one immediate challenge facing this important ecosystem in the National Conservation Area where the birds of prey are, is climate change. And there's an important intersection of invasive plants that are changing what can grow there. Those are catching fire more rapidly and burning the native plants, which means there's less cover for the ground squirrels and the jackrabbits who have all but disappeared from that pantry above the Raptors Canyon Hotel. And by some estimates, 60% of the plants in the are dead or dying and won't come back. And that means there's nothing for those animals to eat or hide in, and the birds will also starve. And so when the pantry's empty, what happens to this conservation area if there's nothing left to live in it because of climate change and these other wildland fires, these other conjunction of factors? What happens? Does the reserve move? Does it follow the falcons and the golden eagles wherever they've gone? Or how else can humans intervene and try to manage this spot differently than what we've done before?

MB: 38:51

Yeah, that's so interesting. I think one of our goals for this podcast, and by now we're well into this thing, so if we have a set of listeners who are still with us, hopefully we've been able to really illustrate the ways in which the binary understanding of the "natural" spaces versus human spaces is kind of part of our issue that needs to be rethought as we move forward. Because as much as I'm all for this national conservation area and the important role that it's played, it's fascinating to think it is a historically specific development, right? Where we thought the best approach to "saving nature" was to set aside big chunks of it and set aside aside, preserve it, and make sure that wildlife and plants and all of the biodiverse beings that we want to live on the planet have a protected quote-unquote space to live. And that protection is protected from humans, which of course sections us out from the nature and from the natural spaces. And as you say, climate change and all sorts of other things, just we're going to talk a little bit about "invasive species" when we talk about migrations in an episode coming up here, thinking about what does it mean to suggest that somewhere is natural and not touched by humans? I don't think we can do that anymore. I think at this particular moment, we understand that humans have kind of touched all places, but all places have also touched humans. And that's the part that we often leave out when we start bemoaning climate change, or we start talking about the Anthropocene. And so that National Conservation Area comes out of a particular moment. It comes out of a particular understanding of nature and humans' relationship to it. It comes out of a particular environmentalist orientation. And I think we're beginning to move into some moments when thinkers are helping us think differently about the binary, think differently about these approaches. And one area that's very... maybe somewhat abstract. It seems very academic. It's called queer ecology. And I'm not going to go into all that it entails, but mostly what it's trying to do is get us to take those ecological concepts that we've hung on to as Western society and just queer them, make them different, make them funky. In queer ecology, there's this searching for ways in which the more than human, or specifically animals, but sometimes invertebrates and insects and what have you, behave in ways that are similar to ways that humans who are non-normative behave. And birds are, quote unquote, fair game in these studies because ornithologists, ecologists, scientists in general have shown that bird behavior mimics human society in a number of ways, including the ways in which are not normative that are ways in which we don't necessarily always recognize as as typical, right? And so there's this terrific article in Orion by Alex Johnson, who's an environmental studies writer. And he's talking about how Bruce Bagamil, I'm hoping I'm saying that right, published in 1999, a book called Biological Exuberance, in which he documents observed non, specifically non-heteronormative sexual behaviors, just sexual behaviors in birds and animals of all different species, where they're sort of, you know, having sexual relationships or domestic relationships that are not heteronormative. And they also exhibit gender nonconformity. And so there's all these different animals that he zeroes in on. And in the case of geese in particular, researchers have observed that up to 12% of pairs were in homosexual and or homosocial relationships in populations of Branta canadensis, Canada geese, which I know for a fact that you know something about. Specifically... about their poo.

EW: 42:58

I might be the biggest Canadian goose poop expert in the Intermountain West. Actually, I think Canada geese are interesting, not just because they are gender nonconforming, but because they have so many other ways they are like us, right? And they have these human tendencies that like beavers, which we talk about in a different episode, they love parks and golf courses. They love green spaces and urban environments. They love a good patio on the water, a little bit of moisture on the side. And Canada geese sleep on water at night. And so it's really convenient for them to just hop on over to the pond to protect themselves from those coyotes. But they also are are really prolific at eating and pooping. And a Canada goose can actually poop five times an hour if they're healthy. And this creates a huge problem of waste for city managers, right? For park managers. It also grosses out little kids a lot and their parents. And it can be sort of unsanitary. There is a long standing feud at Quinn's Pond in Boise, where I live, over whether it is good Goose poop or dog poop that is contributing to the E. coli in, in fact, the pond. You don't want to hear about the human fecal load in that pond either. But poop, right, carries disease. It's a problem. Goose poop is green, so it's slightly more spirited than other forms of poop. But the other piece of the...

MB: Did you just call it spirited?

EW: 44:56

Spirited. I was thinking St. Patrick's Day. Is that not...

MB: 45:00

Oh, wow. Okay. No, I think there's a different... I think that's a whole different thing, but keep going. (laughter)

EW: 45:09

Okay. So there is one way that goose poop in the city is actually tied to historical patterns. And this has to do with geese having a history of transformations, not just of their domestic life, but also of their migratory patterns. And geese are sort of hardwired to not stop in places where there are no other geese. This is why you see flocks of them all together, right? Because if there's one goose there, all the other geese are like, oh, this guy says it's cool. We can park here for the night and they all land there. Well, in the early 1920s, farmers in the Midwest caught onto this pattern and they used to tie a Canada geese to their barn or to a stake out by their pond so that the geese would come there and stop. They'd shoot them, have a little dinner, and then, you know, the geese would go on their way. So geese started to develop divergent migratory patterns. Some populations of geese continue to be migratory They fly in those beautiful V's. They fly south for the winter, all of that. Others in cities, even those cold like Boise, they overwinter and they've decided that they don't want to be snowbirds anymore. They don't want to head south. They have everything they need right here in our beautiful parks because we've created this great habitat for them.

MB: 46:31

Yeah, I love that. So that just goes, it's just yet another example. And it kind of takes us back to Florence and her love of birds because she could see them in the city. And again, we talked a little bit when we talked about coyotes that they're in our midst. And so again, we're trying to emphasize and talk about all of the ecological ways, but also the historical ways in which the more than human are in the midst of human, quote unquote, built civilizations, including cities. And I think It's so cool. And again, just that undoing of the binary, the power of the birds to make us think about blurring of boundaries is so powerful and important. We've heard here today how birds inspired women to write entire books that changed certainly Western culture and really the environment. globally in so many ways. And this information and knowledge, I think, helps us to think about the ways in which even the behaviors of humans that have been so long considered unnatural are likely indeed natural, or at least have in common a lot more with human behaviors and any other number of animals than we traditionally think about. And I think that's a really important mental shift that if we can make it as a society more broadly would be really powerful. What if instead of using nature to exclude human possibilities, we look to it to see all the infinite ways of being. And sure, the animal and insect world exhibit monogamy and sexual reproduction and live far away from humans. And like you said, avoid noise that is very much, quote unquote, human made. But they also exhibit homosocial bonding. They exhibit living among human beings. And adapting to our presence and sort of almost taking over places that we provide, maybe not even for them, but inadvertently for them. They clone, they exhibit gender nonconformity. They're just, birds, in particular, are doing really interesting and important things, sending us messages if we just pay attention. And I just think that it shows us this mind boggling array of diversity, right? One of the ways in which we humans can witness that complicated diversity is by watching and learning about birds. We should all become bird nerds. They can remind us how complex and interesting our world is now and in the past. And because birds just keep showing up in history and in science and in our backyards and in our cities, they remind us that we have the power to keep singing and to return to something better.

EW: 49:10

Oh, I love that, Michelle. Go bird nerds.

MB: 49:15

Go bird nerds. And that's it for this episode of More Than: A Podcast. We hope you've loved what you've learned and we hope it's made you think a little bit differently about nature and about history. We hope you've learned more about the world around you and the histories and stories that make up those places and those more than human beings who are so important to our historical past. We want to thank our guests and our amazing producer, Ruxandra Guidi. We'd also like to give credit to Jason Shaw, who composed our music, Back to the Woods. We'd also like to cite our sound effects from the BBC, and we'll give more specific citation information on our website. There, you can also find sources that we've used and links to other interesting stories to continue your learning. So go check out morethanapodcast.earth. If you'd like to, please leave a review about this podcast and be sure to tune in next time for the next episode of More Than: A Podcast.