Season 5: Episode 10

Behold, The Wonderchicken

More than 60 million years ago, an asteroid hit the Earth, wiping out nearly all the dinosaurs. The only dinosaurs to live through this mass extinction were birds. In this episode, we look at how these ancient creatures learned to listen and communicate, and how listening to birds has changed us.

Guests

Credits

Transcript

[00:00] INTRODUCTION

AMY: It’s an ordinary day, sixty-six million years ago. Bees and butterflies are flitting among the flowers. Turtles the size of small cars are swimming through the sea. Little mammals are chattering together in their nests. And the dinosaurs are… dinosauring. Roaming through the forests of Antarctica. Moseying along the beaches of Nebraska, as the waves of the North American inland sea lap against their feet. And in what is now northern Europe, one very small dinosaur, called Asteriornis, is poking its beak into the ground, searching for grubs.

And then out of nowhere—

BOOM

AMY: —an asteroid slams into the ocean near present-day Mexico. A wall of water three miles high radiates out from the site. The Sun goes dim as dust fills the air. Rocks are vaporized and then pour back down onto the Earth as acid rain. Wildfires rage. Global temperatures plummet. The giants that have ruled the planet for millennia die out.

AMY: But one group of dinosaurs makes it through the cataclysm. Not the mighty T-Rexes or triceratops, but non-descript little things, like Asteriornis. Scrappy microdinos that know how to get by on the margins. They use their wings to move quickly between radically disrupted habitats, their versatile beaks to eat whatever food they can find. And they use their voices to find each other in the chaos of their utterly changed world.

BIRDS that sound like our idea of dinosaurs

AMY: Birds are the dinosaurs that survived.

BIRDS and other sounds of life

AMY: After the asteroid wiped out all of their kin, they kept going. The continents moved and the climate convulsed and changed and changed again, and the children of Asteriornis and other small winged dinosaurs filled the globe, and diversified into the 11,000 species of birds that live among us now. In honor of this triumph over adversity, the scientists who found the first fossilized Asteriornis gave it the name of the Greek goddess of falling stars who turned herself into a quail: Asteria. But it's come to be known as the Wonderchicken.

AMY: The descendants of the Wonderchicken and other small, flying dinosaurs now thrive on the coldest ice, in the hottest deserts, in the wettest jungles, in mountains and prairies and in our cities and towns. And everywhere they go, they sing.

BIRDSONG

AMY: Welcome to Threshold, I’m Amy Martin, and we humans have never walked an Earth without birdsong. When we emerged as a species, tens of millions of years after that asteroid hit, the world was already full of their voices. In culture after culture, throughout time, we’ve woven the sounds of birds into our own stories, and songs, and poems. But like all great musicians, birds aren’t just creators of beautiful sounds, they’re excellent listeners, too. They’re engaged in a constant call and response, attuning themselves to their habitats in order to figure out who's around, where to find food, how to stay safe, and probably a lot of other things that we can’t decode yet. So that’s where we’re going to start in this episode: listening to birds listening to each other.

INTRO MUSIC

[04:49] SEGMENT A

ERICK: You don't see this kind of really neat riparian forest many places anymore. And it's a mile thick here.

AMY: I’m bumping along on a gravel road in western Montana with wildlife biologist doctor Erick Greene. The jagged peaks of the Bitterroot Mountains are awaiting their first dusting of snow, and the trees down here close to the river are turning gold.

ERICK: So this is a really healthy forest. It's not an even-age stand. You can see mature trees, middle trees, and then a lot of trees of all different species coming along behind. So this is kind of what these riparian systems should look like. In the west they're like less than they're about 1% of the land cover. And yet like 80% of all species of birds around here, you know, really depend a lot on these habitats.

AMY: Erick is professor emeritus at the University of Montana and a bird communication expert. One of the things he’s studied extensively is what he calls the bird “forest alarm system,” and we’re on our way out into the woods, to see and hear this phenomenon in action. As we drive away from the highway and toward the river, we start to see some of the local birds—chickadees, nuthatches, and woodpeckers who live in Montana year-round. But other birds here are on epic global adventures—flying off together toward the tropics, some of them from as far away as northern Canada, or Alaska. Red-winged Blackbirds, Western Meadowlarks, Cedar Waxwings, and many other species are heading out, or passing through. And they depend on places like this to rest and refuel along the way.

ERICK: A lot of them migrate at night. They will have dropped down in these habitats and they'll be really, really hungry. Their gas tanks are empty. So typically they're foraging like crazy right now in these really rich habitats. And then they'll sleep and rest up and, you know, maybe fly on tonight.

AMY: We see a big flock of robins in one of the old cottonwoods close to the road.

ERICK: Foraging like crazy. So they probably flew all night and they're here, ahm—oh, and there's a Pileated Woodpecker. There's a lot here, let's hop out and just listen and see what we hear.

AMY: Yeah, let's!

FOREST

ERICK: I'd say 95% of my birding is done with my ears. And so let's just listen. See, look at all these robins. There's like a hundred robins right here. So this is cool. This is a big group of migrating birds that probably just plopped down out of the sky a few hours ago, and they're just busy fueling up on their way to Mexico.

AMY: If you live in North America, you probably see robins pretty often. And because they're common, we usually don't get very excited about them. But as we head off into the woods, Erick says we might want to rethink that.

ERICK: Everybody takes robins for granted. They're amazing bird because they breed from coast to coast, from Mexico to above treeline in the Arctic. They breed from sea level to ten, twelve-thousand feet. And they're beautiful. I'm convinced if they were a super rare bird, you know, people would freak out, you know, when they saw them.

AMY: We both have backpacks loaded up with sound gear, and bear spray at the ready on our hip belts. This area isn't only important to birds—many other wild animals frequent these wet, woody zones too.

ERICK: There are lots of elk right here. Lots of deer, lots of bear, lots of mountain lion. Seen them all right here. And there are grizzly bears right here.

AMY: We see a Bald Eagle perched on its nest across the river, and hear European Starlings yacking nearby. And then Erick freezes.

ERICK: Oh fantastic. There's a there's a couple Lewis's Woodpeckers just to the left of the eagle in that snag. They're just little bumps. But those are ridiculous woodpeckers, they're pink and green. But, ahm, their numbers are tanking. They're really having problems in a lot of their range. And they're considered a very sensitive species of concern here. And actually people will fly to Missoula specifically to come see that bird, Lewis's Woodpeckers, because they're kind of going, going, gone. We don't know why. Probably some of it is habitat loss because they really require these really nice riparian habitats.

AMY: Lewis’ Woodpeckers are just one of many bird species in danger of slipping away forever on our watch. Half of the world’s bird populations are in decline. A major study from 2019 showed that there were almost three billion fewer wild birds filling the skies over North America compared to 1970. Even so-called “common” birds have taken enormous hits. That’s one of many reasons Erick says we shouldn’t wait for a bird to become rare or endangered before we appreciate it.

ERICK: I can hear some redwing blackbirds.

AMY: Erick is an expert, and he actually heard a dozen different birds, right off the bat. So there's a lot of bird life all around us here. But what's striking to me is how quiet they can be when they want to be.

ERICK: But what I'm hearing is a pretty chill forest. There's no alarm calls, no predator around right now. So this is kind of what it sounds like for a forest alarm system to be turned off.

AMY: But although this place feels very peaceful on the surface right now, there's a tension waiting just below. Because this is not only a migration route. It's also a hunting grounds.

MUSIC

AMY: Got some hawks up there.

ERICK: Now look, yeah, oh these are Sharp-shinned Hawks. Two of them, two accipiters. Long, long, thin tails and broad wings.

AMY: Ahh, beautiful.

ERICK: And these, all they eat pretty much is birds. These are bird specialists.

AMY: These hawks are not in hunting mode—they’re flying high, riding a current of warm, rising air. But if they were flying lower and more purposefully, one of the songbirds might let out what's known as a “seet” call.

ERICK: They sound like ssst, ssst, ssst.

AMY: Here are some examples of different birds making these calls. A Rufous-crowned Sparrow:

RUFOUS-CROWNED SPARROW: seet call

AMY: A California Towhee:

CALIFORNIA TOWHEE: seet call

AMY: If you're thinking that they sound really really similar to each other, you're right. Erick says seet calls tend to sound alike, and seem to be almost universally understood.

ERICK: So if we play a seet call to birds here in Montana—say they're up in a bush or tree—what will they do? They'll dive instantly for cover. And I've recorded seet calls and I've played them back to birds in Africa, in South America, in Europe, in various places around the world, and birds in those places know exactly what a seet call of a chickadee recorded here in Montana means. So there's been acoustic kind of all over the world for these very important alarm signals, which is...isn't that cool?

AMY: It's so cool.

AMY: But hold on: if you're a robin who's spotted a nearby hawk on the wing, you've got a moral dilemma to solve. Do you send out an alert, and warn your fellow songbirds of the danger? Or do you prioritize protecting yourself, and stay quiet? Well happily, the processes of evolution have created a way out of this quandary. Birds of prey like hawks and eagles are very good at hearing low-frequency sounds, like the rustling of a mouse moving through the grass. But seet calls tend to be higher in pitch, in ranges that predators have a harder time detecting.

ERICK: And they're really hard to localize. You know, if a bird is producing seet signals like it, it's there, no, it's there, n, it's over there, no! You have no idea where it's coming from. So they're very effective alarm signals that the message gets out, but the location of the sender is hidden.

AMY: So although these seet calls might seem kind of simple at first, they're actually very sophisticated in their ability reach some listeners and avoid others.

ERICK: You know, there's so much information, acoustic information that's washing over us every second, right?

AMY: In our last episode, Joel Pires talked about how people in his community, in the Amazon, tune in to this information, especially from birds. And Erick says other animals are paying attention to birds too.

ERICK: Birds can understand squirrel-ese and squirrels listen into birds, they can understand bird-ese. There's (squirrel) multi-species communication networks. Basically everything that's in the woods is listening to all the other things (squirrel) and all the acoustic signals. so a lot of birds are probably just listening and they're just scanning, they're looking around. So if one of these birds that's scanning were to see something truly dangerous, they would give the alarm.

SQUIRREL

ERICK: Another squirrel…

AMY: I wondered if our presence might be causing the birds to make alarm calls, but Erick says probably not, if we just keep walking in a casual sort of way. But he says if we change how we're moving through the forest, we could trip that invisible acoustic wire.

ERICK: Animals can sort of figure out intention, I guess, is what you'd call it. If we were to slow down and walk like this, sneaking, sneaking along in the woods

AMY: Quietly and carefully.

ERICK: Yeah, moving through the woods as if we're hunting or trying to find something that will elicit a very specific alarm call called the sneak alarm call, which is like, there's something out there and it's sneaking. It's a, you know, it's a coyote stalking or whatever.

AMY: So an alarm call isn't one particular sound, it's a whole genre.

ERICK: They can be very specific. Like there can be alarm calls that mean “snake on the ground” or “flying raptor” or “perched raptor.” And what kind of threat level.

AMY: And different types and levels of threats call for different sorts of responses. A seet call says duck and hide. But this sound says gather and prepare to attack.

PYGMY OWL RECORDING

AMY: This a recording of a Northern Pygmy Owl. Erick is playing it from his phone.

PYGMY OWL RECORDING

AMY: Pygmy Owls are around the same size as robins. They are adorable. But they’re highly unpopular here, because they are extremely skilled at hunting songbirds. So the call of the Pygmy Owl activates a defensive alliance. A sort of NATO for birds.

ERICK: OK, there's chickadees coming in. Here's a warbler. Hear that? Right away. Count the dees on this.

CHICKADEES AND OTHER BIRDS

ERICK: Listen to all the dees, there's about eight dees on that.

AMY: He's referring to the dee-sounds at the end of their calls. As in, chick-a-dee-dee-dee. One of things Erick is somewhat famous for is a 2005 study that showed more dees equals more danger. So the fact that these birds are kind of dee-ing their heads off is alerting everyone nearby to the deadly presence of one of the world's smallest owls.

ERICK: So we've been chasing these guys around, now they're coming to us. Right, see em flying over our heads here?

AMY: Yeah. They think we are a Pygmy Owl.

ERICK: Yep, yep. OK, there's a Red-breasted Nuthatch just called. There's a, there's a my goodness, there's a Brown Creeper that came in! They’re super hard to see. It's going up that trunk.

AMY: OK, yeah I see it, I see it!

ERICK: That's a Brown Creeper that's come in as well.

AMY: This is a teeny tiny little bird moving up and down the trunk of a tree, completely unperturbed by something as pedestrian as gravity. A Flicker swoops in. And more and more chickadees and nuthatches are arriving. All of these birds have banded together in mutual defense against this phantom Northern Pygmy Owl.

ERICK: Had there been a real pygmy owl here, they would have given it hell. They would have probably biffed it on the head and, you know, really been pretty aggressive and driven it off.

ERICK: It seems a little counterintuitive, like if there's a dangerous predator why don't you fly away, but if there's a perched predator, these birds will generally come really close. And the idea is that en masse, they can, you know, harass the predator enough that they can kind of drive it out of the area.

AMY: So it's cross-species cooperation.

ERICK: Yeah, it's many species cooperating, you know, in sort of this joint common defense, which is very cool.

AMY: As the birds begin to fly off, Erick cues up another recording he made here. This time, instead of the call of the predator, he'll play the response from the prey—the sounds of a mixed flock just like this one in the act of mobbing a Pygmy Owl.

ERICK: Okay. So I'm going to play a pretty intense mobbing situation here that I recorded in this woods. So let's see what happens.

RECORDING STARTS

AMY: This is the recording.

ERICK: The chickadees are coming back. They had drifted off. Look at this, they're coming right in. They're coming in. Look, that's a nuthatch, that's a Red-breasted Nuthatch. Right above the speaker. They're really approaching.

ERICK: What, there's probably 15 birds right here all coming in, right?

AMY: All these little birds flying into this aspen and then moving closer and closer to the speaker.

AMY: The recording that Erick was playing has ended.

ERICK: So everything you hear now is them. This is real live birds.

BIRDS MOBBING THE SPEAKER

ERICK: They're right on the ground, some of them.

AMY: Getting as close to the speaker as they can, they're like, “this is where the problem was!”

ERICK: And here's some distant ones still coming in.

AMY: More and more birds fly in, responding to the call for mutual defense against this shared threat.

ERICK: Oh, there's a Ruby-Crowned Kinglet that's come in.

AMY: That little kind of greenish—

ERICK: There's a wren over there. They're ignoring us right there, concentrating. That signal went out that told them there's a dangerous predator that's perched.

AMY: But two humans sitting on the ground nearby? Not worthy of alarm.

ERICK: And this shows this multispecies cooperation in communication. That is so cool. So here's a wren right here, we've had a Brown Creeper, the Ruby-Crowned Kinglet, two species of chickadees—Mountain and Black-Capped Chickadee—Red-breasted and White-breasted Nuthatch, a flicker, and a Downy Woodpecker. So nine species, oh and a robin as well. So ten species showed up, and there's the wren right there.

AMY: There's something kind of touching about these tiny little birds that are like, I hear my most dangerous predator, and I will come towards you with all of my force and fury!

ERICK: And it really works, it really works. Even though they're tiny little fragile things, en masse like that, all together, they're very effective at driving away even pretty big, like, Sharp-shinned Hawks and other things that are dangerous to them, they'll drive them off. They'll drive them out of the area.

AMY: And the squirrels lend a hand as well.

ERICK: So there's probably like six or eight squirrels calling right now. Responding to that, even though this is stopped. They're continuing the message. Right.

AMY: Alert alert alert.

AMY: Erick and his students have studied the way these messages get passed through the forest, sometimes rippling through at a hundred miles an hour. When the threat has been neutralized, things quickly quiet back down. Making noise takes energy that no animal is keen to waste.

ERICK: See now we're back to, back to the default system. Really pretty quiet. You know, there's just as many birds around right now, but they're just...

AMY: They're busy eating.

ERICK: Busy eating, and this alarm system has turned off, but they can mobilize it, they can turn it on like that.

AMY: But of course, it only works if they can hear it.

ERICK: The world's getting to be a more noisy place, right? And that certainly making it hard for a lot of animals to communicate.

ERICK: If your survival in terms of, you know, being aware of predators depends on hearing sounds in part from other individuals like we just saw with this mobbing event, it's really hard to to hear those signals in noisy environments.

AMY: That interference has real consequences. One study, in Idaho, showed that road noise made it harder for migratory birds like these to gain the weight they needed during their long journeys. And noise has impacts on our bodies too.

ERICK: Noise is really stressful. Physiologically, it affects our immune system. It's not good living in super noisy environments.

AMY: So what's good for the birds is also good for us. Walking around in this place where we can hear the birds, and they can hear each other, is healthy for everyone involved.

ERICK: Well, to me, I mean, what we've been listening to, I mean, this is as precious, the sounds, the acoustic landscape is as precious to me as you know, the beautiful trees we're looking through and the smells of the ponderosa pines and stuff. So to me, it's incredibly important, and I get so much joy out of just being able to walk through the woods, and it gives a whole depth and richness that I don't I don't think you can have, you know, just by walking through the woods and not paying attention to the sound.

ERICK: And I guess, you know, you can go on and sort of justify in the big picture why this is all very important, but what could be funner than this, right? Then walking around the woods. And, you know, we were so lucky to hear all that cool stuff! It's like, after a morning like this, I just come back feeling so filled up and replenished, you know?

AMY: We'll have more after this short break.

Break

[25:01] SEGMENT B

TRAIN COMPUTER VOICE: Arriving at South San Francisco

AMY: Welcome back to Threshold, I’m Amy Martin, and I’m on a train, heading toward Richmond, California—an industrial city perched on the eastern edge of the San Francisco Bay. A huge Chevron oil refinery fills up most of the land close to the water here, and highways carve up the city’s core. But there's also a new arts corridor under development, community gardens, and, despite all of the impacts from industry, a lot of birds.

MUSIC

AMY: Egrets, plovers and pelicans regularly visit the shoreline, while various hummingbirds, warblers, wrens, and other songbirds make their homes in neighborhoods and parks. And this is the way it is in a lot of cities. Birds are the wild animals we live with, even if we don’t live in the wild. We see and hear them everyday, often without really noticing them, but sometimes they do come into the foreground at key moments. That definitely seems to be the case for the young man with a shy smile sitting across the table from me right now.

DARIUS: I'm Darius McCain, I'm 22. I grew up here in our lovely city of Richmond.

AMY: I met Darius at a youth community center called RYSE. I’d reached out to ask what some of their members might have to say about the soundscape of their hometown, and Darius was one of the people who kindly agreed to talk to me. I didn’t ask him specifically about birds, I just told him I wanted to hear anything he wanted to say about listening, or just about his life in general. But as it turned out, birds kept coming up in our conversation—flitting in and out of his memories and experiences

DARIUS: Yeah, so you just want me to jump into it?

AMY: Yeah, totally.

DARIUS: Alright, well, shoot. Growing up in Richmond, it's... it's different. (laughs)

AMY: Different how?

DARIUS: It's different from, from everywhere else, definitely cities around us. Growing up, the sounds of gunshots, sirens, all those were just lullabies.

MUSIC

DARIUS: I've had about maybe four, five people die from gun violence on my block growing up. We have so many candlelightings before I turned the age of 17.

AMY: Darius says one of his earliest memories—he thinks he was about three—was when an argument erupted between two men in an apartment building close to his house. He was outside with his cousin, his grandma, and a neighbor he called Mama Rose.

DARIUS: We were outside playing and my grandmother and Mama Rose heard him say, babe, go grab my gun. They both snatched the both of us up, told us to go in the house and told us to go hop in the tub. Ten to twenty seconds after they closed the doors and we get down the hallway, you just hear bap bap bap bap bap. Then like 20 to 30 minutes after that, you hear like three cruisers pull up.

AMY: Darius says the decade between 2005 – 15, when he was age four to fourteen, was a particularly violent time in Richmond, and the statistics back him up. The homicide rate here was was terrible in that period, often six or eight times the national rate.

DARIUS: It was a lot of shootings. A lot of shootings, a lot of police in the environment and the community.  It was just a real hectic time back then. A lot of paramedics, a lot of fire department. And I live right next to the train tracks. So you would hear the train go past a lot.

MUSIC

AMY: What did it…what did it feel like? Especially thinking of your, like, four-year-old, five-year-old self sitting there listening to that?

DARIUS: Well the shooting don't really get no time on it, to be so honest. You'd be sitting there at like midnight, you hear like three cops blasting down the street, and then you hear a fucking—excuse my language—you hear a paramedic come down the street right behind it. And it's like, OK well, somebody just got shot. All righty. Time to go to sleep now.

MUSIC

DARIUS: This is going to sound very sad. But at that point in my life, I thought, I just know it was just normal. And it's like, oh, they're shooting again.

DARIUS: At the time then I knew it wasn't normal, but it didn't really matter to me because it was so normal. It was, I was so used to it, then at a point in life I was sort of involved in it too. So it's just like, it is what it is. But now growing up and look at it now and it's like, bro, that was no way to live.

DARIUS: I was like, maybe I want to say like 18, 19, I leave my house, I cannot walk out my house without looking right and left about four times each. And then I would leave my house and after I leave my house, I'm still looking over my shoulder. That had to play in my head a couple of times. Like, bro, I shouldn't have to, I should be able to walk out my house and just walk out without tripping, looking over my shoulder, none of that. Now looking at it, it's like, yeah, that was no way to live. But hey, that's home. That was home to me.

MUSIC

AMY: What are some of the sounds at home that were comforting or that feel good when you think back on them?

DARIUS: My granny, rest her soul. She was my world. Not was, she is my world, even though she's not here, that's why I got her here tatted over my chest. Yeah. Just hearing her voice just always, calm me down. Brought me back to reality. Ahh, yeah.

AMY: Are there other sounds at home that, like, I don't know, that feel good mixed in with the hard stuff?

DARIUS: The sounds of birds. The birds chirping in the morning. We used to have a couple of neighbors they used to have, roosters back in the day. Ah, shit, six o'clock, five o'clock in the fucking morning you just hear 'em, and I'm like, bro! But yeah, I used to hear that that cocka-doodle-dooing in the morning, or hear just the hummingbirds or just just just the pigeons. Growing up, a lot of people in my, my block, they used to raise pigeons. That was like, that was like the hood thing, to raise pigeons and have your own pigeon coop in the back. So hearing them birds chirping in the morning, or hearing them pigeons get to making them weird noises and flapping around doing tricks in the air and the whole nine, that was the good mixed in with the bad, 'cause it was just like, all right, I'm just gonna sit in my backyard and just watch these pigeons do backflips. (Amy laughs.) Just sit here and just chill. Sip on a cup of coffee like, that was cool. It was cool growing up definitely with that.

AMY: This might be kind of an intense question, so feel free to say you don't want to answer. But when you mentioned the candle lightings, I'm wondering what they sounded like. What do you remember about how that sounded?

DARIUS: Oh. Damn.

DARIUS: The noises you'll hear, it'll be just straight crying people, people sad. People who you know may, they may have got off in the wrong foot and never made they amends with each other. So you hear a lot of apologies, a lot of I'm sorry, I should have been there. It gives you a wake up call, it does. It's a real like, yo, life is too short. It's sort of like a…like a quiet not quiet that you put yourself in. It's like, it sort of makes you feel like there's nobody else around you, but you in your mind. But also at the same time, you're still hearing everything going around you.

DARIUS: The other side of the spectrum would be...it's not us sitting here mourning you. It's celebrating you. Everybody you know got your favorite music bumpin, all your favorite songs. Just overall, generally just having a good time talking about the memories. We're grieving but we're not mourning. We're sitting here celebrating what you accomplished in your life while you was here on this earthly plane.

DARIUS: You know what I'm saying? So that was like the two sides of the spectrums when it came to candlelightings.

AMY: Our conversation took a lot of twists and turns. Darius told me about how his grandparents met here in Richmond, in the Navy, where his grandmother served as a nurse. Those family ties means a lot to him, it's a big part of what makes him feel connected to this place. But like so many people his age, he's also feeling the urge to leave the nest.

DARIUS: I'm ready to go. I'm ready to leave this joint. But also at the same time, I don't want to leave it because my roots is here. I can never forget where I came from, my roots, my foundation. This is my foundation. But also at the same time, I do want to leave, go to different cities.

AMY: You talked about, you know, the hard sounds, you talked about some good sounds. How do you think it affects you when you're in a more quiet or peaceful environment and when you're in a noisier environment?

DARIUS: I'm actually happy you asked that. So, my best example I can give you on that one is when I went to Connecticut.

AMY: As a kid, Darius went on road trips with his grandparents to visit family who lived out in the country. And it sounded…different out there.

DARIUS:….It was weird. (laughter)

AMY: (laughter) The quiet?

DARIUS: Yeah it was weird… it was just quiet, like I was outside and I'm starting to hear crickets. And I'm just like this is way too fucking quiet for me.

AMY: And it's still weird, he said, even as an adult. He told me about the last time he visited, just a few years before.

DARIUS: It was so quiet it was uncomfortable because that's how quiet it gets out there. So it's like...to be honest. It felt like somebody was watching me and it felt like something bad was going to happen at any moment. And it's just because, like growing up here like, shit, get real quiet like that. Oh, something's going to happen. It's either twelve is going to kick your door down, you fittin to see like five cruisers roll up with no lights on, no nothing, but you see SWAT right behind 'em. Like you know somebody's house gonna get raided. Or you see somebody running down the block, getting chased by a dog, or chased by the police, or chased by somebody. And it's just like I'm just sitting here in the back porch, and they have like, a whole get nice little piece of land too, that stretch. So I know I'm cool. Like, oh, this is their land. But I'm sitting there like, “this is too fucking quiet.” I'm sitting there just looking like snappin' my neck, hella hard, it's just like, “OK I'm really uncomfortable now.”

AMY: But, with a little time, Darius says, it shifts.

DARIUS: After you get yourself out your own head. I'm like, bro, you OK, you in a whole different state, let alone a whole different city, a whole different environment, like just relax. Once I was able to actually sit there and just like (deep breath) and relax. Shit was beautiful. It was tranquilic. It's just like you sitting there, I was able to sit there, lean back, kick my feet up, and just enjoy nature, 'cause that's all I'm looking at is straight nature. I'm looking at trees—like, yeah, okay, I got a whole bunch of bugs swarming around me, but it's just like, that's part of the nature. I'm hearing the crickets. I'm hearing these hummingbirds. I hear a woodpecker out in the distance. Like you start to actually, like, hear the little small shit because it's so quiet.

DARIUS: And it's just like you taking in, and getting nice deep breaths in, shoot, and it was it was nice. It was real nice. And then went back out there for my auntie's funeral, like, after we—because we're Native American, too, so after we had our chief talk and set her piece on it, and then had a couple of, ceremonial drummers, after that, it was just real quiet. It was just real quiet.

DARIUS: It was quiet, and it's just like we was, ah, we saw this hawk start circling around us. And then as we left, it was following me, my mom, my grandma, like, it was just following all of us back home. And at least for us, that was our Aunt Clara following us and watching us. I'm like cause even when I came home, whole-ass hawk was like, for at least for a whole week straight, was just following me around. Like I like every time I look up, I see a hawk flying past. Or I look up at the sky cause I feel like something watching me—hawk. Does a little circle on and goes off somewhere and disappears.

DARIUS: So it just be like the quiet after you get out your own head it actually allows you to sit there, take in everything, and enjoy it and appreciate it. So it helps me like think, and like, all right, recollect my thoughts.

AMY: The forests of Montana, the streets of Richmond—wherever we are in the world, birds are there too, breaking through our isolation, connecting us to something bigger than ourselves. I’m going to end this episode with a few stories about how that’s impacted my life. Right after this short break.

Break

[39:51] SEGMENT C

AMY: The first time I did a week of sleepaway camp, I think I was around nine. It didn't go super well. The most powerful girl in my cabin decided she didn't like me, so I became something of an outcast. It kind of sucked. But one night at dinner the counselors told us that there would be an early morning birding hike the next day, and I perked up. They said we'd listen to the dawn chorus, and learn how to identify birds by their songs. Anyone interested was supposed to set their alarms for 5 am, and be ready and waiting outside our cabins by 5:15. Snacks would be provided.

AMY: The next morning I was there, sitting on the cabin steps with my backpack in the Iowa dark. My two favorite counselors soon came along to collect me. They seemed sort of surprised to see me, and I was surprised they were surprised. Weren't lots of campers going to want to do this? Shockingly, no. Not a single other kid had woken up at 5 am to listen to birds. My counselors probably wanted to bag it and go back to bed, but being the good souls that they were, the three of us took off on our walk in the woods.

AMY: And as the sun rose, the birds started to sing. I don't remember that part, actually. I just know that must be what happened. Because that's what happens every morning.

BIRDS

AMY: And it's always morning somewhere. The Earth spins around on its axis, like a cylinder in an old-time phonograph. The Sun's rays are the needle, brushing against the surface. Everywhere the light touches, the birds sing—calling a new day into being, passing the baton of their song ever-westward until it comes back to them again the next day. I can imagine my nine-year-old self standing there in eastern Iowa, listening, amazed.

AMY: This vignette would be a great way to start to the story of how I went on to become an ornithologist, or at least an accomplished birder, that's not what happened. I'm just an ordinary lover of birds. I've learned some of their names, but I'm not particularly great at identifying them. I just love to look at them. To know they're out there. And more than anything, I love to listen to them.

AMY: I love how wherever I go, I'm greeted by their voices. How they tell me where I am. The coast of Greenland. The mountains of Svalbard. The plains of Montana. The deserts of Australia. The sounds of these places is are the sounds of its birds.

AMY: I recorded these snipes and other birds on the island of Grimsey in Iceland.

AMY: This wadidi in the Kenyan savannah.

AMY: And these are the sweet voices of some chickens I got to live with for a few years.

AMY: I'm constantly and happily getting stopped in my tracks by the sounds of birds. Curlews returning. Cranes departing. Owls congregating down by the river just a few weeks ago.

AMY: And now here I am in my yard, writing this, with too many cars going by too fast, and the highway and the train roaring in the distance, and probably soon an airplane overhead. But also, a pair of doves. A little convening of house sparrows. A flicker. A band of waxings. And the crows.

AMY: Always, and everywhere, crows. Theirs was the first voice I heard this morning. Before I heard another person, or myself, I heard the caw caw caws. Some people complain about the crow calls. Too loud, too harsh, too...something. But crows, frankly, do not care. They don't exist to decorate our lives. They're leading their own. They've got places to be, problems to solve, things to say. And apparently, a lot of those things are important.

AMY: One day last fall, a whole clan of crows took a walk down my street. For several blocks, they just paraded down the road, chatting among themselves and showing us all what's what. Sure, we can fly, they seemed to be saying. But we can do this, too, if we want to.

AMY: Birds can be goofballs. And jerks. We use birds to symbolize almost every human behavior, emotion and experience: joy, anger, moments of insight, descent into madness.

AMY: Emily Dickinson says hope is the thing with feathers, and I agree. But I think grief has them too. Birds were singing when I learned that my dad was dying. They were singing when the planes hit the towers. Whenever pain knocks me over and leaves me lying me flat on the ground, I look up, and birds are circling. I close my eyes, trying to find my breath, and listen to them. I don't know why, but it helps.

AMY: Birds are the proximate other. The aliens among us. They inhabit a realm that's all around us, and always just out of reach. We can fly too, in our way. But we wait in lines, present our documents, lock ourselves into heavy metal tubes, and fill the air with our noise and pollution. Birds, on the other hand, eat a few seeds and bugs, lift their nearly weightless wings, and soar off in silence.

AMY: I love them for this—for their grace. Their economy. Their freedom, and how they use it. They travel the world, adding beauty everywhere they go, harmonizing with each other and all the life around them. Birds have so much to teach us about sharing acoustic space. They sing and listen. Call and respond. And wait. And call again. That's partly why hearing birdsong feels so relaxing, I think. It isn't a cacophony. It's a symphony. It hangs together. Not because any one is conducting or controlling the ensemble, but because all the members are paying careful attention to the whole.

AMY: What would I be without these creatures, tethering me to a time, a place, to my own animal self? Who would I be? An Earth without the voices of birds would be like a star too heavy to shed light. A sonic blackhole, collapsing in on itself.

AMY: Once upon a time there was a world without birdsong.

AMY: May that world never come again.

Credits

AMY: This episode of Threshold was written, reported, and produced by me, Amy Martin, with help from Erika Janik and Sam Moore. Music by Todd Sickafoose. Post-production by Alan Douches. Fact checking by Sam Moore. Special thanks to Dalia Ramos and Lauryn Marshall at the RYSE Youth Center in Richmond. You can see pictures and donate to this amazing safe haven for young people at ryse center dot org. That’s R-Y-S-E center dot org.

The majority of the birds you heard in this episode were recorded by me, but I did supplement my own bank of bird voices with the excellent and much-appreciated recordings of our own Sam Moore, and the following people who contributed recordings for public use on the website Xeno Canto: Marc Anderson, Ross Gallardy, Hazel Reeves, Peter Boesman, Bill Grantham, Colin Reid, and Paul Marvin. Threshold is made by Auricle Productions, a non-profit organization powered by listener donations. You can find out more about our show and support our work at thresholdpodcast.org.

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