Birds can tell us a lot about our environment and the future.
You’ve heard of the proverbial canary in the coal mine? In 2019, a grim report documented birds vanishing at an alarming and distressing rate.
A new book, The Return of the Oystercatcher: Saving Birds to Save the Planet offers a more optimistic update, noting the resurgence of some bird populations, and detailing remarkable conservation efforts taking place around the world, while not losing sight that some very real challenges remain.
On this hour of All Sides, we'll hear author Scott Weidensaul's take on the future of birds and our planet.
Guests:
- Scott Weidensaul, author, The Return of the Oystercatcher: Saving Birds to Save the Planet
- Julie Zickefoose, Ohio-based naturalist and author
Transcript
This transcript is generated with AI. To ensure its accuracy, review the audio file.
Amy Juravich: Welcome to All Sides with Amy Juravich. Quick, can anyone identify the bird making that sound? It's called the oyster catcher, and we're going to learn a lot more about them this hour, along with many other birds, shorebirds, raptors, and the like.
Birds can tell us a lot about our environment and the future. You've heard of the proverbial canary in the coal mine? Well, in 2019, a grim report documented birds vanishing at an alarming rate, and it was a distressing rate as well.
A new book offers a more optimistic update, noting the resurgence of some bird populations and detailing remarkable conservation efforts taking place around the world, but never losing sight of some very real challenges that remain. Joining us today is writer and researcher Scott Weidenswahl, who specializes in birds and bird migration.
A New York Times bestselling author, he's written nearly 30 books and he's here to about the latest book. "The return of the oyster catcher, saving birds to save the planet." Welcome to All Sides Scott.
Scott Weidensaul: It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
Juravich: So, I have to say that I was drawn in by the very first sentence of your book. The first sentence says, this is a book about optimism.
And I think we're all looking for a little more optimism in our lives these days. But why did you want to emphasize that word in relation to talking about birds and conservation?
Weidensaul: Well, frankly, because the news has been so grim for so long. I've been doing bird conservation for about 40 years. And my goodness, it just seems like such a relentless drip, drip, drip of bad news.
As you pointed out in the introduction, I'm not suggesting that things are great for birds, because they're not. Birds are telling us that the planet is in pretty dire shape right now.
But One of the biggest challenges I think that we face right now is just pessimism and the sense of just kind of throwing our hands up in the air and giving up, you know, the sense that there's not really anything we can do. And the fact is there's a lot we can. We've actually brought some species of birds back in a remarkable way. You mentioned that 2019 study that was published in the journal Science that showed that we
Juravich: Yeah, that sounds really bad.
Weidensaul: It does, and it is, but that's only part of the story, and we as a species tend to focus on bad news, it's just we're sort of hardwired for that. That same paper, that same journal article indicated that yes, while we'd lost significant percentages of many groups of birds, there were some groups of bird that were doing really, really well.
Wetland birds like waterfowl, ducks and geese and swans, herons and egrets and ibis, birds of the wetlands, had increased by more than 50% in the last 50 years. Raptor populations had come back by more 200%. By coincidence, I graduated from high school in 1976, which was the bicentennial year.
That year there were fewer than 1,000 bald eagles in the entirety of the lower 48. If If you had told me then that by the time we were celebrating the nation's 250th anniversary, there would be 400,000 bald eagles in the contiguous United States, I mean, that would have sounded delusional. And yet, that's where we are. We brought bald eagles back. We brought back peregrine falcons.
We've seen a resurgence in the populations of many other raptors. And, you know, that is a combination of better legal protection, banning many harmful chemicals like DDT.
Part of it was just a sea change in the way we as a society saw raptors, you know, for the better part of 300 years, pretty much from the time that the first Europeans set foot on this continent. We saw them as competitors to be eliminated. And we finally came to realize that they're an intrinsic part of the natural environment and worth protecting and celebrating.
And so raptor populations today are doing better than they have at any time in centuries. So we've done the same thing with waterfowl in the 1980s when things looked really, really bad for North America's waterfoul populations.
We, as a society, said we're not going to stand for this. And we poured an enormous amount of time and money and regulatory muscle and international cooperation between the US and Canada and Mexico. Into enhancing waterfowl populations, and we've seen, you know, dramatic searches. I mean, in some cases, maybe a little too successful. Canada geese.
Juravich: Oh, yeah, we'll talk about the Canada geese, but I wanted to dive into the fact that the title of your book refers to an oyster catcher. And I have to say, I had never heard of an oyster-catcher before.
And many of the birds you write about were new to me as well, but, I mean, I guess this is admitting I'm not much of a birder. But tell me about the oyster-capture. What they look like, where you would see one. Can just describe an oyster catcher for our listeners.
Weidensaul: So this is a beach bird. It's a member of the shorebird family. It's pretty big for a shorebird. They've got about the size of a pigeon or so, and they're pretty striking.
They're black and white plumage, long kind of pinkish-orange legs, and this, it kind of looks like somebody glued a carrot to their face, this bright red-orang knife blade bill. That they use for opening up mollusks. I don't know that an oyster takes a whole lot of catching, to be quite honest. Oyster stabber or oyster pounder might be a better term for them.
But they're found up and down the Atlantic coast and along the Gulf of Mexico, and they nest on beaches. And that's been a problem for them because like other beach nesting birds like leaseturns and piping plovers, particularly in the post-World War II years when the American middle class discovered how much we love beaches in the summertime, that became a really problematic place for these birds to nest.
So many people on the beach, so many people driving on the Beach, so much trash that we leave behind that attracts raccoons and foxes and possums and skunks and other potential nest predators. And so the oyster catcher population, like the population of many of our shorebirds, was going down decade after decade after decades.
But then in about 2008, a really remarkable consortium of about 40 agencies and institutions and nonprofits, all of which were concerned with oyster catchers conservation, came together and basically created a business plan for saving American oyster catches. I mean, they laid it all out. And they realized, the scientists realized, that if they could increase the productivity of each oyster catcher nest by an average of just half a chick per pair per year, they could turn what was going to be another oh, 10 or 12% decadal decline in oyster catchers numbers into about a 30% increase.
And they did that in a couple of basic ways. One was just reducing beach disturbance, you know, working with communities that have beaches. To leave sections of the beach alone for nesting shorebirds, like piping plovers and oyster catchers and lease terns, putting up what they call symbolic fencing, which is just nothing more than some stakes and a string and a few signs asking people to stay out of those areas.
And also, maybe a little bit more controversially, some targeted predator control, and not whacking every predator that's on the beach, but targeting... Those particular coyotes or raccoons that had made a habit of preying on the nests of these vulnerable shorebirds. And it worked. Since 2008, we've seen a 45% increase in oyster catcher populations from about 11,000 birds to about 15,000 bird along the Atlantic and Gulf Coast.
Juravich: So why did you decide to go with Return of the Oystercatcher is the title of your book? I mean, you could have done Return of The Eagle, Return of a Raptor that you just said, yeah?
Weidensaul: I could have. I could have. Alright, I'm going to be perfectly honest with you here. My editor at WWNorton thought oyster catcher was a really fun word.
Juravich: It is! Okay, good, alright, I agree.
Weidensaul: I agree also it also there's a lot of people who gay who say the return of a what? But they're but they're there. They're actually they're a super example of how Even within a group of birds like always like shorebirds because shorebird numbers as a whole especially in the Atlantic Flyway Continue to decline in fact we're seeing accelerating declines in their numbers But mostly because of issues that are happening far away from here like illegal shorebird shooting in places like South America But the oyster catcher is a really good example of how, even in a group of birds that are in really dire shape, if people come together and make some, again, relatively simple fixes, it's possible to turn things around. Progress is possible, even with groups of birds, where we've gotten used to this kind of numbing drip of bad news.
Juravich:
You're listening to All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. We're talking with author Scott Wiedenswaal about his new book, "The Return of the Oyster Catcher, Saving Birds to Save the Planet."
One of the developments you document in your book over the decades is how and when Congress took action to help with these conservation efforts. So what would you say was a pivotal law that was passed that really did help restore bird populations?
Weidensaul: Well, the pivotal law is what's known as the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which was passed in 1918 and it, as its name suggests, was a treaty between the United States and Great Britain on behalf of Canada, which then was a British dominion, to provide protection to native birds. And it says migratory birds in there because they were interested in the birds that back and forth between Canada and the United States.
But the Migratory Bird Treaty Act is the foundational bird protection law in the United States. If I go out in my backyard, not that I would do this, and shoot a protected bird like a robin, I would be prosecuted under the Migretory Bird Act. This happened at a time when we were killing a tremendous number of birds in the united states.
In the late 19th and early 20th century before the passage of some of these federal laws, We were killing between 100 million and 200 million birds a year for the pot. A lot of those birds were being sold in markets, including songbirds like robins and orioles and waxwings and cat birds, but also game birds and a lot of birds that were being shot for the millinery trade, for the hat making trade. These were particularly birds like nesting herons and egrets that during the breeding season develop is really.
Juravich: Oh, they wanted the feathers. I was, yeah. Okay. I was like, yeah, I was like, why would, why did you want a tiny bird? Oh, okay. The feathers.
Weidensaul: Feathers. Well actually in in the early 1900s Frank Chapman who started the Christmas bird count took a stroll down Seventh Avenue in New York City and recorded something like 60 different species of birds adorning women's hats and many of them were were whole birds.
I mean at one point gulls were among the most endangered birds in the United States gulls in turns because they were being shot in large numbers to display on women's And so along with the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, you had laws like the Lacey Act, which was passed around the same time, that made it illegal to sell the feathers or skins of a bird that were collected, that was shot illegally in one state to sell them in another. So it made the millinery trade in New York illegal because they were selling the feathers of birds, many of them smuggled out of Florida, that had been shot illegally down there.
The early foundational laws came in the early part of the 20th century. But then we began to build on that later. We've had waves of conservation that have rolled through this country, and often they've been triggered by kind of the worst of all circumstances.
I mean, think about the Dust Bowl years in the 1930s, when land was literally disappearing into the sky and farmers were going bankrupt all over the country. The federal government stepped in and started buying up hundreds of thousands and eventually millions of acres of land at fire sale prices and adding them to the National Wildlife Refuge System.
And they were funding that with another law that was passed in 1934, establishing a $1 migratory bird hunting stamp, basically what everybody today calls the duck stamp. It's basically a federal duck hunting license. If you want to hunt migratory waterfowl in the United States.
Got to buy a duck stamp. They were $1 in 1934, they're 25 bucks now, and the majority of the money from the sale of those duck stamps goes into supporting our national wildlife refuge system, which has just turned into this astounding bird factory all across the United States. In the 1980s, when waterfowl populations were collapsing again because of post-World War II industrialization and the destruction of wetland habitat, Congress passed a couple of really pivotal things.
One was the North American Wetland Conservation Act, or what's known as NACA, which provides federal funding for wetland habitat restoration and protection matched at a two-to-one level from private funding. And NACC has produced billions and billions of dollars for wetlands restoration. One of the reasons that waterfowl are doing so well today. Is because of knockup.
That was also the time in the mid 1980s when the United States entered into the North American Waterfowl Management Plan, which was the first transnational conservation plan between originally the US and Canada, and then eventually Mexico was brought in as well. Because these birds don't respect national boundaries. Most of the ducks that we see in the United states are born in Canada.
And so working across national boundaries, And also working with private nonprofits like Ducks Unlimited, which again over the years has raised billions of dollars for wetland and waterfowl conservation, both in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. You know, you put all of that money behind conservation and you're going to have good results and that's what we've seen with waterfoul.
Juravich: And before, yeah, before we take the break, I wanted to just fast forward a little bit because you're talking about the 70s and the 80s and all of these laws that passed and things have improved. How are we doing right now with conservation? I know that the Trump administration has taken a few regressive steps here and there. I mean, do you feel?
Weidensaul: How are things going? The Trump administration has taken massive, regressive steps, but it's not just the Trump administration. A few years ago, in what was known as the Sackett ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a way that removed protection from about 95 percent, Clean Water Act protection, from about 95% of the wetlands in the United States.
And More recently, the Trump administration's EPA has also sort of turned its back on what I would consider to be the proper and beneficial enforcement of the Clean Water Act, leaving a lot of our waterways really at risk. And the fact is, we are starting to see an erosion in the numbers of waterfowl.
The progress that we've made over the last 40 years is being whittled away. Now, I think that... Waterfowl have an unusually strong constituency out there.
There's a lot of people, either on both the red and blue divide, who enjoy either watching ducks or hunting ducks, and they have made it abundantly clear to Congress that they don't want anything to get in the way of there being a lot waterfowls. In fact, Congress, which seems unable to do anything. Just recently re-authorized the North American Wetlands Conservation Act, NACA, to the tune of something like $48 million in federal funds and $88 million in matching funds that will work over something like 13 million acres of wetland habitat. So things are bleak, but people are still stepping up.
Juravich: Coming up, we're going to talk about conservation efforts that are working. And we're gonna talk more with Scott Wydenswaal, author of the new book, "The Return of the Oyster Catcher, Saving Birds to Save the Planet." All sides continues in just a moment on 89.7 NPR News.
Juravich:
You're listening to All Sides. I'm your host, Amy Juravich. Bird watching is one of the fastest growing hobbies in the United States, but just loving to look for and listen to birds does not mean that all of our feathered friends are thriving equally or at all, as detailed in a grim 2019 report which says some birds are vanishing at an alarming and distressing rate.
A new book brings some needed optimism to the topic while probing why billions of birds have vanished. And which ones are returning, and why? This hour, we're talking to the author of this book, "The Return of the Oyster Catcher, Saving Birds to Save the Planet." Still with us, New York Times bestselling author, Scott Wiedenswaal. Thanks again for being here today, Scott.
Weidensaul: Oh, it's a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Juravich: So when did you first become fascinated with birds and you decided to make it your life's work?
Weidensaul: I can't really tell you. I have been a museum quality nature nerd my entire life. I literally cannot remember a time when I wasn't fascinated by this.
When I was younger, I was a little bit more serious about herps, you know, reptiles and amphibians. I really got hooked on ornithology, on the science of birds, when I took an Anthology course in college and got in the years since then have gotten more and more deeply involved in the research side of things, although I don't have an academic degree.
I dropped out of college before I finished my undergrad. So it's been an odd, yeah, I have a very, I'm not the person you, you don't invite me to career day at school. Let's just put it that way.
Juravich: I would I would invite you to career day. You've written a lot of books, you know, yeah
Weidensaul: Well, it was more by accident than anything, but I've just always been fascinated by birds. I grew up in the mountains of eastern Pennsylvania and near a place called Hawk Mountain, which was really the first sanctuary for birds of prey in the world, established in 1934 in order to stop people from shooting hawks from this high ridge top in a couple of northwest of Philadelphia.
And I really got hooked on raptors there when I was about 12 or 13 years old. And raptors in particular have kind of been central to my life. That's how I got into bird banding. I've done a lot of work over the years with owls and other species of raptors. It's just, it's been a lifelong love affair.
Juravich: So even in the 1930s, people were realizing that too many hawks or raptors were being shot and they were worried about the bird population, because you think of that as more of a modern concern, but you know, this was something that people realized.
Weidensaul: Yeah, well, at least one, a couple of people. One of them was a woman named Rosalie Edge, who, um... Really one of the unsung heroes of the modern conservation movement. She was green before green was cool. She had been a suffragette, so activism was kind of baked into her genes.
In the early 1930s, when word of this slaughter, and that was really the only word for it, I mean, there were thousands of them being killed every fall. At this migration point along the Kittatini Ridge in eastern Pennsylvania, when word of that came out, there was a guy named Richard Poe who had taken photographs of ranks and rows of dead hawks and was trying to get somebody to do something about it.
He went to the National Association of Audubon Societies and they were concerned, but in those days even conservationists tended to divide birds into good birds and bad birds.
Juravich: Mmm.
Weidensaul: And raptors were kind of bad birds, because they ate good birds. And so it's not that they thought it was a good thing, but they never did anything to stop it.
And then he went to Mrs. Edge. And she found out that this 1,400-acre parcel of land was up for sale for back taxes and bought it and declared it the world's first sanctuary for birds of prey. I mean, Hawk Mountain. And I'm still very involved with Hawk Mountain Sanctuary. I've been on the board.
I've run their banding program over the years. It's a place that is deeply important to me. It is the mother church of global raptor conservation. I mean, that's where it started. The idea of protecting birds of prey as integral parts of the natural environment started on this once blood soaked mountain top in Eastern Pennsylvania, and it spread all over the world.
Juravich: Yeah, your book also takes readers all over the world. A castle in England, you go to a war-torn Ukraine. I mean, what did you find out about birds there? How are birds doing in other parts of the world?
Weidensaul: Well, I want to be clear. I was actually not in Ukraine. I had promised my wife I would not go in Ukraine I was a third of a mile from Ukraine, from the Romanian side of the Danube River.
Juravich: Julie noted, yeah.
Weidensaul: Which did which did not seem all that far away when in the middle of the night I heard air raid sirens screaming just across the river in the in the city of Vilkova, Ukraine One of got to say one of the more terrifying moments of my life as it turns out I was not in any danger.
The missiles were striking far far to the north of me This was still in the early days of the war in 2023 when know, if there was an air raid anywhere in Ukraine, a missile strike anywhere in Ukraine, they went off everywhere. But I was on the Danube River Delta, which is the largest wetland area in Europe.
It's about a million and a half acres in this gigantic biosphere reserve, mostly in Romania, but also in parts of Moldova and Ukraine. And over the course of probably the last 15 years or so, leading up to the war, been a tremendous amount of conservation work done in that area by two organizations, Rewilding Romania and Rew Wilding Ukraine, which are part of this larger movement, this larger rewilding movement that's been been sweeping across Europe in the last 30 years or so, where conservationists are attempting to create or recreate sort of functioning ecosystems with as many of the original parts as possible.
And in the case of the Danube River Delta, they were trying to replumb this badly degraded wetland ecosystem. It's kind of, in a lot of respects, very analogous to the Everglades in the United States where there'd been a lot of channelization and dredging and damming and dykes and levees and the original flow of water had been greatly altered.
And incredibly important for birds. There's more than 300 species of birds that breed in the Danube River Delta, rare Dalmatian pelicans, the largest population of endangered white-tailed eagles in southeast Europe. And when the war hit, as you can imagine, there was a pause in that conservation work.
But these are tough people, and they have not given up. And despite the that the war is raging elsewhere in Ukraine. Conservation work in the Danube River Delta has continued and so I had an opportunity to spend some time again on the you know on the on the Romanian side of the river rather than than going into Ukraine itself but with with people who you know are working there you know and hear the scream of those air raid sirens on an almost weekly basis never knowing if you know an errant Russian missile or drone is going to come slamming down where where they are.
So, you know, really, really gutsy people who are still out there in the trenches literally for these birds and the rest of the wildlife in those areas.
Juravich: This is All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. We're talking about conservation efforts to save birds with author Scott Weidenswahl.
His latest book is called "The Return of the Oyster Catcher, Saving Birds to Save the Planet." I wanted to ask you about that subtitle, Saves Birds to save the Planet. Can you tell me about the connection there? I mean, how does one save another?
Because when you think about all of the issues with climate change and what's going on with our planet, you know, saving little birds, how, you, know, one would How does that help?
Weidensaul: Well, because we've got 11,000 species of birds on Earth. They inhabit virtually every ecosystem, virtually every square mile of the planet.
If we have a planet that works for birds, it will work for everything. I mean, their migrations carry them across tens of thousands of miles. If we can figure out a way to make a world that works with birds, we've gotta look for everything else, including us.
So you mentioned canaries in the coal mine early on. I grew up in the Coal Region of Eastern Pennsylvania, so I have ancestors who literally carried canaries into coal mines. They're the best environmental barometers that we have because they encompass so much of the world, because they are exquisitely sensitive to what's going on out there.
And we've talked before, the fact that we've seen accelerating declines in many groups of birds tells us that we don't have a planet that works for birds. And ultimately we have a planet that's not gonna work for us. So if we keep our eye on what's happening with birds and use them as a barometer for our degree of success or degree of failure, I mean, they will tell us what's working.
There are places where we've seen significant increases in bird populations in places like the working forests of Northern Maine where changes in forestry practices have. Created an incredible resurgence in the populations of many groups of birds, like warblers and virios and thrushes, whose numbers have been in steep decline for a long time. So it's possible for us to make changes at the landscape level that improve the lives and fortunes of birds and will ultimately improve the prospects for us.
Juravich: Let's talk for a minute about, because you mentioned this just as an aside earlier, and I promise to circle back to it, that maybe if we did too good of a job with the Canadian geese. Canadian geese? Yeah, no offense to Canada geese, but man, they make a mess.
Weidensaul: Well, and so here's the ultimate irony about that, almost all of the Canada geese that are out there on office parks and ponds and reservoirs and, you know, you're scraping those green gooey droppings off your shoes, they belong to a particular subspecies of Canada goose called the giant Canada goose, Branta canadensis maxima, which was first noticed by... Sort of Anglo-American scientists during the Lewis and Clark expedition. They found them nesting in old eagle nests high up in trees along the Missouri River.
And they were thought to be extinct at one point. By the 1950s, the giant Canada goose, so far as anybody knew, had vanished.
And then in the early 1960s, this sharp-eyed waterfowl biologist in Minnesota, a guy named Forrest B. Lee. Noticed a population of unusually large, essentially non-migratory Canada geese on a lake on the estate of one of the Mayo brothers, Charles Mayo, one of the founders of the mayo clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
He had a suspicion that these might have been a few remnant giant Canada gees. So he got in touch with a guy named Harold Hanson, who was like the top Canada goose expert out there. Hanson brought a few other experts up to Rochester to Silver Lake and they were able to capture a number of these geese and weigh them.
They looked at what they were getting on their scales and they thought, well, our scales must be broken here. This can't possibly be right. They actually went into town and they got five pound bags of flour that had been weighed on certified scales and found out, no, their scales were right. These were giant Canada geese. So, Forest Lee was tasked with saving the giant Canada goose.
And so he began breeding them in captivity, and they began releasing giant Canada geese in many parts of their former range in the Midwest, and they were really, really successful. So yes, perhaps a little bit too much so, and so what would happen, you know, the interesting thing about waterfowl like Canada gees is once they finished their breeding season, They molt all of their flight feathers at once and so they become essentially flightless for a period of time. So they're really easy to catch.
Juravich: Because they're walking around all over the place around here.
Weidensaul: Yeah, right, exactly. So you can round them up and so for example, if you're the state of Pennsylvania, you can say, well, hey, you know what? We would like to have a small non-migratory population of Canada geese at our Pima Tuning waterfowl management area in northwestern Pennsylvania.
How about we get some from the state of Minnesota? And so Minnesota sends them a bunch of Canada Geese and in a couple of years... There's a lot of Canada geese at Pima Tooming, so they start moving them around to some of their other waterfowl management areas.
And after a few years, they've got lots of Canada Geese there, and they've gotten no place to put them. So you pick up the phone and you say, hey, New Jersey, would you like some Canada Gees? And New Jersey says, yeah, sure, send them on over.
And so pretty soon, New Jerseys got too many of them. We now have a population of something between four and five million giant Canada gees. And Amy reputedly, every single one of those geese can trace its ancestry back to an egg or a gosling that Forrest B. Lee held in his hands back in the 1960s.
That is very much a mixed legacy, I have to say. When Forrest Lee died, he was 93 when he passed away, not all that long ago, he known as Father Goose. He was also involved in trying to save a number of other rare and imperiled species of geese, but... Every time you see a Canada Goose out there, every time you step aside from, you know, a gooey pile on the walkway at your local park, think with charity of Forest Lee and how perhaps overly successful he was.
Juravich: All right, I'll consider it overly successful when I see them, yes. Before we take the break, I wanted to note that, you know, I was very interested in the fact that I saw that Ohio's own Julie Zickefoose, who's a long time, any long time All Sides listener will know her as a frequent guest, Julie reviewed your book for the Wall Street Journal and you'll also find her name on the back of the book, praising your earlier book, "A World on the Wing." Tell us a little bit about how you know Julie Zygrafus.
Weidensaul: Oh, goodness, I have known Julie Zickafoos for a very, very long time, sort of a frighteningly long time at this point, because we're both getting older. I got to know Julie and her late husband, Bill Thompson III, through Birdwatchers Digest magazine.
I have written for BWD since literally the very first issue of that magazine, when I was a... Twenty something year old newspaper columnist in eastern pennsylvania and they've they've the reran a weekly natural history column that had written for the for local paper so so sick and sick and i go back a long long way and we're still you know we're so involved together at uh... At birdwatchers digest magazine uh... She's a she's very old and very valid
Juravich: Well, coming up, our conversation is going to look a little bit at Ohio's role in bird, the birding world as naturalist and author Julie Zakifous joins us. And Scott, author Scott Wiedenswaal will stay with us as well. That's when All Sides continues here on 89.7 NPR News.
You're listening to All Sides. I'm your host, Amy Juravich. We're talking this hour about birds of all feathers and the conservation efforts to replenish their numbers. Still with us is writer and researcher, Scott Wiedensal, a New York Times bestselling author, and he's written nearly 30 books. He's talking with us today about his latest, "The Return of the Oyster Catcher, Saving Birds to Save the Planet." Thanks again for being here, Scott.
Weidensaul: Oh, it's been my pleasure.
Juravich: And joining us now is a guest familiar to long time All Sides listeners, Ohio based writer, illustrator, and naturalist Julie Zickafoose. She illustrates her own books with watercolors. Her latest book was in 2025, the updated and expanded "Birdwatching for Dummies."
Her newest book out this summer is titled "Bluebird Landlord." She's also the advising editor for BWD Magazine, the former Birdwatchers Digest, to which she has contributed since 1986. Welcome back to All Sides, Julie.
Julie Zickafoose: It's so good to be here, thank you.
Juravich: So you and Scott have known each other for years. You recently reviewed his book for the Wall Street Journal and I want you to tell our Ohio listeners, what do you think Ohio readers should take away from reading "The Return of the Oyster Catcher?"
Zickafoose: Well, that's an interesting question, Amy, and I've been musing to myself that I think one of my favorite parts of Scott's book was talking about rewilding in Britain and in Europe. And you know, the classic rewielding involves bringing in large herbivores that graze as the Pleistocene herbivore once did.
I haven't done that, but I have been a mechanical herbivor here in my orchard in Ohio. And I have removed that which does not belong. And that would mean multi-flora rose, 12 foot high walls of that, and autumn olive, which is another thing that the soil conservation service gifted us with.
And when you remove what doesn't belong in vegetation, you get what does belong. And I made a little list while I was listening to you guys of some of the wildflowers that have come back, ragged fringe orchids. Mist flower, butterflyweed, wingstem, cream violet, golden ragwort, just to name a few.
But the birds that have come back into this neglected place that was overgrown with Asian natives, you know, Asian non-natives, include ovenbird, Kentucky warbler, Cerulean warblar, black and white warblor, wood thrush, and many more. And I just, I just thought, you would be kind of nice to bring it home to Ohio to what you can do.
Now I've lived here for 34 years and I've been slashing away at non-native vegetations very intensively since 2019. But that's a pretty short time in which to affect such a change. So I just wanted to shout out to Scott for an incredible book, just beautifully uplifting and just kind of say, you don't have to be in Poland to rewild, you can do it right here in Ohio.
Juravich: Yeah, Scott, what would you like to add about the idea of bringing birds back to your own backyard by having more native plants?
Weidensaul: Oh, that's... Without question, the best way to do it. And you don't have to have a huge property. That's the important thing.
Even a small parcel in town, if you plant, especially like native fruit bearing shrubs, native viburnums, dogwoods, things of that sort, they're producing berries at the right time of the year when birds are getting ready to start migrating south when they need that extra nutrition. You know, people often say, oh, what can I plant for the birds that will hold its berries all winter?
You don't want to have to hold its barriers all winter. You want the birds to come in and eat those berries like 30 seconds after they're ripe because that's the time of the year they need them. You know thrushes and tanagers, cat birds are getting ready to migrate to Mesoamerica or South America for the winter.
You know and again, it doesn't have to be across hundreds of acres. If you can do it across hundreds acres, that's great. But... Every little bit helps.
Doug Tallamy, who's at University of Delaware, who started this backyard national park idea, that you can have small parcels of land with native vegetation, with native plants, you're rebuilding, reconnecting these broken ecological links, creating bird food places for pollinators, it's not just birds, you're creating a small ecosystem in your backyard. That functions the way it's supposed to. And you multiply that across millions of backyards, you could create millions of acres of habitat for birds and other native species.
Zickafoose: Julie, yeah, go ahead, Julie. Yeah. In the rest areas around here, they're starting to take out the Bradford pears that were just reflexively planted everywhere in which we all loathe. And they're started to make native wildflower plantings with pretty good success.
They don't look manicured, they don't pruned or groomed, but it's just so nice to get out of your car and see actual native wildflowers.
Weidensaul: Amen.
Juravich: Julie, earlier Scott and I were talking briefly about bald eagles and how many bald eagles there are now and, you know, how his younger self wouldn't believe it. Julie, talk about High Banks Metropark and its bald eagle's nest coming back. The comeback is years and years in the making. Tell me what it means to have bald egles thriving in central Ohio.
Zickafoose: Well, you know, when Scott said that he graduated high school in 1976, I did too. So you described me as a very old friend. Thank you, Scott.
You know, I think it's just incredible, but we really can't take a lot of credit for doing anything other than eliminating DDT. Bald Eagles did it all. And I'm so amused by it all because when I first moved to Ohio 34 years ago You know, the only nesting Ohio bald eagles were around the shore of Lake Erie.
And they were heavily guarded nests that nobody could go near and all this. And now we've kind of figured out that bald eagles are like, we're cool with this, you know? And they'll nest about anywhere, not quite as tolerant of people as ospreys, but pretty darn close.
I was just up at McGee Marsh near Oak Harbor and watched a pair of bald eels feeding their eagles. From my car in the parking lot. And it just seems like such a miracle to me because I grew up thinking that the bald eagle would be extinct in my lifetime.
Juravich: This is all science. Yeah, did you feel the same way, Scott?
Weidensaul: I absolutely felt the same way. This is why I think despair is such a potent anti-force and why we need optimism and why need reminders that progress is possible. Every summer I teach at National Audubon's Hog Island camp on the coast of Maine, which is mostly it's at the bird camp for grownups.
But we also get teen ornithology sessions there. And last summer I was out on Muscungus Bay on a boat trip with this bunch of 20 or so really avid 14 to 17 year old birders. And... They were lamenting the fact that they felt that they'd been born too late, that the great migratory spectacles that earlier generations saw had left them behind.
And I said, look, I know that somebody your age hates it when somebody my age says, when I was your age. But I said how many bald eagles have we seen today? Oh, well, somebody checked their eBird checklist, and it was like 28. And we weren't even paying attention to them anymore, more shame to us.
I said, you know, my hope is that someday, when one of you is my age, that you'll be out here on a boat like this with another group of young, enthusiastic teen birders and saying, look, I know it seems incomprehensible to think this now, but at one point we thought we were going to lose birds. And look, we've, you know, we brought back robust. Bird populations. We've done it before, we can do it again.
It just takes will. So I remain at my core an optimist, if only because there's no percentage in pessimism. I mean, if you're pessimistic, you're just going to give up. And the only way it will be possible to bring back birds is if we don't try. So let's try.
Juravich: This is All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. We're talking about efforts to save birds and how that ties into larger climate issues. We're taking with writer and researcher Scott Wydenswaal and his latest book is called "The Return of the Oyster Catcher, Saving Birds to Save the Planet."
Also with us is Ohio-based writer, illustrator, naturalist, and author Julie Zickafoose. Northwest Ohio is home to the biggest week in American birding, a 10-day festival each May. It's hosted at Black Swamp Bird Observatory. Participants come from all over the world. And Julie, you attended. What did you learn about that week about birding in America and how people view birds?
Zickafoose: You know, it was really interesting because I hadn't been up to speak at Biggest Week for, you know, four or five years, I think. And it just seemed to me that there was kind of a sea change going on.
The thing that encouraged me the most was the number of young birders I saw on the boardwalk. Teens and 20-somethings. And I don't know if we owe some of this to the pandemic and people's refocusing on natural history.
Comforting things going on outdoors. But we're to, you know, they're very strong and robust young birder club, clubs around Ohio. Black Swamp runs one that's incredible. And I don't know what, who to thank, I think all of those forces, but I am so heartened to see birding catch on and on social media.
We have people like Chappelle, like... Is, I want to say Chapelle Rhone and she's not the person I'm trying to come up with. Anyway, there are popular figures admitting that they bird and touting it. And it's very exciting to me that authors and actors and singers are beginning to embrace birding and make it cool.
Juravich: Scott, people who attend the biggest week in American birding are probably a biased sample of the general public. I mean, do you find in your work, do average people who don't attend the biggest week of American birdings, do they care enough about birds?
Weidensaul: Yeah, I think they do, maybe not to the same extent. Obviously, those of us who are pretty deep in the weeds on this are a self-selected group.
But I'll tell you, I was at Biggest Week this year for the first time in several years as well, and I'll echo what Julie said. I was really struck by the sort of downslope in the age of the demographic, the average age of demographic.
A lot more young people. A lot of piercings, a lot of ink. Just a lot a lot people who looked a whole lot, a whole a lot cooler than I did when I was a kid.
And it's just, it's so heartening to see. Birding has become very inclusive. It has become intentionally inclusive. We saw that with the rise of Black Birders Week that grew out of, you know, that horrible incident with Chris Cooper up in. Central Park having somebody swat him and basically call the cops on him when he was just trying to get her to put her dog on a leash instead of letting it run loose in the park.
Birding is a lot younger and dramatically less white middle class and upper class than it was even just a few years ago. That's fantastic because right now birds need all the friends they can get.
Zickafoose: May I quickly interject, Amy? Bonner Black was the wonderful singer and guitar player and songwriter who performed her biggest week. Bonner black, not Chappelle Rhone. And I know that because my 30-year-old daughter is listening from Rome, Italy, where she's on her Honeymoon. And she texted me to correct me as she often does.
Juravich: My son is listening, too, from Chicago. Well, it's a small world after all, right? Julie, yeah, we are out of time, unfortunately. So Julie, you're going to have to come back later this summer to tell us about your new book called "Blue Bird Landlord," because that's such an intriguing title.
But right now I have just have time to say thank you. We've been talking with Scott Wydenswaal, a New York Times bestselling author. And his latest book is "The Return of the Oystercatcher, Saving Birds to Save the Planet." Thank you for being with us today, Scott.
Weidensaul: Oh, it's been such a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me, Amy.
Juravich: And we've also been talking with Ohio-based writer, illustrator, naturalist Julie Zickafoose, whose new book is "Bluebird Landlord," and we'll learn more about that another time. Julie, thank you for your time today.
Zickafoose: Thanks, Amy, it's great to be back.
Juravich: You're listening to All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. I'm Amy Juravich. If you missed any part of today's show, listen back at our website, wosu.org/all sides.
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