MARK BRAMHILL

Today is the Autumnal Equinox, when the sun crosses the equator and day and night are of approximately equal length across the globe. In her poem ‘Utsuroi’, writer Lee Ann Roripaugh reflects on how, as the days grow shorter, the remaining light feels that much more beautiful.

National Battlefield Parks are grassland habitats worth writing home about. Tall grassy fields aren’t typically considered beautiful, much less valuable to conserve. But battlefield monuments and military parks are maintained as historic sites — with the side-effect of preserving excellent habitat. Today, rather than the roar of cannons, battlefields like Gettysburg, Antietam, and Monocacy are filled with the sounds of grassland songbirds.

Musician Andrew Bird is known as a songwriter, violinist, and, like his namesake, a virtuoso whistler. He showcases all of these skills in the song Rare Birds, which was created as part of The Birdsong Project in 2020. Whistling melodies inspired by Mourning Doves and the Kaua‘i ‘O‘o alongside his violin, Andrew creates a kind of otherworldly natural soundscape.

Poet Holly J. Hughes’ book Passings is a collection of poems about 15 species of birds that we have lost, or presume to be extinct. For National Poetry Month, Hughes shares the inspiration behind her work and three poems: Passenger Pigeon, Northern Curlew, and Ivory-Billed Woodpecker.

Birds convey many types of messages through their songs and calls, but some may have… ulterior motives.

Twenty years ago today, the first BirdNote Daily episode aired on the public radio station now known as KNKX - 88.5 FM Tacoma/Seattle. Since then, through thousands of sound-rich stories about the lives of birds, BirdNote has inspired people to care about the natural world and take steps to protect it.

Kenon Walker got one of the most unusual job offers you can get: be the Duckmaster of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis. That means he would lead the hotel’s five ducks on a daily march to the fountain in the lobby, a bizarre and beloved tradition that draws visitors from all over. But when he was first offered the job, Kenon was hesitant to take it because all the previous Duckmasters he knew of were white. Or so he thought.

Twice every day, a rapt audience gathers at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee to see six local celebrities; five of them are ducks.

The Maui Bird Conservation Center helps care for Hawai‘i’s critically endangered bird species, some of which have gone extinct in the wild. Jennifer Pribble, the center’s Wildlife Care Supervisor, lives onsite. A year ago, several wildfires broke out on Maui island in Hawai‘i, killing over a hundred people. The first fire likely began in the forest near the bird center, as security footage later showed. Early in the morning, the wind began directing the fire toward the bird center. Jennifer and a neighbor rushed out to hold off the flames until firefighters arrived, helping save the lives of the center’s rare birds.

Poet Craig Santos Perez grew up on the island of Guam, and later moved to Hawai‘i where his children were born. Both are places that once flourished with unique and diverse bird life, but because of invasive species and climate change, have seen so much loss and extinction. In this episode, he shares poetry that explores his relationship with lost and endangered wildlife and that reflects on the future his daughter will inherit.

In this episode of BirdNoir, the private eye gets a call from H. Jon Benjamin about unusual Wild Turkey behavior. A male turkey (known as a “tom”) won’t leave his car alone. He keeps tapping his beak on the car. Then the turkey starts circling the house and looking in all the windows. The private eye reveals how things look from the turkey’s perspective, which points the way to a possible solution. Featuring H. Jon Benjamin.

Poet Claire Wahmanholm’s work focuses on nature and the environment. As she was walking around a nature preserve north of Chicago, Claire was listening for birds but realized there was something else she was hearing: the ever-present hum of a nearby highway. “When you’re trying deliberately to hear something else you really notice it,” she says.

With invasive species and climate change, Hawai‘i has experienced so much loss and extinction since Western colonists arrived. But Sam ‘Ohu Gon, the Senior Scientist and Cultural Advisor for the Nature Conservancy of Hawai‘i, believes Hawaiian culture and tradition are key to advancing conservation ecology and has done a lot of work connecting these two worlds. He hopes that one day, Hawai‘i can be not just a microcosm of ecology, but of conservation as well.

For National Poetry Month, we’re sharing contemporary writers’ work about birds. Poet Susan Nguyen got a hummingbird feeder from her neighbor in 2020 during the COVID pandemic. She began taking an interest in the hummingbirds that visited, giving them names and learning the surprising way they use their tongues to drink nectar. The way birds defy expectations has helped inspire several of Susan’s poems.

In this episode of BirdNoir, Private Eye Michael Stein gets a call from his friend Billy, a mail carrier. Billy says he hasn’t seen a single bird on his route since the storm came into town, even though at this time of year the streets are usually chock full of birds. He asks, what happens to birds when it rains?.

Sam ‘Ohu Gon was one of the last people to see an ‘Ō‘ū, a native Hawaiian bird that’s presumed to be extinct. He’s worked at the Nature Conservancy of Hawai‘i for nearly forty years. In 1988, he took part in an Audubon Christmas Bird Count, hoping to encounter critically endangered native birds.

In 2018, paleontologist Daniel Field took a closer look at specimens from an amateur fossil collector. His team used micro-CT scanning, kind of like a high-energy CAT scan, to visualize the encased fossils. They were amazed to find a tiny bird skull: the earliest known fossil record of a modern bird. The skull looks chicken-like in the front and duck-like in the back. The bird may have looked and behaved like a modern shorebird.

Thomas Poulsom is a hobbyist LEGO builder best known for his models of birds. But making birds out of bricks isn’t easy.

As he trained to be an arborist, Thomas Poulsom started developing two new interests: birds and building with LEGO bricks. After first building a European Robin, he went on to create LEGO models of more than 75 species. Thomas became one of the first LEGO fans to have his designs produced as an official set.

Poet Sean Hill performs three poems that encapsulate his dynamic relationship to birds, travel and life as a Black wanderer in the great outdoors. First is The Western Tanager or Why Montana, a villanelle reflecting on why people choose a home. Then, In Houston examines the intimacy of quiet moments and the surprising sounds that can be heard when we really listen. And finally, Silas Fishing 1967 shows how connecting with even small moments in nature can have a transformational effect.

Writer Camille T. Dungy shares the poem Clearing from her new book, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden.

Dave Mull is not your typical birder — he’s a professional skateboarder, or a “skatebirder” as he puts it. He brings binoculars with him when he skateboards and doesn’t mind putting his board down to check out a bird. But the birds aren’t really a distraction for Dave. Tuning into his surroundings, including the birds, helps him stay in the zone and provides inspiration for tricks.

In 1907, a German pharmacist named Julius Neubronner invented the pigeon camera. It was a small camera strapped to a pigeon’s breast — like a photographic baby-bjorn. A timer let the camera take multiple snapshots throughout the bird’s flight. This allowed for some of the earliest aerial photography, and even seemed promising for military reconnaissance.

Skateboarder and birder Dave Mull remembers the first time he heard a Steller’s Jay imitating a Red-tailed Hawk. “These Steller’s Jays were pretending to be something they were not, kind of tricking the world,” he says. It got him into the mindset that he could attempt a terrifying new skateboard trick called the “stump jump.”

In this episode of BirdNoir, the Private Eye hears from his friend Danny, who is having his bird feeders pilfered by a pack of rowdy squirrels. While a determined squirrel thief is hard to stop, the detective gives Danny suggestions on the best ways to foil these clever critters.

Poet Ada Limón often writes about birds, and her new book, The Hurting Kind, is no exception. Birds are a throughline in the book — between the seasons, from childhood to present, and knowing and unknowing. Two of her poems examine opposite sides of the “knowing/unknowing” coin. You can read many more fantastic poems, with and without birds, in Ada Limón’s new book, The Hurting Kind.

Part of an annual series of National Poetry Month episodes I started at BirdNote, highlighting the work of exceptional contemporary poets writing about birds and nature. It was especially exciting to interview the now-US Poet Laureate and sound design some of her poems.

Bills so bright they gotta wear shades.

A student’s birding dream becomes reality.

Writer Camille T. Dungy’s book Trophic Cascade deals with themes of nature and becoming a mother. The title is an ecological term, referring to the far-reaching changes on an ecosystem caused by the removal or introduction of a top “trophy” predator. In the case of Camille’s book, that “trophy creature” is her daughter. Camille performs three poems from Trophic Cascade reckoning with these changes to her own ecosystem.

When poet Ada Limón moved to Kentucky with her husband for his work, she was having trouble adjusting to her new home. To connect with the place, she began learning about the local birds and plants. She found comfort in the idea of the nearly omnipresent state bird, the Northern Cardinal. That inspired a poem in which the state bird becomes a metaphor for love.

Part of an annual series of National Poetry Month episodes I started at BirdNote, highlighting the work of exceptional contemporary poets writing about birds and nature. It was especially exciting to interview the now-US Poet Laureate and sound design some of her poems.

In our second installment of BirdNoir, PI Michael Stein investigates a murder — a fish murder, plucked from The Dame’s pond. Is it a Bald Eagle? Or has ol’ baldy been framed? It’s all about knowing the right questions to ask.

Another installment of BirdNoir, finding playful new ways to teach listeners bird ID. Ft. Avery Trufelman as The Dame.

In this episode of BirdNoir, Michael Stein — Private Eye — gets a call from a friend, Danny, who wants to know why the bluest bird he’s ever seen has vanished. But there are many birds that are blue besides the true bluebirds (which belong to the thrush family). To solve the mystery, the detective needs to know the right questions to ask Danny, finding the relevant information to identify the bird and figure out what happened.

This is the first of an ongoing series of BirdNoir stories, using old film-noir tropes and production to make frequently asked questions about bird-ID and behavior more exciting and memorable. I cameo as fast-talkin’ Danny in this episode.

“It’s a jewel.”

The surprising history of an unjustly maligned bird.

Sculptor and musician Walter Kitundu first became enraptured by birds in 2005 when a Red-tailed Hawk flew four feet above his head. He named the bird Patch, after the white patch on the back of her head, and kept returning to the park to see her. Patch became used to Walter, accepting him as part of the landscape. He documented her transition from juvenile to adult, learning her quirks and mannerisms.

Tig Notaro is known for her acting, writing, and especially her deadpan comedy. Less well known is her love for birds.

When writer Wendy S. Walters lived in LA in the early 2000s, she wrote a collection of poems about the city called The Birds of Los Angeles. For one of her poems, she wanted to examine the idea of the Hollywood romance “and the ways in which people think that they’re going to be walking into a movie about their life,” Walters said. “And you know relationships are often much harder than that.”

In an ornithology class in college, Corina Newsome was introduced to the Blue Jay. After this, Newsome was determined to learn about the world of birds she had never noticed before.

Christian made his first duct tape wallet when he was 10, and it stuck.

You’re playing Stardew Valley, but like, in real life! 👩‍🌾

You can never have enough kinds of fish sauce.

There is a very delicious world outside of those walls 🍎

Lifelong birder Jordan Rutter co-founded the campaign Bird Names for Birds. The goal? To discontinue the use of honorific names and replace them with names that celebrate the unique attributes, behaviors, and biomes of the birds. “There’s a way for us to remember and learn the history of ornithology…that can be separate from the actual birds,” Jordan says. “And just let birds be celebrated for birds.”

August 22 is the birthday of renowned French composer, Claude Debussy. Born in 1862, Debussy is known for his impressionistic sonic portraits, like La Mer, about the sea. But one of his best known works is an earlier piano piece, Clair de Lune. The song is quiet and haunting. Which got us thinking: what if we paired it with the most haunting birdsong — the song of loons? Enjoy Clair de Loon.

I was proud to hearken back to the old days of NPR with this piece and subject listeners to something truly wacky. I collaborated with Breakmaster Cylinder for turning this idea into a reality.

While at Chicago’s Field Museum, I ran into a School of the Art Institute of Chicago nature illustration class in the hall of birds. I took out my iPhone and interviewed as many students as were willing to take out their earbuds to talk to me, and was thrilled to find Michelle.

Each September, thousands of Vaux’s Swifts roost in the chimney of Chapman Elementary School in Portland, Oregon, a stopover on their southern migration. Crowds gather every night to watch the spectacle. As a celebration of Poetry Month in the US, we offer this poem, Swifts, by Stefania Gomez.

Part of an annual series of National Poetry Month episodes I started at BirdNote, highlighting the work of exceptional contemporary poets writing about birds and nature.

Bird populations in North America have plummeted since the 1960s. A recent study found that overall bird populations in North America have declined by 3 billion birds, almost 30 percent of the total population. There are a number of factors causing this: habitat loss, climate change, cats. But glass windows are one of the biggest killers of birds in the United States — claiming the lives of up to one billion birds each year. Producer Mark Bramhill has the story on what’s going on — and what folks in NYC are doing to try to fix it

I travelled to NYC to report this story, shadowing Audubon volunteers and visiting the Wild Bird Fund animal rehab center. It was difficult to see so many dead and injured birds, but also hopeful to know that real change is starting to happen.

How a board game about birds became the game of the year.

How a bus driver in Seattle found a love for birds.

Part of the Spark Bird series I started for BirdNote, sharing the stories of how people first became obsessed with birds, whether they’re a bus driver who casually watches birds or a celebrated ornithologist.

In this extended episode, Traci Brimhall shows how poetry can bring us closer to nature.

Part of an annual series of National Poetry Month episodes I started at BirdNote, highlighting the work of exceptional contemporary poets writing about birds and nature.

What’s the cost of having the latest and greatest?

A look into the environmental impact of Apple’s devices, how the difficulty to repair and recycle them poses a growing problem, and how these issues have complicated my fandom.

The drama, the inspirations, and the hijinks that went into the creation of sounds you hear nearly every day.

My favorite story from my podcast, Welcome to Macintosh. This story also aired on the podcast 20 Thousand Hertz. Runner-up in Audio Documentary for the 2018 Miller Audio Prize from the Missouri Review.

If you have a music library on your computer, you probably use iTunes. It might not be by choice – there’s not much out there. But before iTunes, there was another app. An app that was beloved by many. An app that was quirky and strange and delightful. An app called Audion.

Today: a story about one of the Mac’s first big music players, and what it means to break with the mold of Silicon Valley and forge your own distinct, creative identity.

The story of how a YouTube video made Steve Jobs dance.