Episode 1: The Boreal Forest | Birds on the Move

We talk about birds being sentinels for environmental health and the health of ecosystems. The inference in that is what's good for birds is also good for humans and good for humanity and good for mother nature as a whole. When you're doing the work, those realities come to the surface. Birds represent a connection to the rhythms of life of the earth. They don't just fly, they are creating that energy. We have to have an exchange of energy for the earth to survive. That's why the water is moving, that's why the wind is there, that's why the tides are there. We cannot do this work in nature without understanding truly that we are a part of nature. How do we coexist together? Because Indigenous communities have done that for millennia. The species that breed in North America, over 70% of those species are migratory. When they're in their nesting grounds in the boreal forest and across the tundra, you can see them. You know, we don't have the great bison migrations anymore across North America, but we do have amazing bird journeys. Let's take a minute just right now just to listen to some of the sounds of the birds that are around us and could you just maybe take us through some of what we could be hearing? Yeah, it's a very birdy place here actually. There's a lot of song sparrows singing all around us, probably about three males I can hear just from this one spot. There's goldfinches flying by giving their potato chip calls, one going right behind you right now doing that. There's an eastern kingbird fluttering around here. That's a flycatcher that just comes up for the summer and then goes down to South America for the winter. Yeah, so that's some of the birds I hear at this second here, yeah. I have a special memory of a group of older lady bird watchers from my local Audubon chapter that invited me to go out looking for great grey owls. We had an unusual invasion of great grey owls into the state of Maine where I grew up and so birders go crazy trying to see them so it was a very special event. At that time I didn't know how special but I saw how special the birds were and just seeing how these ladies could identify all these birds and were so excited telling stories about birds and past bird adventures they'd had. You wouldn't think a 13 year old boy, you know, sitting in a car with a bunch of retired ladies would have been the thing I would have wanted to do but I was in heaven. It was just magical and exciting and I was hooked forever. It was my third year of college. I was invited to a prairie chicken blind. So prairie chicken, that's my spark bird. A cedar waxwing has always been my favorite. It looks like it always combs its hair just right. I saw a blackburnian warbler for the first time through a pair of binoculars. It's this spectacular little black and orange bird and it was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen. We were looking at black-capped chickadees and how they spend winter nights and kind of overcome these these obstacles with these little like natural magical tricks. That was kind of what what got me down the bird road. I was there with people from Bangladesh and Brooklyn and India and Korea and we were all from different cultures, spoke different languages but we were having a seminal unified reaction to what we were seeing. For so many people in the whole world that's kind of why birds mean so much to them. 1970 was actually a high water mark for birds. Across North America since 1970 we have lost three billion birds. That's a significant chunk of birds that in less than the span of a typical lifetime have blinked out. They call no more. Birds that have filled our backyards, our hearts and our our minds with their song are calling out to us through their silence. When we say bend the bird curve what it really means is birds have done this dramatic decline across most species and so when we say that our fundamental charge, our fundamental guiding star is to bend the bird curve, it's to take the actions at the scale necessary across the western hemisphere, across the life cycle of birds in our backyards, in our home ecosystems to slow, stop and ultimately reverse that troubling trend that we've been observing since 1970. One of the things that became obvious to me and it's kind of astounding that it hadn't been before but this is true for a lot of people is that a huge number of our birds and we now know there's one to three billion birds that nest in the boreal forest of Canada and three to five billion of them that migrate out across the U.S. and Mexico, Caribbean and Latin America and it was one of the last places on earth that still was mostly ecologically intact. Hello, my name is Stephanie Tarassi. I'm from Tuduli Lake, Manitoba. The land and the water and the air that I come from is 99.97 percent pristine so it looks as nature should look. It feels as nature should feel and it sounds the way nature should sound. We have the second largest carbon sink in the world. It's the breathing lands in Cree, it's Niihawin, it's the breathing lands and the carbon sequestration that happens from the carbon sink itself has been going on for thousands and thousands of years and that's how we keep getting this clean air for us and everything else to breathe. The watershed where I come from and is my home, the Seal River Watershed, is home to millions of birds. They come and they have their babies with us and they are in our backyards and are often our namesakes. My name and my language is Dalatusazit and that actually means a chickadee bird. We've been blessed really to have been led into partnerships and collaborations with many indigenous governments and organizations as they work to develop some of the largest land conservation and marine conservation proposals happening anywhere in the entire world. You go into any indigenous community and every single person has a connection to the land and a deep love for it and it goes back thousands of years and this information and this knowledge is just passed down through generations so there's this deep understanding of the world around them that you just can't get from just dropping in and trying to study a system for a single season or even multiple seasons. I think that it is admirable the science work that has happened for the birds to date but I really do believe that there are large gaps in the knowledge that is being collected. I think there is a lot of information that is being missed or looked over because the knowledge of the people locally is not being included. The First Nations, the indigenous governments and organizations are the ones that have to make these decisions. These are the ones that it's their traditional territory they have to decide whether or not they want it protected, how much they want it protected. Slowly we started to realize okay how can we learn to be real allies and partners here. We've been setting up ARUs for the past few years. We've included the indigenous names of as many of the birds as we could find in the communities in two Dene languages and two Cree dialects and actually because of the surveys and the ARUs and our work with the Audubon Society we're able to celebrate the amount of species of birds that we have is actually higher than what was formally recorded by western science. The work that we're doing with Audubon has been a really important part of the work. We've always counted on the migratory birds as part of our food chain. We also realized that you know we can do a lot of work trying to protect the geese when they come to James Bay and Hudson Bay but what about when where they come from where they have to go through cities in Ontario and the U.S. and other shorebirds that go right to South America. There has to be a network of working relationships amongst all of us where that migratory birds fly. One of the I think preeminent changes that we've embraced is to work not just nationally in the U.S. but across the hemisphere. Why? Because many of our birds that we see in our backyard in the United States that's only a portion of their life cycle and so to conserve we need to work across the hemisphere and across those life cycles across those interconnected ecosystems and so that's something that is new for this community and it's becoming second nature it's becoming a part of our identity which is really exciting to see and people are embracing it and it's enriching our experience. There's not many organizations that can talk about having 120 year history as Audubon can and to see the evolution of Audubon including now as we look to become much more hemispheric as we look to becoming much more inclusive with a multitude of partners you know it's an exciting time and it's what's needed to deal with the biodiversity and climate crisis we have in front of us. We say birds tell us. I think they tell us so much about our environment so much about ourselves so much about what's important. My grandparents raised me with my mom and would always take me out in the bush and we would listen to the birds. When I started playing guitar they said grandson don't play all the time because we can't hear the birds. We were taught to listen to listen to the birds. Humanity needs nature and this is me and this is my son and this is my family we're doing our part because our planet needs it and the birds need it.