Latest / NaturallyScott / E66 Scott Weidensaul – The Return of the Oystercatcher & Stories of Hope for Birds 🐦🌎

Transcript

E66 Scott Weidensaul – The Return of the Oystercatcher & Stories of Hope for Birds 🐦🌎 · NaturallyScott

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Hello and welcome to this edition of Naturally Sky.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I am the host of the podcast, and actually go ahead and say it.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: I'm proud to be so.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: I absolutely love the guests that we have on the show.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: Let us who have gotten to know people over time.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: And one of those is today's guest.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: Scott and I did uh a couple of podcasts earlier on numbers 18 and 19, by the way.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: If uh if you want to go back and watch, but settle in and grab a cup of coffee, because Scott and I tend to ramble a little bit.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: Today.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: Today.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we found each other charming and engaging.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: What the audience thinks is some is up to them.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: But today we're going to cap it at a half hour and we're going to share some stories.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I and I have to tell you, I'm excited about this.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: I've had some conversations with other guests, not with Scott, but with other guests, other conservationists, and people who care deeply about the environment.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: And as a former marketing guy, it's what I did for 35 years while you were out studying, you know, screech owls and salwood owls.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, one of the things I learned is that if you can't always inundate people with the negative, there needs to be the positive, or they just give up.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: If everything is about climate change and plummeting populations and diseases and losses and whatnot, eventually people go the hell with it.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: There's just not anything I can do.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: So when you told me a while back that you were writing a book that didn't focus on how terrible humans are, how there was no chance for the future for animals or humans.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: You were going to focus on optimism and hope and some positive stories.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: I was absolutely thrilled and I can't wait to talk about them.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: The new book just came out.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's called The Return of the Oyster Catcher: Saving Birds to Save the Planet.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: I will go ahead and say this.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: Scott is a New York Times best-selling author with his book, A World on the Wing.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: I'm looking up at my bookshelf, which kind of fills up with Scott's books.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: I focus mostly on the Raptor ones, which are a bit older, but A World on the Ring and Raptor Almanac and Raptors and just some fun stuff.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: So we're gonna we've talked about his other books in the other podcasts, but today we're gonna focus on this one.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I will just say that Scott is not just uh one of the world's leading voices about birds.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's fair to say that you're one of the leading voices for birds.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a critical difference there.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's not semantical.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: And um, with that being said, my three minutes are up.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: I've invited Scott here to talk about his book as much as he wants to talk about it, and to share some of these great positive stories.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: So, Scott, with that, I'm gonna lean back, become part of the audience, and uh listen to what you have to say about your book and the birds in it.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_02: Well, thanks.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and it's a pleasure to be back here.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_02: And we'll we will we will try not to ramble here because we do have a tendency, we we we we are both storytellers and we like to tell stories.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, this this book actually grew out of a challenge from a friend who, when my my last book about migratory birds came out, said, All right, you've done this book about all the challenges facing migratory birds.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_02: Why don't you um sorry, got a call there.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_02: No, no.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_02: Why don't you do a why don't you do a a book about what's actually going right for bird conservation, which I was very happy to steal that idea from him.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um the because it's exact what you said is exactly true.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um we as a species tend to focus on the negative.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think that goes back to the days where if you weren't paying attention to the negative, you get eaten by a cave lion.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um but and and it's true, I think conservation organizations tend to use fear and outrage to motivate people, but you can really get into a into a doom loop where you just, you know, you just, as you said, you just feel despair, you feel like, what the hell?
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_02: What's the point?
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um, everything's going to hell in a hand cart, there's nothing I can do, so I'm just going to give up.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_02: And the fact is that while the picture for birds is certainly grim, and I'm I'm not sugarcoating that.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not suggesting that everything's fine for birds, because it's not.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_02: We know that there have been huge numbers, you know, huge declines in bird populations, that there's some recent evidence to suggest that uh bird declines in North America, especially bird birds like shorebirds and and grassland birds, are accelerating.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, the the the hour is late and the situation is grim.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_02: But all around the world there are people that are making a positive difference for birds.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that there are there are two advantages to listen to to looking at those stories.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_02: One is um because they're roadmaps for hope, they're roadmaps for recovery.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_02: Frequently, what what's being done for one species of bird in one place can be scaled up for many species of birds in many places.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_02: And we've seen that, you know, with new techniques that were developed 50 years ago for seabird conservation to save one species, Atlantic puffin, on the on the to restore Atlantic puffin on the coast of Maine.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_02: And the techniques that were developed by Steve Cress and Project Puffin, like social attraction, using decoys and audio lures, predator exclusion, translocation of chicks, those are being used with hundreds of species of endangered seabirds around the world.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_02: And the other thing is you said just to give people hope.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_02: And I think just to remind us of what's possible to be done.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I I graduated high school in 1976.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_02: I I was I was a bicentennial, um, you know, bicentennial baby.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_02: In 1976, there were about a thousand bald eagles left in the lower 48.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_02: If you had told me that year, um as a as a rabid raptor nut that by the time we were celebrating the 250th anniversary of the country, that there would be 400,000 bald eagles in the lower 48.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_02: God, I would have thought you were delusional.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um it it would have it was it would have seemed incomprehensible.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_02: We'd lost peregrine falcons, we'd lost ospreys, bald, you know, brown pelican populations were crashing, all this stuff.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_02: And this was at the end of not just the DDT period, but s literally centuries of raptor persecution.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_02: And we turned that around.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, I think a lot of your a lot of your listeners are probably aware of the fact that in 2019, you know, there was a paper in the Journal of Science documenting that we'd lost two-thirds of North America's bird population since 1970.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_02: One third.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_02: Well, sorry, one third.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_02: One third.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_02: Math was never my strong point.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_02: Math was never my strong point.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um, yeah, one-third of North America's birds.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but raptor populations have increased 200% since 1970.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_02: Waterfowl populations and wetland bird numbers have come up by 50 to 50 to 80 percent.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, speaking of waterfowl, we saved waterfowl in the 20th and early 21st centuries.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, their numbers were, you know, scraped bare by market hunting and habitat loss and environmental degradation.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_02: And starting in the 1980s, you know, we as a society put time and effort and muscle, regulatory muscle, and billions of dollars of resources into restoring and protecting wetland habitats.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_02: And we probably have more waterfowl today than we've had at any time since the beginning of the market hunting period in the late 19th century.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um, not every duck is doing fine.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_02: Some ducks, some species are struggling.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but my God, geese?
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_02: Look what we've done with geese.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um, maybe a little too successful with geese.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: Not everybody's jumping on that happy bandwagon.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_02: No, no.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_02: Well, okay, so here's the crazy thing about geese.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_02: Almost all of the Canada geese that you see at office parks and, you know, backyards, and these most of these are giant Canada geese, Brantocanadensis maxima, which was first noticed by American scientists during the Lewis and Clark expedition.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_02: They saw these huge Canada geese nesting in old eagle nests up in cottonwood trees along the Missouri River.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_02: By the turn of the 20th century, they were thought to be extinct.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, they thought they were gone.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, they weren't even described for science until 1950, at which point the AOU said, you know, believed to be extinct.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it turns out they weren't.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_02: There were some small populations in places like Silver Lake in Minnesota.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_02: And there was a guy named Forrest B.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_02: Lee.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_02: He was a he was a waterfowl supervisor for the state of Minnesota, and he noticed these non-migratory flocks of unusually large Canada geese near the estate of one of the Mayo brothers, Charles Mayo, one of the people that founded the Mayo Mayo Clinic.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_02: And he got in touch with some other Canada goose experts, and they came in there and they hemmed and hawed and they weighed these birds and they measured them and they announced the recovery, the resurrection of the giant Canada goose.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_02: And Forced Lee was charged with saving these birds because there were only a handful of them left.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_02: So he started breeding them in captivity.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_02: Boy, was he successful.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_02: There are something like four million Canada geese out there, giant Canada geese.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: By the way, it seems that they're all on our beach here at the lake.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, I'm sure there seems like that everywhere.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_02: But here's the crazy thing.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_02: Essentially, every one of these weakly migratory or non-migratory giant Canada geese that have taken over the continent can trace their ancestry back to a goose, a gosling or an egg that Forrest Lee held in his hands.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um that, you know, so a mixed legacy?
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I could, you know, I can you can argue that, certainly.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, I've scraped enough goose poop off my shoes at at at parks and reservoirs to understand that not everybody's happy about them.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, compared to losing birds, that's not a bad problem to have.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: I a hundred percent agree.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, yeah, they can be a little bit of a pain, but overall we're better off with them than without them.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: I was out birding this morning with a good buddy of mine, and um, yeah, we were there right after dawn, and there's a single candidate that lives on this little pond, and it's injured.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: And it's been there now four years without leaving the pond.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: Its friends leave and leaves it there, and it somehow manages to survive.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: And there it was again this morning.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: Flying it never seems to fly more than a foot or two off the lake, but it can fly.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but it chooses now to it got used to staying there, and so we have an overwintering single uh Canada goose on this little pond, which is beautiful to watch.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, they're tough birds, they're tough birds, and and their populations have exploded.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I'm up in New Hampshire next door to Maine, and the Canada goose population in Maine between 1966 and 2017 grew 46,000 percent.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um just it just went from essentially nothing to there are Canada geese now nesting on on the outer islands off the coast of Maine where there were probably never Canada geese nesting, quite frankly.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um so you know, I saw the population reduced by one when I went up there to see the Stellar Sea Eagle, and it took out a Canada goose.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um up on the air side.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, there's not a lot.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_02: Not a lot that can take out a Canada goose.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: There's really not.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um was pretty awesome.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, maybe it was.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: So tell us about the bald eagles.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody loves bald eagles, and not everybody who watches the show is a birder, so fill us in here.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_02: So so I mentioned I graduated in 1976, and that year, because it was the bicentennial, the uh the Fish and Wildlife Service went to Dr.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_02: Tom Cade at the at Cornell, who was the person who was spearheading the Peregrine Falcon captive breeding and reintroduction program, and said, Hey, can you do the same thing with bald eagles?
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_02: Because we'd like to, you know, it's the nation's symbol, they were really in trouble.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_02: And Cade was a little reluctant at first, and he kind of cast around for somebody that he could dump this on.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_02: And so he picked a uh a young undergrad named Tina Morris, who was one of the few women out there doing anything with raptors.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_02: In those days, raptor biology was about as testosterone-soaked um afield as you could find.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_02: And they had a couple, there were a couple of bald eagle chicks that were raised, had been raised in captivity at a zoo in, I'm gonna say Wisconsin.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not absolutely certain about that.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but anyway, they had these two siblings.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_02: So Tina was given the task of hacking these birds back into the wild using the same techniques that Cornell had and Kate had had pioneered for getting paragraph falcons back in the world.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_02: At Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge in the Finger Lakes region of central New York, they built this huge, what they call a hack tower, um, you know, 50, 60 feet off the ground on telephone poles, big cage on the top of it that the could hold the eagles and they wouldn't be able to see the person bringing them food, so they wouldn't associate humans in food.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_02: And she spent the whole summer out there living, you know, basically living in a tent, guarding these eagles, you know, collecting carp to feed them.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and it worked.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_02: They were able to they released these eagles, they went safely into the wild, and other people picked up those, that technique that she had developed with bald eagles.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_02: And one of the reasons that we got 400,000 bald eagles in lower 48 right now, in addition to people not shooting them and no more DDT in the environment, is because state after state after state figured out how to do, you know, how to modify the techniques that Tina Morris came up with all by her lonesome in 1976 and hacked out bald eagles in Pennsylvania and New York and Ohio and Maryland, and you know, the list just goes on and on and created these regional populations to bring these birds back.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_02: And we see this again and again in bird conservation, where you know, one or two really stubborn people figure out what needs to be done and sort of blaze a path for everybody else.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_02: And if they're really successful, and Tina was really successful, um people kind of forget about it, and you you're sort of you're sort of lost in the mists of history.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_02: One of the stories I tell on the book is um spending a day on up on North Lookout at Hawk Mountain in Pennsylvania, which is where I got hooked on raptors as a kid, up there with a couple of friends of mine, including a guy named Seth Benz, who he was the first intern at Hawk Mountain in 1977.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_02: And he and I remember the days when, you know, the the total bald eagle count in the migration in the fall at Hawk Mountain was like 18 birds.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_02: Well, last fall they had like 758 was the bald eagle count.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_02: And you compare that, like compare that to Hawk Ridge in Duluth and Minnesota, where they'll get four or five thousand.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um and people are really complacent about bald eagles.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_02: They just take them totally for granted.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm very much of two minds about that, because on the one hand, you know, how wonderful that bald eagles can be so commonplace that we can just consider them an everyday bird.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_02: But there were times, you know, sitting up on North Lookout a couple falls ago, watching this parade of bald eagles going by, and people sitting around on the rocks in the lookout, and they're chatting and they're eating their lunch.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_02: And occasionally, you know, somebody would look up at one of the eagles going by.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_02: And I felt like grabbing people by the scruff of the neck and saying, you know, we almost lost this.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_02: You know, this you need to pay attention to this.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_02: This was not inevitable.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: We, you know, people maybe Nor is this guaranteed into the future.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_02: Nor is it guaranteed into the future.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_02: That's a really good point.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_02: We cannot ever.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: Elizabeth Gray over at National Audubon tells a story that she grew up in the in the D.C.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: area and loved bald eagles, but had never seen one outside of a zoo, growing up in the D.C.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_01: area.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_01: And she left and moved to Washington for a few years.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: And when she came back, she said you couldn't shake a stick without hitting a bald eagle.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: You know, because they came back quickly.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: Once once DDT cycled through and and and we federalized the penalty for shooting them, um, those, like you said, those made a made a big difference.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a blessing.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, along with the osprey.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_02: And well, but you know, but here's a point.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_02: Just to drive home your point about not being complacent, there are some places right now where ospreys are again in serious trouble.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_02: And parts of the Chesapeake are a good example of that, where the the commercial, what's known as the reduction industry, which are the the huge boats that are taking enormous numbers of menhaden out of the Chesapeake Bay to make fish oil as nutritional supplements, they've taken so many menhaden out of the out of the bay that osprey chicks are starving in the nests.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_02: And people like uh Brian Watts at the Center for Conservation Biology at the College of William and Mary have been documenting this for years.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_02: It's very clear what the problem is.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_02: And unfortunately, the federal agencies like the Atlantic States Marines Fishery Council that oversees harvest quotas for Menhaden have refused to reduce those quotas.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_02: You know, the next, the very next river system to the north, those ospreys feed predomin predominantly on freshwater fish, and their chicks are doing just fine.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_02: But in the parts of the bay where they're dependent on Menhaden, in parts of the Atlantic coast, like around New Jersey, where there are a lot of Menhaden fishing, um, osprey numbers are in trouble.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_02: So um, I have just heard that.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: Oh.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Dave Gestner, who you know wrote a couple books about osprey, is the one that filled me in on that.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: I was not aware of that.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: I was still reveling in the we've saved him, yay.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: But you're right.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: There are there are no guarantees on this.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: And if we're not vigilant, the successes can fade quickly.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um The Osprey.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sorry, go ahead.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_02: No, you go ahead.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_02: It's your your book.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_02: I was just going to say just and we can then we can move on from the subject.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, Hawk Mountain has been keeping its migration count since 1934.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_02: It's the longest running migration count of the of raptors in the world, of anything in the world.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_02: And last fall they had their lowest count for osprey since 1940.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_02: And that tells me that there's something seriously wrong with ospreys.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_02: And we need, you know, we need to be paying attention to this.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_02: And it may not, it's not, it's not DDT, but there's a whole host of new chemicals that are out there.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_02: PFASes and um you know, um I'm drawing a blank on what you call um uh some of some of the forever chemicals that are used for uh fireproofing garments.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um those things are working their way into the food chain, and it's possible that we're seeing, you know, the same kind of reproductive issues with ospreys now that we saw during the bad old days of the 40s and 50s and 60s from DDT.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_02: With conservation, your your losses are often permanent and your your your victories can often be temporary or or at least not per not inevitable.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_02: But there's again, there's you know, there's a lot of there's a lot of good news out there.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I think the story that probably had the most resonance for me, and it's the it's the final chapter in the book, and you know, often when you talk about conservation, one of the questions that comes up is scale.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_02: Like, okay, well you can do this, you know, you can do this good thing for this one species in this one place, but how do you scale that up across, you know, the whole planet?
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_02: And one place where conservation is happening at an absolutely breathtaking scale is in the boreal forest of Canada, which is itself a breathtaking scale.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_02: It's a billion and a half acres, it's the biggest intact forest on the planet.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it is a bird factory of global significance, more than 300 species of birds, all of these neotropical migrants that are coming back up now from Mesoamerica and the Caribbean.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of those warblers and vireos and thrushes are heading up into the boreal forest to breed, as are shorebirds and waterfowl and whooping cranes, and I mean the list just goes on and on and on.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_02: And across that enormous landscape, until recently, there was very little land in any kind of permanent conservation protection.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_02: And that's changing, and it's changing in large part because of the indigenous communities that have lived in the boreal forest of Canada since the ice melted 12,000 years ago.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_02: And ironically, many of those indigenous communities have spent the last couple of generations fighting to prevent, for example, national parks from being declared on their ancestral grounds because it would have prohibited them, those that national park designation would have prohibited them from hunting and fishing and trapping and foraging and doing the lifestyle that they've done again for twelve thousand years.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_02: But what's happened in the last especially about the last fifteen years is that there's been a recognition that the people that live on the land have rights under Canadian treaty to To maintain that land and have begun reaching agreements with the federal government, federal Canadian government, and the governments of the provinces and the territories to permanently protect that land in a way that is respectful of indigenous lifestyles and under the management and control of the indigenous communities that have lived there from time immemorial.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: You're not suggesting we reach a compromise where everybody benefits, are you?
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_02: Believe it or not, yes.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_02: That's exactly what I'm talking about.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: Because that just seems silly in today's day and age.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_02: And and and it really does come down to a compromise because what what has held up this process for years is are these two incompatible notions of who controls that land.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm I'll give you the the example I write about in the book is a place called Thidene Nene, which means which in Dene means land of the ancestors, Thidene Nene Indigenous Protected Area, along the east arm of Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_02: It's about six and a half million acres.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_02: It was formalized in 2019 after almost 20 years of negotiation between four indigenous communities and the Canadian government and the government of the Northwest Territories.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_02: Six and a half million acres of staggeringly beautiful land where the indigenous communities said this is our land and we have the rights to it, and the Canadian government said this is Crown land and we have rights to it.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_02: And so the the first the first line of the agreement that set up Theta NA says this is, you know, we the Canadian government believe this is Crown Land and it's ours.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_02: The second clause says we, the Latzel Denne First Nation and the other um associate First Nations believe this is our ancestral land and we and we control it.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_02: And the third clause says we agree to disagree.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_02: That it doesn't matter at the end of the day, it doesn't matter who owns the land as long as we agree on how to manage it.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_02: And that really popped the cork out of the bottle on clearing the roadblock to just an enormous amount of land conservation that's going on right now in the Canadian Boreal Forest in the form of these indigenous protected areas, or sometimes called indigenous protected and conserved areas.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_02: So Thidene Nene is six and a half million acres, which is huge.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_02: There is one that is, at this point, probably days or weeks away from uh final agreement.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the Seal River watershed um uh indigenous protected area in northern Manitoba, 12 million acres, the size of the province of Nova Scotia.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_02: And there are agreements now in the Northwest Territories among groups of um up to, well, I think there's 22 indigenous communities that have signed on to this, what they're calling our land for the future, which will eventually put 146,000 square miles of land in formal protection under Indigenous control.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um not indigenous management.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_02: They don't talk about management, they talk about wanting to create a re you know, managing their relationship with the land.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_02: So they has they don't have management boards, they have relationship boards.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um but it's you know, these lands have been withdrawn from mining claims.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um the indigenous communities will continue to be able to use them as they have for hundreds and hundreds of generations.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_02: And by the end of this decade, um probably about just under one billion acres of Canadian boreal forest will be in some form of formalized or pledged conservation protection and under the under the guidance and stewardship of the people who've lived there since there were mammoths.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_02: And I gotta tell you, if that is that is one of the most hopeful, optimistic stories I've ever had the privilege of reporting on.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um and also and just a huge win for social justice.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, some of these are communities that were forcibly evicted from their land back in the 1950s and you know, survived generations of grinding poverty before they returned to the land again, and they've taken control of it and taken control of their destiny.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_02: Working in concert with Western science, blending Western science, scientific traditions, and traditional ecological knowledge in a way that again just tremendously beneficial to the land.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_02: Working a lot of the communities are working very closely with the National Audubon Society on that.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um I just it it just blows my mind.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_02: So you want to talk about scale.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_02: That's like the definition of conservation scale.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and that is that is optimistic and it is positive and it is exciting.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, Scott, painfully we are already getting close, but I am not gonna let you go without addressing the title of the book, The Return of the Oyster Catcher, and at least a quick story about oyster catchers.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_02: Well, okay, so so shorebirds are another one of those groups like grassland birds that are in the steepest and most rapidly accelerating decline in North America.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_02: And especially oyster especially shorebirds that that migrate through or live along the Atlantic flyway because it's the most heavily industrialized and developed and urbanized.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_02: But oyster catchers, American oyster catchers, are an exception to that.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_02: Piping plovers are an exception to that.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_02: And so one of the one of the chapters traces how we were able to get to that point.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_02: And it's it's remarkable.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_02: In the case of the oyster catcher, you know, their numbers were going down and down and down, decade after decade after decade, decade, like a 10 or 12% decline every decade.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_02: And then around 2008, um, a group of um oyster catcher biologists got together and they formed a working group.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_02: And they said, you know, these piecemeal all these piecemeal efforts that we're trying trying to do are not really working.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_02: They drew up a business plan, which is not something you hear about in conservation a whole lot, and they got funding from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, NIF WIF, and um at the to the tune of about$500,000 a year, so it wasn't chunk change.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_02: And they realized that, you know, their their research showed that there were a just a couple of main threats to oyster catchers.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_02: One was beach disturbance, too many people on the beach, not enough room for the birds.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_02: You can deal with that by roping off certain areas.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um the big problem actually was was predation, nest predation.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um and look, predators are fine, and predators are natural, but what has happened in many of our beach areas is that there are so many people that have so much that take so much stuff to the beach.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um food, you've got these overflowing trash dumpsters, overflowing trash cans, and there's they're like subsidized populations of raccoons and foxes and coyotes and skunks and raccoons and feral cats, free-running dogs.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_02: And so they realized if they could increase the productivity of each oyster catcher nest by just half a chick on average per nest per year, they could turn a 12% decrease into a 30% increase.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_02: And so they used very targeted predator control.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_02: They're not just whacking every predator that's out there, but the ones that are actually out on the beach at night looking for nests, they trap them and euthanize them or sometimes shoot them.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and it worked.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_02: Since 2008, the oyster catcher population went from about 11,000 birds to about 15,000 birds.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_02: That's about a 45% increase at a time when so many other shorebirds are in steep decline.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_02: And piping plovers have been even better.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_02: Now they have the Endangered Species Act behind them, so you know, people have to take better care of piping plovers.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_02: But I actually, for that chapter, I interviewed my wife, who um, when she was in college, worked for Mass Audubon um at Plymouth on Long Beach in Plymouth, Massachusetts, which was kind of like the ground zero for the really ugly plover wars of the late eighties and early nineties when they first told people, no, you cannot drive 2,000 off-road vehicles out on Plymouth Beach on a on a summer weekend.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_02: And um, and the the result is that in the years since then, the piping plover population in Massachusetts has in has increased 500%.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, huge, huge wins, not not big changes.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um and and all of these things are we can we can do these, you talk about compromise, you can do these in ways where people and birds get to share the beach.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, my wife tells the story of, you know, when she was when she was in in college trying to walk out the beach, she had to hide her mass Audubon vest and her binoculars because people would hurl like full beer cans at her head, make a serious attempt to try to hurt her, um, because they were so angry about these uh these plovers, and now people love them.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_02: You know, they're just they've become icons of the beach.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: So that is fantastic news.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_01: And as much as it pains me, one of us has to stick to our promise.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_02: I know, I know.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: Scott, thank you.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's uh and you're an easy man to listen to, so it works out well.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_01: We'll do it again.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_01: You've got more stories in the book, and um we'll share those.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, if you're watching this right now, I'm throwing my email up, um, which is Scott at naturaliscott.com.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: If you're not watching, you just heard it.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: Send me a note if you've got one.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_01: If you've got one for Scott, send it to me and I'll forward it to him.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_01: If you're watching on YouTube, this is the favor I ask.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_01: Hit the subscribe button.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't take anything, it doesn't cost anything, you don't get ads.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_01: You just hit the subscribe button.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_01: Every time you do, YouTube pushes these videos out.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I think these stories are important.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um, not because they're on my podcast, but because of the people that tell them.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to drop a comment or hit like, that's great.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_01: But just hit the subscribe button.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_01: Scott, thank you so much, man.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_01: I really, really appreciate it.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_01: I can't wait to finish your book and add it to my what's becoming my white and saw shelf up there.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_01: I think between you and Simon Gomery, I think you're each gonna get a designated shelf um in my uh in my office.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: Well, thank you.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: As I close every show, I'd I encourage you to get outside.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_01: Whether outside is your front porch or your backyard or your local park or stare and get you get outside.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: And we need to do stay safe and stay curious.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_01: Scott, thank you, my friend.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate you being here.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: My pleasure, Scott.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: You take care.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_00: You've been listening to Naturally Scott with Scott Harris.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_00: Naturally Scott is hosted by Scott Harris, produced by Justin Harris, directed and edited by Frank Sierra.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_00: Follow us on our YouTube channel at Naturally Scott and Instagram at naturally Scott Harris.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_00: If this conversation resonated with you, please follow the show, leave a review, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: Naturally Scott thanks you for viewing and listening to this podcast.