ADRIAN FLORIDO, HOST:
At NPR, we bring listeners to the front lines of conflict, we report on political upheaval, and we also share people’s passions, like for the natural world.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Oh, nest. Whoa.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Whoa.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: You have to pin that.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Pin, pin, pin, pin.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: You have to pin that.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: I’ll pin it.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Sharpie nest.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: It’s so hard.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Sharpie nest. Where is it?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Sharpie nest is good.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Yeah, that’s really good.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Holy.
FLORIDO: We are listening to the sound of some teenage birders.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: So we’re using our scopes to try and find an owl on that pipe out there across the river, right across the pond.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Do you guys see…
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: We’re just trying to scan.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: In the water, two black skimmers. Everyone, both.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Those are not skimmers.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Yes, they are.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Skimmers?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Look, they’re flying very low. The wings are…
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Oh, yeah, I see.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Oh, my gosh.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Do you guys see two black skimmers?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Yeah, whoa.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Wow.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Yeah.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Dad, we just got a skimmer.
FLORIDO: These boys were competing last month in New Jersey Audubon’s 43rd Annual World Series of Birding.
NATALIE ESCOBAR, BYLINE: So the gist is that you have – it’s an entire day from midnight to midnight.
FLORIDO: And this is Natalie Escobar, an NPR editor who spent that entire day with them.
ESCOBAR: And the goal is that you have to count as many species of birds as physically possible within the borders of the great state of New Jersey.
FLORIDO: Natalie recruited colleague Ava Berger to join her as she crisscrossed the state.
AVA BERGER, BYLINE: So I’m not someone who was in the birding worlds, so I didn’t know what to expect. But did I expect us to actually be following around three teenage boys for 24 hours? No. But they genuinely go for 24 hours.
FLORIDO: The boys – Jack Trojan, Zade Pacetti and Otys Train – were driven around the state by their dads. Like any other reporting assignment, this one presented challenges, like how to stay up for 24 hours straight or how not to get carsick in the back of a minivan, making sudden U-turns because of a possible bird sighting. Ava and Natalie did their best to keep up, but they were at the mercy of the way these boys had organized their day. So for this week’s Reporter’s Notebook, I started by asking Natalie and Ava about.
ESCOBAR: They have it planned out by the second. They would be amazing radio producers, to be honest.
(LAUGHTER)
ESCOBAR: They had an entire Google Sheet saying, at midnight, we’re going to be here. Fifteen minutes later, we’re going to be here. A certain bird is only going to be in a certain spot for, like, a very short period of time, in some cases.
BERGER: Yeah, and what you can’t account for, even though they tried to account for everything, is if they’re actually going to see the bird they want to see in that one spot. And their dad, Jeff…
ESCOBAR: Otys Train’s…
BERGER: Otys’ dad, yeah.
ESCOBAR: Yeah.
BERGER: Jeff Train – he explained it to us like this.
JEFF TRAIN: You know, that’s a part of the game…
BERGER: Yeah.
TRAIN: …That, you know, hopefully, you spot a bird. And if you don’t, you got to just suck it up, move on. There’s lots of surprises, right? You’re going to have peaks and valleys.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: I’m always trying to…
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: How long…
TRAIN: And so we’re going to be on our way to see a bird, and it’s going to fly right across the car, and they’ll pick that up, and then they don’t have to go to that spot. And sometimes you’ll show up to a spot looking for an owl, and the owl…
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Shh.
TRAIN: …Just doesn’t…
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Shh.
FLORIDO: Is he getting shushed?
BERGER: Yes, I wanted to play that tape because he was getting shushed at the end.
FLORIDO: By his son.
ESCOBAR: They’re not shy about shushing. They’ll – they shushed us. They shushed me. They shushed Ava. And it’s not personal. I picked that up really quick, but I was like, oh, OK, this is – I…
FLORIDO: (Laughter) They’re focused. They’re serious, and they’re accounting for every second. And they were trying to break a record. They were trying to spot more than 200 birds – species in 24 hours. How do you verify that they’ve actually heard or seen the birds that they say they’ve heard or seen? Is it just, like, the honor system? How does it work?
ESCOBAR: Yeah, so there are competition rules that, you know, everybody has to adhere to. The – for the vast majority of the birds, all of them, all the people on the team have to hear it or see it, and they all have to agree on what bird they saw. So one thing about birds is that there’s a lot of them that look like each other – famously shorebirds and gulls – but they have to all be in agreement. And you also can’t play the bird calls in order to try to get a response. But if you’re really good like these teenagers are, you can imitate the bird calls to try to get a response. So one of them was doing the call of the great horned owl, which was really cool.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Imitating great horned owl).
BERGER: I thought that I heard an owl. And I was like, oh, my gosh. Like, no.
ESCOBAR: No.
BERGER: That was him.
ESCOBAR: That was him.
BERGER: (Laughter).
ESCOBAR: Things they can do, though, is that they can also clap to try to – like, to, like, stir up the birds a little bit without stressing them out.
(APPLAUSE)
ESCOBAR: And they can also do this thing that birders do called pishing. It’s like this (vocalizing).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Vocalizing).
ESCOBAR: And for whatever reason, that makes the birds a little more active. Maybe they’ll come out of their hiding spot.
BERGER: And we did ask them the question of cheating ’cause that was something on our minds. I mean, why not just say you saw it? Why not just put it in, get one extra bird? And their answer was immediate.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: I don’t really know. We’ve never had an incident, though, that we, like, lied about it. Like, already, we’ve had two birds that – we had the monk that they didn’t see, and then we had the screech owl that I didn’t hear. So I feel like we’re pretty honest about that.
FLORIDO: These kids didn’t actually win the competition. They came in second place. Was that – you know, you’re an objective journalist. You’re there just to record what happened, but was it hard to see them fall three bird species short of the trophy?
ESCOBAR: I was a little devastated for them.
FLORIDO: Yeah.
ESCOBAR: I’m not going to lie. You get really invested when you’re hanging out with them for 24 hours. But a lot of it is luck. A lot of it is, like, you’re at the right place at the right time, and it works in both directions. Sometimes that – you get unlucky, sometimes you get lucky and you see something that you wouldn’t have otherwise.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Yeah, last night, like Jack said, we were a little annoyed and, I guess, this morning, too, just, like – but I’m not focusing on, like, we lost. I’m focusing on the fact that, you know, we got second in our division with 206 species, and we had an amazing time and made some amazing memories. And we can use this as a learning experience for other years.
ESCOBAR: The other team simply saw more birds – the Flying Penguins.
BERGER: The Flying Penguins.
ESCOBAR: Give them their due. They are rivals, too, I will say. They were swapping notes at the end. They were really careful to not reveal the locations of specific birds that they saw, like, where their nest sites were ’cause, like, they are rivals.
FLORIDO: You know, we cover a lot of serious stories at NPR, a lot of tragic stories, a lot of sad stories, a lot of important social issues. But, you know, we also like to do stories like this, and people really like them – fun stories, stories that take people out into a community with people just doing cool things. Why was this a story that you wanted to tell?
ESCOBAR: I just thought about how beautiful it would sound and how beautiful it would look ’cause people really connect with stories about the natural world. People really love birding. But I also – one of the things I realized as I got further and further into getting to know this group, getting to know this team and their dads is – I don’t know, I always hear stories about how teenagers are always on their phones and, you know, teenage boys in particular might have trouble forming deep friendships, and just this really flies in the face of that.
Also that – seeing parents and their kids just really bonding and having this moment – you know, dads who love their sons so much that they’ll spend 24 hours driving them around in a van, eating – what? – they were, like, eating chips and M&Ms and drinking Red Bull. And – buut also sons who, like, really want to hang out with their dads and go birding and spend all this time with them. I felt kind of like I was crashing this, like, really sweet moment.
BERGER: I will just say, as a member of Gen Z, we get a bad rep. And I think this really showed – I mean, it was posted on the NPR Instagram, and it got a ton of attention. And the top comment was, the kids are all right. And I love that. I think that really summed up what we were trying to show and what these kids were doing. And just to your point of the stories we cover, I mean, this week, I was covering the Epstein files, and we cover these stories that are really difficult and really hard. And having some messy wonder in our lives is very beautiful. And that’s what these kids gave to us.
FLORIDO: Well, I’ve been speaking with Natalie Escobar and Ava Berger about the reporting on the World Series of Birding. Thanks to both of you for coming by.
ESCOBAR: Thank you. That was so much fun.
BERGER: Thank you.
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