One in three Americans identify as enjoying birds and being a bird watcher or a birder. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife, that's 96 million people in the United States alone, not counting youth under the age of 16.

And for a long time, there's a stereotype that bird watchers were senior-aged white men. And there's a reason for that. There were actually bird clubs and ornithological societies that for decades, all the way up into my lifetime, who excluded women and people of color. And so that stereotype existed for a reason. But times are changing.

In this recent study by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife, they were able to identify that:
- A quarter of Black Americans identified as bird watchers.
- A third of Hispanic Americans identified as bird watchers.
- 40% of Asian Americans identified as bird watchers.

And during the pandemic, we saw this huge boom of teenagers and young people who started getting into the hobby of looking at birds in their backyards. Needless to say, birding is this inclusive hobby that transcends racial, ethnic, generational, and gender lines.

My name is Eva Lark. I'm your host today for Voices of Open Space. And we're going to dive into birds and bird watching in Boulder County. We're going to explore different species that call this area home or just a stopover location. And hopefully it motivates you to get out there and enjoy these feathered friends on the trail.

Let's start by listening to the soundscape from Hall Ranch. We're going to be hearing birds at the Antelope Trailhead. In this clip, one thing to notice is that there are over a dozen distinct species that are singing and calling and buzzing by this trailhead. These birds are announcing their territories. They're singing, calling for their mates. They're communicating with each other that there could be potential predators nearby or people like myself hiking through.

They're displaying the broad-tailed hummingbird wings. When they are displaying in their mating ritual, that sound that you hear is not the bird with its vocal box. It's actually the sound of their wings. This soundscape allows us to understand what a critical piece our parks and open spaces play in the bird's life cycle.

Because it's summer in Boulder County, the season of love, and these songbirds are trying to find a mate and reproduce. We know that when birds are calling that they are announcing their fitness to each other. They're announcing that they are available and that they have a claim to territory.

And when we listen to bird song, some thought leaders even think that it rewires our brain and impacts our behaviors. There's a TED Talk you can check it out. The one thing that we know for certain though is listening to bird song and looking at birds provides this mental reprieve from the digital world. We're able to have more mental clarity. We're able to focus and get our attention spans back.

There was a study done by Niels Peterson on college campuses where he found that if college students were looking at birds and listening to them, that they were able to focus more, perform better, and it was providing mental health benefits to them.

Most importantly, we know that when we're looking at birds and listening to them creates a social connectedness with each other. I was at Walden Ponds birding recently and I had multiple people stop me along the way asking me, what are you looking at? Have you seen any good birds today? It's a way for us to start conversations but also share with each other the things that we're seeing, observing, looking at. And the social connectedness is so important in this digital age where we can feel more isolated and alone.

At Boulder County Parks and Open Space, we've even created this intentional inclusive community program. It's free. It's called the Birding Big Sit and we do them each season.
Now, if you've never heard of a Birding Big Sit, it's a 17-foot circle-ish that you stay in. You don't hike the trail. You're not going for long distances. You're literally sitting in a circle looking at birds together. So you're talking to each other. You're connecting with each other. And you don't have to stand. It's an inclusive program, so you can sit. We provide chairs. There's benches. It's a really great inter-generational way to enjoy birds and nature together. You can find the next Big Sit on our website, discover.bouldercounty.gov. Sign up, drop in, and enjoy some birds with us. It'll provide mental clarity, and you'll even maybe make a friend.

In future episodes, I'm looking forward to bringing people like you on the podcast to talk about birds and birdwatching. I'm looking forward to bringing volunteer naturalists, wildlife biologists, ornithologists, even backyard birders to come and lend their wealth of knowledge and connection to birds. And in these interviews, I really want to get down to what makes birding personal. And I think one of the best ways to do that is to have people tell their spark bird stories.

A spark bird story is something that is an aha moment. The time when you first realized that you got connected to birds and birdwatching. I first learned about this from the late, great Bill Thompson III. He was a giant in the birding world. He explained how when he saw his first snowy owl, it changed his life. He became a birder, and that trajectory impacted all these decision makings.

For me, I also have a spark bird story. We all do if we're birdwatchers. And I'm really looking forward to hearing some of the spark bird stories in our community. But since this is our first episode going into birds and birdwatching here at Voices of Open Space, I thought I would tell my spark bird story. And it's going to go back to 2007. So I'm going to set the scene for you.
It's South Florida, 2007. And I've recently moved to work for Palm Beach County Parks and Recreation. I'm a naturalist at Green Cay Nature Center and Wetlands. It's a tertiary wastewater treatment plant. So the last part of the treatment water comes over to this recreated wetlands. And it's amazing. There's a mile and a half of boardwalk on top of this wetland and a beautiful nature center where we could lead programs.

Also, I'm a young 20-something-year-old who is heartbroken. Just having one of those soul-crushing heartbreaks where I oscillate between sadness and depression and just feeling numbness and like a zombie. So this is where I'm at. I'm at work just trying to survive and thrive. And my boss says, hey, you have to lead the bird walks. You need to go out there and learn the 30 most common birds. Go on your lunch break. So I start doing that. I'm out there on my lunch break with my bird guide trying to learn those 30 species so that I can lead public bird walks.

But while I'm out there, it really opens my eyes to birds, almost like for the first time. First of all, it's South Florida, so the birds are amazing. Imagine this beautiful pink bird that has a beak that looks like a spoon. It's called a roseate spoonbill. And then right beside it is this really strange-looking brown bird called a limpkin. Literally screams all night. But it's not this charismatic megafauna, herons and egrets and limpkins and spoonbills that really draw me in. It's actually these really tiny birds called warblers.

Warblers, for those who don't know, are a small passerine that typically migrates from Central and South America into the United States to breed in the summer. But there is a small population that winters in South Florida, South Texas, Southern California. And it's these birds that really are my spark birds because they're small. They can fit just in the palm of your hand. They're so intricately patterned and colored, red and orange, green and yellow. Birds that you've probably never even seen before because they're small. And in the wintertime, they're pretty quiet. They're not singing.

But this little puzzle piece really interests me because I've never seen a bird like this before. And trying to identify the males from the females and they're moving quickly and they're in the treetops, it just becomes this place where I just get so in tune with the birds. I go into something like a flow state where I'm not depressed or sad anymore. I'm just really looking at these birds and trying to figure out what are they? What are they doing?

I start not just birding on my lunch breaks, but I'm birding before work, on my lunch breaks, and after work. And what I realize is that for me, when I'm looking at birds, I'm instantly feeling this endorphin of happiness. It's also part of the puzzle. I've always loved puzzles, so I enjoy trying to figure out what that bird is. And also realizing that I'm not always going to get it right. That's the really great thing about birding. You could be doing it for decades. You're still going to misidentify birds or think that maybe that limb or that leaf was a bird when it's not.

For me, this was my spark bird. This group of little winter warblers in South Florida, where they took a heartbroken young person and made me realize that I could get past that and also II could really enjoy my life. I could be connected to the world around me. When I moved here to Colorado in 2013, I even got a tattoo of these little warblers on my forearm as a reminder that there's always better days. But more importantly, I put it in a very visible place so that if I was having a stressed out day at work, if I wasn't feeling good, I knew that, oh, I could just go outside, look at a bird, and all those other things would kind of just drain away. There's never been a time that I've looked at birds or watched them intensely where I walked away feeling worse. I've always felt better. So if you've never tried watching birds or being a birder, this is your invitation. You never know. It could save your life.

Well, now that you've learned a little bit about me, I'm going to introduce you to a new segment called Meet Your Neighbor, where I'm going to introduce you to a local resident bird species that you probably are familiar with, but maybe you'll learn a few things, and next time you see it in your yard or on the trail, you'll appreciate it even more. And today I'm going to introduce this bird through one of my favorite poets, Emily Dickinson. And even though she wrote this poem in the late 1800s, it could be very true as a poem that was written today in Boulder County. It's called A Bird Came Down the Walk.

A bird came down the walk. He did not know I saw. He bit an angle worm in halves and ate the fellow raw. And then he drank the dew from a convenient grass and then hopped sideways to the wall to let a beetle pass. He glanced with rapid eyes that hurried all abroad. They looked like frightened beads, I thought. He stirred his velvet head, like one in danger, cautious. I offered him a crumb, and he unrolled his feathers and rode him softer home. Then oars divide the ocean to silver for a seam or butterflies off banks of noon leap plashless as they swim.

When I read this poem, I always see an American robin pulling a worm, biting it in half. A bird came down the walk. He didn't know I saw. Bit him right in half. This could be Amherst, Massachusetts in 1880, Emily Dickinson, or it could be me in my neighborhood, Boulder County, 2025. That's the amazing things about birds. They transcend time. And robins, even though it's not the same robin, they are essentially the same. And this bird may be overlooked by you because it is common, but there's some really interesting things about our resident American robin.

First of all, you may not know that in Colorado, they don't migrate. They're actually here year-round. Literally, their scientific name is Turtus migratorius. That means thrush migrating, migrating thrush. They do migrate. If you're in Canada, you're only seeing robins in spring and summer, and then they're leaving and going farther south. But if you're here in Colorado, we have these resident year-round robins, though you will see them more in the springtime because of what they're eating, these worms down in the ground. Ground thaws, it's warm, the earthworms come up, they're out there hunting, they're pulling them, they're eating them. They eat a lot of invertebrates in spring and summer. But once fall and winter arrive, what makes this bird common is that they are adapted to totally just change their diet. They completely switch over to fruit and berries. And in the winter, they form these huge flocks up in the tops of the trees where they're eating fruit and berries and traveling, looking for a food source. So even though they are a sign of spring, you probably see them more because they're on the ground. You should look in the wintertime for these large flocks.

The other kind of interesting thing about them, because they are only eating fruits and berries that come late winter, early spring, they're eating these really old fruits that are fermented. Robins will get intoxicated. They'll get tipsy. Kind of an interesting fact, and you should look out for them during that time of year if they look like they're staggering around, they probably are.

Another really interesting thing about robins is that in the summer, they can have up to three broods, three separate clutches of babies. They have these beautiful sky blue eggs that they have in this little tiny cup that they make out of different leaves and straw and any natural materials. And they have a lot of babies because not many of them survive, unfortunately. About 40% will go to hatch and fledge, and out of that, only a quarter are going to make it to adulthood. So the average robin is maybe two years old, though they can live up to almost 14 years because we have caught a banded robin that hit that milestone. But this short-lived bird is iconic. You probably have seen it in children's books and illustrations. Rockin' Robin is literally a song. It is one of America's favorite birds. It's the state bird of Connecticut, Wisconsin, Michigan. It's everywhere. And you see it pulling that worm like out of the Emily Dickinson poem. But robins are more than just an illustration. They are a sign of survival. They can live in inner cities. They can live in our backyards, and they can also live in really remote areas like up in Alaska and Canada where there are nobody. There's just birds and wildlife. I think that's one of the amazing things about this little resident bird that we have is that they can change their diet. They can live in all different types of areas. They also have done something that not a lot of songbirds can do, which is they can identify when there's a nest parasite. You may have never heard of this, but there's a bird called a brown-headed cowbird. And this bird is really interesting. It lays its eggs in other birds' nests. No parental duties. Sounds amazing. But most birds are just going to raise that cowbird chick, but not the American robin. It can identify these little speckled eggs and literally just kick them out of the nest. Just another reason why this sometimes common bird is overlooked as being really special. So next time you see an American robin hopping through your yard or flying overhead, I hope you take a moment to appreciate its uniqueness. And you'll even be able to share with your neighbors some new facts about it.

Let's dive into some notable sightings over the past season. I want to start with a bird that showed up at Lagerman Reservoir in late May, and it's called an Arctic tern. This is an elegant, long, slender-tipped winged seabird that it's unusual for Colorado, but not unprecedented. I think the last one seen was probably in 2019, but lots of records before that. But this is the first time that it was seen at Lagerman, and lots of birders came out to see it. And there were so many birds at Lagerman in May. If you've not been there, it is a place where the shorebirds love to migrate. Now what makes this place unique for an Arctic tern to stop? It's a food source. These reservoirs that we have in Boulder County are wonderful stopover habitat for birds that are migrating all the way to the tundra. Now this rarity would not normally stop in Colorado. This is a bird that spends literally its whole life at sea. It travels from the Arctic Circle to the Antarctica and back again. 60,000 miles every single year. But it likes to nest in the northern parts of our globe. And so this one may have gotten a little off course, but it was lucky because it found some amazing habitat at Lagerman Reservoir so it could feed, catch its food, and hopefully it was able to reunite back with the ocean and find its breeding territory farther up in Canada, Alaska.

When we think about these critical stopover habitats, they're not just important for shorebirds that are coming through, but they're also amazing habitat for nesting birds. We even have our own shorebird that calls Lagerman Reservoir home. It's called the American Avocet. This is one of the most delicate, beautiful shorebirds in the world. If you haven't seen one, you'll have to check any of our wetlands in the spring. Look on the shorelines. They literally nest right on the ground. And that's why you will find that we have a wildlife closure at this open space for part of the year to protect our breeding species from people walking by or from dogs that are off-leash. It's just a protective measure that we take because we know that this is a critical stopover site and also a critical nesting spot for many different species. American Avocets are enjoying their time at Lagerman because of the food source, because of the nesting habitat, and because it is a protected area that they can have their young and raise them. Probably one of the most amazing things, as soon as they hatch, they're running on the shoreline. This is not a bird that is helpless and has no feathers and is just sitting in a nest waiting to be fed. It is up out of the nest running and learning how to hunt. You should check it out.

The next notable highlight I want to mention is probably our most famous migrant nesting bird in Boulder County. I call it famous because it's literally under a camera. Not just one, two cameras. And that is our osprey pair at the Boulder Fairgrounds. There's a camera above them that's looking down into that nest, providing this intimate look of what it's like to be an osprey. How are they feeding their young? When are they incubating the eggs? Who is taking care? Who is providing food? This is cutting-edge technology. Having cameras on nests are allowing researchers this look that they never have been given before. Usually we were observing birds from the ground and looking up and wondering what's happening in the nest. And now because of technology, we can actually look down and we can stream that and share it with people all over the world. There's another camera from the side. That one's really important because you can see the comings and goings. You can see when the male is bringing in fish to the female or when a predator may be coming by. So this double look is a really great way for you to connect to birds. When you're working at the office and you're on your lunch break, not all of us have the luxury of being able to go to a park and walk. But we can look at the Boulder County Fairgrounds osprey nest cam. They will be on the nest all the way until September. So I'll give you a little rundown about how their nesting season plays out. They arrivein April. They come back to the nest. They tidy it up. They lay their eggs. They incubate. Ospreys usually have one to three eggs. And by the end of May, they start hatching. They usually hatch one, then the next one, and the next one in order, one day apart. And then they'll feed those young. until about 60-some days later. And that's when the first wolf ledge, and then the second chick will ledge, and the third, if they have three. Sometimes they have one, two, or three. It just depends on the year, the food supply, predation. There's a lot of factors in play. That's one of the fun parts about looking at the nest cam is you never know what's going to happen each year.

And so then from the 60-day mark until September, these young ones are just learning how to survive. They're learning how to fish, because these are fish eaters, also called the fish hawks, right? They're learning how to be adept at flying. It's not easy being a bird, learning how to fly. That's why they often come back to the nest and stay there and yell at their parents for food. Sometimes their parents will oblige them. But their parents are there for this critical time to try to teach them.

Now, at some point, the female, she's going to leave. She was really sitting on that nest for the majority of the time, incubating the eggs, protecting the young all through the night, only having like one break a day where she could go hunt for herself. And so as soon as these teenagers are ready, she's gone. She's flying south down to central South America. Now, the dad will stick around for a little bit longer. And then he too will decide to leave. It's interesting. They migrate by themselves. That leaves our young fledgers who are now without parents. And finally, they will leave, usually sometime at the beginning of September.

If you missed the series of nesting this year, you can always look at the highlights from previous years and the timelines and then mark your calendar for when they're going to return in the spring. It's an amazing thing to witness, especially when you think about how these birds spend their whole winter apart on their wintering grounds in central and South America. But then they fly all the way back to Boulder. Adults have this nest fidelity, which means like they're going to come back to the same exact nest, this mated pair. And they'll stay pair bonded unless something happens to the other. So if one of the adults dies during migration on the wintering grounds, then they, of course, will have to find another mate. But otherwise, they will be alone and separate all winter, back together for breeding season and alone again. And the young ones will have to go off and find their own territories. It's a really amazing thing to witness.

You can drive by the fairgrounds and see the nest even easier. You can go online. It's a really inclusive way that you can share with your students if you're a teacher, homebound individuals that can't get out of their houses, or even people like me that sometimes have to sit at a desk for long periods of time. I can tune in, see what's happening and check on my local famous osprey pair.

Speaking of migration, we're going to look ahead at what's coming up in Boulder County. As we go into autumn, we are going to see a uptick in migration. And there is this reliable cadence:
1. First, we see our shorebirds migrating through. They're done nesting up in the tundra of Canada and Alaska, so they're heading back south.
2. After that, we will see our songbirds.
3. Then our hawks.
4. And then finally, we'll have our waterfowl.

And we're lucky because we are actually a wintering area for many species of ducks and raptors. We will spend their winters here because it's nice and warm compared to the tundra that they call home in the summer. I invite you to go out this fall and look for these species.

And one way that you can do that is by going to a website called ebird.org. It's run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and it's a wonderful resource. First, it's a community science tool. So you can download the app or use the desktop version to log your sightings. People like you and I can log that we saw an American robin in the backyard or American avocet at Caroline Holmberg. And that goes into this huge database that researchers can use to show large ornithological trends, but done on a micro level by people like us. It's a great way to participate, but it's also a great way as a birdwatcher to figure out what birds are being seen. You can go on the website, you can type in Boulder County, and you can see a list of birds that maybe you're interested in looking for. It also has all of our parks and open space properties on there. Click on those and you can see what birds are being seen this week. They'll even have photos of birds that people have uploaded. So it's a wonderful tool for community science, but it's also a wonderful way for people to connect to birds and maybe see something new they've never seen before.

So this season, it's migration. There's going to be a lot of birds that are just coming through for a week or two at a time. These are stopover locations. A lot of our parks and open space do serve as this hub of activity because of the food that it provides, because it's protected. There's not cars and parking lots. It's actual natural landscape for them. So it's a reallygreat way to go out, connect to each other, connect to the birds, connect to the land. I invite you to try birdwatching for the first time or for the 25th time or the 2500th time. To try birdwatching for the first time, or for the 25th time, or the 2500th time, I guarantee when you get out there, you're going to not only feel better, you're going to be more connected, you're going to feel restored, and hopefully you also have fun.

Thanks for tuning in today. We'd like to thank Longmont Public Media. Please follow us on social media and wherever you listen to podcasts.