This is BirdNote.

I'm Jay Drew Lanham, an ornithologist, naturalist, and writer, and this is a note I've written to a bird I love.

[bird singing] Dear Olive-sided Flycatcher, might I call you Ollie Fly? Please forgive the familiarity, but, um, there's a dead tree, a nice tall pine snag on the edge of my home by the mountain lake that's just calling your name.

For three years now, I've been waiting for you to find it.

No, I'm not expecting a quick three beers call or anything so tell-tale as that.

[bird singing] Especially since it's fall now.

This is BirdNote.

I'm J.

Drew Lanham, an ornithologist, naturalist, and writer.

Names are important as they help us tell one thing from the next.

My name is Drew.

What's yours? Easy enough.

... what does social justice mean to you?

Social justice means that a community gathers, flocks in a way, just as birds do.

We murmurate around an issue.

Um, we swirl and we turn and we come together, um, in a way to demand rights that are due us that, um, aren't extraordinary by any means.

And, and in many ways, Michelle, it's, it's demanding your just due as a human being.

And, um, that we have to, to come together to do that means that there is force in those numbers.

It's just like we might see one black bird and think something of it, but then when we see those same birds murmurating, flocking together, there's, there's power there.

Okay.

This is BirdNote.

I'm Jay Drew Lanham, an ornithologist, naturalist, and writer.

I'm often asked, "What's your favorite bird?" My standard response is, "The one with feathers." Birds deserve more than the disappearing by billions and reducing them to just names on a list.

But here's the recent taxonomy of my obsessions, selected birds of the moment, annotated by why.

[bird singing] White-crowned sparrow.

Envying the brown ignored thing.

And so watching these sparrows in habitat that many people would overlook inspired a poem celebrating these little brown birds.

[Sparrow singing] [gentle music] "Sparrow Envy." Were I the sparrow, brown-backed, skittish, and small, I would find haven in thorniest thickets, search far and wide for fields lain fallow, treasure the unkempt, worship the unmown, covet the weed-strewn row.

I would slink between sedges, chip unseen from brambles, skulk deep within hedges, and desire the ditches grown wild.

I would find great joy in the mist-sodden morning, sing humble pleas from the highest weeds, and plead for the gray days to stay.

[Sparrow singing] I asked Drew, were he the sparrow, what species would he be?

Oh, wow.

Um, I'd be the skulkiest sparrow.

I'm thinking a Henslow's or a LeConte's or a Fox Sparrow.

This is BirdNote.

I'm Jay Drew Lanham, an ornithologist, naturalist, and writer, and this is a note I've written to a bird I love.

[bird singing] Dear Kentucky Warbler, are you real? It's hard to believe the way that citrine melds into your mossy olive drab back and those black sideburns drip down your cheeks.

[bird singing] Remembering a close encounter with you one mid-May day for about half an hour, and I thought I'd crossed over some ethereal boundary into another world.

You singing that ringing redeep, redeep, redeep, redeep, telling me you're hidden deep in the gap tangle of some new greening spring woods.

The resounding solo is a siren's draw into warblerific joy.

Both have taught him that joy is a source of strength.

I find my joy on daily walks around the farm or just sitting and watching some bird, and it doesn't have to be a rare bird.

This past spring, I was just enthralled watching robins.

It was like they were so happy that spring was here, they would just sit in little shafts of sunlight.

[robin chirping] I can see that bird.

I can just see it, just sitting there in the middle of dooryard violets.

I could see its eye blink, and then it opened that yellow beak and, like, yawned.

It's easy to get so caught up in the hustle and bustle of modern life that we forget how to be present or even take for granted that we're free to choose joy.

[music] BirdNote presents.

One of the first books, pieces of literature anyway, that I read as a child was this book by, um, an author named Fred Bodsworth called The Last of the Curlews.

[music] And it was this beautiful story about the last of a bird that's now extinct, the Eskimo curlew.

And I remember reading that book, and then I saw an ABC After School Special that, like, set me on fire, right? 'Cause I was, [laugh] I was like, "Oh, wow, this bird is gone." And in my mind, though, I was like, "Maybe it's not gone.

Maybe it's there." But, you know, as the writer had written this story from the point of view of a bird, it's like he had become this bird in a way, and so I went on to read other writers that were writing about nature, sometimes writing specifically about birds.

And that was sort of the genesis for me, that maybe while I was still in the egg somewhat, that was singing to me in a way that said, "Okay, when you hatch, you get to write about birds yourself."

Drew Lanham, reading an excerpt from the title poem of his book, Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves.

[gentle music] Joy is the sunrise breaking through night's remains, bright shone new on a shell-wracked shore.

This is BirdNote.

I'm Jay Drew Lanham, an ornithologist, naturalist, and writer, and this is a note I've written to a bird I love.

[woodpecker drumming] Dear pileated woodpecker, first off, do you prefer a long I or a short? Just want to make sure I start off right.

Personally, I go for the pileated pronunciation and not the pileated one.

Potato, potato, right? Speaking of names, been wondering what you think of all the Lord God bird stuff, people mistaking you for the long lost ivory-bill woodpecker.

I mean, after all, that huge ivory bill used to give you guys a run for your biggest pecker money back in the day.

Go ahead, Drew.

Well, you know, we can talk about grassroots, um, (laughs) as, as, as conservation sort of impetus.

And, and here I think we can talk about flight feathers, right, and, and how we get started, how we fledge to some state beyond watching and appreciating, which is absolutely critical, um, to being activated.

And that frequently occurs in the backyard, which is our first place, right? It's grassroots.

It's, it's where many folks fledge into becoming birdwatchers and birders.

And so to first think of your backyard as that first place of activism, and that's a word that I really want to push forward into conservation, is in that it's not a conservative act, but it's an activist thing to not just see birds and watch them and list them, but to, to actually feel for them, to love them, to know that their plights are tied to ours.

Same air, same water, same soil, same earth, and ultimately, again, same fate.

What are your biggest concerns when it comes to environmental losses and what it means for bird populations?

[music] This is Bird Note.

I'm J.

Drew Lanham, an ornithologist, naturalist, and writer, and this is a note I've written to a bird I love.

[bird chirping] Dear Snowbird, Junco, yes, you with the dark eyes.

Dark-eyed Junco.

Yes, you are a junco to most, but persistently in my memory, you're a snowbird.

Go ahead, Drew.

Well, you know, we can talk about grassroots, um, (laughs) as, as, as conservation sort of impetus, and, and here I think we can talk about flight feathers, right, and, and how we get started, how we fledge to some state beyond watching and appreciating, which is absolutely critical, um, to being activated.

And that frequently occurs in the backyard, which is our first place, right? It's grassroots.

It's, it's where many folks fledge into becoming birdwatchers and birders.

And so to first think of your backyard as that first place of activism, and that's a word that I really want to push forward into conservation, is in that it's not a conservative act, but it's an activist thing to not just see birds and watch them and list them, but to, to actually feel for them, to love them, to know that their plights are tied to ours.

Same air, same water, same soil, same earth, and ultimately, again, same fate.

And so that happening in your backyard, the birds that you see that are homebodies, that are there all year round that you come to know, but then in the spring as migrants begin to stream north from the Neotropics, and they tie us to the rest of the world, but that begins in our own backyards, in our own communities.

What are your biggest concerns when it comes to environmental losses and what it means for bird populations?