—Hillary Gonzalez

Ever notice how good things happen when you slowww down?

For all its problems, social media can on occasion bestow wonderful gifts upon us. That happened to me last month as I was birdscrolling (doomscrolling’s much sweeter, less problematic sibling) on Instagram and felt suddenly compelled not just to slow down, but to stop scrolling entirely. Here was a birder mutual and fellow Substacker, the eco-poet , out in the streets of Baltimore protesting against AI and the construction of data centers.

As writer who is married to a writer, times are wild for people trying to make a living with words. Seems like AI has been on everyone’s mind lately, so I chanced a DM. About half a minute after receiving the podcast invite, Hillary agreed to be my August guest on Ten Birding Questions.

My recording sessions always run longer than planned. That’s what happens when you get birders talking about birds. My lively conversation with Hillary ran extra long, though. We had birds and more discuss, including:

• The magical, amber-eyed spark bird who appeared at the family’s farm where they grew up.

• Osprey—the conservation success story that is once again facing an existential threat.

• The rise of artificial intelligence and the loud, dirty, dangerous infrastructure it requires.

• Birding with disabilities and the need for more empathy in the world.

• Their second favorite bird—A new twist on The Dreaded Question.

This episode also features a pair of firsts. The three poems Hillary reads from her incredible new book of poetry, Where the Osprey Nest, mark the first time an author has read from their own work on my show. This beautiful, inspiring collection of eco-poems is a must-read and is available as of today!, though Hillary was kind enough to advance me a copy ahead of our talk.

Hillary also agreed to do some beta testing in what I hope will be a regular feature in the podcast, Agree or Disagree, wherein I posit an opinion my guest is invited to agree or disagree with. Make sure to tune in to see whether Hillary and I come to (verbal) blows over my controversial take.

Our interview may have covered a wide range of topics, but the answers were united by a pair of imperatives that also feature prominently in Hillary’s poetry: 1) Slow down, and 2) Reconnect. Throughout, Hillary urges us to slow down our busy lives and busy brains, to take time to look around, breathe in the natural world, and stop seeing “nature” and human existence as somehow being separate from each other.

I hope you all will take a moment, or rather 80 minutes, to slow down and give our conversation a listen, to laugh with us, perhaps cry a bit with us, and soak up the wisdom Hillary pours into each answer.

After that, you’ll want to hop online to purchase your own copy of Where the Osprey Nest, which is available in paperback and Ebook form.

While you’re at it, visit Hillary’s website to find their other books, including another 2026 release, Wild, Unfelt World. You’ll also learn more about Hillary’s activism, birding life, and how you can get involved in saving Osprey and combating data centers.

Also, be sure to follow Hillary on Instagram, and of course subscribe to Hillary’s Substack!

Finally, if you do nothing else, please scroll down to find Hillary’s letter template, which provides an easy way to contact Virginia governor Abigail Spanberger, urging her to fight for protections for Atlantic Menhaden, the overfished food source Atlantic Osprey depend on to live, reproduce, and migrate.

Further reading

Two Washington Post articles discussing the importance of Atlantic Menhaden and the fight over its future.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/09/22/chesapeake-bay-osprey-menhaden-virginia/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/08/19/fight-save-tiny-fish-powering-atlantic-coast/

That’s all for this month. Have you witnessed Osprey or any other bird struggling where you live? What are your thoughts on data centers and generative AI? Do you prefer fall migration or spring migration? Are there any birders you’d like me to interview on Ten Birding Questions? The comment section wants your thoughts👇

Leave a comment

Until next time, happy fall migration. Be sure to slow down. Read some poems. Get outside. And don’t forget to bird like Hillary!

nwb

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Call to Action – Send A Letter to the Governor of Virginia, Demanding a Pause to the Overfishing of Menhaden

Email Subject: Protect the Our Ospreys: Support Stronger Protections for Atlantic Menhaden

Dear Governor Spanberger,

I am writing as someone who loves ospreys, and is deeplyconcerned about the health of the Chesapeake Bay. I am writing to urge you to take immediate action to protect Atlantic menhaden from industrial reduction fishing.

Like our ospreys, Atlantic menhaden are a keystone species in the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem. As one of the primary forage fish in Atlantic coastal waters, they provide food for countless species, including ospreys, striped bass, rockfish, blue crabs, bald eagles, dolphins, whales, pelicans, and many other birds and marine animals. When menhaden populations decline in a particular area, the effects can ripple throughout the food web, placing additional stress on wildlife that already face challenges from habitat loss, pollution, and a changing climate. This has never been clearer than it is now.

The Chesapeake Bay has long been celebrated as one of America’s greatest estuaries, but it remains under tremendous environmental pressure. Protecting menhaden is an important part of supporting a resilient Bay and coastal ecosystem. Healthy forage fish populations help sustain the predators that residents and visitors come to see and enjoy, supporting recreational fishing, wildlife viewing, ecotourism, and the local economies that depend on a thriving Chesapeake watershed. Because of the menhaden reduction fishing off the Virginia coast, it is being reported that osprey populations are suffering all along the Atlantic seaboard, not just the Chesapeake Bay. Our waters are an entire ecosystem, and are not separated by state borders.

The osprey is one of the Bay’s most recognizable conservation success stories. After recovering from the devastating effects of DDT, ospreys have become a symbol of what is possible when science, policy, and public support work together. Today, many coastal and Chesapeake Bay osprey populations are experiencing reduced nesting success in areas along our coasts, leading to near population collapse, due to the availability of prey. Ensuring abundant forage fish is a necessary step we can take to support these iconic birds, while strengthening the broader ecosystem they represent.

I respectfully ask you to support stronger protections for Atlantic menhaden by pausing industrial reduction fishing. We need Bay-specific research, which can better evaluate localized menhaden abundance and ecosystem needs. Taking a precautionary approach while additional science is gathered will help ensure that management decisions protect both wildlife and the long-term health of the Bay.

The Chesapeake Bay is one of our nation’s greatest natural treasures. The decisions we make today will shape its future for generations. By protecting Atlantic menhaden, we help safeguard the birds, fish, marine mammals, waterways, and communities that depend upon a healthy Bay.

Thank you for your time, your leadership, and your commitment to protecting the Chesapeake Bay. Time is of the essence if we are to save the Bay’s beloved sea hawks.

Sincerely,

[Your Name]
[Your Address]
[City, State, ZIP]
[Email Address]

—, from his essay, “The Promise of an Insect Egg”

Summer birding doesn’t suck!

—Nathaniel Bowler, from his essay, “Summer Birding Doesn’t Suck!”

Making Mom Proud (Maybe)

My mother adores House Wrens. For decades she has festooned her yard with nest boxes, always in the hope that each spring breeding pairs of the indefatigable Troglodytes aedon, newly arrived from their wintering grounds, will fill the vacant domiciles, first with nesting materials, then with a clutch of eggs, then with a healthy brood of chicks. More often than not, the strategy works, and the payoff is six months of constant chatter and a yard brimming with boundless wren energy, or wrenergy©, as I suddenly realize it should be called.

With the goal of being just like Mom, and to add some class to the first spring we’d experience in our new Pittsburgh home, I bought a beautiful hand-made, hand-painted birdhouse in April of 2023. Our son Santiago and I found what we thought a choice location for the box—the Japanese maple in the front yard, easily viewed from our bay window but reasonably concealed among branches that were quickly leafing out.

The objective was clear—provide some elegant privacy for a horny pair of House Wrens (yeah, I know they don’t actually do it in the bird house, but it was fun to write) and spend the ensuing months observing a growing wren family. Like my mother, I love the relentless chatter of one our tiniest oversummering songbirds. For me, their loudness, smallness, and perhaps-not-as-tough-as-they-think-they-are-ness liken them to one of the great cinema toadies of all time.

I’ve never been one to deny a bit of instant gratification, so you bet I was tickled when, just a few days later, a single stick could be seen jutting from the cavity. Every morning for the next several days there was more nesting material in the box.

I was excited. So was Santiago. So were the House Wrens, who filled our days with their pleasantly incessant trill.

But then one morning the chorus was missing a layer of sound. Same thing the next day, and the next, until finally there was no choice but to accept reality—plans had been abandoned for whichever of the myriad reasons birds ditch a nesting project. Perhaps the House Wrens had been chased off by territorial Carolina Wrens, annual breeders at our home. Perhaps this nest had been serving as a dummy nest, a decoy meant to throw off potential hostiles. Is that a thing? my wife Alex asked while editing this piece. Yes! Some birds do indeed build decoy nests.

Things only got worse from there. For the next two years, nary a twig found its way to the box, even as I moved it around the yard to what I hoped might be more advantageous locations. Why this bird house failed to take I cannot say, especially when House Wrens aren’t known to be particularly fussy when it comes to an abode, and a forgotten shoe might appear as inviting as any masterpiece of woodworking from the local bird store. Was there something about this box in particular? A design flaw? Was the diamond shape somehow inhospitable?

I don’t know. All I know is that this spring I moved the box, still sturdy but by now weather-darkened, into a quieter, more concealed corner of the back yard, just at the edge of the woods. I remained hopeful, but my expectations were subterranean.

But birds have a way of dashing expectations, high and low. This May, I noticed some sustained House Wren activity around the back yard, and once again sticks were protruding from the openings in the box. Would there be an active nest this time? Incubating eggs? A passel of chicks? Would our yard be home to a new generation of House Wrens? To learn whether the House Wrens of 2026 completed what they started and finally got in a family way, you’ll have to read to the bottom of this post (scrolling past the intervening paragraphs is illegal in 49 of 50 states and Guam). Until then, rest assured this year’s backyard bustle had me feeling something like this:

The Owls of Crouse Run 🦉

Twice yearly birders everywhere rightly celebrate the incredible phenomenon that is migration. Understandable. The migration of billions (with a b!) of birds from from wintering to breeding grounds in spring and back again in fall makes for spectacular birding. Crammed in between is a different kind of phenomenon that, although no less spectacular, somehow draws the short end of birder affection. A real middle child, as it were. As a middle child myself, one crammed between two spectacular siblings I’m sure my therapist tires of hearing about, I can relate.

The summer phenomenon I am speaking of is of course avian reproduction.

In the previous two installments of this three-part series, I wrote how one of my main birding patches, Crouse Run, is fascinating for: 1) once being the site of the largest dance hall in the eastern United States, and 2) once being the stomping grounds of possibly the most important conservationist of the 20th century.

Today, the valley stream located in the northern suburbs of Pittsburgh is perhaps best known for… well, judging by the dearth of people hiking the trail on a daily basis, it isn’t particularly well known at all. But it should be known, for its history, for its beauty, and for the reproductive bonanza that takes place there every year. I first got a load of procreation Crouse Run-style in the spring of 2024, when a foraging pair of Louisiana Waterthrushes led me to a nest full of ravenous thrushlings.

Locating and observing that nest immediately vaulted the Louisiana Waterthrush to the top of my favorite warbler list, and it remains the crowning find of my birding life. So moved was I that I vowed to make finding a Waterthrush nest at Crouse Run an annual endeavor.

In the intervening years, I’ve been fortunate to find numerous breeding birds at Crouse Run. Or at least evidence of breeding birds. Birds like American Robins.

Aside from Robins, I’ve never found a thrush nest at Crouse Run, but I’ve seen plenty of fledgling Veerys and Wood Thrushes. Red-bellied and Downy Woodpeckers are reliably fruitful there too. So are the Hairy variety of woodpecker, like this foraging fledgling.

Three flycatcher species commonly breed at Crouse Run, including Eastern Phoebes and Eastern Wood-Pewees, though I’ve only ever found the nest of the former. Last year I sniffed out two Acadian Flycatcher nests, one of which I lost track of due to summer travels. The other? That one had the misfortune of being targeted and parasitized by Brown-headed Cowbirds.

There have been some non-avian youngsters in the mix as well, like this White-tailed Deer that wildlife rehabber and former podcast guest Jess Andersen assured me looked healthy, was likely only calling for its mother, and was better off for me having ignored my human impulse to meddle.

Then there are the owls.

Breeding season started off hot at Crouse Run this year, and early. On April 11th, I received the following text from . I replied with the exact amount of enthusiasm warranted by an owl-related text:

Elizabeth and I had heard a Great Horned Owl vocalizing during a Crouse Run weeks earlier. We knew roughly where they were, but finding the nest was an impressive feat, more so given its location.

The following morning I was up early and on the trail. Per her instructions, I was able to locate the nest too, situated midway up an eastern hemlock wayyy high up in a hilltop hemlock stand. Aside from the nest, I was encouraged by the solid, moving mass I was able to see though my binoculars. It’s always good to practice proper owl etiquette (and proper birding etiquette in general), but there were no worries about disturbing this remote nesting site. A more legitimate worry was getting any kind of usable media from such a distance. An overcast sky wasn’t helping, but I took a few photos and was happy to discover the mass had wings, though even a maxed out zoom on my Sigma 150-600 lens failed to capture anything identifiable.

Luckily, I had a hack, and I came back the next day with a tripod. I fixed my lens on the nest and turned the focus wheel, which gave me the close-up I needed.

A brief aside: Perhaps one of my brilliant readers can explain why the act of focusing my Sony a6400 provides a wonderfully zoomed-in image until the exact moment the shutter button is pressed.

Leave a comment

What I saw had me second guessing whether or not I was causing a disturbance, because this Great Horned Owlet was staring me deadass in the eye with a look to curdle the very blood.

The spasm of terror didn’t last, and now I wanted to get my own progeny involved. Remember a post from earlier this year when, after an unsuccessful American Woodcock excursion, Alex vowed she’d never go birding again? When I announced to our boys just one week later that I was going to take them to see the owl nestling, she lifted her birding embargo in record time. After dinner, our quartet made its way to the site and set up our makeshift observatory.

And lo!, a pair of young humans (and a pair of middle-aged ones) beheld a pair of young owls!

You know what’s incredible? How fast the reproductive cycle is for birds. No nine months incubating. No 18 years (or more!) in the nest, eating everything in sight, leaving empty wrappers and cans on the floor and sticky evidence of a peeled orange or a bag of stale, half-eaten popcorn or whatever snack that wasn’t properly sealed as I’ve instructed fifty goddam times...

No, a Great Horned Owl egg, once laid, will sit in the nest for an incubation period of four to five weeks. The hatched owlet will remain there for another six weeks or so before being ready to venture out onto the surrounding branches, as I found them. At seven weeks they may begin testing their wings with short flights. At eight weeks, the birds may be ready to fledge.

This pair must have been right at that stage because, a mere two days after taking my family to visit their family, the gang had dispersed, and I have not observed them by eye or ear ever since, though the consistent presence of marauding crows tells me some of the owls at least remain at large.

The Turkeys of Crouse Run 🦃

Wild Turkeys are easily one of my ten favorite birds, but I’m more likely to encounter them in our yard than at Crouse Run, where I’ve documented only a handful of sightings, usually a lone hen that quickly vanishes into the brush. What follows is a magnificent exception—Wild Turkeys attempting to cross the run. Warning—you are about to melt into a sentimental puddle and are advised to protect your electronic device from an impending cascade of tears.

Afraid my presence was stressing the chicks out and interfering with their ability to climb the bank of the stream, I moved on. By the time I doubled back a half hour later, there was no trace of the family. May their mother keep her brood safe from foxes, coyotes, crows—all the perils that await them in the wild. (I know predators need to eat, but how can I not root for these Turkeys!)

The Flycatchers of Crouse Run (there is no flycatcher emoji 😢)

My luck in finding Louisiana Waterthrush nests the previous two years did not continue in 2026, and though my favorite warbler abounded at Crouse Run as per usual, their nests remained successfully concealed from my prying eyes. Well done!

Acadian Flycatchers also showed up in force this spring and were perhaps even more abundant than last year. One pair was good enough to begin constructing its nest at the point where the Rachel Carson Trail diverges from Crouse Run and turns east. That made for easy observation right from the comfort of the path.

That’s where I set up shop for the next several days as the Acadians added twigs and rootlets and spider webs to their porous construction, until at last they had something resembling a livable abode.

At the expense of some of my other favorite birding spots, I visited this nest site at Crouse Run daily, ever hopeful I’d witness Acadian Flycatcher adults feeding Acadian Flycatcher babies. After two alarming days of finding no Acadians at the site and fearing for the worst (namely: Blue Jays ate the eggs), my luck changed on June 29, much to the delight of myself and a curious passer-by.

Parents took turns gleaning insects and spiders from the surrounds and delivering them to their two hungry offspring. No Brown-headed Cowbirds had invaded this nest, and I was able to observe this feeding activity over the next several days.

Other birding business lured me away from Crouse Run after capturing this footage, including a miserable failure of a lifer quest. When I returned, the nest was empty. Acadian activity could still be heard in the vicinity though, and I can only hope these first-year birds were able to fledge and are now busily fattening up for their impending journey south. It’s a punishing world out there for birds, and the youngest ones are especially vulnerable. Still, I have a good feeling about my newly minted Acadians, and I believe I was able to photograph one of them alive and well and looking scruffy above the banks of Crouse Run.

Back to Mom

What a summer it was at Crouse Run. Things were quiet during our walk there yesterday, though the occasional piercing chirp of an Acadian Flycatcher could still be heard. As for our yard wrens? On June 19, as I was dumping some table scraps on the compost heap, I heard a telltale ruckus that compelled me to start recording.

Babies! They hatched! Later they fledged! They brought all the wrenergy a yard could handle. For one year at least, I was just like Mom.

I’ve spent a good deal of time talking about my dad and my paternal grandparents since launching this newsletter. No mystery there—all three were avid birders who took me on my earliest birding adventures. But when I think about the chatty little bastards who finally deigned to nest at our house, I can’t help think of Mom and the peaceful way she has observed House Wrens from her kitchen window over the years, and the joy she gets as their song serenades her hours in the garden. Thanks for passing that adoration on to me, Mom. Whenever I think of House Wrens, I think of you, and in your honor I vow to add more nest boxes to the yard in the future. And who knows? Maybe those tiny brown birds will catch on around here. Capture some younger imaginations. Maybe one day when your grandsons see a House Wren, they’ll think of you, the GOAT, too.

Now, as I sit typing this on the back deck a month and a half after seeing those feeding wrens, I’m aware that not a single one can be heard. That layer of sound is absent once more. Breeding season is winding down, and fall migration is warming up. Soon House Wrens, Acadian Flycatchers, Eastern Phoebes, Veerys, and many of our other nesting birds will be gone.

So too will our children, for at least part of the day, when they migrate daily to school—our youngest, Santiago, to seventh grade, and his brother William to ninth. That’s right, high school. He’ll be fifteen this fall, old enough to get a learner’s permit in Pennsylvania, and he’s keen to drive. The boy wants to make like an owl. Branch out, so to speak. Spread his wings. Take some test flights.

What do birds think and feel when their offspring leave the nest? We can’t possibly know (although I’m sure scientists are working on that, come to think of it). Does fledging come with any of the joy and pain and pride and fear that I’m anticipating feeling when the time comes for our boys to take off? No idea, but I always think bird emotions are much bigger and more complex than we give them credit for, and I’ll be contemplating that as so many billions of baby birds make their first journey south.

Happily, this kid and his brother won’t fledge for many more years. In the meantime, they can clean up their f*#%ing mess.

Featured Video—Pee-wee Herman and Our Family

Speaking of gifting things from generation to generation—as parents, Alex and I gently nudge our kids in certain directions when it comes to sharing the things we love and grew up on, while also giving them plenty of room to find interests of their own. I haven’t had much luck passing a passion for birding on to my family, nevermind an adoration of House Wrens. Much more contagious has been my lifelong Pee-wee Herman fandom. Please enjoy our contemplation of Pee-wee’s enduring magical universe.

10/10 Recommends

Chris Lizama

I’ve featured my friend Chris here before, and I’m featuring him again with no apologies. When a search of my files for a House Wren photograph incredibly turned up nothing, I came to Chris with a last-second plea. In what seemed mere nanoseconds later, Chris provided not just the photo above, but these two stunners and a third not included here because Substack can’t handle its dimensions.

Oh to be so talented. Oh to be so organized.

That’s all for this week. Have you observed any avian reproduction this breeding season? Have you seen some nesting activity at your home? Any luck with nest boxes? Do you have any human offspring that will be fledging way too soon? Or any that have already fledged? Tell me about the babies in the comments!👇

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Until next time, thanks for reading, and don’t forget to breed your ass off (but only if you want kids)!

nwb

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This post was human-generated. All media by Nathaniel Bowler, except where noted.

Developmental edits by Alexandra Hidalgo.

The second thing that gives me hope, honestly, is just the number of birders now.

—Ryan Goldberg

Every city should have a . You know, the conservation-minded, bird-obsessed writer with a background in journalism who is endlessly curious about the confluence of people, animals, and green spaces in the city where they live and is determined to write all about it.

That’s Ryan, and that’s Bird City; Adventures in New York’s Urban Wilds. After reading Ryan’s evocative, informative debut, which takes the reader on a guided, four-seasons tour of New York City’s birding scene, I was keen to get to know the man who so poignantly captures not just New York’s avian life, but also the menagerie of always devoted, often eccentric humans who make up the birding populace of the five boroughs.

Our terrific, all-too-short conversation covered a range of topics, including.

• Ryan’s birding origin story—how a lifelong urban creature went from having never taken a hike in the woods to becoming fully bird obsessed, thanks in part to a spark bird, a spark field guide, and a spark… aunt?

• The value of a mentor to a beginning birder, particularly one who takes a holistic approach to birding and is hellbent on improving local habitats.

• Flaco, the ultimate celebrity bird—what his legacy means for the birders, New York’s much-maligned rodent population, and the city’s apex predators.

• Ryan’s favorite season for birding and the migration phenomenon of morning flight.

• Adventures in a birder’s dream wedding destination in The Last Frontier.

• A brand-new favorite bird—tales of enchanting dances, dips in mountain streams, and nictitating eyelids.

I came away from our conversation feeling that: 1) only 15 minutes had gone by, 2) I really want to bird New York City in September, and 3) there’s much we can learn from New York’s conservation example and the people Ryan spends time with in the pages of his book. People like:

Melissa Breyer, who tirelessly seeks out injured and dead birds in her mission to reduce building collisions and make New York safer for migrating birds.

Peter Dorosh, AKA The Bird Man of Prospect Park, who has spent his life among the birds and his career restoring their habitat.

, who founded the New York Plover Project to protect the fragile nesting sites of endangered Piping Plovers on the beaches of New York City.

Ryan and I also talked about his wife, Angie Co, with whom he shares a birding passion (and a spark bird!). Angie is co-founder of Bird Collective, which works with artists and conservation groups to create bird-themed apparel, accessories, and gifts. To date, Bird Collective has raised nearly $300k in support of conservation efforts!

Oh, and if you’re eager to sample Ryan’s writing before getting your hands on Bird City, you don’t have to look far. He’s right here! So go ahead and subscribe to his excellent Substack, Ryan Goldberg’s Field Notes, where the most recent post treats of his amazing adventures in Alaska.

I hope you’ll come away from our talk as hypnotized about New York and as hopeful about conservation as I was. Ryan and I agreed that the surge of young new birders can only be good news for the birds. Loving birds means wanting to protect them, and protecting them means sharing bird joy and spreading conservation messages. Here’s hoping New York’s successes migrate far and wide.

If birds can make it there
They’ll make it anywhere
It’s up to you
New York, New York

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That’s all for this month. Have you read Bird City? What’s your favorite season for birding where you live? Are you immersed your the local conservation scene, or do you practice environmental conservation at home? If you have thoughts about Ryan’s book or the subjects we covered, take it to the comment section!! 👇

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Until next time, thanks for listening, and don’t forget to bird like Ryan!

nwb

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This post was human generated.

Developmental edits by Alexandra Hidalgo.

Curiosity is a funny thing. When my wife Alex and I moved our family from central Michigan to western Pennsylvania in the fall of 2022, I was of course keen to get familiar with the local birding scene. Birding paints a portrait of a region in a way few hobbies can. An avid pursuer of the local avian life quickly becomes acquainted with the surrounding roads, woods, fields, and… runs?

As I drove around Allegheny County in those early days, particularly to birding locations near our home in the suburban North Hills of Pittsburgh, I couldn’t help but notice the area was lousy with runs. Everywhere the road signage announced their presence—Fall Run, Hart’s Run, Willow Run, Thompson Run, the wonderfully named Gourdhead Run.

There was no escaping it—Pittsburgh had the runs. But what the hell were they?

A run, as far as I was able to deduce, is a stream, nothing more, nothing less. In our corner of the North Hills, all the runs form part of the Pine Creek Watershed. The runs feed Pine Creek, which in turn feeds the Allegheny River.

And that’s where my curiosity about runs petered out, even though I didn’t quite have the full picture.

Not until I started exploring the fascinating history of our nearby run, Crouse Run, did my curiosity rekindle. Why the heck were all these streams called runs? Were there clear features warranting one body be labeled “creek” and another “run”? As far as my research can tell, not really! The terms are pretty ambiguous and often region-dependent. Creeks are not necessarily bigger. Runs are not necessarily faster. Brooks don’t necessarily babble any louder. Run is simply a regional term, used predominantly in Appalachia and the mid-Atlantic to describe a stream, and there seem to be no defining physical characteristics that distinguish a run from a brook, creek, rivulet, rill, runnel, or any other term attached to a flowing body of water deemed too puny to be called a river, though I invite you, dear reader, to bring your intel to the party and correct me if I’m wrong!

Now that I’ve sort of been able to clear that mystery up, let’s get back to the run in question—our family’s favorite run, and with good reason, because for all their loveliness, I’m not sure any of the local runs can top the combined beauty and biological and historical interest of Crouse Run.

In the first of this three-part series, I told the story of Italian opera singer-turned-entrepreneur Francesco “Frank” Bongiovanni, who in 1920 opened the largest dance hall in the eastern United States along the banks of Crouse Run.

Today that dance hall is a ruin that sits 1.7 miles from our home. A century ago, Bongiovanni’s Gardens was a retreat where Prohibition-era Pittsburghers went to dine, dance, and drink bootleg liquor. Those with automobiles could drive north from the city. Others got there via the Butler Short Line, the electric trolley that deposited passengers mere steps from Bongiovanni’s doorstep.

But not everyone hopping on the BSL was seeking the kind of entertainment offered at Bongiovanni’s roadhouse. The proprietor may have chosen the location primarily to dodge the long arm of Pittsburgh’s municipal law enforcement, but he also had good taste. Crouse Run is a beautiful creek valley with wonderful biological diversity. The local populace noticed, and the area became a popular destination for picnickers and nature enthusiasts, including one science-minded college student with literary ambitions.

The Biologist

Today we know Rachel Carson as one of the most important conservationists of the 20th century and a driving force behind the modern environmental movement. Birders enjoy the widespread distribution of Bald Eagles, Peregrine Falcons, and Osprey instead of mourning their disappearance largely due to Carson’s efforts in exposing the deleterious impacts of DDT and other chemical pesticides on birds’ reproductive abilities. Her best-known book, Silent Spring, not only led to a national ban of DDT, it also helped mainstream the concept of environmental conservation.

But before she got busy changing the world, Rachel Carson was a curious young girl growing up in rural Western Pennsylvania.

The borough of Springdale, Pennsylvania sits on the Allegheny River, some 18 miles northeast of Pittsburgh. The Carson family owned a 65-acre farm in Springdale when Rachel, their third child, was born in 1907. There, under the guidance of her nature-loving mother, she explored the surrounding fields and woods (and no doubt the nearby Riddle Run!).

A passion for nature sparked early, as did a knack for the written word. Always an avid reader, young Rachel began publishing her own stories in the St. Nicholas League magazine at age 10. At age 14, her first story about nature appeared in the magazine. “My Favorite Recreation” describes a day of “birds’-nesting” and the birds she and her dog encountered during their wanders in the Pennsylvania hills.

But her explorations weren’t limited to the Carson property. Like many families living in the greater Pittsburgh area at the time, the Carsons would ride the Butler Short Line to Crouse Run for picnics, a journey Rachel continued to make after enrolling at the then-Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham University), where she studied English before switching her major to biology in 1928.

What was the appeal of Crouse Run? The answer begins with its very formation. The valley is narrow and its walls are steep, geologic characteristics that combine to trap cool air year round, making the ravine hospitable to a range of plant species, including some that typically occur in more northerly locations. The Allegheny County Natural Heritage Inventory (ACNHI) has identified Crouse Run as a site of state significance, and its biological diversity has long attracted nature enthusiasts like the legendary Allegheny County naturalist Joe Grom, whose legacy lives on at Crouse Run and whose good works certainly did not warrant the name of our pestilential president being etched into his memorial bench.

Springtime is particularly magical at Crouse Run, when the flora springs to life and the valley floor is carpeted in native wildflowers, many of them doubtless the same that Carson and Grom observed in decades past.

Some aren’t the same. The ACNHI has also identified numerous threats to native Crouse Run’s native flora, including invasive plants. Oh, to travel back in time, a hundred years or so, when Rachel Carson was observing Crouse Run in a more natural state, before garlic mustard and Japanese stiltgrass and any number of other invasive/non-native (though lovely) plants found their way via human intervention into the valley.

Bird life abounds in Crouse Run too. Did Rachel Carson observe the same birds in 1926 that are typical for my birdwalks a hundred years later? Certainly Carolina Wrens and Red-bellied Woodpeckers, ubiquitous here now, were uncommon or even rare in her day. Even though Northern Cardinals have expanded their range north, I suspect they were well established in western PA a century ago, and hearing a Cardinal’s song in Crouse Run would not have been unusual.

Did Louisiana Waterthrushes breed in Crouse Run in the 1920s like they do every spring today? Did their signature ass waggle amuse Rachel Carson the way it does me in the 2020s?

Did Rachel ever encounter a Prothonotary Warbler like the one I found foraging around the pond at Crouse Run? Was it a rarity in western PA in her time too?

I suspect there were at least as many Song Sparrows to be found in Crouse Run in 1926 as there are now. In 2026 you can count on finding at least a dozen foraging along the stream at any time of year.

One bird I imagine was not hard to find in Crouse (formerly Grouse) Run in Carson’s time was the bird for which the run is named, but by now the forests of Allegheny County have been altered too drastically for the taste of the Ruffed Grouse, who prefers mixed woods with plenty of the kind of understory that White-tailed Deer have decimated in western Pennsylvania.

What about the fungi of Crouse Run? Did Rachel Carson take an interest in stunning violet-toothed polypores like these?

Did Rachel Carson get as much joy observing Ebony Jewelwings as my wife and I do during our strolls?

Though she is perhaps best known for saving birds, Rachel Carson was a marine biologist by training, and she burst upon the literary scene with her bestselling trilogy of books about the ocean and marine life. There’s no lack of marine life at Crouse Run, and thus no lack of Belted Kingfishers and Great Blue Herons. Just don’t ask me to identify the fish swimming in this video.

Too bad we haven’t solved time travel. What I wouldn’t give to take a stroll along Crouse Run with Rachel Carson today. I’d show her Bongiovanni’s speakeasy, now a crumbling, graffitied foundation. Gone too is the trolley line, its rails replaced by the trail that is marked by a series of rectangular yellow blazes. No doubt her curiosity would have her questioning the significance of the markers, and I wonder how she’d feel to learn that they indicate to a hiker that they are walking a section of a larger 46-mile path known as the Rachel Carson Trail.

Embarrassment is what I suppose she would feel. Rachel Carson doesn’t strike me as the type to festoon everything in sight with her name. But that didn’t stop admirers around her home county from doing it for her. You’ll find the Rachel Carson Bridge spanning the Allegheny River in downtown Pittsburgh. The home where she first fell in love with the outdoors is now a museum known as the Rachel Carson Homestead. I like to think she’d be tickled that my friend has devoted a whole newsletter to birding the entirety of the Rachel Carson Trail every season, and that she writes exuberantly about wanting to see a Veery, among Rachel’s favorite birds, one whose rich, descending song can be heard ringing through Crouse Run every breeding season.

Of course I can’t think of anyone more deserving of a run than one of Allegheny County’s most important native daughters, the one who devoted her life to conservation, whose superpower was combining sound science with beautiful prose to demystify nature for the rest of us. You’ll find the 1.4-mile Rachel Carson Run near the western terminus of the Rachel Carson Trail, where it flows southeast through Harrison Hills Park toward the Allegheny River.

Carson wasn’t universally beloved in her time, nor is she today. Her warnings about the heavy use of DDT and other pesticides collided with big business interests and the still-prevalent attitude that nature was something to be conquered and tamed rather than protected and revered. Knowing she rose to the height of her fame in the early 60s, I had a hunch there was speculation that she was a communist. Sure enough, in a letter to President Dwight Eisenhower, former Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Benson concluded that because she was “a spinster with no children” in spite of being physically attractive, Carson was “probably a Communist.”

Perhaps a biology lesson would have come in useful for Benson, who was apparently unaware that communists are mammals and thus reproduce in the way all mammals do. As to Carson’s love life, she may never have married, but she certainly loved, and profoundly so, as revealed in a series of correspondences between herself and friend Dorothy Freeman. In one, Carson writes:

First–in answer to your answer to my veery letter–I thought the whole episode pretty starry, beginning with the fact that, as I learned the other day, while I was in the Rock Creek Park listening to veeries and wishing for you, you were walking along your road listening to wood thrushes and wishing for me!

What a lovely, bird-filled sentiment. As to Carson’s political beliefs and what economic system she espoused, I don’t know. I do know she never called for an outright ban of chemical pesticides. I also know she was right about DDT and the harm it was causing, and nowhere more evident than our national symbol, the Bald Eagle, which was in rapid decline before Carson sounded the alarm. Thanks to her words and the research of others who were committed to reversing the awful trend, the hypothetical scenario Carson paints in the opening of Silent Spring has not come true:

It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices, there was now no sound. Only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh… No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.

Crouse Run is anything but silent. As I sit here typing, the sun is rising. I know less than two miles away, Veerys and Wood Thrushes are singing. So are American Robins, Gray Catbirds, Mourning Doves, Blue Jays, Carolina Wrens. Scores of other bird voices will fill the valley on this summer day.

And thanks to Rachel Carson, the summer nights are alive with another species that was impacted by DDT and will play an outsized part in the third part of this series.

10/10 Recommends

Silent Spring

Duh. What a masterpiece. Peregrine Falcons nest around Pittsburgh thanks to this book. Thanks to this book, Osprey patrol the confluence of Crouse Run and Pine Creek. Each year, hundreds flock to North Park to photograph the celebrity Bald Eagles. There’s a biologist and her book to thank for that.

Toy Story 5

Speaking of sounding alarms, loneliness is a real problem in this era of supposed connectedness, and Toy Story 5 shines brightest not in denouncing technology and screentime, but in valuing genuine friendship. Though the most recent two installments of the beloved franchise don’t quite measure up to the first three, the creators at Pixar clearly care about the quality of the storytelling of Toy Story. At no point did the fifth iteration feel like a cash grab, though our family was somewhat divided about how well or accurately the studio portrays technology.

That’s all for this week. Have you read Silent Spring or any of Rachel Carson’s books? Do you have any important biological areas where you bird? Do you see evidence of Carson’s legacy in your favorite natural areas? What are streams called where you live? Drop your thoughts in the comments!👇

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Until next time, thanks for reading, and don’t forget to conserve your ass off!

nwb

At Birding with BillBow, I strive to entertain you with tales of birding adventures and podcast interviews with fascinating birders. If that sounds like your type of content, consider supporting my work with a paid subscription. Your financial contribution helps me dedicate more time to BWB as I endeavor to deliver passionate, (hopefully) funny, high-quality writing. As always, 5% of earnings donated to the American Birding Association.

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This post was human-generated. All media by Nathaniel Bowler, except where noted.

Developmental edit by Alexandra Hidalgo.

—Ted Floyd

On the evening of May 12, while spring migration was in full swing, I was making dinner and perusing some of the Allegheny County rare bird alerts that had found their way to my email inbox. One checklist from the previous day jumped out at me, not only because of the eye-popping number of species (76), or the number of hours spent birding (over 6), or the inclusion of a bird I’ve never seen in Pennsylvania (Summer Tanager), but also because of the name of the birder who had submitted the checklist (Ted Floyd).

THAT Ted Floyd?, I remarked to myself before remembering that THAT Ted Floyd grew up in Pittsburgh, and there was nothing shocking about a native son birding his old stomping grounds. THAT Ted Floyd is also the editor of the American Birding Association’s Birding magazine and the author of Field Guide to the Birds of the United States and Canada, the eighth iteration of National Geographic’s guide to ABA-area birds.

That’s one birdwalk I wish I could have been on.

By some miracle, I was able to shake off the sudden acute onset of FOMO and continue preparing supper, determined the only cure for having missed out on birding with Ted Floyd was to talk birds with him. Shortly thereafter, the invitation to Ten Birding Questions was emailed and, to my eternal gratitude, accepted.

I hope you’ll enjoy this episode and Ted’s insightful, informative, sometimes self-deprecating approach to all we discussed, including:

• How compulsory journaling at a young age led to a life spent among the birds and an almost out-of-body experience with a plover.

• How birding and birds have changed over 45+ years in the field.

• The surprising “rocket science” behind writing a field guide (spoiler alert—it ain’t the writing).

• Pittsburgh birding, then and now.

• His current home base of Boulder County, Colorado and the staggering diversity of bird life (and animal and plant life in general) to be found in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

• An unbroken eBird checklist streak of 7,000+ consecutive days and what motivates him to bird and submit at least one checklist every day.

Perhaps ironically, we only discussed Birding in passing. Not because there was nothing to say about the ABA’s magnificent publication, but because I wanted to take a relatively deep dive into the NatGeo guide, and it was a great time getting to know just what it takes (read: how many people it takes) to write an authoritative field guide.

I came away from our talk with a brand-new case of FOMO—I really blew it living two years in Boulder without having birded once. Just behold some of the Colorado birds we discussed in the episode (including one Ted named as his top favorite among a quintet of favorite birds.

Yep, I sure blew it. A mistake I won’t make again. Meanwhile don’t you blow it by passing up on the spectacular field guide Ted and his team have gifted to the world.

I would love to have talked to Ted about his 2019 book How to Know the Birds. I would love to have talked about many more things, but that would have required fifteen or twenty birding questions and another hour (or four) of Ted’s time, and he was gracious enough as it was in going overtime with me.

If you haven’t already, I highly recommend Ted’s “Random Birds” appearances with Nate Swick on the American Birding Podcast. You’ll learn a ton about birds, and it’s just great fun to listen to two super knowledgeable birding minds riff on our favorite flying creatures. Here are a few recent episodes:

April 2026
February 2026
December 2025

Finally, if you’re curious (as I was) to hear the Nightingale that Ted references, the one recorded over 100 years ago and approved by Ottorino Respighi to accompany his Pines of Rome, here it is!

Note: I was delighted when June guest Ted Floyd mentioned May guest in his comment about daily birding in its good health implications.

That’s all for this month. Do you have the new National Geographic guide? Are physical field guides a part of your birding life in the age of apps and cell phones? How have you seen birding and birds change over time, particularly in the places you’ve lived? As always, the comment section awaits you!👇

Leave a comment

Until next time, thanks for listening, and don’t forget to bird like Ted!

nwb

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On July 25, a pair of earthquakes caused mass destruction in Venezuela that resulted in 2,000 deaths. My wife , a Caracas native whose family still resides there, wrote about it in her Substack. Luckily, they were unharmed. For others less fortunate, her post includes a link where you can donate to the rescue and recovery efforts, if you are able.

Love in Many Genres

Venezuelan Earthquakes and the Families Who Live Through Them

In July of 1967, my mom, three of her sisters, and my grandmother went on vacation to Spain. They enjoyed their European summer adventure until it came to halt when the newspapers were suddenly brimming with reports of a devastating earthquake in Caracas. They called my grandfather at home, but no one picked up. Since this happened two decades before an…

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2 months ago · 20 likes · 17 comments · Alexandra Hidalgo

This post was human generated.

Developmental edits by Alexandra Hidalgo.

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May be extinct sounded grim, but not final. Was there a chance Bachman’s Warblers could still be out there, eluding human detection in remote corners of the American Southeast? What a tantalizing idea, but the more-up-to-date Peterson Field Guide didn’t share my optimism.

As for the Sibley Guide? Forget it. You won’t find an entry for Bachman’s Warbler, except for the page it shares with Ivory-billed Woodpecker, Great Auk, and several other species of birds that have disappeared forever.

I’ll never see a Bachman’s Warbler. No one will. No one has seen one for sure since the 1960s. Subsequent sightings of the then-critically endangered bird in the late 1980s and early '00s were compelling but not confirmed, and extensive surveys of its habitat since then have turned up no visual or auditory evidence suggesting the warbler may somehow still be hanging on.

And what a shame, because look at this lovely little bird, the male reminiscent of a Hooded Warbler with its black cap and bib, the female less ostentatious but elegant in yellow, olive and gray.

More than that, of course, is that extinction is tragic, especially human-driven extinction. The bird had only been known to western science since 1832, when Lutheran minister and naturalist John Bachman discovered it in South Carolina, though certainly the bird was known to indigenous people long before the arrival of Europeans to the Americas. Less than two centuries after Vermivora bachmanii was identified and classified, it was gone. (For the record, my wife Alex thinks the Latinification of Bachman’s and other names for binomial classification is “so corny.”)

So what happened?

Welcome to Birding with BillBow, where I strive to entertain you with tales of birding adventures and podcast interviews with fascinating birders. If that sounds like your type of content, consider supporting my work with a paid subscription. Your financial contribution helps me dedicate more time to BWB as I endeavor to deliver passionate, (hopefully) funny, high-quality writing. As always, 5% of earnings donated to the American Birding Association.

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For all their bluster about capitalism vs communism and democracy vs authoritarianism, the United States and Cuba proved quite an effective team in annihilating the Bachman’s Warbler. Habitat destruction in the southeastern US, where the bird bred, and in Cuba, where it wintered, was a one-two punch that led to a precipitous decline in population from which it seems there was no recovery. In 2021, the US Fish and Wildlife Service recommended the bird be declared extinct.

Two years later, it was.

All this to say, thanks to reckless deforestation, I have one, not two, eastern warblers missing from my life list. After finally conquering my longtime nemesis, the insufferably bashful Connecticut Warbler, at Magee Marsh in May of 2025, only the Swainson’s Warbler remained.

Grayish back, whitish underside, with a nifty chestnut cap and a cool eye stripe. The bird is elegant but understated. Even with that sabre-like bill, I don’t know if Swainson’s Warbler is going to win any pageant prizes, but beauty pageants are silly, and I don’t think I’m being contradictory when I call this bird beautiful and nondescript in the same breath.

There’s a lot of overlap in the historical ranges of Bachman’s and Swainson’s Warblers. In the warm months, both species favor the swampy forests of the southeastern USA. Southwest Pennsylvania represents the northernmost extreme of the Swainson’s Warbler’s breeding territory, a fact that wasn’t confirmed until spring of 2023, when a nesting pair was found at Bear Run Nature Reserve in Fayette County, about 70 miles south of our Pittsburgh home. That’s a big deal for a bird that has fewer than 100 documented sightings across the entire state.

There’s evidence that Swainson’s Warbler populations are stable and perhaps even increasing slightly (though numbers have dropped in parts of its range). And the Bear Run breeding pair suggests that maybe the bird is expanding its range north. Adaptability is perhaps why Swainson’s Warbler survives where Bachman’s couldn’t. Perhaps Bachman’s Warblers were too finicky, too dependent on certain habitats, and the shock of deforestation proved too cataclysmic.

Whatever the case, Swainson’s Warblers are here in PA. For reasons not entirely clear to me, I didn’t chase them in 2023 or over the next two years. For equally mysterious reasons, this was the year I felt ready to add them to my life list. The urge was sudden and acute, and I was undaunted when my birding friends Holly, Elizabeth, and Sophia were unable to go on the appointed day—Wednesday, June 3.

No humans would be joining me, but I wasn’t alone. Janet, our battery-powered Nissan Leaf (named for the not-a-robot, not-a-girl informational assistant in The Good Place), would be transporting me to the destination. I’d powered her up overnight, making sure she had enough juice to get me to Bear Run and back. After seeing our sons William and Santiago off to the bus stop at 7:00 a.m., Janet and I were on the road. According to Google Maps, I’d be on the trail at Bear Run by 8:30, with a great chance of hearing a singing male, according to recent eBird reports.

For all her charm, Janet (the car) isn’t much of a conversationalist, so I used the intervening 80 minutes to acquaint myself with the Swainson’s song and catch up on the latest (and delightful!) “This Month in Birding” episode of the American Birding Podcast. Time was flying, and I was feeling optimistic as we cruised down the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

Then I missed my exit.

We were 19 minutes away when that happened. There isn’t exactly a surfeit of cellular service in that part of the state, so it took a minute for the GPS to recognize my blunder and calculate the new route. Meanwhile my brain was doing some calculations of its own. Worst-case I’d get off at the next exit and have to double back. At most I’d added a half hour to my drive. Annoying, but no biggie.

Then Google delivered the news.

FUUUUUUUUUUCK!

That’s what I screamed when Janet’s screen informed me the next exit was almost 20 miles away, and an hour and ten minutes now stood between me and my lifer. That seemed impossible. Punitive even, a sinister retaliation cooked up by Google’s AI, but for what offense? Perhaps for the crime of having recently googled How to turn off Google’s AI.

Refusing to believe these new circumstances could hardly change them. I could only accept them, and the 70-minute delay. Except it wasn’t going to be a mere 70 minutes. Forget making it there and back on a single charge. By the time I made it to Bear Run, the battery would likely be depleted enough to make me nervous about Janet’s ability to reach a charging station. In a flash, optimism gave way to anxiety.

I got off the turnpike at Somerset, PA still in denial that one tiny missed exit had added almost another hour to my drive. I pulled into a gas station to see if I could find an alternate route, but Google had indeed calculated the quickest way to Bear Run. Alternate routes added another ten or twenty minutes. The only thing to do was suck it up, accept that I alone was to blame for my plight, and find a charging station.

Twenty minutes at a fast charger would get the job done. Unfortunately, there were no fast chargers in Somerset that I could find, so I settled for a standard charger, located at the Mary S. Biesecker Public Library, across the street from the Sheetz service station. After fumbling with the controls like an asshole and listening to the chatter of Chimney Swifts I could only interpret as mockery, I was able to activate the charger. I was also bordering on a full-blown panic attack for which I could see only one antidote—breakfast food, the greasier the better. The Sheetz would come in handy there, and soon I was sitting on Janet’s hood and getting intimate with a sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit that tasted way better than any gas station sandwich has a right to. I also took a moment to contemplate just who Mary S. Biesecker was and what worthy deeds she had done to be thusly commemorated (see below👇). I also had an eBird checklist going. Might as well take advantage of Somerset’s avian life to help sooth my jangled nerves. One hour and five species later, Janet’s charge was up to 51%. Not ideal, but hopefully enough to get me to the bird and, if not all the way back home, at least to a fast charger en route.

The road to Bear Run thankfully featured long downhill stretches that allowed Janet’s regenerative braking feature to keep the battery from draining. I was calm by the time I was 10 minutes from the reserve, and Janet’s charge incredibly was at 47%. Things were looking up, until this:

This vehicle, equipped with some kind of road-blocking sprayer, was moving roughly as fast as the corpses buried in the adjacent hillside, and I was beginning to believe my rising apoplexy would soon overwhelm me conveniently close to a cemetery.

By the time that glacial impediment was out of the way, rage had given way to resignation. Good thing too because that was not the end of the slow-moving traffic—the final leg was an interminable crawl to the entrance of Bear Run.

I have no memory of what happened between this moment and when I found myself standing in the Bear Run parking lot, Indigo Buntings, Chipping Sparrows, and Northern Yellow Warblers expressing awe at my prest-o, change-o trick of turning a pleasant 80-minute drive into a four-hour ordeal.

By now it was well after 11:00, and I wasted no time heading down the trail. My eyes were peeled, but of more use for this mission were ears. Swainson’s Warblers tend to stay hidden in the understory, and they would be near impossible to find as they foraged for insects on the forest floor.

My ears were telling me there were plenty of woodland species around. Black-throated Green and Black-throated Blue Warblers. Wood Thrushes. Scarlet Tanagers. Red-eyed Vireos. I wasn’t the only Homo sapiens in the woods, either. In the distance I spied a hiker, binoculars hanging from his neck, face wizened by, I assumed, a life lived birding. After greeting each other, I asked if he’d heard the Swainson’s Warbler. He had not, but Merlin had. He instructed me to continue along the path, where I’d eventually encounter some mist nets and people banding birds. I’m not sure they want people going back there, though, he warned.

Oh, I’m going back there, I replied to no one but myself. If my own stupidity can’t stop me, you think a some puny bird banders can?

I thanked him for the tips, and sure enough, several mist nets were set up along the trail, almost blocking it. But these nets were designed to ensnare birds, not humans. No way I was turning back after that hellish morning, so I maneuvered around them with a few dexterous steps.

I hiked on, encouraged that the bird was present, at least according to a stranger’s Merlin. I even dared get my hopes up when I heard voices that belonged to a couple of men who certainly looked the part of bird banders. They hurried toward me, gave me a brief How’s it going?, and raced right on by, despite my efforts to get their attention. No matter. They were working, and anyway I encountered another trio of banders further down the trail who appeared to be packing it in for the morning. One of them, deducing the reason for my presence, asked whether I had gotten eyes on the Swainson’s Warbler.

Nor eyes, nor ears I told him. They were super friendly and generous with the intel, informing me I’d have the best chance around where we were standing and up to a quarter mile in either direction. There were multiple singing males, they said. Only they tend to get quiet late in the morning and into the afternoon. They also took a moment to question why anyone hoping to find a rare bird would be dumb enough to show up at midday when any half-wit with a pair of binoculars knows that songbirds are most active and vocal in the morning.

Obviously they didn’t say that last part, but what they did tell me was discouraging, and it also proved right—nothing resembling the Swainson’s song could be heard, and the woods were growing quieter, not louder, as the morning turned to afternoon. Still, I was going to stick it out for as long as I was able.

Thank goodness I did. After two hours walking the path back and forth, my dogged determination was rewarded with a better look than I could have ever hoped for and the photo of my dreams!

Lol no it wasn’t. I didn’t hear a peep out of the damn bird, much less see it. What I did get was a nice long look at this sign urging eager birders to be conscientious in our attempts to track down the rarity.

I’d be lying if I told you this was an enjoyable birding adventure up to this point. Objectively I could recognize the humor in all that had happened, but I wasn’t laughing. Frustration was kicking my ass, the only silver lining being that I hadn’t dragged my friends into this debacle.

I was about to accept the L and spend the rest of the day stewing in my own bile when it occurred to me that this was the perfect time to remember the wisdom of my latest podcast guest Holly Merker, one of the foremost practitioners and teachers of mindful birding. What would Holly do? I asked myself. Only Holly knows that, but I could make an educated guess based on our conversation. Under these circumstances, she might pause to look inward and recognize how she was feeling and why. And she might then try to make this moment more about the moment and less about the goal.

Here I was in a resplendent green forest listening to songbirds and Bear Run flowing through its rocky channel. Time to my head clear and stop worrying about potential life bird #579. I went from dejected to elated almost instantly. How could I not?

I’d like to tell you that this was the magical moment, after calm had washed over me, that the Swainson’s Warbler revealed itself in all its beautiful/nondescript glory. But Bear Run Nature Preserve isn’t Hollywood. Nor is it in business of serving up happy endings.

But that doesn’t mean I didn’t get one.

I didn’t recognize the high-pitched peeps coming from the brush near one of the bridges that cross Bear Run, but a quick look through binoculars revealed a pair of Hooded Warblers foraging at eye level. The male became coy when I readied the camera, but his mate was one of the most cooperative warblers I’ve ever encountered.

If you look closely, you can see this bird is not only beautiful but also banded. Perhaps she’d been caught in the mist nets and banded that very morning. Perhaps her ultra close encounter with humans explains her lack of shyness with me.

It occurred to me that I couldn’t remember ever seeing a female Hooded Warbler before, and I’d certainly never photographed one. That’s a lifer of sorts. More than sufficient to banish the last traces of my rotten mood as I watched her adorably terrorize the local insect population for almost an hour.

At around 3:00, Janet and I headed home. Turns out she had plenty left in the battery. No need for a recharge.

As for the The Swainson’s Warbler? That will have to wait until spring of 2027. I’m not making that infernal drive again this year. I’ll go earlier next year, and I’ll go with my friends.

Featured Video—Acadian Flycatcher

My regular readers know I frequent another “run” located very close to our home—Crouse Run. Every spring Crouse Run becomes home to several mating pairs of Acadian Flycatchers, who build shitty-looking, loosely woven nests, usually hidden in some pretty dense foliage. The goal is to remain hidden, but Acadian Flycatchers are active foragers with a boisterous song, and if you keep an eye on them as they move around from tree to tree, they’ll eventually lead you to their nest. Last week I was able to observe this female busily constructing her nest while her mate hovered protectively nearby. Here’s wishing them better luck than I witnessed last year, when the nest I monitored was parasitised by Brown-headed Cowbirds.

On Mary S. Biesecker

The Somerset Public Library was established in 1914 through the efforts of 100 residents who wanted to share their love of books and reading with the wider community. The library was later renamed the Mary S. Biesecker Public Library for local philanthropist Mary Scull Biesecker who had been one of the driving forces behind its opening. Beyond that, I was unable to dig up much more about her. I ever find myself in Somerset again, I’ll stop in. The library seems like a wonderful establishment with some interesting original art that’s worth checking out.

That’s all for this week. Have you ever seen a Swainson’s Warbler? What’s your biggest bird chase gone wrong? How do you stay calm and collected when a birding expedition goes sideways? Have you ever been stranded in the middle of nowhere with an electric car? The comment section awaits! 👇

Until next time, thanks for reading, and for the love of god, don’t miss your exit!

nwb

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This post was human-generated. All media by Nathaniel Bowler.

Developmental edit by Alexandra Hidalgo.

—Holly Merker

Generous. That’s the word I think best describes my latest Ten Birding Questions guest, southeastern Pennsylvania-based birder Holly Merker. Generous with her time, generous with her wisdom, generous in her openness. For well over an hour Holly was willing to share stories from her birding life, some of them deeply personal.

As I researched Holly’s expansive career in preparation for our recording session, it dawned on me that there was just too much to cover in one interview. Writer, podcaster, educator, bird guide, eBird reviewer, and driving force behind the Mindful Birding movement. What a life lived among the birds! I wanted to talk about it all, but some questions I had to shelve. I hope we did justice to the topics we did cover, including:

• Birding as meditation and the benefit of slowing down and adding mindfulness techniques to our birding practice.

• Teaming up with birds. How listing, eBird, and Merlin can be complementary and not at odds with mindful birding.

• Ornitheraphy. The healing power of birds and birding in the face of serious illness.

• Life as an eBird reviewer—understanding the review process, how the filters work, and how she has seen eBird evolve since joining the project in 2005.

• How to deal with the stresses that sometimes come with birding, like FOMO and listing anxiety.

Of course we talked birds throughout. That is, after all, what this is all about. Some of this month’s cast of characters includes Chipping Sparrow, Red Knot, Dark-eyed Junco, Whimbrel, and Clay-colored Sparrow. I especially loved learning how one bird in particular sparked Holly’s passion for bird songs and vocalizations.

As I point out in the interview, I’ve always maintained that the song of the Black-throated Green Warbler is reminiscent of the transforming sound the Transformers made in the old '80s cartoon. After giving both a listen, I don’t think I’m too off base, but judge for yourselves!

What my guests may not realize from the time they receive an invitation to be a guest to when the interview goes live is that the whole time I have been secretly scheming to one day go birding with them. Put a mindful birding walk with Holly Merker at the top of my bucket list.

When I launched this podcast, I had my doubts about asking guests their favorite bird as a way of concluding the interview. I was wrong. The question is a highlight of the conversation every month, including Holly’s pick, a wonderful singer from the Family Icteridae.

I’m so grateful to Holly for her willingness to share such personal stories from her life and lessons of Mindful Birding. I hope you, listeners, will consider carving out some time in your birding practice to slow down and open yourselves to the calming, centering, healing power of birds and nature. I also encourage you explore Holly’s expansive world of Mindful Birding:

The Birding magazine article that has had me thinking about birding’s health benefits ever since, “The Birding Prescription.”

Learn more about her work promoting health and wellness through birding on her website, Ornitherapy.

Be sure to subscribe to Holly’s Substack, The Birding Prescription.

I highly recommend The Mindful Birding Podcast, co-hosted with Holly Thomas, which covers many birding-related topics through the lens of Mindful Birding.

We didn’t even get to her book, the award-winning Ornitherapy: For Your Mind, Body, and Soul.

Do you want to learn more about Mindful Birding or about how you can join the movement? Check out the The Mindful Birding Network.

Finally, check out some of Holly’s beautiful photography on Instagram.

That’s all for this month. Do you practice mindful birding? Has birding helped you through a challenge life has dealt you? Do you sometimes feel FOMO creeping into your birding practice? Are you an eBirder? What do you find are some of the benefits and drawbacks of making checklists? As always, find me in the comment section!👇

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Until next time, thanks for listening, and don’t forget to bird like Holly!

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This post was human generated.

Developmental edits by Alexandra Hidalgo.

Made sense to me. Taking a piecemeal approach by picking out problematic people for whom a bird is named would mean making a value judgment about the life that historical person lived. One person’s hero may be another’s pariah. Instead of wading into those murky waters, the AOS announced they were changing ’em all. No biggie, right?

Wrong.

Welcome to Birding with BillBow, where I strive to entertain you with tales of birding adventures and podcast interviews with fascinating birders. If that sounds like your type of content, consider supporting my work with a paid subscription. Your financial contribution helps me dedicate more time to BWB as I strive to deliver passionate, (hopefully) funny, high-quality writing. As always, 5% of earnings donated to the American Birding Association.

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When the news broke, many celebrated what was the culmination of the Bird Names for Birds movement spearheaded by Jordan Rutter and Gabriel Foley in 2020. The argument that birds should be named descriptively and not for (with few exceptions) dead white men had won out.

Others were less happy. Many birders agreed that bird names honoring genuinely lousy people should be changed, as had already been done with McCown’s Longspur, named for John McCown, who battled native tribes in the American Indian Wars and fought to preserve slavery as a Confederate General. McCown’s Longspur is now known as Thick-billed Longspur. Fine for this one isolated case, but to erase the honorifics attached to all birds was, in the view of some, to erase history, to forget those whose noble work in centuries past had laid the foundation for modern ornithology and the understanding we have of birds today.

Then there was a third kind of reaction. This is the 2020s, after all. The age of Trump and social media and the all-too-toxic blending of the two. Some believed the specter of wokeness 😱 had crept into birding and ornithology. Enter the online horde of trolls, bots, and MAGA types. The less time spent on that line of thinking the better, I think, but suffice to say a lot of people who aren’t birders and wouldn’t know a Wilson’s Warbler from a Wilson’s Snipe had a lot to say on the subject. That fire burned hot (consult the replies to the AOS’s original Tweet announcing the name change) but not long, which was predictable because, again, these people don’t care about birds and couldn’t tell a Wilson’s Phalarope from a Wilson’s Plover, or a Wilson’s Storm-Petrel, for that matter (yep, that’s five birds named for one Alexander Wilson, who was a fascinating man and deserves a post of his own someday).

Place me squarely in the first category. In my opinion, naming species after people is at best silly, offering little to assist in our shared mission of identifying birds in the field. At worst, it elevates some true scoundrels. Scoundrels should be remembered, but not by having birds named after them. Birds are wonderful. Scoundrels suck.

Well, not all scoundrels.

I do sympathize somewhat with those who object to the AOS’s decision in good faith. Dozens of honorees did brilliant work and deserve to be remembered fondly. But again, the naming tilts heavily white and male, and the worthiness of a given nominee is hopelessly subjective. And I do wonder how many of us see a, say, Baird’s Sparrow and feel compelled to look into the life and work of Spencer Baird. Not many, I’d wager. And birders with a nose for history are going to dig, whether or not the birds are named for people, and they’re going to learn about Baird, Wilson, and Harris, and hundreds of other ornithologists who did equally meaningful work in the field and never had a bird named after them.

The bottom line, some 150+ bird names are going to change, including a large sparrow of the central United States and Canada.

Harris’s Sparrow.

Who was this Harris, and why is a sparrow named after him? Great questions! I sure didn’t know, so I did some light research. Edward Harris (1799-1863) was an American ornithologist, naturalist, farmer, and contemporary of Audubon who accompanied the famed painter on a pair of expeditions and also provided some financing to assist in the publication of Audubon’s groundbreaking The Birds of America. No wonder Audubon saw fit to name not one but two birds after Harris, including the magnificent Harris’s Hawk.

Though I question the choice of befriending a slaver, Edward Harris undeniably did good work in advancing ornithology, if only for his role in making the monumental The Birds of America a reality (yes, I am simultaneously denouncing and praising Audubon—see how sticky this is?). But Harris was more than a wealthy enthusiast. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Audubon himself praised Harris’s avian expertise, which he cited as invaluable in his own work.

Does Edward Harris deserve remembering? Certainly. Does he deserve to have a hawk and a sparrow named after him? In my opinion, absolutely not. That’s not a knock on Harris. As stated above, I just think birds should have bird names.

Now, about that sparrow.

The only region I’ve birded within the Harris’s Sparrow’s rather limited range is central Iowa, which lies along the bird’s migration path. Sadly, I didn’t travel to Iowa during migration, so when the Rare Bird Alert for Allegheny County lit up on May 11th announcing a confirmed adult Harris’s Sparrow had been found hanging out in Pittsburgh’s Southside Riverfront Park, naturally my first thought was—Huh. I wonder what they’re going to change its name to?

Ha. Just kidding. My real first thought was—Oh fuck, that would be an incredible life bird but here I am at home and it’s already too late to drive a half hour into Pittsburgh and where even is that park I’ve neverheardofitandgoddamitI’mgonnamissthebird…

After I snapped out of the spiraling, bird-induced panic, I resumed making dinner and resolved to discuss my fit of FOMO hysteria with this month’s podcast guest, , whom I would be interviewing two days later about, among other things, birding for your mental health. What else was there to do, aside from go to bed appealing to whatever power in the universe holds dominion over when vagrant birds decide to pack up and move on?

When I awoke to a notification from my birding neighbor Ed (who takes beautiful photos and posts them on Instagram) that the Harris’s Sparrow was continuing to show in the same location, I knew I had a better than decent chance of getting my lifer.

Various things waylaid me until mid-afternoon. When I was finally heading down to the site, I reviewed what I knew about the Harris’s Sparrow. Admittedly little. I knew the adult had a distinctive black streak that extends from the crown of the head down to the center of the breast. I knew it was a big, chunky sparrow. I knew it was not a secretive bird (it willing visits feeders). I knew it was prone to vagrancy. I knew it could be overlooked as a House Sparrow at a casual glance. Big shoutout to the Allegheny County birder who didn’t overlook the Harris’s.

That was the extent of my knowledge. I listened to its song on the way—long whistles that come in series of two or three, usually changing pitch with each new series. Another shoutout to vagrant birds who vocalize. You make life so much easier!

Not surprisingly, two birders were already on the scene, including Michelle, whom I’d met before, as I recall chasing another rarity (for Pittsburgh), an American Avocet. Michelle sat at a park bench, admirably calm. The bird was not vocalizing at the moment and had not been seen in the half hour since she had arrived. Another birder showed up moments after I did, and that was good. By my reckoning, four pairs of eyeballs and ears had a better than average chance of finding the sparrow.

Thirty minutes later, the bird still hadn’t shown. I’m not saying I was getting antsy at this point, but the idea that I’d be driving home feeling like a total loser did flit across my mind.

Finally, after the four of us had split up, the bird reappeared. It’s over here! Michelle called. She had seen the sparrow moving around in some brush beside the path. After several fruitless, frenzied minutes of searching, a chunky songbird burst out of nowhere and zipped into a mulberry tree that was laden with fruit.

Lifer achieved. Cue dopamine.

The sparrow moved around the tree as it feasted, offering splendid looks through binoculars and fairly good photo ops for the gathered admirers, a half dozen by now and more coming. No wonder. When a bird is making its second known appearance in a county, birders don’t mess around.

After a hardy mulberry repast, it took off again, and we were unable to locate it for long enough that I wondered if I’d already had the best look I was going to get. As we waited, I got to talking to the assorted admirers. One of them, Bill, I suspected I had met before. He suspected the same. When we figured out we had crossed paths at local waterfowl hotspot Duck Hollow, he remembered I was from Ohio. He gave me his number and his card and invited me to check out his website, which I did later that day, and I can say with total sincerity that what I learned about Bill blew my mind every bit as much as the sparrow we saw together. More on Bill below.

It’s over here!, Michelle announced again. The Harris’s was even more accommodating this time, foraging on the ground, unbothered by the gaggle of admirers inching closer for better photographs. As I captured it, it occurred to me that this was one of the handsomest sparrows I had ever seen. Handsome, but not in a straightforward, Cary Grant kind of way. There’s something messy about a Harris’s Sparrow and its scattershot streaks. They’re a bit disheveled. Ruggedly unkempt. Benicio del Toro, but a bird.

Funny thing—we didn’t spend a single moment reflecting on Edward Harris. Who he was and why this beautiful creature was named after him didn’t come up. What we did reflect on was how far out of range it was. How tame it was. Mostly how striking it was, with its black cap, mask, and bib. How long its tail was. How pink its bill. How lovely the light buff coloring offset the streaky blacks, whites, and grays.

Only later, after my euphoria began to subside, did I reflect on Harris and the AOS and what the Harris’s Sparrow’s new name should be. Perhaps an out-of-use former name? Perhaps not. I think we can eliminate what was chosen prior to Audubon by naturalist Thomas Nuttall, who referred to the bird as the Mourning Finch. A sparrow is not a finch, so let’s go with something novel. The bird breeds only in northern Canada, so Canada Sparrow or Tundra Sparrow could be appropriate, though I have reservations about choosing a geographical name when the bird spends half its life outside of its breeding range. A reference to the field marks is usually a good bet. Black-masked Sparrow? Long-tailed Sparrow? Great White-bellied Sparrow? I concede my imagination isn’t running away with this one, so I leave it to you, dear birders👇

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Featured Photo—Harris’s Sparrow

This is my favorite shot from the series. I love how the sun illumines the bird’s eye as it reaches for an underripe mulberry. I don’t know what this bird will be called when I see it next, but I’ll never forget the afternoon half-hour I got to spend with Harris’s Sparrow in a Pittsburgh metro park.

10/10 Recommends

William Pfahl Fine Art

That evening, after perusing my photos, I pulled out Bill’s card and visited his website. What I found floored me. Bill Pfahl is a painter. A damned talented one too. I can’t get enough of his Pittsburgh cityscapes, particularly his depictions of the borough of Sharpsburg, one of my favorite places to bird in the Pittsburgh metro area. Sharpsburg was once a bustling manufacturing hub where Heinz got its start. That heyday is long gone, but Bill captures the ghosts of the past in his hazy portrayals of modern Sharpsburg.

That’s all for this week. Have you ever seen a Harris’s Sparrow? Have you thought up a suitable new name for it? What’s your opinion of the decision to change honorific bird names in general? Please use this handy button if you’d like to opine👇

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Until next time, thanks for reading, and don’t forget to bird your ass off!

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But the more I poked around, the more I realized our back yard wasn’t just a beautiful natural area. Here and there were vestiges of industry, deteriorating hunks of concrete and metal that hinted at a bustling past.

I wanted to know more. What went on here? When and why did it end? I took my questions to the internet, but for all their utility, search engines aren’t portals to infinite knowledge. When Google failed, I wondered if some hall of records contained the answers I sought. Didn’t need an archive, it turned out. What I needed was to find neighbors educated in local lore.

The Butler Short Line 🚋

I met Tom during my first annual Big Trash Day in 2024, and I run into him from time to time down in the creek valley, always armed with his mechanical trash picker-upper, always ready with some history. From Tom I learned that the fields behind our house were once a dumping grounds for the byproduct of steel manufacture. When operations ceased sometime in the 1970s (presumably due to the decline of Pittsburgh’s steel industry), the grounds were covered with earth, and nature was allowed to take over. Though I shudder to think what might be buried not so far beneath the surface, the tall grasses and wildflowers have become habitat for Red-winged Blackbirds, Northern Yellow Warblers, Marsh Wrens, and more.

I also learned that this graffitied concrete slab is a remnant of a station where the Butler Short Line (BSL), an electric trolley service, made its Allison Park stop twice every hour as it traveled north from Pittsburgh en route to Butler.

For a nickel, the BSL would pick you up at Allison Park and carry you to its next stop at Wildwood, and that’s where things get spicy 🌶️🌶️🌶️

Crouse (Grouse?) Run 🦃

There’s no trolley to catch from Allison Park to Wildwood today. I suppose the proliferation of the horseless carriage spelled doom for the BSL and others like it. A ten-minute car ride will get you there, but since we’re birders, let’s go on foot instead. Walk the train tracks north until they intersect with Sample Road, a twenty minute hike if you’re not pausing to observe Great Blue Herons, Osprey, or others who scour the creek for aquatic life.

A short distance along busy Sample Road leads to a tiny pulloff and a nondescript trailhead, marked only by a pair of rectangular yellow blazes that will figure big in the second post in this series.

Here, along the last stretch of the former trolley route between Allison Park and Wildwood, things get woodsy. Gone are the fields of goldenrod and ironweed, swapped out for stands of sycamore, hemlock, basswood, and dripping shale walls through which Pine Creek cuts its path. This natural area, I came to learn, is Crouse Run Nature Reserve, 17 protected acres that are spectacular year round, but more so when breeding birds return each spring. Eastern Phoebes nest all along the stream. So do Acadian Flycatchers, Wood Thrushes, and my favorite warbler—Louisiana Waterthrush, here doing its signature waggle as it forages along the shore of the creek.

Crouse Run isn’t particularly challenging terrain. The old trolley path crosses Pine Creek in various places, and after a heavy rain, it can be difficult to keep your feet dry. But for the most part the trail is flat and well maintained, and a half hour gets you to where the BSL would have made its Wildwood stop at Wildwood Road.

Who was this Crouse to whom the reserve is apparently dedicated? Legend has it the name evolved from Grouse Run, a claim not entirely unfounded, if the local signage has anything to say about it—just across the street from the Crouse Run parking lot is Grouse Run Road, presumably a reference to Pennsylvania’s state bird, the Ruffed Grouse. Considering Ruffed Grouse are essentially extinct in western Pennsylvania (though Wild Turkeys are a common sight), it is perhaps fitting that the name evolved along with the local fauna.

The dearth of Grouse doesn’t stop me from birding there several times a week. I was doing just that one morning a couple of years ago when I was approached by another local well versed in Hampton lore. Liz, a member of the Pine Creek Land Conservation Trust, was investigating damage to a sign instructing hikers to remain on the path in one of Crouse Run’s sensitive areas. When she learned I was a recent transplant, she let me in on a little history—a nearby ruin was the site of what was once the largest dance hall in the eastern United States.

That shook me. The largest dance hall? Here? In quiet Hampton Township? That was a fascinating morsel to take home to my wife Alex, who loves to dance and had recently adopted Crouse Run as her favorite place to take her daily hike.

We didn’t do much with that knowledge aside from enjoy it and imagine the nightly festivities that brought this hidden nook in Hampton to life.

But there was more. So much more. Last month my curiosity had me back at the search engines. This time, Google didn’t let me down.

The Bootlegger 🍸🍝 🎶

According to his obituary in the September 26, 1925 edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Francesco “Frank” Bongiovanni was born in Forsano, Italy on Christmas day, 1875. As no such place exists according to Google, I suspect (with no hard evidence) the Post-Gazette simply misspelled Fasano, a town located at the top of Italy’s boot heel. Whatever the actual location, Bongiovanni’s ambitions were too big for his birthplace. When he turned 20, young Francesco, by then a baritone opera singer, packed up his million-lira voice and set off for London, then New York, then Washington DC.

Along the way, as he learned the ins and outs of entertainment and hospitality, Bongiovanni must have discovered a flair for entrepreneurship. By the time his peregrinations landed him in Pittsburgh around 1904, he was just the man to fill a gaping hole in the entertainment scene. In 1913, Bongiovanni bought his place of employment, the Nixon Café on 6th Avenue, which he transformed into the place for Pittsburghers to drink, dine, dance, and watch a show. Soon Bongiovanni was the toast of the town, hailed as the father of Pittsburgh’s cabaret industry and one of the first to introduce Italian food to western Pennsylvania’s culinary landscape.

What a time that must have been for Bongiovanni, an immigrant getting rich in an industrial boomtown, and his café, packed nightly with Pittsburgh’s high society.

All was well… until it wasn’t.

Seven years later, when tongue-clucking moralists were celebrating the passage of the 18th amendment, saloon keepers everywhere found themselves staring ruination dead in the face. Not Frank Bongiovanni, who proved not only innovative but also nimble as the regulatory noose was tightening around the production and sale of spirituous beverages. Doubtless seeking to elude the long arm of municipal law enforcement, Bongiovanni crossed the Allegheny River and found refuge in Pittsburgh’s rural surrounds, known today as the North Hills. In the borough of Wildwood, a welcoming, secluded ravine had been carved over thousands of years by Pine Creek. Also awaiting him was the Butler Short Line, whose tracks had been laid down in 1907.

In that quiet water and transportation corridor in the rural outskirts of Pittsburgh, Frank Bongiovanni didn’t settle on building a discreet speakeasy. Ever the showman (and perhaps seeking to loudly flout the law), Bongiovanni built a grandiose pleasure palace. Bongiovanni’s Gardens was an all-purpose entertainment hub where Pittsburghers could escape the strictures of Prohibition and down bootleg liquor out of the shadow of a police crackdown.

Some patrons arrived at the impressive roadhouse by car. Others left the driving to a (hopefully) sober conductor, riding the BSL practically to Bongiovanni’s Gardens’ front door, as depicted below.

One must take some creative license when picturing the scene inside the walls of Bongiovanni’s Gardens. I like to imagine a mirthful vibe as Pittsburghers dined and drank in peace, resting assured in the knowledge the proprietor had lined the pockets of whatever uniformed officials had jurisdiction in the North Hills. I like to think of Bongiovanni, natty in a tailored suit, drifting from table to table, greeting his patrons as they attempted to eat heavily sauced Italian delicacies without defiling their own evening finery. I envision the diners calling for their host to take to the stage and regale them with his voice, Bongiovanni humbly refusing until the clamor rose to a din he could no longer fend off with a wave. From Bongiovanni’s grand stage, the visionary restaurateur would unleash his baritone, tapping Verdi, Puccini, Rossini… the full repertoire of his origins in the Italian opera.

And I’m taking entirely too much license picturing Bongiovanni arriving at his roadhouse early of a spring morning, before trucks and wagons pulled up with food supplies and barrels filled with illicit refreshment. Before chefs and cooks and waiters filed in to prep their crudités and lay white tablecloths. In the quiet morning hours, Bongiovanni would sit creekside, taking in the sounds of the birdlife (perhaps even the drumming display of the still-extant Ruffed Grouse) as he slurped the first of many espressos he would down in anticipation of the busy night ahead.

Prohibition lasted until 1933. Bongiovanni didn’t. The enterprising Italian died childless after a sudden illness in 1925 at the age of 51. By then he had opened other speakeasies around Pittsburgh, including Bongiovanni’s Floating Palace, a river scow that offered booze, gambling, and a house dance act—Bongiovanni’s Syncopators. His final enterprise was the Rendezvous on Penn Avenue. The home he shared with his wife Rose in Pittsburgh’s Knoxville neighborhood no longer stands, but is said to have housed brewing and distilling facilities, as well as a system of tunnels to help keep things clandestine.

Bongiovanni’s Gardens endured for another half dozen years before closing its doors in 1931. That same year, the Butler Short Line ceased operations. The building survived the 1930s as a restaurant and dance hall, the 40s and 50s as a gathering place for the German Beneficial Union, and the 60s as the Wildwood Lodge, a teenage dance hall. Finally, in 1971 or 72, fire consumed the edifice Frank Bongiovanni had constructed a half century earlier.

In 2026, near the northern terminus of Crouse Run, one can find remnants of Bongiovanni’s magnificent roadhouse, including its foundations, a boiler, and one of its two front stairways.

And here we pan from the remains of the bridge that motorists would have used in crossing Pine Creek to roughly the perspective offered by the postcards.

Walking Crouse Run today, it’s difficult to imagine it was once a beating heart of Pittsburgh’s nightlife. Not everyone who journeyed to the North Hills via the Butler Short Line in the 1920s was seeking out cabaret entertainment. Some were drawn to the abundant animal and plant life, including one brilliant young biology student who was enchanted by a little red thrush and would one day have an outsized impact on the environmental movement. That student will be the subject of the second installments of this three-part series, Look for The Biologist and the Birds to land in your inbox soon!

That’s all for this week. Do you wonder about the history of where you love to bird? Are there vestiges of a bygone time that intrigue you? Have you already unearthed some juicy lore about your birding patch? Are colorful characters part of its past? I’m here for it, and there’s a whole comment section where you can share your stories.👇

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Until next time, thanks for reading, and don’t forget to bird, dance, eat, and drink (in moderation!) your ass off!

In the researching of this post, I owe a debt of gratitude to:

Tom, who first told me about the BSL and who helps keep the valley clean.

Liz, who provided the first postcard image of Bongiovanni’s Gardens and the full history of the building. Thanks also for her stewardship of Crouse Run.

Kristen Fredriksen of the Trolley Museum, who provided the second postcard image, as well as the trolley route map.

Further reading

https://nextpittsburgh.com/pittsburgh-for-all/pittsburgh-area-roadhouses-and-resorts-served-black-travelers-off-the-beaten-path/

https://www.pghcitypaper.com/columns/floating-palaces-and-pleasure-scows-pittsburghs-colorful-history-of-raucous-riverboats-26099464/

https://www.pghcitypaper.com/news-2/before-bloomfield-pittsburgh-had-multiple-little-italys-now-lost-to-history-28502130/

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This post was human-generated. All media by Nathaniel Bowler, except where noted.

For all of the very real pitfalls of social media, bird Twitter was glorious. A place to revel in birds, to learn, the share in a passion that was booming in a post-COVID world. By Tweeting daily about birds, I quickly became enmeshed and even grew a modest following.

Not long after I joined, another birder burst upon the scene. Aspen Richardson may have been new to the platform, but she was anything but new to birding.

Aspen brought years of birding experience to the conversation, and she put on a social media masterclass that resulted in something more than a modest following—namely the 30k+ followers she has today.

Perfect candidate for Ten Birding Questions. Aspen readily accepted the invite, and when eastern birder (me) sat down with western birder (her), we had a lot to talk about.

• How she went from beginning birder to giving bird talks at a single-digit age.

• Her unapologetic competitive streak and listing on the county and state level.

• Utah’s extraordinary birding scene and the legend behind a state bird that is named after another state.

• Conservation dilemmas—the state of the Great Salt Lake and what to do about the imperiled Northern Spotted Owl.

• Conservation wins—dam removals and hope for expansion of the California Condor’s range into the Pacific Northwest.

• How the demographics of the birding community have changed over the last 16 years.

A real highlight for me was when we got to talking about chasing rarities and the sometimes (extremely) high cost of the long chase. But after all, when a freaking Brambling shows up in Utah, what else is there to do but chase?

I also love how Aspen is such a passionate spokesperson for the iconic Tufted Puffins of the PNW. And, yeah, I kind of get it.

Then there’s Aspen’s favorite bird. Unlike so many guests, she didn’t hesitate to provide an answer to The Dreaded Question—the magnificent, and dare I say unsung(?), Bonaparte’s Gull.

Are you still on Twitter? Did you endure Musk’s mucking the place up? So did a lot of amazing birders. Follow Aspen at @birdmoder. While you’re at it, you can find me at @baggins_bow.

By the way, Aspen is no slouch with a camera. You can check out more of her bird photography on Instagram at aspenthebirder.

Before that, feast your eyes on these masterpieces.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll have Utah on your destination bucket list after listening to our conversation. If guided tours are your thing, Aspen recommends Pitta Tours and their team of gifted guides to help you find California Condors, Boreal Owls, Long-billed Curlews, and so much more.

When the call was over, I was left marveling at the depth and breadth of Aspen’s bird knowledge (especially in her native Utah), at her passion for birds and their conservation, and how every state needs such an ambassador for its birdlife. If we could only make 49 copies of Aspen and set a conservation-minded army free across the country.

What a difference that would make.

That’s all for this month. Have you ever birded in Utah? What lengths have you gone to in search of a rare bird? Did it require a major sacrifice, and was it worth it? Do you have any better ideas for the state birds of Utah and Oregon? How have you seen your birding community evolve over the years? The comment section awaits!👇

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Until next time, thanks for listening, and don’t forget to bird like Aspen!

nwb

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This post was human generated.

Developmental edits by Alexandra Hidalgo.

But birding is a hobby. All in is different when it comes to a romantic partner. I knew I was all in the moment Alex first walked into my house during my senior year at Ohio University. Likewise I was all in when we got engaged and married and rented our first real home together, a cozy one-bedroom apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. But what did it mean to be all in, really? Was it even wise to be all in? I didn’t care. I was going to embrace the whole person, all the things she was passionate about, including art. Especially art. Music, movies, books, and…

Broadway musicals?

Understand that prior to purchasing a pair of tickets to Phantom of the Opera in a gesture of sweeping all in-ness, I’d spent most of my life harboring a hatred for musicals that usually stewed at a low simmer but was sometimes brought to a raging boil, as when, thanks to a maniacal aunt, I was forced to attend a local theater troupe’s production of The Sound of Music at the tender age of seventeen.

That experience was traumatizing, and it wasn’t long after the curtain lifted on Phantom that I knew I was in for a similarly rough night. Andrew Lloyd Webber wasted no time turning my best intentions into misery, and because Alex was all too aware of the suffering in the seat next to hers, the experience was ruined for her too.

Never again, Alex told me. To my immeasurable relief, I was banished from Broadway forevermore. Alex attends annually, and instead of seeing one show with me, she sees two shows with her Broadway-loving friends, and everyone is happy.

What does any of this have to do with Woodcocks? My regular readers may recall how I bribed rewarded our sons William and Santiago with ice cream for joining my Woodcock expedition last year. The goal was to spark them with the silliest bird out there. Sound plan, to my mind. Kids like silly, and if this bird was silly, maybe more birds were just as silly…

A year later, our boys aren’t birders yet, but we had so much fun last April that I decided to make Woodcocks n’ ice cream an annual tradition. When I mentioned to Alex the time had come to experience Woodcocks in their spring courtship display, she volunteered to tag along. While certainly a bird appreciator, Alex is not a birder. When it comes to our family, however, she’s all in, and thus she was all in on Woodcocks, at least for one night.

Woodcocks 2026 would be our family’s third birding expedition together. The first was to see a Snowy Owl in our previous home of East Lansing, Michigan in March of 2022. The second was the Resplendent Quetzals of Gerardo de Dota, Costa Rica last August. Neither of those experiences fanned a latent passion for birds in Alex. If anything, they had the opposite effect. What’s the opposite of spark bird? Splat bird? Maybe not, but we do need a term for that. Comment below with any ideas👇

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I had no delusions that Alex was ready to dump everything and take up a pair of binoculars, but I’d been hyping Woodcocks, and maybe she was a bit curious because, and it needs to be said, American Woodcocks are ridiculous birds, in the best possible way. It starts with the name, comedy gold for giggling eight-year-olds and Michael Scotts everywhere. Same for its vernacular names like Timberdoodle, Labrador Twister, and Bogsucker, all of which survive, as points out in his latest post, where others species have seen their vernacular names fall out of use. Why? Surely not least because they’re funny. Funny names for a funny bird.

Funny looking too. Bulbous bodies with a preposterous pipettes for a beak. Dig around the birding apps and you’ll see that the Merlins, Sibleys, and Audubons of the world are fair in their assessment of the Woodcock—Plump, rotund, goofy-looking, odd-shaped, dumpy

Wouldn’t you know it—American Woodcocks make for great art, too. I love this rendition by my friend Cameron Archer from Colorflock. Be sure to check out Cam’s line of merch, especially for friends and family members who are all in on Woodcocks.

And I knew I could count on Kelly Ballantyne to have some Woodcock art to share. This image is available in her etsy shop as a sticker.

Let’s talk eyes for a minute. Woodcock eyes. Bulging, wide-set evolutionary marvels that allow them to see predators as they forage for subterranean delicacies—earthworms, spiders, grubs, and the like. If only Andrew Lloyd Webber had the presence of mind to compose Birds instead of Cats, one actor alone could have locked down the role of Timberdoodle.

Alas for missed opportunities.

We didn’t intend to miss ours. Monday, April 13th was the appointed date. The chosen location was the same as last year—North Park’s Upper Fields, reliable Woodcock habitat where they arrive every year to nest and breed. After dinner, our merry quartet piled into Janet, our peppy Nissan Leaf, and off we were!

Living with someone for 27 years gives you a certain fluency in their body language, and I knew there was trouble before we even got to the park. The twenty-minute drive to the Upper Fields includes one stretch of strictly enforced 15-mph speed limit. How close are we? Alex asked as the car inched along, nose scrunched in an expression I could easily translate. There’s a million things I could be doing that don’t include driving slowly to a park I don’t particularly like to maybe see a bird.

I watched the devolution happen in real time. For Alex, all in was now merely in.

Woodcocks reveal themselves via vocalization at dusk. Unfortunately for our mission, I’d miscalculated the amount of daylight that would remain at the time of our arrival. When I saw the sun’s position in the sky, I anticipated a solid half hour would pass before we heard the Peent! call that would give the Woodcocks away and signal their aerial courtship display was about to begin.

If there were any Woodcocks. I was doubtful. To my dismay, the vast majority of the Upper Field had been mowed and was largely devoid of ground cover. In place of grasses and brush, there was the stubbly equivalent of a three-days beard. Equally alarming was the lack of birdsong. Missing were the Fox Sparrows, Field Sparrows, and Eastern Bluebirds that usually fill the Upper Fields with music.

To break up the time, we took a walk, hiking to the far end of the field and back, where there remained enough cover to possibly satisfy the needs of the secretive sandpipers. Yes, Scolopax minor is a sandpiper. A woodland shorebird. If you can make sense of that seemingly flagrant paradox, I beg you to make it make sense to me.

Finally, the daylight began to fail. And with it our hopes. Nary a Peent! issued from the grass. Aside from us four, Red-winged Blackbirds, Wild Turkeys, and a smattering of Tree Swallows were the only willing participants on this forlorn Tuesday.

How much longer do we give them? Alex asked.

Five minutes, I replied.

Ten minutes later, enough was officially enough. I’m calling it, Alex said, asking as we shuffled back to the car who might be willing to give it another shot tomorrow. Excluding herself, of course, and I don’t think it would an overstatement to say she was exulting in her declaration that she would never go birding again. As with me and Broadway 25 years ago, all in had become all out.

And the boys? William was reluctantly still in. Santiago was out. Though the birds were a no-show, the boys had earned their ice cream. They chose Häagen-Dazs, strawberry for William, cherry vanilla for Santiago.

Nothing for me, thank you, except bitter pills.

I couldn’t blame the birds, though. Had I done my homework, I would have seen that no Woodcocks had been reported at the Upper Fields for over three weeks. A little research would have sent us instead to another part of North Park—the Mine Waste Field. The former site of a mine that today is rich in grasses, wildflowers, and birdlife. Woodcocks had been reported there three days earlier. Hope was kindled anew.

Rain kept us home on Tuesday, but the weather looked favorable for a Wednesday Woodcock redo. To my delight, Santiago changed his mind, and so after dinner Alex bade her boys good luck and we embarked again on a journey to North Park.

The sun was falling quickly by the time we arrived, and as we hiked down to the Mine Waste Field, we were serenaded by a certain unmistakable song.

Who-cooks-for-you? Who-cooks-for-you?

Or maybe it was Wood-cocks-for-you! Whatever the case, a Barred Owl seemed a good omen, and I was hopeful when we reached what appeared to be suitable terrain—tall grasses near the woods, from which the Woodcocks would hopefully emerge to perform their twilight sky dance.

After twenty minutes, my hopes again were beginning to flag. We moved a little further down to where the trail overlooked a sunken meadow. The day was getting dark and boys restless. Meanwhile, I was wondering if Woodcocks were trying to excuse themselves from my year’s list for Allegheny County.

Shortly after William’s How much longer?, we heard the first Peent! Then several.

The Peents increased in frequency. They sounded like a countdown now. Peent… peent… peent… peent… peent… LIFTOFF!

Triumph! We reveled in Peent… peent… LIFTOFF! several more times before thunderous clouds gathered in the distance. As delightful as these winged yams proved to be again this year, we were unwilling to make lightning rods of ourselves for their sake. Janet transported us to the nearest gas station. The boys celebrated with lemonade and Spree, a terrible candy to commemorate a wonderful bird.

After that I steered Janet home, hopeful the boys would be all in for Woodcocks 2027.

Woodcock Impressions

Alex—I grew up in Caracas, Venezuela, which rivals any city for horrific traffic. I spent many hours a week stuck in an unmoving car, and it made it so that when I’m out and about, I don’t like to stand still. I walk in nature almost every day, and there’s nothing I love more than being there, but I have to be moving. That’s how I get my best thoughts and how I feel energized by being there. Thus birding and its countless pauses to look up into trees is something I will henceforth never do again. But I love that the rest of you do. Even if the birds had shown up and tried to court each other, I would have still been frustrated by standing around all that time waiting for them.

Will you do it again next year? Never. I will just enjoy you guys enjoying it.

William—I liked the park. I didn’t really think we were going to see them. You could tell they were about to fly from the sound they made before. I liked the way they flew, and it was cool when you could tell there were two of them.

Will you do it again next year? I guess.

Santiago—I liked walking in the park, especially the one with the wires. The second one. It was a really nice place. I liked seeing the deer and the Turkeys at the first place, but the second place made me feel way better. It set a really nice mood. When I saw the Woodcocks I was excited and they were flying really fast. I was surprised that we saw them. I thought maybe we had the wrong time, but we actually got there at the perfect time so we saw them really clearly. Overall, I’m really glad we got to see what we went there to see.

Will you do it again next year? Probably.

Nate—Woodcocks are endlessly entertaining, and I got to see them with my kids for a second year in the row. Top-ten experience of my life. Maybe top-five.

Will you try to see them again next year? Hell, I’ll try to see them again tonight!

April eBird Challenge

challenged me to submit at least one eBird checklist every day in the month of April. As of April 19th, the streak remains intact with 43 checklists submitted, including my first-of-year American Woodcock and…

Featured Photo—Surf Scoter

Speaking of goofy-looking birds, one showed up here in Pittsburgh today and found itself on my 43rd checklist. Surf Scoters are beefy diving sea ducks that seem awfully out of place in a municipal reservoir, but this male was content to occasionally dive but mostly float as walkers circulated the perimeter and gawkers attempted to capture his comically large bill and vacuous grin. I wish him good luck whenever he chooses to continue his journey to his breeding grounds in the boreal forests of the Great White North (or possibly Alaska).

10/10 Recommends

Special thanks to those who contributed American Woodcock photos and art in my time of need.

—Anuj is a real one. And he’s making sure I’m keeping it real by keeping up with my daily eBird checklists.

Edmund Berry—@EspressoBird. Twitter mutual. Breathtaking photo and video media you’ll want to follow.

Ben—@wildnewyorkshow. Another Twitter mutual. Please check out Ben’s stunning website while you’re at it.

—Silas is fast becoming a favorite writer of mine on Substack. Please subscribe to Raw Nature and treat yourself to a rising star.

Cameron Archer—The talent behind Colorflock. Get your favorite bird on a shirt, mug, hat, and more!

—Birder, artist, writer, educator… Kelly does it all. And does it well.

—Amazing writer, amazing educator. Subscribe to Ryan’s Substack and buy his fantastic book, Wild NYC!

Lisa Velasquez—@RelayLisa. Though her Pittsburgh fandom is questionable 🤨, the quality of Woodcock photos is not 😃!

Bo—@boehnerce_jr. Tons of great bird photos and representing the CLE!!

Alyssa Camacho—@babysaiy. Finally met the Bryant Park Timberdoodles and was kind enough to share them.

That’s all for this week. Have you seen American Woodcocks this spring? How do you feel about musical theater? Have you ever had to pull the all-out card in the name of a healthy partnership? Do you have any exciting first-of-year birds to report this week? Let’s rap in the comments👇

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Until next time, thanks for reading, and don’t forget to bird your whole ass off!

nwb

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This post was human-generated. All media by Nathaniel Bowler, except where noted.

streak verb
1. To submit eBird checklists on consecutive days
2. To run naked through a public place

Boy, do I hate to disappoint people. Particularly the people who have been gracious enough to lend their time and birding expertise to my podcast. People like , AKA Episode 3 of Ten Birding Questions.

Last week, Anuj posted a Note on Substack asking the general birding public whether they use eBird and what their current checklist streak is.

After taking a moment to be impressed by Anuj’s prodigious streak of 1,516 consecutive days of submitting a checklist on eBird (4.15 years without missing a beat!), I chuckled the kind of chuckle that isn’t so much out of amusement as it a need to tamp down a burning shame. I chuckled because I knew full well how lazy I’ve been with eBird lately. Not with birding, mind you. That I do every day, whether it’s a couple of hours of hiking or fifteen minutes nosing around the yard. But as far as submitting a daily checklist? Not a priority. Not since I determined at the start of 2024 not to miss a day for a full calendar year. That year largely accounts for my own personal best checklist streak, which stood at 404 days when I finally let it lapse sometime in February of 2025.

Still, I did have a modest streak of my own going when I saw Anuj’s Note.

Anuj wasn’t impressed. He could have dismissed me as a hopeless layabout, but like any good guy with a scientific brain, he took a more constructive, solutions-based approach.

First things first—by my reckoning, I already owe Anuj a six pack, so let’s call it even when I get to 30. Second—you better believe I’m filing that visit me in Nepal part away for future reference. Nepal! Land of 900+ birds! A country roughly the size of Tennessee but with thrice the amount of avifauna. Birding that beautiful, mountainous land has been a goal of mine since my conversation with Anuj. Birding with Anuj in his home country? Dream come true. Forget the six pack. Give me a Himalayan Monal!🇳🇵

In the meantime, there’s a streak to attend to. First, a couple of notes on strategy. To compensate for my sloth, I’ll use eBird features I’ve largely neglected in the past, features like breeding codes, which during mating season allow birders to report the breeding activities they observe, everything from courtship behavior, to copulation, to nest building, to feeding hatchlings in the nest. Interested in upping your eBird game and providing scientists with valuable breeding intel? Perfect time of year for it! You can access eBird’s breeding codes by tapping the bird on an active checklist and entering the code that corresponds with the observed breeding activity. Northern Cardinals are singing nonstop right now, so I chose S for Singing Bird.

I’ll also be contributing to the Pennsylvania Bird Atlas, a statewide bird census with a portal that is easily accessed via eBird, if you know where to look. Not every region offers a bird atlas or other targeted data collection portal. To find out what birding projects are available to you, tap the bottom left hand button on your active checklist, then select your project.

Finally, I’ll be submitting somewhat more photographic media than I’m accustomed to. As for sound recordings? Those submissions will have to remain firmly fixed at zero for the time being. Honestly, I can’t do every damned thing.

So how’s it going? So far, so good! By the end of today I will have submitted to eBird for eight consecutive days, with a total of 19 checklists blowing February and March (a paltry 14 and 14 checklists, respectively) out of the water. The best part? I can hardly wait to submit a checklist in the morning. That’s the thing about birders like Anuj—their passion is contagious.

April eBird Highlights

April 1—My streak got off to an exciting start on the cheekiest of calendar days. Three checklists yielded several first-of-year (FOY) birds, including Fish Crow, Horned Grebe, and Osprey. Here I’ll take the opportunity to advise that, however the date may invite eBird chicanery, submitting spurious bird sightings on eBird in the name of an April Fools gag is strongly frowned upon and could get you kicked off the platform. Tempted to report a Three-wattled Bellbird in Walla Walla, Washington? Good luck submitting a checklist after finding yourself on a blacklist.

Nothing erroneous about the female Red-winged Blackbirds of Allegheny County, who began to arrive in late March, about a week after the males. Here’s one playing nice with a Song Sparrow under the feeders.

April 2—I’d been bemoaning the complete lack of irruptive finches visiting our yard for years, and it looked like the winter of 2025-26 would be more of the same, until I spotted a single female Purple Finch at our back feeders last Thursday. She flew off before I could take a photo, but happily I found her again in one of the nearby oaks. Drought, you are officially over!

April 3—We spent Easter weekend in Akron, Ohio with family at my brother’s place. Friday was a busy day, and my scorching-hot two-day streak was on wobbly ground until I submitted a checklist from the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Two birds—a Red-tailed Hawk and the American Crow harassing it.

April 4—My brother’s place is a home of many feeders. Many feeders that attract many birds, like the handful of Northern Cardinals jockeying for breeding territory the entire weekend (breeding code T for Territorial Defense!), except when pausing to feed on a safflower seed.

Calm and stoic, this female Cardinal observed the frenzied antics of the males from her perch, crest tousled by the wind.

Early April is that brief period when Dark-eyed Juncos and Chipping Sparrows share the same habitat. The Juncos will be gone soon. Probably. My brother had a breeding pair oversummer in his yard last year! As always with birds—expect the unexpected.

My Summit County lifer Broad-shouldered Hawk rounded out Saturday’s checklist of 31 species that also featured my FOY Wild Turkey and a pair of Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers, captured here in an astonishing feat of photographic mediocrity.

April 5—Speaking of irruptive finches, my brother’s yard matched our yard’s Purple Finch on Saturday and then surpassed it when a small flock of Pine Siskins showed up on Sunday.

Of course we took some time off from the birds to turn our attention to hidden eggs.

April 6—Back in Pittsburgh, I had a friendly run-in with this Mallard Drake. Per a cue from , I spent a bit more time than usual admiring his colors.

We stood there contemplating each other until he’d had enough and joined his mate in the creek. But they weren’t ready to part ways just yet.

April 7—My search for Louisiana Waterthrushes in their annual nesting grounds along Pine Creek was fruitless, and an otherwise uneventful hike was salvaged by my FOY Eastern Towhee.

April 8—The Cathedral of Learning, the second tallest academic building in the world, is an architectural marvel that houses the University of Pittsburgh’s English department and my wife Alex’s office. It’s also currently home to a breeding pair of Peregrine Falcons. You can watch a livestream of Carla and Ecco incubating their four eggs in turns and occasionally munching on a Rock Pigeon. I declined to count the bird I photographed atop the cathedral today, which I believe was one of the Peregrines but was too distant to be sure.

Not in doubt were the three FOY Louisiana Waterthrushes I heard as Alex and I walked along the Fall Run ravine trail later this afternoon. I heard their descending song more than I saw them, and it seemed a herald of spring and a serenade to many migrating birds, and checklists!, to come. Louisiana Waterthrushes are my favorite warbler. I was overjoyed to hear them, and you better believe I entered their bobbing asses on eBird.

April checklists to date—19
April species—55

I love eBird. I find it an incredible asset to the hobby and to scientists who track bird populations and distribution around the world. That said, I’ve always abided by one rule when it comes to birding—bird how you want to. Short of trampling habitat and harassing birds, it’s all good. And as useful a tool as it is, it can be a distraction in the field. We’re out there to look at birds, after all, not look at a screen. And maybe that’s what ultimately killed my streak at 404. When I started feeling simultaneously compelled and unwilling to pull my phone out for some data entry, I knew eBirding had become an eBurden. I was submitting checklists for the sake of the streak, not for the sake of science.

But no need to overcompensate. I’ll rise to this April challenge and see where it goes from there. Whether I can or want to best 404, I don’t know. What I do know is I’ll take my breaks where I need them.

Just don’t tell Anuj!

Featured Photo—Downy Woodpecker

My wife Alex finds this in-flight Downy Woodpecker disturbing and totally creepy. I think it’s a cool shot of a common bird caught in uncommon fashion. Tricky sucker too—though apparently a female, the position of the bird’s head obscures a critical field mark identifying him as male.

10/10 Recommends

The Itinerant Ornithologist

I knew I made a good choice when I asked Anuj on Ten Birding Questions. I made another good choice when I subscribed to his Substack. You can read his own thoughts on eBird and checklist streaks in his post from April 5th (spoiler alert—1,500 straight days ain’t easy!).

That’s all for this week. Do you use eBird? If so, how? Do you use breeding codes? Do you contribute to a bird atlas? Do you add supporting media to your sightings? If you don’t use eBird, why? Do you have any reservations about using it? Is there an intimidation factor? If so, let this post serve as an invitation to discuss the obstacles—my DMs are open, as is the comment section👇

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Until next time, happy migration, happy eBirding, and don’t forget to streak your ass off!

nwb ♎︎

Thank you for reading! My goal at Birding with BillBow is to bring you funny, informative content about birds every week. If you find yourself laughing or thinking or just being plain entertained, consider aiding my mission of spreading bird joy by upgrading to a paid subscription. As always, 5% of earnings donated to the American Birding Association.

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This post was human generated. All media by Nathaniel Bowler.

Developmental edits by Alexandra Hidalgo.

Before joining the ABA as Executive Director in 2023, Wayne spent nearly four decades working in conservation, most notably with The Nature Conservancy. I could have spent the entire show mining Wayne’s deep knowledge of conservation, and as we talked, it occurred to me that hope is the superpower of a conservationist, who recognizes massive problems like declining bird populations, habitat degradation, and climate change and decides to do something about it. But more than that—to keep doing something about it, in spite of obstacles, setbacks, and myriad other frustrations, all while knowing they may not see the fruits of their labor in their lifetime. Takes hope to play the long game, and I wanted to tap into that sense of hopefulness. Turns out I had no choice—it pervaded our entire talk, wherein we discuss—

• Wayne’s humble birding origins in rural Maryland with an incomplete field guide and a spyglass.

• The paved demise of his original birding patches and how that sparked a life in conservation.

• Corridor conservation, community-based conservation, and some of his favorite conservation success stories.

• The past, present, and future of birding and the American Birding Association’s role in an increasingly diverse and inclusive hobby.

• Whether we’re experiencing a new Golden Age of birding (spoiler alert—we are).

• How to stay hopeful in the midst of declining bird populations, and the way nature is ready to bounce back when we give her a chance.

• Two ABA Area bucket list birds.

Optimism is infectious, and I came away from our conversation with a renewed belief in the power of birds to bring people together, and to make conservationists of anyone who, for whatever reason, really notices a bird for the first time, like Wayne did a Dark-eyed Junco when he was a fledgling birder of 11 or 12 years old.

I also came away excited about the direction the ABA is headed with Wayne at the helm. I’m kind of an ABA geek, and Wayne’s determination to steer the organization in a way that caters to young and experienced birders in a mutually beneficial way has me confident that the ABA will ride the current birding spirit of diversity and inclusivity to horizons never imagined when it was formed in 1968. I truly believe that birding is for everyone, and after talking with Wayne for more than an hour, my assertion that birds can save the world has only been reinforced.

Finally, in following up with Wayne via email about when he saw his first Horned Lark, the ABA’s Bird of the Year for 2026, I learned that one of his early mentors was the great Charles Henry Rogers, the Princeton ornithologist who was one of 27 participants in the first-ever Christmas Bird Count on December 25, 1900. What a legacy to inherit, and perhaps that early mentorship is what imbued Wayne with such a generous spirit when it comes to his mission to make birding better for everyone.

I confess I struggled with time management during this interview. I found it challenging to move on from each question, and more so to toggle between the three major subjects we addressed—Wayne’s birding life, his career in conservation, and his stewardship of the ABA. Three episodes packed into one is how I’m looking at it. Here’s hoping we did them at least partial justice.

That’s all for this month. Are you a member of the American Birding Association (if not, what are you waiting for?). Are you hopeful about the future of bird populations and nature conservation? How are you looking to enhance your birding experience, and what role can the ABA play? Mentorship? Identification help? Travel advice? Personally, I’d love to learn more about what I can do as an individual to promote conservation in (and attract birds to!) my immediate surroundings. Leave your ideas for Wayne in the comments!👇

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Until next time, thanks for listening, and don’t forget to bird like Wayne!

nwb

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This post was human generated.

Developmental edits by Alexandra Hidalgo.

So I was content to chase, dip, laugh, and shrug until, one fall morning at Beechwood Farms Nature Reserve, after one dip too many, it just wasn’t funny anymore.

Welcome! My goal at Birding with BillBow is to bring you funny, informative content about birds every week. If you find yourself laughing or thinking or just being plain entertained, consider aiding my mission of spreading bird joy by upgrading to a paid subscription. As always, 5% of earnings donated to the American Birding Association.

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Why September 17th was my breaking point, I’ll never know, but I did then what I did with all my bird-related thoughts and feelings—I took them to bird Twitter. I was going to purge my frustration by taking another hike and insulting every bird I saw with the most savage Tweet I could muster (if you’re currently in your right mind and not on Twitter, someone saw fit to post the entire thread on Reddit).

Thirty-five insults later, I felt better. I also noticed one bird in particular had been double tapped.

I’ve since tracked down a Connecticut Warbler, and 552 days after my epic rant, I feel I owe Eastern Phoebes not just apology, but also a paean of a Substack post. The truth is, I adore Sayornis phoebe, and it’s with great anticipation that I begin listening for their eponymous (and, yes, shrill and repetitive) song every spring, roughly around the ides of March. Trust me, there’s no POWB when I have this conversation each year:

Eastern Phoebe: FEE-bee!

Nate: Well, hello there! Welcome back!

EP: FEE-bee! FEE-bee!

Nate: Yes, yes, that’s it. Keep telling us your fucking name.

March 15th is early in songbird migration, but Phoebes aren’t typically the first migrant to show up every spring. That would be a trio of representatives from the blackbird family.

But Phoebes are never far behind, the first flycatchers to arrive from their wintering grounds in the southern United States and eastern Mexico. Their migration will set no records for long-distance travel, but don’t take that to mean they’re lazy. They’re energetic insect-eaters who spend all day sallying out from their perches to catch a meal and bobbing their tails up and down, one of my favorite behavioral traits and something I could have easily ridiculed in my Tweet, it now occurs to me.

This year I heard my first Fee-bee! on March 11th. The morning was gray and the bird didn’t care to be photographed in a flattering way. Of more interest was staking out some prime nesting ground. Turns out there were two Phoebes on the scene, and I enjoyed watching them duke it out for territorial supremacy. Whether or not Eastern Phoebes are typical in that the males migrate ahead of the females to claim their nesting turf, I don’t know. Phoebes aren’t sexually dimorphic, so my guess that these were two males is just that—a guess.

Having chased off its rival, the victor takes a moment to 1) revel in triumph and 2) scoff at an inferior opponent.

I was glad to see them, but March 11 seemed pretty early, even by Phoebe standards. That had me curious—was this my earliest-ever Phoebe sighting? I turned to eBird for the answer, and eBird told me nope!

2026 - March 11 (Allegheny Co, PA)
2025 - March 13
2024 - March 8
2023 - March 22
2022 - March 31 (Ingham Co, MI)
2021 - March 31
2020 - June 1 (started birding on May 20)
2011 - May 12 (Tippecanoe Co, IN)

That Indiana sighting in 2011 represents my lifer Eastern Phoebe, an event I remember well. I was wrapping up a birdwalk with my dad at Celery Bog Nature Area in West Lafayette, Indiana when he pointed out a small, nondescript bird perched atop a wooden post. In the throes of warbler fever, I didn’t give the Phoebe much thought, except to note how plain it was and how neat that my dad could so readily identify such a plain bird.

Plain bird? I suppose flashy bird enthusiasts like my former self could easily dismiss an Eastern Phoebe as plain. Or drab. Arrayed without fuss in grayish-brown and white and lacking even the wing bars and eye rings that decorate many other eastern flycatchers. My current self, less obsessed with pops of color, sees subtle beauty and elegance in the Phoebe. Soft, warm hues in place of crass obviousness and blatant overtrying (looking at you, Painted Bunting).

What I didn’t know (and evidently wasn’t curious about) back in 2011 is that the Eastern Phoebe is one of three phoebe species in North America (Say’s Phoebe and Black Phoebe being the western cousins) and one of more than 400 new-world tyrant flycatchers spread across North and South America. I didn’t know how adaptable Eastern Phoebes are to human activity, and that they’ll gladly nest where humans build a house or a barn or a bridge. I didn’t know that, in an age of declining songbird populations, Eastern Phoebes have been busy cozying up to human development and increasing their numbers over the past 60 years. In light of such resourcefulness, perhaps I was too quick to denounce their intelligence?

They also seem partial to the local culinary scene. Each year they eschew the national chains to set up shop near Mineo’s, a Pittsburgh pizza institution since 1958.

I love a good birding challenge, and the Eastern Phoebe does have a lookalike that overlaps its range. The Eastern Wood-Pewee is another tyrant flycatcher that is similar in size and similarly colored.

But whereas a Phoebe will readily come and hang with you at eye level, Eastern Wood-Pewees mostly stick to the treetops, where they announce their spring arrival two months later with their own eponymous song, the sweet and melodious Pee-a-weeeeeeee! Need another ID clue? Don’t look for a tail bob in a Pewee. That move was trademarked long ago by the Phoebe, and Phoebes are famously lawyered up.

As March crawls to an end, Eastern Phoebes are back in force. That means Baltimore Orioles can’t be far behind. I’ll be on the lookout for Northern Rough-winged Swallows and Chipping Sparrows too. None of these birds are the darlings of migration, but unlike the wood warblers, here for a cup of Joe and a smoke, these nesting birds will pair up and breed and give us something special to observe over the summer, like in the featured photo below👇

In the meantime, I hope Eastern Phoebes (and 34 other innocent birds) will accept my apologies. My wrath was misdirected.

As for you, Connecticut Warbler, here’s a double tap I won’t apologize for, coming at you Pittsburgh-style.

Featured Photo—Eastern Phoebe

I took this photo of an immature Eastern Phoebe in August of 2023. The bird is scraggly as hell and just as overwhelmed by it all, but look at the yellow feathers filling in. Soon this youngster will have a yellowish wash on the belly that makes a fall Phoebe glow in a way that they don’t in early spring.

That’s all for this week. Have you seen an Eastern Phoebe yet this year? What’s your favorite flycatcher? Have you ever been POWB? Was a bird the source of your anger? Leave a comment. Let’s talk👇

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Until next time, happy migration, and don’t forget to bird your ass off!

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Developmental edits by Alexandra Hidalgo.

So what gives? Why such ebullience over a chorus of the commonplace—Blackbirds, yes, but also American Robins, Northern Cardinals, and Song Sparrows, birds I’m almost guaranteed to see every day of the year? Sure, the fair weather had something to do with it, but there was something else behind the clearheadedness, the spike in energy, the joy with which I was imbibing all I surveyed…

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Or maybe it was about what I wasn’t imbibing—I hadn’t had any alcohol in three days.

Everything seemed bright and cheerful. As though a thin veil had been swept from my vision, I was seeing each bird in technicolor, like this Robin—so vibrant it was startling.

Just yards away, the local waterfowl were paired off and ready to get in a family way. The first spawn of spring will certainly be a passel of Canada Goslings.

Mallard babies will soon follow, the promise of renewal in the form of fuzzy yellow hatchlings.

It wasn’t a novel experience, feeling physically, mentally, and spiritually better in this way. I’d gone the first two weeks of February without so much as a sip of beer and felt similarly great during that time. I even noticed my pants fitting a bit looser by the time my parents and brother visited mid-month. My embargo ended that weekend with an ice-cold martini, and I reverted back to daily drinking and all that comes with it—empty calories, restless sleep, anxiety. I was feeling less and less great, so gradually I didn’t notice at first, until reality became impossible to ignore—the booze was beating me up.

By last Monday, my pants were no longer feeling loose as I made my way down the railroad tracks that cut through the Sanctuary, but three days back on the wagon were already paying off. Oh, I was intoxicated all right, but this time with birdsong. Northern Cardinal song, to be specific. Male Cardinals were belting it out with all their might. They were courting mates of course, but the chirrups seemed a herald of sorts—an era of better health was dawning.

And oh how those birds were glowing!

I even found renewed appreciation for the commonest of common Sanctuary birds. On any given day, I’m liable to turn up 30 or more Song Sparrows during an hour’s walk. They sing casually throughout the year but are turbocharged in early spring as they contend for mates, territory, and resources. What a visceral, exhilarating reminder of the fierceness behind the cute facade.

So why drink at all, if one of the benefits of abstaining is an even more profound adoration of birds?

A little-known fact about me is that I once co-wrote a book, a textbook on wine appreciation with an extremely on-the-nose title—Wine Appreciation. My job was to turn Purdue University Professor of Enology Christian Butzke’s lecture series on wine appreciation (yes, wine appreciation was a class. Yes, there were wine tastings at the end of each class) into a textbook.

Nearly 20 years after its publication, one line in particular has stayed with me—We drink wine because (1) it tastes good and (2) it makes us feel good. Professor Butzke wanted to make clear that, though there are some potential health benefits that come with the moderate consumption of red wine, our primary motivation for drinking alcoholic beverages is not whatever salubrious qualities, if any, can be found in the bottle.

To that point, I’ve always drunk because 1) it tastes good and 2) it makes me feel good. Still tastes good, but lately I can’t ignore the toll that comes with even moderate daily drinking, all of it adding up to a sustained feeling of malaise. That’s a pretty hefty price to pay for a relatively short-lived buzz. Bottom line—I’m not 25 anymore. I’m not even 45 anymore. I’m 50. My body simply can’t take it like it used to.

On the other hand, the bird-fueled buzz I was feeling on my hike was longer-lived and came with no icky side effects. That my body can take.

Further down the tracks I was pleased to see that overwintering American Tree Sparrows were still around and hadn’t yet migrated to their breeding grounds in northern Canada and Alaska. Here’s one looking plump, dumpy you might even say, as if they too could stand to cool it with the booze.

Tree Sparrows don’t breed in the Sanctuary, but many songbirds do, including orioles of the Orchard and Baltimore variety. Neither has arrived yet, but there are vestiges from last year’s mating season, like this Baltimore Oriole nest. I’ve been aware of this nest since last spring, but not until Monday, in my more alert state, did I notice the plastic building material woven into the organic matter. I throw away the fishing line I find around Pine Creek, which runs parallel to the train tracks. Resourceful Orioles have found a more practical use for it.

I’m not going to quit drinking altogether, at least not at this stage in my life. I’m not one for extremes (even extreme birding). A cocktail helps me suffer through Cleveland sports fandom. There’s no better way to celebrate anything than with glass of Champagne. I rejoice in every new life bird with a shot of rye whiskey. Furthermore, I’ve always fantasized my old age thusly:

This year, and my 50s, and hopefully the remainder of my life, is about finding balance. I feel better and more balanced when I bird daily and keep my drinking occasional, not the other way around. So that’ll be the plan. Have a drink when a lifer strikes. During a big game. Whenever there’s cause to be festive.

And bird my ass off every day.

Featured Photo—Red-tailed Hawk

I was wrapping up my hike and hurrying back to the car when a perched Red-tailed Hawk informed me in no uncertain terms that my birding day was not over—there was one more spectacle to observe. After posing for a minute or so, the great big beautiful brute took off, but not before I was able to capture one of the few in-flight bird photos I’m really proud of. I love how muscular this juvenile bird looks, and how deadly with those two talons, razor-sharp and ready to strike. Beware, critters of Saddle Sanctuary!

Featured Video—American Goldfinch

Later that day I was ready to drive our son Santiago to his Odyssey of the Mind practice when we found a castaway perched atop our Kia. Showing no inclination to move, I was about to shoo the American Goldfinch away when I noticed she was flapping only one of her wings. Before I could exit the car and properly assess what I presumed an injury, she flew off clumsily and disappeared into the woods, hopefully to safety.

Poll results

After almost a week and a half, the FeatherSnap smart feeder I installed at my friend Holly’s house finally attracted a bird. To the five of you who guessed Tufted Titmouse, take a bow.

That’s all for this week. How’s the early spring birding where you live? Have you seen any migrants yet? Have you experienced similar diminishing returns when it comes to alcohol? Have you sworn it off altogether? As always, the comment section awaits👇

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Until next time, thanks for reading, and don’t forget to bird (not drink!) your ass off!

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Developmental edits by Alexandra Hidalgo.

You can do some birding.

Birding! In Cleveland! On any given day Alex is brimming with good ideas, but this time she outdid herself with potentially the greatest idea she, or anyone for that matter, has ever had. Cleveland has provided me a bounty of rarities and life birds over the last few years. Heermann’s Gull, Black-throated Gray Warbler, Brant, Little Gull, and Red Phalarope, to name a few. Yes, the shores of Lake Erie have been generous with exciting and varied avian life, and I can never wait to get back.

With luck, I could add a bird or two to my life list. At worst, I’d have a great time looking at gulls and waterfowl. Whatever the case, I was sure to wring a Substack post from the experience.

And the more I thought about it, the more my adventure evolved. When the time came to set sail, a tripartite plan had solidified, and I defy anyone to find a flaw in my itinerary.

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Part 1—Birding

I’ll be honest—the rare bird alerts coming out of Cuyahoga County lately haven’t exactly been setting the world on fire. Great Egrets are tall, elegant, statuesque, and indeed great, but I’ll see 200 of them in a single tree in North Carolina this June. Eastern Towhees are wonderful and beautiful and all, but why drive two hours for a fat sparrow I often see and hear in my own yard?

Gulls. That’s what I wanted. Rare gulls. I had one in mind specifically—the enormous Glaucous Gull. Larus hyperboreus. I’d never seen one. They’re not terribly common in Cleveland, and yet apparently not scarce enough to merit rare bird status. A quick peek at eBird informed me that two of them had been reported at Wendy Park on March 3rd—two days before our departure. Perfect! Good chance they’d still be there, and Wendy Park was just an eight minute skip from where I’d be dropping Alex off.

I was ready on Wednesday morning, equipped with binoculars, spotting scope, camera, and snack. For added luck, I was bringing along my copy of Amar Ayyash’s The Gull Guide. Calcifer, our sturdy Kia Sorento, was ready too. We got a bit of a late start due to some last-minute multi-conference planning (Alex, attending two!! conferences over four days, would be jetting to Baltimore on Friday to attend the Association of Writer & Writing Programs conference), but by 1 p.m. the Cleveland skyline was rising on the horizon.

Or at least it should have been.

Is something on fire? I asked Alex as we exited I-77 onto East 9th Street. No, something was not, but downtown Cleveland was enveloped in a soupy fog I had not anticipated in the early afternoon. After kissing Alex goodbye at the Hilton Cleveland Downtown, I drove west, mildly dismayed by the conditions. Might make birding tough, I thought, but hopefully there would be some visibility on the lakeshore.

Think again. Thick fog and icy waters meant the gulls were far from shore and way out of sight. I could hear them plenty good in the distance, screeching what seemed to me like targeted derision.

As for ducks? Forget it. Couldn’t see any. Couldn’t hear any. Only at the adjacent Whiskey Island Marina was there anything amounting to visibility. I was the lone birder on the scene, a fact not lost on this Ring-billed Gull, who perched just long enough to sneer and side-eye me before adding its voice to the symphony of belittlement.

If there was a speck of empathy to be found, it came from this dock, where a lone American Herring Gull stood in solidarity, refusing to chide me in my plight. I can’t say why exactly—call it a vibe—but I swear I detected sense of fellowship in that moment—man and gull and a shared lament for the conditions at Wendy Park.

And would it be crazy to say that I also felt a twinge of remorse from this bird, as if abashed by looking so incredibly similar to a Glaucous Gull, especially through a veil of fog?

Well, I wasn’t about to spend much more time staring into a stubborn wall of gray. In a show of courtesy, I bowed to the Herring Gull, gestured obscenely to the Ring-billed Gull, and pointed Calcifer east.

I’m not through with you, Wendy Park. See you soon.

Part 2—Feeder Ninja

When my college bestie Holly texted me a few months ago seeking advice on a bird feeder for her new home, I got to thinking what the best options were. A good old-fashioned tube feeder filled with black oil sunflower seed was the obvious choice, but that would also perhaps require a shepherd’s hook and a squirrel baffle, if she didn’t want the feeder ransacked by a relentless squirrel army. All those accessories can add up, especially if you want something that won’t rust or break down after a year or so. A finch feeder loaded with thistle seed is less attractive to rodents, but thistle is also less likely to attract a wide variety of songbirds.

Then it hit me—in an effort to scale down my feeders and attract birds with native plants (and to slim my bird seed budget), I’d indefinitely decommissioned my FeatherSnap smart feeder. I enjoyed my time with the feeder and got a kick out of the tech, but in addition to the cost in US dollars, there was the time lost checking my phone for new visitors. That wasn’t the feeder’s fault. No need for it to languish in a garage, so why not give it a new home? When I offered the feeder, Holly accepted, though when and how it would be delivered remained unknown, until my plotting mind got to work.

After my gull debacle, I drove 25 minutes east to the suburb of Willoughby, where a Wild Birds Unlimited would provide sustenance sure to attract a wide variety of colorful songbirds to Holly’s yard. Readers know my mission is to spread bird joy, and on Wednesday I was gonna spread joy with all my might. Not only would Holly be Crazy for Cardinals in no time flat, she’d be Wild for Woodpeckers, Nutty for Nuthatches, even Freaking the Fuck Out for Finches.

To solve the potential squirrel problem, I procured a bag of wild bird seed laced with hot pepper. Squirrels hate that stuff. As for Holly’s kids, they like spicy food. I could only hope the mealworms would deter them from reaching for a handful of mixed seeds and nuts.

Holly’s house was a short drive from the shop, and soon I was pulling into her driveway with devilish glee. I got to work straightaway.

Because I had to pick our son Santiago up from an Odyssey of the Mind rehearsal back in Pittsburgh, the clock was ticking. The idea was to sneak over, install the feeder, and vanish into the shadows (or rather drive away in our Kia) like some canny bird feeder Ninja. None would be the wiser, but just as I was putting the finishing touches on the setup, a school bus pulled up in front of the house. Out popped Holly’s two sons, who are friends with our two sons. Busted.

You caught me! I said with amused resignation.

Hey! they answered in unison.

I just set up this bird feeder. Kind of a belated housewarming present.

Cool!

I gotta run or I’d stick around and say hi to your mom.

Okay!

Her younger son disappeared into the house. His brother, about to follow him in, paused suddenly and turned to me with an impish smile and a parting question.

Can I see your bald spot?

What could I do but laugh and oblige? I bent over to give him a favorable angle of my middle-aged glory, winked in admiration of his temerity, and hopped back into Calcifer.

Time for the final stage of my master plan.

Part 3—Swensons

Swensons, a regional chain of drive-in hamburger stands operating mostly in northeast Ohio, was founded by Wesley “Pop” Swenson in the Wallhaven neighborhood of west Akron in 1934. For almost 100 years Swensons has been serving the best goddam fast food burger in the world and slowly expanding its footprint around the state. Two locations that existed when I was born in 1975 have since expanded to 25, including this stand in Willoughby.

I’d hoped to celebrate my lifer Glaucous Gull with a double cheeseburger with everything. Nothing doing, but you think one little gull setback was going to spoil my lunch? No way. Whereas my no-quit attitude might have petered out at Wendy Park, no amount of fog could ruin a cheeseburger with pickles, onion, and mustard. Anyway, I needed some comforting, so why not indulge in my ultimate comfort food?

As much as I wanted to savor it, the burger went down in a blink, gone so fast I might have thought it a dream, if not for the photographic evidence.

With that, I applauded some nearby parking lot House Sparrows for their good taste, bade goodbye to Northeast Ohio, and turned Calcifer toward Pittsburgh. Not long after, Holly texted her thanks and disappointment we couldn’t hang out. That was a bummer. Time for a less stealthy visit soon!

Two days later, the FeatherSnap feeder was synced to her phone. As of publication, no birds have yet been lured, so let’s make the most of their reticence. I put the question to you, dear readers—what bird will be first to pluck a morsel from Holly’s new feeder?

10/10 Recommends

Swensons Drive-In

A rite of passage in the maturation process of any Akronite is the realization that there is no reason to eat at McDonald’s when a far more delectable option has been available since long before the Golden Arches first darkened Akron’s culinary scene. Where I have failed so far to make birders of our children, they request—nay, they demand—Swensons every time we visit Akron. That makes me proud. As for you, dear readers, next time you’re in Ohio, give Swensons a try. In 2026, the entire state is peppered with locations. Cheeseburger with everything is my recommendation, and any of their tasty sides and beverages. (I also recommend you avoid the Galley Boy, though the signature burger with its two special sauces has its devotees.)

Countdown to 1,000

On the morning of March 5, posted our podcast episode of Ten Birding Questions on his own Substack. Shortly after that, a wave of new subscribers pushed me to 1,000 and beyond. Thanks to Bryan for the wonderful talk and the generous share. And welcome, new subscribers. Hope you’ll sit and stay for a while.

Current subscriber count—1,005

That’s all for this week. Have you seen any good gulls lately? Has rotten weather foiled your birding plans? Do you have a favorite hometown burger joint? Have you ever surprised a friend (or been surprised) with a gift? Let’s talk frustration and redemption (and burgers!) in the comments.

Until next time, thanks for reading, and don’t forget to bird your ass off, or in lieu of good birding, eat the hell out of your favorite comfort food.

nwb

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This post was human generated. All media by Nathaniel Bowler.

Developmental edits by Alexandra Hidalgo.

That was my thought during the final question of my interview with writer and field biologist . We had gotten to talking about our favorite birds, and I was having the time of my life. It easily could have gone on forever.

I first encountered Bryan in the pages of Audubon. He’d written an article for the magazine’s 2024 summer issue about bridge cameras. Later that year, shortly after launching Birding with BillBow, I was on the prowl for birding Substacks to follow when I ran into Chasing Nature by Bryan Pfeiffer. I remembered Bryan’s name from the Audubon article, and his publication, though not specifically dedicated to birds, jumped out immediately as one of the most popular and best Substacks on the subject of nature. Thoughtful, playful, philosophical… the work of someone who has spent a life not just working and reveling in nature, but also thinking deeply about it. Reading Bryan’s work isn’t just informative, it’s edifying.

When it occurred to me Bryan would be a wonderful guest on Ten Birding Questions, I explained to my wife Alex that his words had a “sticky” quality unlike any nature writing I’d encountered on this platform. Aside from being beautifully written, Bryan’s articles linger, resonating long after you’ve read the final word. That’s an enviable quality I hope I’m able to cultivate in my own writing.

No surprise—same phenomenon in talking with him. Since our recording session ended last Sunday, I’ve been meditating on all the topics we discussed over the course of our lively talk, including—

• Apps vs. books and the difference between identification and learning.

• The ways in which birding and the birds have changed over the last half century.

• Why a flatlander from Michigan settled in mountainous Vermont.

• The tug of war between wanting to save the world and wanting to savor the world.

• How he’s remained a boy explorer and life as a smokestack climber, journalist, pot washer, bread baker, firefighter, birding guide, and field biologist.

Aside from his writing, I wanted Bryan on the show because of his almost half century of birding experience, and it didn’t take long for him to flash his veteran birder card—he referenced Roger Tory Peterson’s famed LP A Field Guide to Bird Songs in his very first answer. I was almost tempted interrupt him and pull my dad’s copy from my record collection. I just hope my geeky reaction shines through in the recording.

There’s something about these analog learning tools that can’t be replaced, no matter how sophisticated our phones and their apps get. For more of Bryan’s thoughts on that, read his excellent essay, “The Triumph of the Book in Nature.”

When I extended my invitation to Bryan late last year, he readily accepted, but he also warned that birding was no longer the center of his outdoor life. That was fine with me. I wanted the full scope of his life in nature, including his obsession with butterflies. I was especially fascinated to learn about a little brown butterfly known as the Bog Elfin and Bryan’s decades-long quest to discover the species in Vermont.

Perhaps more than any other essay, it was a recent one, “Birdwatching’s Carbon Problem,” that compelled me to invite Bryan on the show. How can birders claim on one hand to be concerned with birds and their welfare, while on the other hand be so willing to burn fossil fuels in the pursuit of them? I’ve wrangled with this question ever since I started chasing birds, and I wanted to talk it out with Bryan.

Finally, Bryan has a podcast of his own, and he’s generously made his latest episode available for free. Give “A Songbird for Your Psyche” a listen—the opening music is the haunting song of the Black-faced Solitaire, a bird we discuss during question #10 and one I spent a magical few minutes with during our trip to Costa Rica last summer.

When the call ended, I was energized but not satisfied. There was more to talk about, more to think about, so here’s hoping Bryan will join me again on Ten Birding Questions somewhere down the road. Until then, I hope you too find this conversation not just satisfying, but also sticky.

Note—you can access the one-hour gull lecture Bryan references, “Gull Central,” with a paid subscription to his Substack, a great way to support his work and keep him chasing nature for the benefit of us all.

That’s all for this month. How have birding and birds changed over the span of your birding life? Has a curious spirit led you down myriad career paths? Have you had memorable experiences as a birding guide or with a guide? What are some of your most profound experiences outdoors? Comments are welcome, as always👇

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Until next time, thanks for listening, and don’t forget to bird like Bryan!

nwb

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This post was human generated.

Developmental edits by Alexandra Hidalgo.

What’s this dog food doing here?, I asked Mom after we pulled into the garage. My parents were visiting for the weekend and we’d needed a few groceries for the meals we had planned, including Sunday’s full turkey dinner. Our family loves turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and stuffing. Especially stuffing. Why limit ourselves to once per year?

Your father must have put it there when he emptied the car, she reasoned. The Ziploc bag of dog food was sitting atop our mini-fridge. Mom doesn’t have a dog, but my brother does, and because he frequently borrows Mom’s car, it wouldn’t be surprising if a bag of kibble had been forgotten.

What’s this dog doing here? I asked Mom after following her up the basement stairs. You can imagine my surprise when I found Corolla, my favorite dog in the world, exploring the sights and smells of an unfamiliar kitchen.

That wasn’t all. Instead of the usual two kids, there were five. My brother Jeff, his wife Sandra, and their three young sons decided on a whim to celebrate Valentine’s Day/Presidents Day weekend in Pittsburgh. Aside from the guarantee that some viral or bacterial calamity would be visited upon our household before the festivities ended, which always happens when these five cousins get together, that sounded good to us.

Enjoy my writing? As artificial intelligence continues to invade spaces that should belong to human creators, I promise the words and images of Birding with BillBow are coming to you without the use of AI. The best way to support our work is with a paid subscription. As always, 5% of earnings donated to the American Birding Association.

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As if the twin holidays didn’t promise enough excitement, the Olympic Games were in full swing, and best of all—the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (the good folks behind the Merlin and eBird apps) had designated February 13-16 for this year’s Great Backyard Bird Count. Oh, there was also the annual travesty that is NBA All Star Weekend—to this avid basketball fan the most putrid from of entertainment.

But birding is never putrid! If you’ve never participated in the GBBC, doing so is easy. All you have to do is fire up the eBird app and count birds wherever you want (doesn’t have to be your backyard) at least once and for at least for 15 minutes over the four-day span. Any checklist submitted to eBird in that time is counted toward the GBBC, providing valuable data to scientists who track bird populations and concern themselves with the welfare of avian life on Earth.

My brother is more than handy with a pair of binoculars, and since our yard is plenty birdy with its woods and creek and myriad feeders, we decided to take the backyard part literally and do a daylong list at home on Sunday.

Here are some highlights from our GBBC!

6:45 a.m. American Crow flyover kicks off festivities. I’ve been providing a daily hard-boiled egg to our trio of American Crows for almost two years, but they’ve been largely MIA for weeks, possibly due to an unintentional offense caused in January when, upon spotting them in a neighbor’s yard, I slowed the car, rolled down the window, and shouted, I just put your egg out! They cawed their annoyance and scattered, and I’ve only seen them in passing ever since. Must attempt to regain their trust this spring.

7:15 Fill mesh feeder with the avian equivalent of crack cocaine—Wild Birds Unlimited’s Finch Blend. Hear singing Tufted Titmouse, White-breasted Nuthatch, Blue Jay. Return indoors to await American Goldfinches and hopefully one goddam Pine Siskin. Pine Siskins are currently in the county but have never deigned to visit the very feeder I bought specifically for them.

7:25 No American Goldfinches. No Pine Siskins. No birds period.

7:29 American Goldfinches begin to arrive. Pine Siskins do not begin to arrive.

7:30 American Goldfinches arrive in force.

7:34-7:50 Northern Cardinal singing. First of four Eastern Bluebirds spotted at suet.

7:52 Northern Flicker and one of four Hairy Woodpeckers spotted at feeders. First of 15 failed attempts at photographing either.

7:55-7:59 Second and third attempts at photographing Hairy Woodpecker

8:01 Request by our father to turn on cable news network denied. Appease father with winter Olympics broadcast.

8:26 Reprise four-year tradition of being fascinated by curling while failing to understand rules.

8:31 Dark-eyed Junco spotted.

8:41 Nephew hacks at extremities with jagged Minecraft sword.

8:50 Golden-crowned Kinglets heard by me. Golden-crowned and Ruby-crowned Kinglets seen by Jeff. No photos attempted because screw trying to photograph kinglets.

9:00 Drive to bottom of ravine behind house. Quartet of Mallards spotted.

9:11 Overwintering Yellow-rumped Warbler spotted by Jeff. Award-worthy photo captured by Nate. Screw trying to photograph warblers too.

9:45 Pick up Calicifer, our aging Kia Sorento, from mechanic.

10:06 Stuff turkey with traditional sage dressing. Realize I forgot to dry brine. Do not sweat it.

Turkey take #1—I’m a traditionalist when it comes to turkey. I don’t want a lot of seasoning mucking things up. Hold the garlic and onion powder. Forget the lemon pepper. Hard pass on cayenne, smoked paprika, and whatever else. Let salt, pepper, and butter work their magic.

11:45 Dry February ends in mid-February with fancy bourbon provided by Jeff.

1:07 p.m. Finally capture Hairy Woodpecker.

1:50 Capture Carolina/Black-capped Chickadee (probably Carolina?) attempting staredown and looking ridiculous.

1:56 Find nice mix of songbirds under neighbor’s feeder, including female Northern Cardinal, Chickadee, and Dark-eyed Juncos. Present but not seen—Mourning Dove, Song Sparrow, Downy Woodpecker. On neighbor’s feeder—finches, House and American Gold.

2:00 Turkey in at 325°F.

Turkey take #2—I’ve know all about the alternative methods—low-and-slow, high heat, cooking the dark meat separately, spatchcocking, smoking, deep frying… all great, but I still prefer to stuff the bird whole and roast at 325. One thing I don’t trust is the little plastic pop-up button. Meat thermometer FTW.

2:05 Most American Goldfinches I’ve ever seen in one spot.

I know our feeders look a mess. I do clean them, but have you ever tried reasoning with 75 Goldfinches? I can’t stop the birds from doing their business whenever and wherever they will.

2:10 Witness horrifying crash by Finnish freestyle skier Elias Lajunen during one of his big air qualifying runs. Vow to leave flying to the birds for rest of life. Hope Lajunen is okay (have since read he suffered a concussion but is recovering well).

2:37 In recognition of Presidents Day, reflect on the contributions of John Tyler, Rutherford B. Hayes, Millard Fillmore, and other titans of the Executive Branch.

3:00-3:20 Outdoor search for raptors turns up no raptors. Suspect Red-tailed Hawk scream is actually a Blue Jay.

3:27 Witness Red-bellied Woodpecker doing Red-bellied Woodpecker things (being noisy. Chasing other birds off feeders. Not having a red belly. Etc).

3:33 Find House Finch acting chill on branch and admiring potential mate at feeder.

3:34 White-throated Sparrows forages for scraps beneath full feeder directly overhead.

4:30-5:00 Jeff breaks to play Super Mario Bros 2. Nate breaks to prepare feast.

Controversial Nintendo take—SMB 2 is the best Mario Bros. game for the NES.

4:37 Suspect mega-rare Five-striped Sparrow, Rustic Bunting, and Red-crested Cardinal visit yard during half-hour lack of vigilance.

5:00 Happy hour martinis prepared as daylight begins to fail.

5:02 Turkey out. Proceed to pick at little golden bits of skin that have roasted in concert with the stuffing. Celebrate Valentine’s Day by providing delectable morsels to my wife Alex.

Turkey take #3—The best part of the turkey are the little golden bits of skin that have roasted in concert with the stuffing.

5:15 Final sweep of feeders as turkey rests. Goldfinches. So many Goldfinches.

6:00 - whenever Sit down to sumptuous meal. Thanks to keeping a close watch, turkey comes out juicy and delicious. No dry, overcooked breast. No sad conclusion to a day of cooking. No sad conclusion to a day of birding, either. Final count—24 species in tiny contribution to big global science event.

7:30? 8:00? Meal ends. Surfeit of food and drink takes effect. Time loses all meaning.

8:?? Settle into our cozy living room to enjoy some entertainment by the fire. Before slipping into heavy, turkey-fueled sleep, annihilate Jeff in matchup between two pixelated, Mario-shaped competitors in NES classic(?) Golf.

??:?? a.m. Awoken by our son Santiago, informing me he has vomited. Awaken to find two others have also vomited, thus initiating inaugural Great Indoors Barf Count. By the time germ-ridden guests have returned home to Akron, stomach flu has swept through entire family, no member spared.

Except one.

Aftermath Debilitation. Misery. Inability to write. Birding with BillBow publication delayed one week.

10/10 do NOT Recommend

Stomach flu

No elaboration required.

Mesh feeder with base

Not because it has been ineffective in attracting Pine Siskins. The base on our mesh feeder provides an additional feeding station for birds, but it does not drain well, and any rainfall mixes with trapped seed to form a disgusting slurry that must be immediately cleaned.

Countdown to 1,000

What a nice flurry of subscribers in the last two weeks! New subscribers—welcome! Old subscribers—thanks for stickin’ with me! Unsubscribers—don’t let the door… ahhh never mind 😇

Current subscriber count—962

That’s all for this week. Did you participate in the Great Backyard Bird Count? Where did you bird over the GBBC weekend? How many species did you get? Any surprises? Do you have any deeply held turkey beliefs? Did you get sick and 🤮 Let’s do our thing in the comments👇

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Until next time, thanks for reading, and try not to puke your ass off!

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This post was human generated. All media by Nathaniel Bowler.

Developmental edits by Alexandra Hidalgo.

Welllll… maybe I do have this thing where I sip a Beefeater martini during any important game the Cleveland Cavs, Guardians, or Browns (lol) are playing… and maybe when I’m watching a game and my team is playing well, I do feel compelled to not adjust where I’m sitting or even the position I’m sitting in for as long as the hot streak lasts… and yeah maybe on the day of the game I do light 500 candles and speak a Latin incantation summoning wingéd demon-gods from their shadow kingdom to fill the hearts of the opponent with cravenness and despair…

Okay, so I am superstitious, and given the success of Cleveland teams over the span of my 50 years on Earth, it occurs to me now that I might consider an alternative set of superstitions.

But enough about sports (for now). When it comes to birds, I don’t know that I’m particularly superstitious.

Or am I?

My friend Sofia has a trick for when she’s preparing to chase a new life bird—she opens her field guide to the target bird’s page and leaves it open until the bird is found. That trick has an impeccable track record of success—100% according to her most recent report. I personally know of only one failed chase for Sofia—when we ditched our futile search for a Ruffed Grouse last spring and decided to seek out a confirmed Eurasian Wigeon. We didn’t get it, but that wasn’t the field guide’s fault—Sofia never had a chance to open it.

So on the eve of last Tuesday’s planned chase of a western bird that had recently shown up in Butler County, about an hour north of Pittsburgh, I sent Sofia a quick text.

Open that field guide to VATH

She quickly replied,

You just saved our trip I had totally blanked on that

What’s VATH, you ask? For those who may not know, every bird species North and Central America has been assigned a banding code, a four-letter, all-caps abbreviation. The basic rules for formulating the codes are simple, and the results are often fun!

• One-word bird name: the first four letters (Ovenbird = OVEN)

• Two-word: the first two letters of each word (Horned Lark = HOLA)

• Three-word: first letter of the first two words, first two letters of the third word (Worm-eating Warbler = WEWA)

• Four-word: first letter of each word (Yellow-crowned Night Heron = YCNH. Okay, that one’s not so fun)

Banding refers to the practice of capturing birds and placing an identifying metal ring around their leg or neck (all while checking the bird’s weight, length, age, health, etc). The codes are a shorthand meant to optimize data entry for researchers, sparing them the arduous task of writing, say, Northern Beardless-Tyrannulet over and over until they want to shake their arthritic fists at every tyrannulet they see, bearded, beardless, or otherwise.

Laziness is what motivated me to text a banding code, but Sofia knew exactly what VATH meant.

Varied Thrush.

Ah, thrushes. Family Turdidae. What a wonderful branch in the bird family tree. Rotund beauties with sometimes incredible vocal repertoires you can often find foraging on the ground or in the brush at eye level. They can be secretive and well camouflaged, but their size and propensity to sing and chip make them, in my experience, less of a challenge to find than other skulkers I can name (yep, I’m still talking shit about you, Connecticut Warbler).

Some 200 species of thrush are distributed all around the world. The suite we normally encounter in the eastern US range from the understated…

… to the brightly colored.

In terms of looks, the Varied Thrush would most easily be mistaken for an American Robin.

Still, they’re distinctive enough to tell apart with a reasonably good look, so no surprise a birder was able to pick out the Varied Thrush that appeared in State Game Lands 96 in Butler County in late January.

Also no surprise the birders of the region quickly flocked to the site. I didn’t chase the Varied Thrush that showed up in Michigan in 2022. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake again.

But first—what’s a denizen of wet, western forests doing all the way over here? Great question! Check out the Varied Thrush’s range map.

As you can see, western Montana is about as eastern as this bird tends to get. But see the light blue dotted line jutting all the way out to Nova Scotia? That means the bird is an uncommon winter vagrant over a huge swath of the northern United States. But why? I’m not sure what forces compel Varied Thrushes to venture so far our of their typical range, be it weather, a glitch in their navigational systems, or just sheer curiosity. Perhaps this fellow had heard tell of the many splendors of Butler County, PA and simply couldn’t stay away. The scant research I’ve done has led to no answers, but if you know the reason behind (or have a theory for) this phenomenon, feel free to leave a comment!👇

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Last week I introduced you to my quartet of birding friends, the H.E.N.S. This time, Elizabeth, Nate, and Sofia were able to make the trip north, with only Holly previously indisposed.

So on Tuesday morning, I picked up Sofia, and we headed to Elizabeth’s house. The three of us piled into Elizabeth’s car and the E.N.S. were off to Butler County.

A fellow Allegheny County birder had kindly dropped GPS coordinates into the Discord chat, and we arrived at the location to find this lovely scene.

We closed the car doors and opened our ears. Pretty enough, but utterly devoid of birds. Silence prevailed. Almost. There was a distant Blue Jay, and something else.

Do you hear a voice? Elizabeth asked. We could hear two voices, actually, not too far off, but their owners were in range of neither our eyeballs nor binoculars. I had a hunch that the voices we heard were on the same mission, and after some quick research on my phone, I discovered we had been led to the wrong spot. Where we wanted to be was roughly from whence the voices had come. We climbed back in the car and sped (as fast as the snowy road would allow) to the locale that hopefully would be full of birds and birders. Sure enough, two human individuals were on the scene, bundled against the cold and equipped with cameras and binoculars. Now we were talking!

We introduced ourselves. I recognized one of their names, but I had never met Zach Vaughan, whom I knew by reputation as one of the best bird photographers working around Allegheny County. The thrush was present, he informed us, and had been moving back and forth between a stand of tall evergreens and the spot Zach had staked out in front of the fruit-laden trees and shrubs the bird was feeding from.

The thrush wasn’t the only one feasting in State Game Lands 95. Plenty of other birds were on hand to keep us busy while we waited. A sizeable flock of Black-capped Chickadees. Several White-throated Sparrows. American Goldfinches, Tufted Titmouses, White-breasted Nuthatches—all the birds you’d expect to see in a western PA winter.

There was a beautiful flock of Cedar Waxwings, too.

A tidy row of Northern Cardinals.

And then, perhaps 15 minutes after our arrival, the object of our pursuit revealed himself, a glorious male bedecked in black, blue-gray, and fiery orange. I’ve always thought no thrush could surpass the beauty of the Wood Thrush, but this Varied Thrush had come all the way to Pennsylvania with one directive for us easterners—Hold my beer.

What a bird! Bulbous and blazing orange! Black mask and beautiful wing bars! It’s as though an American Robin and a Blackburnian Warbler had gotten into some fermented fruit and let one thing lead to another.

We stayed for as long as the bird did, long enough for wonderful looks and sufficiently good photos. When he retreated back to the pines, we retreated to our transportation.

Less superstition than celebration, I have a some rituals of my own for after getting a new life bird. For one, I like to drink a shot of rye whiskey. Not an option right now while I’m doing a dry month. I also open my gigantic coffee table edition of Audubon’s Birds of America to the bird I found. (Yes, I’m very aware of JJA’s, ahem, questionable character, which is a whole post for the future.) The book, practically a coffee table unto itself, contains hundreds of Audubon’s renderings, some more masterful than others, but I have to give him credit for his Varied Thrush. Knocked out of park.

As of today, the Butler County Varied Thrush continues to show well at the same location. Whatever lured him there, the incendiary orb became life bird #577 for me and my first of 2026. Life bird for my fellow travelers as well. We thank him for his vagrancy. How long he’ll stay, we’ll have to see. Here’s hoping he’ll be welcomed back to his breeding grounds after making this long winter pilgrimage. Here’s also hoping he hooks up with a female of his species and not a Blackburnian Warbler. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Super Bowl note—I have no delusions about the Browns ever appearing in the Super Bowl, played earlier tonight. But the Super Bowl goes on without them. This year, I rooted for the Seahawks, named for a bird and led by a birder quarterback, to beat the Patriots, whom I hate. Beat them they did, and without any superstitious help, or hindrance, from me.

Go Browns.

10/10 Recommends

Zach Vaughan Photography

Zach has an impressive camera setup. But equipment can only get you so far. It’s another thing altogether to know how to use it, and more importantly—to have the patience and artistic eye to capture a bird at just the right moment, like he did with the very same Varied Thrush. Want more? Check out his website, linked above, and follow Zach’s Instagram for some beautifully detailed bird closeups.

Countdown to 1,000

I recently surpassed 900 subscribers. The growth in my readership has been so rewarding, as has the wonderful engagement my posts have gotten since launching this venture in October 2024. Thank you, subscribers for teaming up with the birds to motivate me every day to keep writing, keep taking photos, keep podcasting.

Current subscriber count—911

That’s all for this week. Have you ever seen a Varied Thrush? Have you gotten any life birds yet this year? Do you have any superstitions in your birding life? Do you have any rituals to prepare for or celebrate a new life bird? As always, the comments are open👇

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This post was human generated. All media by Nathaniel Bowler.

Developmental edits by Alexandra Hidalgo.