North American bird populations have been in steep decline for decades, in part due to habitat loss. In one forest near the Blue Ridge Parkway, researchers have been putting special recording units in the trees to monitor the birds that find refuge there. Can a coalition of wildlife conservationists and outdoor enthusiasts protect this rare old growth habitat for the animals — and people — who depend on it?
Neotropical migratory songbirds spend the winter in Central and South America and travel each spring to their breeding grounds in the U.S. and Canada. These species are teeny creatures on average, often weighing under two ounces each, yet their travel plans are bold — some make roundtrips of more than 10,000 miles in a single year. But this colorful cohort of birds, from warblers to thrushes to tanagers, face habitat loss from climate change and development at both ends of their range.
But the Big Ivy region of the Pisgah National Forest in North Carolina is a rare intact forest that provides a welcoming breeding ground for many of these birds, including species whose outlook has been especially bleak. This episode, host Jennifer Errick speaks with NPCA Southern Appalachian Director Jeff Hunter and Wildlife Research Program Coordinator Steve Goodman on the 415,000 birdsongs they’ve captured in the Big Ivy and how they’re using the beautiful recordings to protect this rare and beautiful Appalachian forest.
The Secret Lives of Parks is a production of the National Parks Conservation Association.
Episode 46, The Bird Nerds of Big Ivy, was produced by Jennifer Errick, with help from Todd Christopher, Bev Stanton and Linda Coutant.
Original theme music by Chad Fischer.
Learn more about the campaign to create a Craggy National Scenic Area at IHeartPisgah.org.
Learn more about NPCA’s Day of Action at npca.org/everypark
Learn more about this podcast and listen to the rest of our stories at thesecretlivesofparks.org
For more than a century, the National Parks Conservation Association has been protecting and enhancing America’s national parks for present and future generations. With more than 1.6 million members and supporters, NPCA is the nation’s only independent, nonpartisan advocacy organization dedicated to protecting national parks.
You can join the fight to preserve our national parks. Learn more and join us at npca.org
Episode 46
The Bird Nerds of Big Ivy
Jennifer Errick: North American bird populations have been in steep decline for decades, in part due to habitat loss. In one forest near the Blue Ridge Parkway, researchers have been putting special recording units in the trees to monitor the birds that find refuge there. Can a coalition of wildlife conservationists and outdoor enthusiasts protect this rare old growth habitat for the animals — and the people — who depend on it?
I’m Jennifer Errick, and this is the Secret Lives of Parks.
[Music break]
Before we start our main story today, I want to let you know that NPCA is organizing a day of action on August 23 to stand up for national parks. Recent proposals from the Trump administration threaten to dismantle, close or even sell off some of our national park sites. Parks are already underfunded, and their staff are stretched thin. These proposals could push parks past the breaking point, and NPCA is hosting events around the country this month so we can band together and speak out on these relentless attacks. You can go to npca.org/everypark for more information on how to get involved.
Now, on to our main story.
If you’re somewhere safe right now — you’re not driving a car or scaling a cliff or something — I’d like you to pause for a moment and just close your eyes and imagine you’re walking through a forest.
[Fade in birdsong]
What you’re hearing is a special sound that comes from deep in the woods, away from roads and clearings, in a place that’s wilder than most of us get to go most of the time. I can almost feel my blood pressure drop the longer I listen. This wonderful music is the song of neotropical migratory songbirds — in this case, a cerulean warbler in a morning chorus of other birds.
Neotropical migratory songbirds spend the winter in Central and South America and travel each spring to their breeding grounds in the U.S. and Canada. These species are teeny creatures on average, often weighing under two ounces each, yet their travel plans are bold — some make roundtrips of more than 10,000 miles in a single year. But this colorful cohort of birds face habitat loss from climate change and development at both ends of their range.
There are 3 billion fewer birds in North America today than there were in the 1970s, and migratory songbird populations have suffered most of these losses —about 2 and a half billion of them are simply gone from our skies. But the Big Ivy region of the Pisgah National Forest in North Carolina is a rare intact forest that provides a welcoming breeding ground for many of these birds.
My colleague Steve Goodman wants to know how many of these birds make their home in Big Ivy each spring, and he’s been setting up specially made microphones throughout a 16,000-acre section of the forest to capture the diversity of animals that sing in these trees.
Steve Goodman: To think that they're breeding on the top of our mountains, and two weeks ago, they were in Brazil, you know, is pretty amazing.
Jennifer Errick: Steve is a conservation biologist who works as the wildlife research program coordinator for the National Parks Conservation Association. He became involved in the coalition to study and protect the Big Ivy — also called the Craggy Mountains or the Craggies — because this area is adjacent to the Blue Ridge Parkway, one of the most popular national park sites in the country. It provides one of the parkway’s most breathtaking views, leading many locals to advocate for making the Craggies a national scenic area.
Steve has been studying wildlife for more than 25 years, but researching birds wasn’t the plan he had imagined for his life.
Steve Goodman: Well, I’m a career changer. My original degree is in finance, so I have a business degree, and I was halfway through an MBA program, and I was in a business ethics course, and we were debating the Endangered Species Act, and how might a business interest circumvent that. I remember having those debates in business class and realizing I was kind of on the wrong side of that conversation. And so, I dropped out and then enrolled in the biology program. And then I knew I wanted to work with wildlife. And around that same time, I started going out and hiking and canoeing and whatnot. And initially, I found a lot of peace in natural environments. And then, once I started realizing the threats, it's like, I want to do something about it.
Jennifer Errick: I'm glad that you changed majors, Steve. So now, 25 years later, why do you particularly want to study the issue of bird populations here?
Steve Goodman: So, the genesis of this research was the presence of the largest known population of cerulean warblers in North Carolina, and that's a species that has declined about 72%, based on USGS Breeding Bird Survey data, since the 1970s. So, most of that is documented along the parkway, just outside of our project area. So, our interest was, to what extent does that population extend further into the surrounding Pisgah National Forest and our study area. But after I did a deep dive into the literature, it really became clear that this study wasn't just about one bird species, but it was a study about the much larger grouping of these neotropical migrant birds, many of which are declining and becoming quite vulnerable. And so, this landscape represents an area that's very rich. It has a lot of mature forests and then also has a lot of elevation changes, so you have a bunch of different habitats, a lot of different microclimates. So, it makes it really rich for birds.
Jennifer Errick: How many birds were you attempting to track with this research?
Steve Goodman: Well, we're recording every bird that we hear. And when we set the bioacoustic recorders out, they record everything in the landscape that's audible.
Jennifer Errick: As a side note, bioacoustic recorders are devices that are typically used in environmental research and are designed to be left unattended for long periods of time to capture sounds without interference from people, since our presence changes animal behavior. These devices are also sometimes called autonomous recording units, or ARUs for short.
Steve Goodman: We have certain focal species that were particularly interested in, but we’re really recording the entire community. But we will concentrate on about 17 or so.
Jennifer Errick: Is it because their populations are at particular risk?
Steve Goodman: Yeah, it was pretty disturbing to realize we had lost 3 billion birds.
Jennifer Errick: I mean, it's hard to hear that number and not be shocked by it.
Steve Goodman: They not only have threats from their wintering grounds in Central, South America, Caribbean Islands, Mexico, even South Florida, but then also, as they're migrating, they have threats. And then of course where they breed, they can have threats. So those birds are particularly vulnerable to decline.
Jennifer Errick: So, you set up these autonomous recording units, ARUs. Basically, you set up little microphones in the trees. Can you tell me a little bit about what that process was like?
Steve Goodman: Yes, these units, they're called song meters, and they have these really high-quality microphones, and there's, like, one on each end of the little unit. And the little unit is only maybe 4 by 6.
Jennifer Errick: Inches?
Steve Goodman: Inches, yeah. They're very small, but they're very powerful. And you can set them to start at one hour before sunrise to two hours after sunrise, one hour before sunset, to two hours after sunset, 10 minutes on, 10 minutes off, so you can just configure them in all different kinds of ways. So, that allows you to pinpoint the particular birds so you can kind of cater your bioacoustic recorder to the species that you're after.
Jennifer Errick: They're kind of predictable that way.
Steve Goodman: Right, right.
Jennifer Errick: So how many of these recording units did you set up, and how did you determine where to put them?
Steve Goodman: So last year we deployed, I think it was 64 units at 64 sites. And the way we chose our study sites was, we gridded the whole study area, the whole 16,000-acre area, on ArcGIS Pro — so, mapping software — and the grids are individual cells of 250 meters by 250 meters. So, you have this whole area of maybe 1,000 different cells. And then we selected out for the cerulean warblers, we selected out montane-oak-hickory natural community, which they prefer, and then we also intersected that with the age of the forest. So, we only selected sites that were greater than 80 years old. And then, if all those things together were more than half of that grid cell, then we selected that site for a recorder.
Jennifer Errick: So, you studied the tree makeup, like, where these particular trees were that you knew the birds particularly like to nest in?
Steve Goodman: More the age of the forest. Like, cerulean warblers generally breed below 4,100 feet, and that’s about when our montane-oak-hickory forest gives way to a different type of forest, and so, that kind of works in tandem there. Yes, tree species, elevation, age of forest. Those particular birds like older, mature forests.
Jennifer Errick: So, I heard that you collected 415,000 bird songs. How do you even know what to do with 415,000 bird songs?
Steve Goodman: Yeah, and that's a minimum, too. So, Cornell has AI-generated software that helps ID the birds, so you can load that into the software, and then it kind of spits out a spreadsheet, but then an expert needs to come by and validate those, because sometimes the software gets it gets it wrong.
Jennifer Errick: For those unfamiliar with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University, it’s an academic mecca for all kinds of bird research and tools for bird conservation, from free guides and articles to initiatives that engage people in bird watching and research. Many people may also be familiar with their popular app, Merlin Bird ID.
Steve Goodman: So, yes, over 400,000 calls and songs. But if we had set the sensitivity to higher, we would have got double that. So, at some point we’re just trying to figure out, like, the sweet spot. We want to know how many species were at each site and get a general idea of how abundant they were based on how often they sung or called.
Jennifer Errick: So, you don't need to listen to all 415,000 songs and calls, but you need to validate a certain percentage of them?
Steve Goodman: That's correct, yes.
Jennifer Errick: So, how many bird songs are you listening to, Steve? And is it fun?
Steve Goodman: Yeah, it is very fun. I've probably gone through thousands during this process because the post-validating is a really important part where you determine how confident you are in the software's ability to ID that species. Some species they get right nearly 100% of the time. Other species, maybe half the time. Unfortunately, one of our biggest focal species, the cerulean warbler, the software makes a lot of mistakes. So, we actually had to listen to those by ear — every single one of them, and there were thousands of them — to make sure that indeed was really a cerulean warbler, and I would say 90% of them weren't. We did a rigorous process because what we find could have implications on how the forest is managed, and we want to make sure we have very accurate data.
Jennifer Errick: According to Steve, the first year of the data showed that many species in overall decline were present in the Big Ivy. Some, like cerulean warblers, were only at 20% of the sites he monitored with suitable habitat. Others showed stronger numbers, like Canada warblers, which he found at 52% of the sites, and wood thrushes, at 89%. The team is in the process of capturing its second full year of recordings, and it remains to be seen how the newer data will compare, but overall, the numbers affirmed the importance of this forest — that birds declining elsewhere were present here in strong numbers.
Jennifer Errick: Did you find any bird species that you weren't expecting?
Steve Goodman: No, I think we recorded most of the species I was expecting. But I was really surprised on the level of activity. When I moved to Asheville, a lot of the times I was hiking more managed forests of the Forest Service where they do more logging, and they rotate it around. Where, Craggies, they do logging, but not very often, because it becomes really controversial because so many people love this area. And I was really struck at the difference level of numbers of birds versus a more managed forest or a private forest where the timber values are more important than, you know, wildlife values.
Jennifer Errick: So, in September we had this incredibly destructive hurricane, Helene, hit this forest very hard. How has that affected the work that you are doing now to prepare for the second year of the data?
Steve Goodman: It's been extremely challenging, but at the same time rewarding. All the study area is closed to the public. And so, even though we do have a research permit, so we're allowed to be in there, access is tough to be able to get to our sites, which were already very rugged sites. We would hike off-trail, sometimes a couple miles back in there. But we have this huge pre-disturbance data set, which is very rare in the scientific community, to have such a large data set. So, we were approached by the state ornithologist, and she had already been a partner on this project, as far as providing subject matter expertise, but her and this North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission are very interested in this data set now and actually provided us with additional recording units and asked if we would go back to the sites that we've already monitored to do some post-Helene monitoring. And they're thinking that this could potentially be a 20-year project because —
Jennifer Errick: Wow.
Steve Goodman: — you're going to see some drastic changes in the bird community over time as the forest recovers — or doesn't recover. We don't know what's going to happen, but now, we have this opportunity to contribute to science, but then also continue our mission and hopefully have this national scenic area.
Jennifer Errick: What would a national scenic area entail for this region? What would it mean in terms of preserving the forest?
Steve Goodman: So, the national scenic area, first off, it would preserve recreation that's been ongoing already. So, things like hiking, biking, nature viewing. But what it would do, it would stop all future logging. As many folks know, it's not just the logging, but it's all the roads, temporary roads, that are a result of the logging — when it rains a lot, they're very vulnerable to creating landslides and we've seen that now. This forest, some of it, about 3,000 acres, has been mapped as old growth forest with the other 13,000 acres or so, maybe 75% of that, is kind of in the 100-year-old range. This protection would allow it all to get to the old growth stage.
Old growth forests are profoundly important for the overall avian community. It's not just about large trees, but rather a forest that is relatively undisturbed by humans where these natural occurring disturbances like fire and wind, they lead to this mosaic of habitat conditions at the ground, understory mid-story, canopy level, creating highly productive, you know, conditions for ground and shrub nesting birds as well as, you know, cavity and canopy nesters.
Jennifer Errick: Do you think there's public support for a national scenic area or for additional protections of any kind to preserve this forest?
Steve Goodman: Yes. It would actually be North Carolina's first-ever national scenic area. It has overwhelming public, political and community support. The city of Asheville and Buncombe County have passed a unanimous bipartisan resolutions supporting Craggy, and more than 33,000 people have submitted comments supporting Craggy at iheartpisgah.org.
Jennifer Errick: What's your favorite bird?
Steve Goodman: Wow. The yellow-bellied sapsucker.
Jennifer Errick: Why do you like that one?
Steve Goodman: There's a lot of reasons. Here in North Carolina, they occur in the higher elevations. They’re cavity nesters. But they have the most distinctive of all the woodpecker drumming, like a [mimics woodpecker sounds], and so that's why.
Jennifer Errick: So, it’s like, a reassuring sound.
Steve Goodman: Yes. Yeah. So, I have a have a history with them, I guess, but, you know, I love all the birds. I mean, ultimately what I love is when the ecological integrity of the birds is sound.
Jennifer Errick: Coming up after the break, we learn a little more about the Big Ivy, why it’s an important part of how visitors experience the Blue Ridge Parkway, and what the path forward looks like for a national scenic area. Oh, yeah — and we more about birds, too.
Jeff Hunter: It's an integral part of the visitor experience to any national park. And I want to see that protected. A visit to a park without birdsong — I can't even imagine it.
Jennifer Errick: That’s next. Stay with us.
[Music break with promotion for Imagine America Without campaign]
[Fade in of more birds]
Jennifer Errick: As a hiker, some of my favorite moments on the trail are those times when I feel like I’m completely alone in the forest. But one thing Steve and his coalition partners have shown is that they are never really alone in the Big Ivy. A whole community has come together to protect this forest and its birds.
Jeff Hunter: You know, I'm a naturalist. I'm not a trained biologist like Steve is. So, I've been a birder since the early 90s, and I brought that interest down here with me when I moved south 22 years ago.
Jennifer Errick: Jeff Hunter is Southern Appalachian director for the National Parks Conservation Association, and he has spent much of his career supporting safe wildlife migration, including initiatives that fund wildlife crossings over busy interstates, so that bears, bobcats and other creatures don’t get slaughtered by speeding cars — and people don’t get hurt by these collisions either. Jeff is also part of the coalition using these 415,000 birdsongs as supporting evidence for a national scenic area to protect the Big Ivy.
Jeff Hunter: I'm a forest lover. I spend a lot of time in the woods, and 25 years ago today I was somewhere in Pennsylvania on the Appalachian Trail, heading northbound to Maine. And when you have a thru-hike experience on a long trail, you know, you wake up to the birds every morning. And it just, it stirs my soul. It's something that's really important to me, and it's an integral part of the visitor experience to any national park. And I want to see that protected. A visit to a park without birdsong — I can't even imagine it.
Jennifer Errick: Can you tell me what this Craggy Mountain section of the Pisgah Forest is like?
Jeff Hunter: Sure. So, one of the interesting things about the place we often call Big Ivy, there is an elevation gradient, so the lower parts of the forest are down around 3,000 feet, and the highest parts are just shy of 6,000 feet. So when you get on a trail, you start out in one ecosystem, and you end up in a different ecosystem, when you’re up on the ridge. There's tremendous bird diversity. There's tremendous amphibian diversity, particularly in the form of salamanders. You know, there's lots of different mammals, from bats to bears and foxes and deer, and it's a special place.
Jennifer Errick: And Steve was telling me that it is visible from the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Jeff Hunter: That's what got us involved in this project in the first place. The thing about the Blue Ridge Parkway, it’s this narrow corridor. And in North Carolina, it is often about 1,000 feet wide. You know, it's basically a narrow strip, so when you're up on these viewpoints like Craggy Gardens _ it's one of the most visited and photographed parts of the parkway — you're looking out over the national forest. And so, that viewshed is an important aspect of that visitor experience, and it's not controlled by the National Park Service or the Department of the Interior. That's the U.S. Forest Service that maintains those lands. But the birds don't know the boundaries, right? They go back and forth between the National Park Service lands and the Forest Service lands.
You know, when I first got involved in conservation as a volunteer in the 90s, the wood thrush was sort of this iconic species that lived in the forest near where I lived in in New York state. There was a place called Sterling Forest, about 10 or 12 miles of the Appalachian Trail runs through there, and there was a plan to build 14,000 houses and 8 million square feet of commercial office space in this intact 18,000-acre forest in my community, and that's how I started to learn about the decline of the wood thrush. Forest fragmentation is something they don't like — and by fragmentation, I'm talking about things like roads, power lines, pipelines — anything that creates an edge in the forest or clearing. And so, we utilized the wood thrush as our focal species in an effort to protect Sterling Forest. We were successful. That was a rush. And I thought, gosh. If I can get paid to do this kind of work, how cool would that be?
Jennifer Errick: What are your general impressions of the data that you've collected so far?
Jeff Hunter: That the Craggies, this forest we call Big Ivy, is a place where there are healthy populations of birds that are declining elsewhere. You know, Steve and I talk often about the need to protect these species before we start to have a conversation about potential endangered species listing. Why not endeavor to protect them while they're still relatively common and not on the precipice of disappearing?
Jennifer Errick: How do you hope to use this research?
Jeff Hunter: I think it comes down to public engagement. We're filling in data gaps, and I dare say that most folks who live here in the southern Appalachians probably aren't even familiar with many of the birds that we're looking at — birds like Canada warblers and blackburnian warblers. They're small, they're fast, they're not here all year long, they don't show up at feeders, they're hard to see. You generally need to have good binoculars or a spotting scope and a lot of patience. So, uncovering these mysteries, you know, unraveling them and talking about climate change through the lens of birds is really what we're going to do with the general public.
Can you imagine if you needed to do point counts and you had five biologists that would go out over the course of the morning and record what they hear at various locations? With the ARUs, we can place these out, you know, 20, 25, 30 of them, and they're capturing data simultaneously at all these locations, not for a couple of minutes, but we have 5 hours of data for each site each day. It's a larger sample size than the human performing a point count can obtain.
Jennifer Errick: So will this research give a clue into the continued ability of birds to use the forest as well as they did before?
Jeff Hunter: Well, great question. What our research will tell us is whether there's presence by particular species. There's an expression — absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So, just because we don't get a bird calling on any of our devices doesn't mean they're not there. It might mean that they exist in the forest somewhere other than where we're deploying our equipment. But I think what's going to be interesting is to find out, for instance, the cerulean warblers that we captured at a number of our sites last year, did they return? Because the forest where they breed is highly disturbed, the canopy is gone in many places. One of the things that Steve told me is he was out in the woods the other day, and he thought he heard a redheaded woodpecker, which is not a bird that is generally an interior forest breeding bird. They like more disturbed habitat, and Steve had offered up the idea that perhaps that was a species that could colonize some of the disturbed areas, and that may in fact be happening, we're not sure yet. So, having that baseline from last year is great, and then we'll be able to do some comparison between the sites and see, has the species composition changed? Are there more species? Are there fewer species, or is it the same? It'll be fascinating to see what happens. I think the birds are going to help us build support for this place.
Jennifer Errick: So, why have local residents been interested in getting this national scenic area designation there?
Jeff Hunter: So, to give you an idea of where this is, this is Buncombe County, North Carolina, the county seat of Buncombe is Asheville, which is an urban area. There's a little town of Barnardsville, which is what you have to pass through, this community, in order to get up to the forest. The folks who live in Barnardsville really are most invested because this is their backyard. Many people have scenic views of the forest. They enjoy the birds. But there are other values at play here. Clean water, right. This is a watershed for this community, and if you have logging that takes place in this area, it can severely impact water quality.
Jennifer Errick: What are the benefits of having a national scenic area on a public land that is already managed by the U.S. Forest Service?
Jeff Hunter: Well, one of the benefits is that this legislation would designate about 4,000 acres of wilderness. And wilderness, you can't log, right? There's no mechanized equipment that can go into a wilderness area. The local county commissioners in Buncombe County have supported a wilderness designation in Big Ivy. So there's political support, there's local support, and so, hopefully that will happen. That’s one of the highest values in this forest, is those 4,000 acres of old growth.
Jennifer Errick: In order to get a national scenic area, though, that would be something that would need to have federal support, correct? Would this need to be passed by Congress?
Jeff Hunter: It does. It requires an act of Congress, and our hope is that that will happen. And one of the folks who's a real proponent of this, his name is Will Harlan. He's a community member in Barnardsville. He has worked to generate something on the order of 40,000 comments to the Forest Service in support of protecting Big Ivy. There's enormous support.
Jennifer Errick: Will Harlan has been garnering this support as part of his role with the Center for Biological Diversity, an organization that has been a great partner in the research. Steve and Jeff wanted me to give a shout-out to them, as well as the rest of our partners, Defenders of Wildlife, North Carolina Wildlife Federation, Mountain True and Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy.
Jeff Hunter: So, the support is there, we just have to develop the political will. I'm inspired by the local advocates, and we really want to bolster their case for protecting this forest. There's local support politically. There's broad support in the community. I absolutely think it's possible in this Congress. It's achievable. That doesn't mean it's easy, but nothing worth doing is easy.
Jennifer Errick: I was just going to say that. I couldn't agree more, and I appreciate you lifting up our local partners and giving them their due credit.
Jeff Hunter: Earlier this week, Steve went out into the lands surrounding the Blue Ridge Parkway, national park lands, with a forest ecologist, and he deployed some of our autonomous recording units on, it’s a mountain that is mostly devoid of trees. It has to be managed. The Forest Service goes in and mows to keep it clear. And the Park Service, they think they have a species of bird there that is not common, something called an alder flycatcher, and the Park Service would really like to know, is that bird breeding on these lands, in part because they mow the woody debris periodically, and if we have alder flycatcher nesting there, that very well may alter the frequency with which they manage those lands. It's important to know what's there in order to inform your management.
Jennifer Errick: Earlier this month, Steve confirmed the presence of alder flycatchers on National Park Service lands associated with the Blue Ridge Parkway. This is exciting news for the whole team, as this is a rare, high-elevation species. Steve credits the ongoing expertise of the Park Service staff for managing the area in a way that encourages wildlife diversity.
Jeff Hunter: It's just super exciting to me that we started this work outside park boundaries and now it's expanded into the adjacent national park, which for us is a bullseye. That's our mission.
Jennifer Errick: Do you have a favorite bird? I know it’s not really a fair question, but I asked Steve, so I’m going to ask you, too.
Jeff Hunter: I do. That bird would be the broad-winged hawk.
Jennifer Errick: Ooh.
Jeff Hunter: The broad-winged hawk is a relative of the red-tailed hawk, probably the most widespread and common hawk we have here in the United States. You often see a red-tail along highways. They don't mind fragmentation. In fact, they thrive on it. They often hunt in the right-of-way for rodents.
What's cool about the broad-wing is that the entire population of broad-winged hawks vacates the United States in September and they go in mass to South America, and by South America, I'm talking about Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, as far south as Bolivia, perhaps in western Brazil. And last year, last September, I was at the Corpus Christi Hawkwatch, and in one single hour, I saw an estimated 78,000 broad-winged hawks fly overhead.
Jennifer Errick: Wow.
Jeff Hunter: It is perhaps the greatest migratory spectacle for wildlife that we have here in the United States. It is soul stirring. It really is.
Jennifer Errick: Though I have mentioned to both Jeff and Steve that they should use their 415,000 bird songs to start their own podcast, they are far more focused on finishing their second year of collecting this data and analyzing it to advocate with their partners for the national scenic area. The good news is that sections of the Blue Ridge Parkway continue to reopen in North Carolina as the National Park Service makes repairs from the damage caused by Hurricane Helene, and with the strong community support residents have shown to protect this forest, outdoor lovers in the Southern Appalachians might just continue to hear these wonderful songs first-hand well into the future.
[Music break]
The Secret Lives of Parks is a production of the National Parks Conservation Association.
Episode 46, The Bird Nerds of Big Ivy, was produced by me, Jennifer Errick, with help from Todd Christopher, Bev Stanton and Linda Coutant.
Original theme music by Chad Fischer.
Learn more about the campaign to create a Craggy National Scenic Area at IHeartPisgah.org.
Learn more about NPCA’s Day of Action at npca.org/everypark
Learn more about this podcast and listen to the rest of our stories at thesecretlivesofparks.org
For more than a century, the National Parks Conservation Association has been protecting and enhancing America’s national parks for present and future generations. With more than 1.6 million members and supporters, NPCA is the nation’s only independent, nonpartisan advocacy organization dedicated to protecting national parks.
And we’re proud of it, too.
You can join the fight to preserve our national parks. Learn more and join us at npca.org
Jeff Hunter: Americans are deeply divided, and it's often politics that cleaves us apart. But Helene has brought together communities. The people who live here care about their neighbors. When the rubber meets the road, politics is cast aside, and we help one another, and that's inspiring to me, to know that we don't have to always be so polarized, and we can actually set all that aside and think about ourselves as a family, as a community, and help each other out.