Vultures Inherit The Earth

The Bicknell's Thrush is a bird that can only live in a few very very restricted places. It spends its summers in dense alpine forests in the Northeast of the US. In the winter, perhaps as many as 90 percent of the birds fly to the Dominican Republic. It's a bird without many options, and that makes it a poster child for what's to come. 

Featuring Chris Martin, Dave Anderson, Sam’s friend Stu, Chris Rimmer, Katie Fallon, Kirsti Carr, Nate Launer, Yolanda León, and Roman Julliard.

“Our bird”—that’s what conservationists in New England call the Bicknell’s Thrush. Why do they love it so much? It’s not a particularly comely bird. It’s almost entirely indistinguishable from the much more common gray-cheeked thrush. It has a nice song, but it’s about as endearing as any other song bird you might notice in the woods. What gets the Bicknell’s thrush its the moniker is simply that you can’t find it anywhere else.

“They’ve pigeon-holed themselves into a pretty narrow ecological niche,” says Chris Rimmer, director of executive director of the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, a little research and conservation outfit that has taken up the challenge of trying to study and conserve the thrush.
 
That ecological niche is so small it’s almost comical. In the summer, the birds stick to “thick stands of stunted conifers on steep mountain slopes or near tree-line” according to the researcher that successfully argued the bird should be considered its own species, back in 1993. That means we’re talking about a handful of weather-beaten, high mountain peaks in the northeast of the U.S. and Southern Quebec. In the winter, the birds fly south, and nearly all of them head to the same place. Rimmer says that somewhere around 90 percent of Bicknell’s thrushes spend the winter in wet forests in the interior of the Dominican Republic.

In other words, the Bicknell’s thrush is a specialist: on both ends of its range, it lives only in a very narrow band of habitats. They don’t seem to know how to live anywhere else. “If these habitats disappear from our mountain tops,” explains Rimmer, “I don’t think the birds are going to just find a different place to go.”
 
Consider, now, another bird, one nobody seems to call “our bird,” though it has its aficionados: The turkey vulture.
 
“I think turkey vultures are just about a perfect creature,” says Katie Fallon, author of Vulture: The Private Life of an Unloved Bird. “They breed from south central Canada, throughout most of North America, Central America, and all of South America. They’re even on islands... Caribbean Islands... the Falkland Islands. They’re a bird that can be seen by almost everyone in the hemisphere.”
 
Turkey vultures aren’t picky. They will nest in dark crevices, abandoned buildings, the nests of other birds, mammal burrows, and even quiet spots on the forest floor, if nothing else is available. They are also shockingly efficient. When soaring, their heart-rate is nearly the same as when they are sleeping, which has even led some to suggest turkey vultures might actually take quick naps while flying. This is just one of the many delightful facts about these birds—my personal favorite is that their stomachs are acidic enough that it can neutralize cholera, botulism and anthrax.

When you add these various evolutionary talents up, you get an animal that is poised for success in virtually any habitat; basically, you have a generalist on your hands.
 
The world is made up of many species, and any one of them will loosely either fit the profile of a generalist or a specialist. That has always been true. What is newly true is that species are disappearing at an alarming rate, and many scientists believe we’re seeing the beginnings of something that will eventually be recognized as a mass extinction event.

““If these habitats disappear from our mountain tops, I don’t think the birds are going to just find a different place to go.””

And the problem is that these extinctions are not distributed equally. They’re coming for the specialists first.
 
“There’s really a striking common pattern that specialist species are declining everywhere,” explains Romaine Julliard, a researcher with the National Museum for Natural History in Paris, who co-authored a paper on the subject with the striking sub-title: toward a global functional homogenization? He say he found the decline “in coral fish, marsupials in Australia, and bumblebees in the UK, and some plants.”
 
But what’s intriguing about the trend is that the decline of specialists is “almost balanced by the increase in population size of generalist species.” Julliard has studied European birds in particular, and he found that while the abundance of specialist birds has declined 20 percent, numbers of generalists has increased by 20 to 25 percent.
 
We see this in our tale of two birds as well. The Bicknell’s thrush is losing habitat at both ends of its range. The high, coniferous forests are retreating upslope towards oblivion as climate change warms the Northeast, and illegal agriculture has eaten into the national parks that serve as the bird’s refuge in the Dominican Republic. There are estimated to be around 100,000 of the birds in total, and the species is on several lists of birds that the conservation community is concerned about.

a baby turkey vulture in its nest

a baby turkey vulture in its nest

The turkey vulture—in contrast with the Bicknell’s thrush—is thriving. Roadkill on our highways has created what amounts to a massive network of turkey vulture smorgasbords, crisscrossing the nation. Because the black asphalt absorbs and re-radiates heat during the day, these serpentine buffets also act as a ready source of thermal updrafts for the birds to surf along, spreading their ever-growing population to every nook and cranny of the hemisphere. Fallon says that 25 years ago the birds were estimated to number around 5 million, but today that number has risen to nearly 20 million worldwide.
 
This is the current trajectory we are on: The beautiful finely tuned specialists, hyper-efficient little motors built to extract calories from their own very, very specific habitats, are on the way out. As they vanish, the generalists—admittedly, marvels of flexibility and adaptation in their own right—are ascendant, rising to fill the space that’s left behind.

What’s behind this shift? According to Julliard, to date, it’s just regular old habitat loss. “Even though the climate change footprint on pressure on biodiversity is increasing and the evidence for that is increasing, it’s still likely lower than habitat degradation,” he says. In fact, a paper on extinction risk that was published in the most recent Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences came to the same conclusion: Large animals are most at risk from us eating them, small animals are at risk because we are destroying the places they live.

“We already see the same starlings and house sparrows in almost any city anywhere in the world. Could we get to a future where the skies are full of nothing but turkey vultures, and the oceans are populated entirely by jellyfish? ”

sam evans-brown thrush-listening, with little luck

Is there anything wrong with this push toward functional homogenization? We already see the same starlings and house sparrows in almost any city anywhere in the world. Could we get to a future where the skies are full of nothing but turkey vultures, and the oceans are populated entirely by jellyfish? To me that feels like a nightmare scenario—something from Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy, except minus the genetic engineering.
 
Julliard has a reminder for me: “Evolution is really a force that drives to specialization and to differentiation,” he says. Pointing out that just as soon as we stop doing all the things that make life hard on them, the specialists will start to thrive again, and given enough time, speciation of new specialists will start to pick up again.
 
This reassurance is thanks to one of the tenets of ecological niche theory: In a stable habitat, natural selection favors the specialist. Which means “you need really a very high pressure to maintain this homogenization,” he says.
 
The problem, of course, is that the time-scales involved are deeply out of whack with our human experience. The world can recover from a whole heck of a lot, but that can take millions of years, and the world we’ll inhabit in the meantime will be a deeply impoverished one in comparison. And more to the point, who knows if we’ll even be around to watch the birds that repopulate that sky, to call them our own.

 

Outside/In was produced this week by:

Outside/In was produced this week by Sam Evans-Brown with help from: Maureen McMurray, Taylor Quimby, Hannah McCarthy,  and Jimmy Gutierrez.

Music from this week’s episode came from Blue Dot Sessions, Poddington Bear, David Szesztay, Jason Leonard and Ikimashoo Aoi.

Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

If you’ve got a question for our Ask Sam hotline, give us a call! We’re always looking for rabbit holes to dive down into. Leave us a voicemail at: 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837). Don’t forget to leave a number so we can call you back.

Audio Transcript: Vultures inherit the earth

Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:00:04] Do you hear any birds now?

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:00:15] Recently I went on two expeditions looking for birds. The first was with a friend of mine, Stu, on the side of New Hampshire's biggest, most famous rock pile, Mount Washington.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:00:27] It's almost like snipe hunting.

Stu: [00:00:28] Yeah.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:00:29] We're [00:00:30] going snipe hunting.

Stu: [00:00:32] We're looking for Little Foot, cousin of Bigfoot.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:00:36] Spot number two, a much smaller hill with two friends of the show, Dave Anderson and Chris Martin, hosts of NHPR's long running nature facts podcast, Something Wild.

Dave Anderson: [00:00:47] These birds live in a stone fortress of granite.

Chris Martin: [00:00:50] Or big hollow logs. That's another place they might know.

Dave Anderson: [00:00:53] Abandoned buildings.

Chris Martin: [00:00:54] Old abandoned buildings in the woods.

Dave Anderson: [00:00:56] And rocky den sites like this.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:00:58] In the first case on [00:01:00] Mount Washington with Stu.

Stu: [00:01:01] This is great.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:01:02] We're looking for the Bicknell's thrush.

Stu: [00:01:03] Love the sound of birds in the night.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:01:05] Yeah. A small, unremarkable songbird. Brown on top, gray with little spots on the belly. In the summer, it's only found in high elevation forests in the northeastern US and southeastern Canada, and there's only about 100,000 of them total. In the second expedition on the little rocky hill with Dave and Chris. We're looking for one of the Western hemisphere's most ubiquitous birds, the turkey vulture.

Dave Anderson: [00:01:29] If they feel trapped, [00:01:30] they will regurgitate on you.

Chris Martin: [00:01:32] Cool.

Dave Anderson: [00:01:33] They hiss. They have a naked head.

Chris Martin: [00:01:35] Do they hiss first?

Dave Anderson: [00:01:36] We'll find out.

Chris Martin: [00:01:37] Okay.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:01:38] That's why I brought my sunglasses.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:01:40] Supposedly, Dave knows where one of these majestic scavengers is nesting up on Mount Washington with Stu, as you heard --

Stu: [00:01:48] No.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:01:48] We struck out, but down lower with Chris and Dave looking for the turkey vulture.

Dave Anderson: [00:01:55] There he is. Whoa! So right now [00:02:00] my adrenaline is redlined. That just scared the crap out of me.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:02:04] After scrambling up the rocky slope, we spooked a fully grown turkey vulture. Six feet of silent black wings, a wrinkly, bald pink head out of its nest, a she or he spent the next 15 minutes flying in high, lazy circles above us.

Chris Martin: [00:02:22] The other one is probably out gathering food right now. I wouldn't expect it to be in here guarding the young. If there are young, which [00:02:30] I should be.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:02:31] Would they be eggs or chicks?

Chris Martin: [00:02:32] There could be eggs. But at this time of year, June, they're probably chicks. But it's hard to say until somebody takes a look.

Dave Anderson: [00:02:38] 1 or 2.

Chris Martin: [00:02:39] Can we go closer?

Dave Anderson: [00:02:41] Oh, we're going in.

Chris Martin: [00:02:41] I'm going closer.

Dave Anderson: [00:02:43] I'll follow.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:02:44] The nest is not really a nest. It's just a crevice in a field of boulders. And actually, what Chris and Dave did was send in the guy with the microphone first.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:02:56] The entrance was too small to stand or to crouch, so I had to sort [00:03:00] of slither in on my belly.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:03:02] Oh my gosh.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:03:03] By the way, we cleared this with Chris, who is a biologist with the Audubon Society.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:03:07] So how Chris, how close can I get before I'm being problematic?

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:03:11] And right there, just a few feet from the entrance, two fluffy little turkey vulture chicks.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:03:19] Oh my gosh, they're tiny.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:03:28] So two [00:03:30] bird chasing excursions, one for the rare and difficult to spot Bicknell's thrush, which ended in failure. The second, poking around in craggy corners for turkey vultures: a success. These two birds, the turkey vultures that we found, and the Bicknell's thrush that we didn't, they're representative of a trend that's underway right under your nose.

Katie Fallon: [00:03:55] Oh, I think turkey vultures are just about a perfect creature. They are a bird [00:04:00] that can be seen by almost everyone in the hemisphere.

Chris Rimmer: [00:04:04] The Bicknell's pigeonhole themselves into a pretty narrow ecological niche. And if these habitats disappear from our mountaintops, I don't think the birds are going to just find a different place to go.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:04:28] This is Outside/In, a show [00:04:30] about the natural world and how we use it. I'm Sam Evans-Brown. Today, it's the tale of two birds, one the turkey vulture, almost universally reviled, but they're also pretty amazing in their own way. The other, the Bicknell's thrush, is a local celebrity, the target of research dollars and enthusiastic birdwatchers. But it's in a tight spot, literally and figuratively. And the story of these two birds actually tells us the story about our world [00:05:00] as a whole. It tells us where we're headed toward a world of songbirds and high alpine gardens, or toward a world in which turkey vultures inherit the Earth.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:05:25] Okay. Right here at the top, I want to introduce you to an idea. You know how natural selection works. [00:05:30] Random mutations make individuals that are slightly different, slightly more able to succeed. All that. Now, one thing this does is the longer a species hangs out in a specific place, the better and better it gets at living in that place. They become really incredibly good at finding food and surviving much better than species that range more widely and live in many different places. This is called specialization, and as long as habitats are not [00:06:00] changing very much, it's the logical conclusion of natural selection. So now that you know that natural selection drives toward specialization, let's take a look at the Bicknell's thrush, starting with the guy who discovered it.

Chris Rimmer: [00:06:17] On June 15th, 1881. Believe it or not, I know the exact date.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:06:22] That's wildlife biologist Chris Rimmer. He's basically the world's expert on these birds.

Chris Rimmer: [00:06:27] An amateur ornithologist named Eugene [00:06:30] P. Bicknell was hiking around on Slide Mountain in the Catskills of New York.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:06:37] Hiking around and sees a bird that he doesn't recognize. It's a thrush that he doesn't recognize, and that was unusual for him.

Chris Rimmer: [00:06:44] So, as ornithologists did in those days, he pulled out his shotgun.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:06:49] And he collected the bird. Just in case you didn't know this Audubon, like James Audubon that the bird society was named for, also [00:07:00] shot a ton of birds. Bicknell shot two of them and picked them up.

Chris Rimmer: [00:07:05] Examined them in his hand, still didn't recognize him, and thereupon sent them down to the Smithsonian, where they were identified as a new subspecies, or race of the gray cheeked thrush, which is a much more northern and widely distributed bird.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:07:22] Case closed. Right? Well, fast forward 100 years. In [00:07:30] the 1990s, along comes this Canadian biologist.

Chris Rimmer: [00:07:33] A taxonomist zoogeographer named Henri Ouelett. He worked for the National Museum of Canada in Ottawa.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:07:39] Something about the Bicknell's gray cheeked thrush thing didn't quite sit right with him, so he gets to work.

Chris Rimmer: [00:07:46] So he examined specimens in museums, finds.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:07:50] Very slight differences in the feathers and body sizes. He then listens to them singing.

Chris Rimmer: [00:07:56] The songs of the two species, which are slightly different.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:07:59] And if you played the song [00:08:00] of the one species. So that the other could hear it, they just didn't react. Which is weird.

Chris Rimmer: [00:08:11] Because if you play the song of a, let's say, a song sparrow or a robin to another robin, usually they're going to react because they think there's an intruder on their territory. They got to drive it out, right?

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:08:22] And then comes the most important bit of evidence.

Chris Rimmer: [00:08:25] The final nail in the coffin.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:08:27] He tested their DNA and found that they were different enough [00:08:30] that probably the two species stopped breeding together around a million years ago. So he writes all this up in a paper, brings it to the authorities.

Chris Rimmer: [00:08:39] The sort of god squad of ornithological taxonomy, the American Ornithologists Union Checklist Committee, and they accepted it. And so in 1995 the switch was made. Bicknell's went from being a subspecies of gray cheek to being [00:09:00] its own distinct species.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:09:06] Let me just be clear about what this is. This is a small population of birds that a million years ago, started living further south than its former compatriots because they've now become separated. The two populations stop breeding with each other. But this happened relatively recently in evolutionary terms, so there haven't been enough random mutations [00:09:30] to make them actually look different.

Chris Rimmer: [00:09:32] You can't tell them apart. People say they can. I don't believe it.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:09:35] But science tells us they're different enough to be a new species, though. A new species that is almost indistinguishable from the old one. And there is nothing that birders love more than a new species.

Nate Launer: [00:09:46] So we're doing a 20 minute surveys at each point.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:09:50] This means people care enough about them to design a study to keep track of them, called Mountain Birdwatch.

Nate Launer: [00:09:57] And I can still hear that Winter Wren. He's really far away.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:09:59] And [00:10:00] that's why we're on the side of Mount Washington at the beginning of the story. Every year, a bunch of volunteers and a few college students paid by Chris Rimmer's organization, the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, go up and very carefully, very scientifically count birds. That first one you heard was Nate Launer. And here's another Kirsti Carr.

Kirsti Carr: [00:10:20] What I think is so cool is that it's endemic to the northeast and...

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:10:26] It's like, it's our bird.

Kirsti Carr: [00:10:28] It's our bird, and it's, you [00:10:30] know, it's globally rare and it travels all the way down to the Caribbean area, you know, to like the island of Hispaniola, I guess, is a place where it overwinters the most.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:10:48] So, you see, in the summer when they're breeding, Bicknell's thrush only lives in high altitude forests in the northeast of the US and the southeast of Canada. And then in the winter, they fly south. And some [00:11:00] crazy number, maybe as much as 90% of them spend the winter on Hispaniola. Mostly in the Dominican Republic. Just think how crazy that is. There are lots of big islands down there Cuba, Puerto Rico, Jamaica. But the thrushes are picky and the vast majority of them go to this one 30,000 square mile island. This bird is a specialist. It can survive in just one kind of habitat. [00:11:30] There are lots of specialists out there. Koalas, for example, can only eat eucalyptus leaves. Piping plovers can only nest on sparsely vegetated beaches. The monarch butterfly caterpillar can only feed on milkweed leaves. The Bicknell's thrush is like those more famous specialists. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology says it has one of the most restricted breeding and wintering ranges of any North American bird. If anything goes wrong in the places it lives, it's got [00:12:00] nowhere else to go. Now, in contrast, allow me to reintroduce you to:

Katie Fallon: [00:12:14] Turkey vultures are just amazing in that they can eat disease and neutralize it.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:12:21] The turkey vulture.

Katie Fallon: [00:12:25] Turkey vultures can eat things like an animal that has died from anthrax. [00:12:30] They can also eat an animal that's died of botulism toxin or cholera. The turkey vulture can eat it, and it doesn't affect the turkey vulture in any negative way.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:12:41] Our turkey vulture enthusiasts, by the by, is Katie Fallon, who wrote Vulture: The Private Life of an Unloved Bird.

Katie Fallon: [00:12:48] I actually went, had a few other possible subtitles for the book. One was Vulture: Eat Your Heart Out and another one was Vulture: Happy Entrails to you.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:12:59] Oh man. [00:13:00]

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:13:01] The crux of Katie's book is that turkey vultures deserve some cred here for cleaning up after us.

Katie Fallon: [00:13:07] We unfortunately aren't as fond of these birds as I think we should be because of the great service they provide.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:13:13] Most of what makes turkey vultures so amazing is how incredibly well adapted to eating dead things they are. But since that's gross, I'm going to intersperse gross but cool turkey vulture facts with some straight up cool turkey vulture facts here. So [00:13:30] turkey vulture stomach acid is roughly ten times more acidic than human stomach acid, which means by the time it gets to the other end, their waste is both clean and very acidic. So as a strategy, they deposit it all over their legs.

Katie Fallon: [00:13:47] That helps cool them off if it's hot. But we also think that that liquid waste acts as a sanitizer and it kills bacteria that might be on their feet from standing on a carcass. So it's sort of like they carry [00:14:00] their hand sanitizer with them, right?

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:14:03] Gross. But cool. Straight up cool. You know how you see them soaring all the time, lazily tipping their wings back and forth in the hot air?

Katie Fallon: [00:14:14] Yeah, they can soar for a long period of time. They've done some studies where they've put implants in Turkey vultures to monitor their heart rate and their respiration rates, and they found that when a turkey vulture is soaring, it's it's [00:14:30] a heart rate is about the same as when it's asleep.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:14:35] That's amazing!.

Katie Fallon: [00:14:36] Pretty amazing!

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:14:37] Yeah! My heart rate goes up if if I'm sitting in a chair versus lying in a bed.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:14:41] Okay, okay, okay. Just a couple more. Gross/Cool: Turkey vulture heads are bald so they won't get rotting meat chunks stuck to feathers when they're jamming them into carcasses. Regular old cool: Even though most birds can't really smell at all. Turkey vultures noses are so good that in one case study, a bunch of farmers were shooting and burying ground hogs, only [00:15:00] to find them dug up and eaten the next day.

Katie Fallon: [00:15:02] They have documented them being able to smell something like a dead rat underneath leaves in a forest, and they've also documented turkey vultures actually digging up carcasses that have been intentionally buried.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:15:15] And all of these various evolutionary talents add up to an extremely successful bird.

Katie Fallon: [00:15:22] They breed from south-central Canada throughout most of North America, Central America, and all [00:15:30] of South America. They're even on islands. Caribbean islands. The Falkland Islands has turkey vultures. They are a bird that can be seen by almost everyone in the hemisphere. Oh, I think turkey vultures are just about a perfect creature.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:15:54] So, they're like an amazing generalist.

Katie Fallon: [00:15:56] Yes they are, they are an amazing generalist. Exactly.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:16:02] A [00:16:00] generalist. They're thriving everywhere. They can nest in a rocky talus slope or in an abandoned warehouse. They don't need a very specific set of ecological conditions in order to survive. They take what they've got and they work with it. There are lots of these cockroaches, rats, ravens, raccoons and jellyfish. Quite often, generalists do a good job living alongside humans. [00:16:30] I mean, if you think about it, we're really the most obvious example of a generalist. So we've got one very rare bird that needs a very specific habitat to survive, and another that can live almost everywhere. Now, you've probably heard this part of the story already. Species are disappearing. Many scientists believe we're in the midst of something that will eventually be recognized [00:17:00] as a mass extinction event. And those extinctions, they're coming for the specialists first.

Roman Julliard: [00:17:07] Yeah. So I'm Roman Julliard. I'm working at the National Museum for Natural History in Paris.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:17:14] This is Roman Julliard, who came up with a way to mathematically define what a specialist species is.

Roman Julliard: [00:17:20] Since the beginning of our survey, which is now 25 years old, that's on average special species population size [00:17:30] have decreased by 20%.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:17:32] But this is the story you've heard already. The other half of the story is that specialists are being replaced by generalists.

Roman Julliard: [00:17:41] And it's almost balanced by the increase in population size of generalist species.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:17:47] Almost balanced. So while specialists are declining, generalist species are growing. Now, Roman studies birds. And we have been talking about birds. But this is not just a bird [00:18:00] thing.

Roman Julliard: [00:18:00] There's really a striking common pattern that specialist species are declining in everywhere.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:18:06] So all around the world.

Roman Julliard: [00:18:08] And it was true in coral fish, marsupials in Australia...

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:18:15] The Bicknell's thrushes and species like them...

Roman Julliard: [00:18:17] And bumblebees in, in the UK and...

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:18:20] ...are struggling.

Roman Julliard: [00:18:21] Yeah and some plants also.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:18:23] And the turkey vultures, the generalists, are doing better. They're actually getting more numerous. [00:18:30] Just one particularly terrifying example. A few years ago, the first study ever to try to estimate global jellyfish populations came out, and it found that in 60% of the world's oceans, jellies are on the rise. The headlines that followed jellyfish are taking over the oceans. We're headed toward a jellyfish world. What's [00:19:00] the deal? Well, it's really not a surprise.

Roman Julliard: [00:19:04] Well, it's most likely a habitat degradation. I mean, it's the most parsimonious explanation.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:19:13] The most parsimonious explanation. If you only know how to live in one place, and that place is changing because of logging or invasive plants or increased forest fires, or not enough forest fires or whatever the problem is locally, you're in a tough spot. And that's the story with our bird, too. [00:19:30]

Yolanda León: [00:19:30] No matter how much it's done in North America, if in the wintering range and there there are no, no changes, it's it's it's a bottleneck.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:19:42] This is Yolanda León, executive director of Grupo Jaragua, a conservation organization down in the Dominican Republic. While we snooty New Englanders think of the Bicknell's thrush as our bird, it spends half the year in the Caribbean, too. Nearly all of the population spends the winter [00:20:00] on a single island, and a lot of them are in a single place right now.

Yolanda León: [00:20:05] Most of the habitat for many of these mountain birds and other species is in Sierra de Bahoruco.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:20:13] The Sierra de Bahoruco is a mountain range on the border with Haiti. It's also a national park, the biggest in the Dominican Republic.

Yolanda León: [00:20:20] And you would think because it's a national park, it's it's protected and the birds are safe there. However, [00:20:30] what we found out was that there was a lot of agriculture going on inside the park. This is all illegal agriculture.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:20:39] This is what's called a paper park. The government declared it off limits, but its borders aren't marked or enforced. So over time, people have started to cut down trees and grow crops. In particular, wealthy farmers have started to grow avocados.

Yolanda León: [00:20:54] And these are export avocados.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:20:56] So this is like this is like Chipotle, you know, [00:21:00] all the, all the guacamole that we love.

Yolanda León: [00:21:03] Yes, yes. And you know I love avocados, ad people say, it's like: you're opposed to avocado! I love avocado, but avocados don't have to be produced in a national park.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:21:14] A quick aside: apparently most of the Dominican Republic's avocados go to Europe, not to Chipotle. And let me just put a big old disclaimer here. National parks in developing economies is a complicated, fraught topic. Some subsistence farmers actually work in this park and [00:21:30] had it declared right on top of them. And others are folks who genuinely didn't know the park was here because, you know, it's just on paper.

Yolanda León: [00:21:37] Like, with the avocado and the farming, there are big players and small players, and I think chasing after the small players, the poorest people is not the best solution. And it's not it's not very fair.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:21:50] But after all caveats about the problems with how Western-style conservation is executed in the developing world, it's pretty easy to recognize that this isn't a good situation [00:22:00] for our bird.

Yolanda León: [00:22:01] On the north side of Bahoruco, we do have a good area that seems to be off limits because of of road access, and I think that area is pretty safe. But on the south side of Bahoruco, if nothing is done in the next 2 to 5 years and we, we are not going to have any more of the the birds or any of its fauna.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:22:33] Habitat [00:22:30] degradation a specialist's worst nightmare. And it's happening up on the north end of their range, too.

Chris Rimmer: [00:22:40] Yeah, it's absolutely it's one of the most vulnerable habitat types in the northeast.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:22:46] Here's Chris Rimmer again. Remember, in the summer, Bicknell's thrush live in a specific type of forest up on the sides and tops of mountains.

Chris Rimmer: [00:22:56] These forests are predicted to begin getting [00:23:00] pushed up slope by warming temperatures. And if these habitats disappear from our mountain tops, I don't think the birds are going to just find a different place to go. They've pigeonholed themselves into a pretty narrow ecological niche.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:23:13] Meanwhile, turkey vultures, they're thriving.

Katie Fallon: [00:23:16] 25 years ago, we thought there were about 5 million turkey vultures.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:23:21] Since then, we've made more roads which mean more roadkill and also more hot air updrafts to surf along. There's also less shooting [00:23:30] and poisoning of vultures going on, and warmer winters probably are better for them, too. Less frozen meat. So today -

Katie Fallon: [00:23:38] And the most recent estimates that I've read are, you know, we might have as many as 20 million turkey vultures worldwide.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:23:51] This is the trajectory we're on. The beautiful, finely tuned specialists. Hyper efficient little motors built to extract [00:24:00] calories from their own very, very specific habitats are on their way out. And as they vanish, the perhaps equally beautiful in their own way, generalists are rising to fill the space that's left behind. You can already see the same starlings and house sparrows and pigeons, and almost any city anywhere in the world. In my mind, there's this nightmare scenario where the skies [00:24:30] are full of nothing but turkey vultures. The forests and the cities are full of skunks and raccoons, and the oceans are populated entirely by jellyfish. It's the stuff of dystopian novels. It's the jellyfish world.

Roman Julliard: [00:24:54] So I don't think we'll I mean, we really need to work hard [00:25:00] to have the nightmare scenario.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:25:03] Ah. A reminder from Roman Julliard. Remember where specialization comes from. In stable environments, specialists actually do better than generalists.

Roman Julliard: [00:25:13] You need really a very high pressure to maintain these homogenization.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:25:17] Specialists are just better than generalists at getting food in their very special niche.

Roman Julliard: [00:25:22] If you relax a bit, evolution is really a force that drives to specialization in a differentiation. [00:25:30]

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:25:30] So if we stop doing all the things that we're doing that make life hard on them and the habitats stabilize, the specialists will start to thrive again. And given enough time, we'll even get new specialist species. The problem today is environments are changing faster than evolution can change the animals. Really, if you set your frame of reference long enough, thousands of years, even millions of years, there's very little that the earth can't [00:26:00] recover from.

Roman Julliard: [00:26:01] So I think we I mean, we should still be optimistic, and, uh...

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:26:05] So, so are you. Are you optimistic then?

Roman Julliard: [00:26:11] There's no objective reason to be optimistic because the the pattern is still the decrease wherever you look at. But it's still reversible. That's the, the point.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:26:24] That was a very scientific answer.

Roman Julliard: [00:26:25] Yeah.

Sam Evans-Brown: [00:26:39] No [00:26:30] objective reason to be optimistic, but maybe we should try anyway. Pretty much my motto going through life. Outside/I [00:27:00]n was produced this week by me, Sam Evans-Brown, with help from Hannah McCarthy, Taylor Quimby, Jimmy Gutierrez, Ben Henry, and Maureen McMurray. Music from this week's episode came to us from oaddington Bear, Blue Dot Sessions, David Zest, Jason Leonard, and Ikimasoo Aoi. If you've got a second, head online to check out our website [00:27:30] outsideinradio.org. We've got photos of the tiny turkey vulture chicks and the crevice that I had to crawl into in order to see them. We'll be posting them on social media too @Outsideinradio. Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.

In Too Deep

This week, we're bringing you an adventure from our friends at the Outside Podcast. Trapped in a shipwreck on the ocean floor, running out of oxygen, body temperature falling, how long could you survive? Intrepid producers Robbie Carver and Peter Frick-Wright take a deep dive on this one.

In 1991, a man named Michael Proudfoot was SCUBA diving off the coast of Baja, Mexico. The details of his story are everywhere. And, more or less, the same. Exploring a shipwreck, Proudfoot breaks his regulator and surfaces in an air pocket deep in the belly of the ship. He finds a tea-kettle full of fresh water, and eats sea urchins to survive. But as producers of the Outside Podcast— Robbie Carver and Peter Frick-Wright — dig deeper and deeper into the tale, it becomes harder and harder to tell what's real and what isn't.

This is a story about deep-sea fact checking. Fact checking to the point of no return. What happens when you can't prove a story -- a really great, big fish of a story -- right or wrong?

Outside/In was produced this week by:

Outside/In was produced this week by Sam Evans-Brown with help from: Taylor Quimby, Hannah McCarthy,  and Jimmy Gutierrez.

Special thanks to Robbie Carver and Peter Frick-Wright for sharing their reporting and story from the Outside Podcast. You can hear more here.

Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

If you’ve got a question for our Ask Sam hotline, give us a call! We’re always looking for rabbit holes to dive down into. Leave us a voicemail at: 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837). Don’t forget to leave a number so we can call you back.

Pick Your Poison

in

In our long, evolutionary history, modernity is just a blip. The wiring of our brains took place over hundreds of thousands of years of hunting and gathering food out in the wilderness, and nothing proves that more vividly than the practice of mushroom hunting. It’s incredibly addictive, even to those who know all too well the associated dangers.

Photo © 2012 J. Ronald Lee

Photo © 2012 J. Ronald Lee

***DISCLAIMER*** Don't pick and eat wild mushrooms based on photos you find in this post, or really anywhere on the internet. Please consult professionals. ***DISCLAIMER***

|This story comes to us from Barbara Paulsen, the host and producer of Midway: A Podcast about Midlife Transitions.

To tell that story, we’ll start with a woman named Donna Camille Davis. On a November day a few years back, Donna and her boyfriend got in their car and drove north for a weekend getaway from their home in San Francisco.

“We were finding the most amazing mushrooms,” she says, “I think we counted seven different types of edible mushroom, from hedgehogs, to chanterelles, to black trumpets, to blewits, and matsutakes.”

The difference between those mushrooms and the ones you find in your grocery stores (besides not tasting like styrofoam) is that wild mushrooms can’t be cultivated. So if you want to eat wild mushrooms—and lots of people do because they’ve got way more interesting mushroomy flavors—you have to go into the forest and find them yourself.

And when it came to foraging, Donna knew what she was doing. She’d been mushroom hunting for years. She’d found porcinis the size of her head. She had no trouble telling a black trumpet from a chanterelle.

“They took one look at me and wheeled me right upstairs immediately, because they knew that this was not good.”
— Donna Camille Davis

But, as it turned out, on that particular day in November, Donna made a mistake. Within days, she was living every mushroom hunter’s worst nightmare.

On the way home from her trip up north, the first symptom appeared: drop dead fatigue. She slept for three whole days. When she got up, she looked at herself in the mirror and saw that her skin was jaundiced, and she rushed to the hospital.

“They took one look at me and wheeled me right upstairs immediately,” she says, “because they knew that this was not good.”

When the doctors told her, “We think this is mushroom poisoning,” all she could think was this is going to be interesting... this is going to be interesting.

Scratching a Primal Itch

Salt Point Park in Sonoma Valley California is an oak and pine forest perched on the Pacific Coast. It’s a mecca for mushroom hunters—and one of the few parks that permit foraging in California. | Photo by Barbara Paulsen

To understand why mushroom hunters would take the risk of getting poisoned, you’ve got to go hunt mushrooms. So last Spring, I went to the very place where Donna Davis got herself into trouble: Salt Point State Park in California’s Sonoma Valley. I drove there with a self-taught mushroom expert, Patrick Hamilton. He’s got a ponytail and a soul patch and he became fascinated with mushrooms back in the 80s, after smoking some really strong Maui Wowie. These days, he teaches groups of beginners how to identify edible mushrooms.   

There was a steady drizzle as about a dozen of us gathered in the parking lot. First, Patrick sent us off to pick any mushrooms we could find, declaring, “If you see something fun, bring it!” After 15 minutes we met up to share what we’d picked, and Patrick had us lay all the mushrooms out  on a log. Most of them, he told us, were inedible, and one was a particularly poisonous specimen called a Deadly Galerina.

He proceeded to tell us how to identify the three or four mushrooms we wanted to find that day: black trumpets, hedgehogs, candy caps, and chanterelles. And then he sent us off again. Only this time, we knew what we were looking for.

But it was really hard!  I came across a British couple who also couldn’t find anything. We told Patrickour plight, but he wasn’t having it. He knew that our eyes just hadn’t adjusted yet—we were looking, but our eyes didn’t know what to see. He told us to get on our hands and knees  (“For Chrissakes!”) and look underneath things.

Take a peek into the bag of a novice mushroom hunter who’s delighted to have found chanterelles, black trumpets, and other edible mushrooms. | Photo: Barbara Paulsen

Fungi hunting is a muddy business. Mushrooms pop up a week and a half after a rainstorm and thrive in moist environments, like the sides of streams. | Photo: Barbara Paulsen

It’s extremely important to keep the entire mushroom intact for correct identification, as Donna Davis learned when a bit of poisonous mushroom contaminated an entire bag of edible mushrooms. | Photo: Barbara Paulsen

After I found this yellowfoot chanterelle, I finally got my “mushroom eyes.” Yellowfoots are a chef’s favorite for their delicate, mushroomy flavor. | Photo: Barbara Paulsen

And then something weird happened. He pointed to some black trumpets right there, hidden under leaves, and once Id seen them, they began to snap into focus everywhere I looked. It was like one of those Magic Eye books from the ‘90s, the ones with the meaningless pattern that hides a 3-D image. You stare and stare and stare, and then all of a sudden…Pop! There’s the picture.

I was drenched by the rain. My pants were smeared with mud. But I was crazed with the hunt. And right then is when Patrick said it was time for us to head back.

As it turns out there’s a term for what happened to me in the woods of California: Scientists call it the “pop-out effect.” Mushroom hunters call this “getting your eyes on.” I used to work for National Geographic, and for years I sent reporters all over the world to hang out with hunter-gatherer tribes. When they got back, their feet would be cut up and they’d be covered with insect bites, but they’d all tell me the same thing: Even though it’s really hard living off the land, there’s something deeply satisfying about finding your own food.

Veteran mushroom hunter Patrick Hamilton sorts the mushrooms our group has collected on a log in the forest. He’s taught thousands of people in the San Francisco Bay area how to safely identify edible mushrooms. | Photo: Barbara Paulsen

And that makes sense, right? I mean, our eyes are built to do this, to scour the ground for food. And every time we find something tasty, our brains give us this little chemical jolt. That’s what foragers call mushroom fever.

Invasion of the Death Cap

And that’s exactly what happened on that day in November 2014, when Donna and her boyfriend went mushroom hunting. They stuffed bags full of mushrooms, and they brought them back home to sort through.

“We didn't see anything unusual,” she says, “There were some pieces there that didn't have the caps so we tossed them out just to be safe.”

The next day, Donna invited friends over for wild mushroom soup. It was so delicious that she had a second bowl—and you know the rest.

Three days later, Donna was in the hospital, where they told her about an earlier patient who’d gotten poisoned and died. Before she was told it was the mushrooms that were making her sick, the thought of having picked the wrong mushroom never crossed her mind.

The reason Donna didn’t realize she’d been poisoned is that it took so long for her symptoms to appear. That delay was actually a clue, since it suggested that Donna had probably eaten a mushroom called Amanita phalloides, or the “death cap.” Other mushrooms can poison you—make you so sick you might wish you were dead—but it’s the death cap that’s most likely to kill you. Its toxins work slowly, and by the time you begin to feel really sick, it’s got a head start on digesting your liver from the inside out.

“There are people that accidentally poison themselves with death caps just about every year,” says Cat Adams, who studies mycology at the University of California at Berkeley. She says the death cap is responsible for 90 percent of fatal mushroom poisonings worldwide.

Despite its deadly reputation, Cat is enchanted by it. “I think it’s a really beautiful mushroom. It starts as a cute little button,” and grows up to be an elegant, mostly white mushroom that has  gills underneath and a greenish tinge to its cap.

“It’s so common, it smells good, it tastes good, apparently. I’ve read a lot of reports of people who’ve been poisoned and unanimously people report that it was a very delicious mushroom, even as they’re dying.”
— Cat Adams

But (and this perhaps is no terrible surprise) it’s actually not even supposed to be in North America. The death cap arrived here around 1930, when American botanists imported certain oak trees from Europe and the native soil around the trees’ roots were laced with death cap spores.

The deadly mushroom has been spreading across North America ever since. It’s been spotted in forests from Maryland, north into New Hampshire and Maine, and on the West Coast from Los Angeles all the way up to British Columbia. It’s especially plentiful in northern California, where Donna got herself into trouble. When you combine this with so many amateurs now cooking up wild mushrooms in their risotto, the number of poisonings is going up.

“It’s so common, it smells good, it tastes good, apparently,” says Cat Adams, “I’ve read a lot of reports of people who’ve been poisoned and unanimously people report that it was a very delicious mushroom, even as they’re dying.”

Last winter 14 people were poisoned in northern California in the month of December alone. Four were trying to get high on magic mushrooms, but most of the victims were just cooking up mushrooms for dinner. One meal poisoned five people, including an 18-month-old girl who now has permanent brain damage. In every case, a death cap was somehow mistaken for an edible  mushroom.

Adams says the death cap can grow intermixed with other edibles mushrooms, so if you’re not paying really close attention one may wind up in your basket. And since only a few milligrams of its toxins can be fatal, minor mistakes can become deadly.

Heart of a mushroom | Stanley Zimny by CC BY-NC 2.0 via flickr

Heart of a mushroom | Stanley Zimny by CC BY-NC 2.0 via flickr

Donna’s Path

“The whole episode of being in the hospital is like an Alice in Wonderland story in and of itself,” Donna says. Once doctors realized she had likely been poisoned by a death cap, they asked her more questions. Terrifying questions.

Do you have a will? …You need one, now.

Do you understand what it's like to have a liver transplant?  

Donna was in bad shape. She was throwing up the charcoal doctors had given her to extract the poison. Enzyme levels showed her liver was failing. “I was just in this kind of like dazed world of not really knowing what was going on,” she says.

And then she started to hallucinate. On the wall of her room in the intensive care unit, she saw a path.

“I could look down and the ground is like pebbles, clear, clear pebbles, and a canopy of trees and I could see the leaves and the veins and the bark,” she remembers, “and I'm beginning to walk down this path because it's like, ‘Wow, this is such a beautiful path!’”

But then, in her vision, things began to change. “As I walk down the path it was completely pitch black, and I thought … I'm not going there.”

Donna decided something remarkable, something that might have seemed—in that moment—nonsensical. Even though doctors were telling her to write a will, and that her liver was failing, Donna began to think otherwise. She didn’t believe she was going to die. Because of how badly she was doing, her doctor told her she was at the top of the liver transplant list, which has more than 14,000 people waiting on it. But when a liver became available, she turned it down.

She remembers the doctor looking at her and saying, “You don't want the liver?” and she replied, “If I don’t need it, I don’t want it.” She says they must have thought she was insane, or high (maybe a side effect of the mushrooms?).

But Donna was right. Her enzyme levels stayed dangerously high for several days, but on her fifth day in ICU, her levels came way down, and her liver started to regenerate. She says it was—inexplicably, unbelievably—a full recovery.

By Quinn Dombrowski from Berkeley, USA - Hedgehog mushroom, CC BY-SA 2.0,

By Quinn Dombrowski from Berkeley, USA - Hedgehog mushroom, CC BY-SA 2.0,

Backlash from the Mycophiliacs

This past summer, citing the rise of mushroom poisonings, the CDC issued a warning. They called the spread of death cap mushrooms a serious public health concern and issued a caution against eating foraged mushrooms.

Patrick Hamilton, the guy who took me mushroom hunting, wasn’t impressed.  

“Mushrooms have a notoriety, right? It’s like “Ow! Wow! Wild mushroom poisoning!” he told me, over the phone, “I think people fall off ladders a lot more, right? It’s a much greater public health concern!”

That’s true, but of course a lot more people climb ladders every day than go foraging for mushrooms. Regardless, Patrick is right that there are very few mushroom-related deaths, only 10 or so annually. And If you’re a mushroom hunter, this all fits into a maddening pattern: Even though very few wild mushrooms are poisonous, most Americans are afraid of them, because they don’t know which ones are safe to eat. That’s called mycophobia. But then when they do learn about mushroom foraging and try it out, a few get themselves poisoned. That triggers sensational press, warnings from the CDC, both of which feed Americans’ fear of mushrooms. A classic vicious circle.

So when people get poisoned by mushrooms, there’s often this backlash against the victims by the mushroom hunting community. Patrick says whenever he hears about these poisonings, he just thinks it’s “people doing stupid things.”

“Really why would you put something in your mouth and eat it when you don’t know what it is?” he asks.

He must have used the word stupid a half dozen times when I asked him about this.

“Really why would you put something in your mouth and eat it when you don’t know what it is?”
— Patrick Hamilton

“How many red lights do you have to go through?” he sputtered, “Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupider, stupidest!”

Given the mushroom hunting community’s sensitivity to this issue, it’s no surprise that when Donna Davis’ poisoning became public, they weren’t exactly sympathetic. They seized on a detail from a news report that said Donna had confused a hedgehog mushroom, which has pretty distinctive toothy spikes under its head, with a death cap mushroom, which has gills underneath.

The backlash to Donna’s story on the internet was just as dismissive. Mushroom hunters were like, this lady doesn’t know her ass from her elbow. She hasn’t bothered to learn to identify the number one deadly mushroom! If you know what you’re doing, you could never make that mistake.

Patrick cites this old adage: “There are old mushroom hunters and there are bold mushroom hunters, but there are no old, bold mushroom hunters.” In other words, experienced mushroom hunters don’t accidentally eat deadly mushrooms.

But Cat Adams disagrees. “I’ve read like every paper there is about the death cap,” and she says even super-experienced mushroom hunters can make mistakes. She says she’s read cases of people who have been hunting mushroom for decades and —who accidentally poisoned themselves by eating  death caps.

“I really...I think sometimes a lot of people that do mushroom hunting are scornful toward those who get poisoned as a way to sort of make themselves feel better, but I think that really this could happen to anyone,” says Cat, “I think that really we should see them as examples of the fact that what we do is inherently a little dangerous and that we have to stay vigilant, always.”

But She Can’t Put Down the Basket

True mushroom hunters collect their bounty in baskets, to prevent the fungi from getting squashed. Plastic bags are a no-no: By day’s end, mushrooms turn to mush. | Photo: Barbara Paulsen

I asked Donna where she thinks she went wrong that day she got poisoned, and she told me it’s hard to say. Her best guess is that she accidentally slipped a death cap into her bag of hedgehog mushrooms, and that must have been one of the capless stems she’d discarded when she and her boyfriend sorted through the mushrooms after the hunt.

While it’s remarkable that Donna survived, it’s maybe more remarkable that she was the only one at the dinner party who got sick. She thinks this is because she actually made two batches of soup, one with chanterelles, the other with only hedgehogs. “Lo and behold, I was the [only] one who ate the soup that had the poisonous mushroom,” she says. “Thank God, they didn’t eat the poisonous soup.”

In retrospect, Donna says her real mistake was that she got overconfident, and that made her careless. Given the minute amount of toxin needed to kill you, the safest thing would have been to throw out all of the mushrooms from the contaminated hedgehog batch…no matter how delicious they were.

But Donna doesn’t beat herself up over her mistake. She never thought, how could I be so stupid? “It was,” she says, “just something that happened.” Since her recovery, she’s slowed things down in her life. But she still forages for mushrooms.

“You know you make your decisions. How you want to live your life. Do you want to live your life in fear?” She says, “Yes there are things that I did learn from that. Absolutely. But is it going to stop me from ever eating mushrooms again? No. I don't choose to live my life that way.”

Outside/In was produced this week by:

Barbara Paulsen with help from Sam Evans-Brown, Taylor Quimby, Molly Donahue, Jimmy Gutierrez, Ben Henry, Hannah McCarthy, and Logan Shannon.

***DISCLAIMER*** Don't pick and eat wild mushrooms based on photos you find in this post, or really anywhere on the internet. Please consult professionals. ***DISCLAIMER***

Music from this week’s episode came from Podington Bear, Blue Dot Sessions, and Antony Raijekov.

Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

If you’ve got a question for our Ask Sam hotline, give us a call! We’re always looking for rabbit holes to dive down into. Leave us a voicemail at: 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837). Don’t forget to leave a number so we can call you back.

Lime & Tabasco

in

Two young, starry-eyed conservation biologists take a college road trip through Mexico that transforms their outlook on the world. In so doing, they created the foundation for a strategy that would lead them to succeed where heavy-handed government policies had failed. But along the way, they had to get their hands dirty. 

 

In grad school, Wallace J Nichols (or J, for short), wouldn't have been considered the most likely person to help save an entire species. He had hair down to his ass and lived in a teepee on the edge of a national park near the University of Arizona in Tucson. He was a surfer bum, studying ecology.

But J, despite his waywardness, had a deep, abiding love of sea turtles. As a young boy, he would catch turtles in the Chesapeake Bay and, lacking the scientific apparatus to apply a real tag, paint numbers on their shells. J was not accustomed to people sharing this near-fanatic affinity for turtles, but then he met Jeff Seminoff in Tucson. The two of them, they discovered, had both volunteered at the same turtle nesting beach in Costa Rica at different times and they struck up an immediate friendship.

J and Jeff would take Jeff's 1975 Land Cruiser to Baja, Mexico on the weekends, go surfing and scuba diving during the day, and drink tequila around beach bonfires at night. Life was easy. But around that same time, in the early nineties, J and Jeff's favorite animal was in crisis, especially in Baja. Sea turtle populations had tanked so hard in recent years that the Mexican government outlawed hunting them in 1990, and most people thought it was too late to save them.

In their youthful haze, J and Jeff planned a road trip that would take them to every turtle nesting beach in Mexico. But what they saw weighed down the free-spiritedness that had driven them to take this trip. Some nesting beaches, where millions of turtle hatchlings had once drug themselves into the water, were now empty. Ancient fishermen spoke of mythical times long past when one could walk across the Gulf of California on the backs of turtles.

Jeff & J circa 1993 when they were both guiding turtle trips to Pacific Mexico.

Against the advice of professors who told them it was too late, J and Jeff both changed the concentration of their studies to sea turtles; they hoped—with a nearly-deranged confidence common to grad students—they might change the trajectory for a critically endangered species. Mexico's turtle fishing ban had very little discernible impact in improving the turtle's bottom line. Commercial fishing had stopped, but a black market still thrived. Exactly how two suburban kids from the east coast might change a turtle-eating culture that went back centuries remained unclear.

Trying to Catch a Turtle

Jeff Seminoff is now a scientist for NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. When I interviewed him in his office a few months ago he acknowledged the difficulty of the quest. "To go in and be an armchair conservationist and tell people not to eat turtle would literally," he said, "have been no different than somebody going into anywhere in the United States and saying you can't eat hamburger anymore. It's illegal."

The government ban wasn't working because eating turtle was deeply embedded in Mexican culture. Poor families in fishing communities ate turtle several times a week for subsistence. Rich people ate it as a show of power, which in turn created a black market. J Nichols told me that for his first couple of years working in Baja, the cultural forces standing in his way seemed insurmountable: "Whether it was a chief of police or a governor, [eating turtle] was something people did with impunity."

To prove they actually had a project worth pursuing, Jeff and J needed to catch a turtle so they could measure and document it for their research, showing that a long term tagging study would be viable. But to do that they needed a knowledgeable fisherman, and that wasn't exactly an easy get. The cultural differences between two middle class grad students and a Baja fisherman can hardly be overstated. Fishing was basically "janitorial status" at the time, J says.

In Juncalito, a small village 700 miles south of the U.S. border, they found Juan de la Cruz. Juan started fishing in 1959, just as the turtle population began to nosedive. He remembered the days when turtle seemed plentiful and he still knew where to catch them. Jeff and J heard he was the greatest turtle hunter they could hope to find, but when they approached him, he told them to go away and not come back.

Jeff Seminoff with the first turtle he and J ever caught.

The Americans didn't have the right permits to catch a turtle and if Juan had been caught by the authorities in a boat with two Americans and a turtle, he would certainly have been facing jail time. They offered Juan a meager amount of money for his time, but Juan said, "No, no, no, I'm afraid if we catch a turtle then you will go to jail and I will have to go with you. Then if I have to go to the jail, I will kill you."

Day after day, J and Jeff showed up at Juan's house trying to convince him to help. They would bring beer and Juan would feed them. Jeff and J met his wife and daughters. Eventually, Juan began to appreciate these two nutty Americans and their hard-headedness. He decided to help. He took his turtle nets out from under a piece of corrugated metal where he kept them hidden and the three of them went out at night to try to catch a turtle.

As Juan dozed off just before sunrise, J heard a splashing in the net. He nudged Juan, but Juan said, "No, no it's probably a sea lion." The splashing continued though and Juan heard the strained breath of a sea turtle. They heaved it into Juan's panga, a Mexican fishing boat, and as a pink sun rose in the background, J shot pictures, while Jeff measured the turtle.

"It was an indication that there was one turtle left," J told me later. "We built our case on that one turtle and on Juan's trust."

Jeff and J pitched research projects, and got grants. During the beginning of the internet boom in the mid-nineties, they put a satellite tracker on a turtle and shared the data. Classrooms full of children watched on computer screens as "Adelita" swam from Baja to Japan. It was the farthest tracked migration of a turtle up to that point.

But their research wasn't converting to actual conservation of the species. They spent time in Mexican classrooms educating young school children about the dwindling population, but most adults still ate turtle regularly.

Lime & Tabasco

J and Jeff were becoming full-fledged scientists. They had the right permits from the Mexican government to catch and release turtle. This made it easier to convince Mexican fishermen to help them, but it didn't mean they had the complete trust of those fishermen. After all, this is two foreigners descending from the United States and telling turtle hunters it's bad to catch turtles to feed their family. If Jeff and J couldn't convince these fishermen to reduce the turtle catch, they—like the Mexican government—had no chance of succeeding.

Many fishermen had asked J during his travels around Baja whether or not he had eaten turtle. Answering honestly, he said no and very frequently, that was the end of the conversation. There was a cultural rift between himself and the fishermen, that he could not bridge. The two halves of J were profoundly conflicted: on one side J's inner child, that little turtle tagger standing on a dock of the Chesapeake Bay; on the other, J the burgeoning conservationist, who knew that to gain the trust of Mexican fishermen he might have to compromise his ideals.

J ultimately made a decision that went against the ethics of many of his scientific colleagues and many environmental activists. The first time he ate turtle, a fishermen had accidentally caught the animal in his net and it had died. J knew the fishermen wouldn't let the meat go to waste, and he felt like it might go down easier if he knew that the turtle hadn't died just so someone could eat it.

But the second time was much harder.

One of J's contacts caught a turtle and J knew he was planning to eat it. J asked the fishermen to save him some research samples, if indeed he did eat the turtle. "Oh you want me to kill this turtle for you," the fisherman replied. J protested, but the fisherman butchered the turtle right in front of him. His wife served the liver, sliced, with tabasco sauce and lime wedges.

J still didn't know how to build a movement of fishermen dedicated to saving turtles, but he felt like eating that liver was somehow a step toward making it happen.

Grupo Tortuguero

The idea of not eating turtle wasn't widely catching on in most places where Jeff and J were working across Baja, but in one community fishermen were beginning to become receptive. Jeff Seminoff focused all of his turtle research in the community of Los Angeles Bay and J often worked there too. Jeff estimates the two of them dropped $50,000 a year in research money there, and paying volunteers began coming to LA Bay to assist in their work. Local fishermen began to realize that there could be money in this conservation thing.

While Jeff was working in just the one community, J was driving around Baja working with fishermen in many different places, and several fishermen, including Juan de la Cruz, asked J about the other fishermen he worked with. They wanted to know who the other fishermen were, where they lived, how many turtles they caught. As J was driving one day, the idea dawned on him: why not bring this informal network of fishermen together? Get them all in the same room and talk about how it might be possible to reduce the turtle catch.

Close-up of the first turtle Jeff and J ever caught.

J told Jeff Seminoff about the idea and they mashed it around together to come up with a plan. They scraped together enough money for beer, tacos and some hotel rooms and held the meeting on a weekend. They even invited, in J’s words, “the biggest, most badass poachers of all time” to show up. They were taking a big risk. If the endgame is for two foreign scientists to tell a room full of badasses to stop doing what they do, the chances of those people getting angry or walking out is high.

But it wasn’t just foreigners at this meeting; they had allies. Instead of bringing out charts and talking about the decline of turtles, Jeff and J got help from people they’d already convinced like Juan de la Cruz. “I’m worried that if we keep catching the turtle my grandkids will never be able to meet them,” Juan told everyone. The second decision they made involved compromise, just like J’s initial decision to eat turtle. Instead of asking people to stop catching turtle, period, J and Jeff asked if everyone in the room could “throw one back.”

“Because if they can throw one back maybe it can be two or three,” said Jeff Seminoff. “And once we start the dialogue then maybe we can get people potentially to a place of not eating turtles at all anymore.”

Everyone agreed to throw one back, though Jeff and J had no way of knowing if they would stick to it. They also agreed to meet again next year, and chose a name. They settled on Grupo Tortuguero. There’s not a great English translation, but “Turtle Hunter Group” is probably best.

Their work didn’t go unnoticed. Everyone knew about these two crazy gringos who wanted everyone to stop eating turtle; but once it seemed like they might actually have an impact, some people got mad, especially those whose pocketbooks might get hit hardest.

A man involved in trafficking, who also had tons of political clout—J wouldn’t say who it was—once told J to his face, in public, “Get out! Don’t mess around with that or you’re gonna have problems.”

Another time, at a fishing camp far from removed from the safety of crowds, J found a picture of his face pinned to a wall with a bullseye drawn around it.

Chuy Lucero, field director of Grupo Tortuguero, tagging a green turtle

Getting Closer

J told me once, “If there’s one turtle champion that’s terrible actually: you need thousands. And so how do you get from one or two or five to one thousand or two thousand or five thousand fighting for the species?” The strength of the group that Jeff and J formed is that, in the end, it answered that question. Threats to just the two of them would not be enough to stop what eventually became a changing culture.  

In the second year of the meeting, Jeff and J were impressed. More people showed up and this time everyone had a story of throwing a turtle back—even those big, badass poachers. The story could end here, with Jeff and J getting fishermen to buy into the idea of saving turtles. But they took it one step further.

J and Jeff also made an effort to cut themselves out of the picture and start putting research money directly into the hands of community members. Jeff says they wanted to make people “junior biologists.” That first meeting brought representatives from only a handful of communities. Now Grupo Tortuguero has members in more than 75 communities. Some of those members are paid and some are volunteers. Many of the paid people are former fishermen.

J describes it this way: “So if Uncle Jose works at GT he could have a pretty big shadow in his family and in his community.” Maybe he’s not influencing 100 percent of the community, “but it is enough to give sea turtles a chance.”

They’ve done more than give them a chance. While some turtle species are still struggling in Mexico, others have rebounded greatly since J and Jeff arrived. Green turtles (known as black turtles in Mexico) have increased their numbers more than 20-fold on some beaches. J Nichols likes to imagine a day when he'll be able to sit with Juan de la Cruz and share a beer, as their kids and grandkids play in the waves and sea turtles swim—again as abundant as bison used to be on the plains—around and beneath them. That day hasn't arrived yet. But because of the work of Grupo Tortuguero it is closer.

Outside/In was produced this week by:

Will Huntsberry with help from Sam Evans-Brown, Taylor Quimby, Molly Donahue, Hannah McCarthy, Jimmy Gutierrez, Ben Henry, and Logan Shannon

Special thanks to Julio Solis, Matty Plau, and the folks at Red Travel for helping out down in Baja.

Music from this week’s episode came from Jason Leonard, Komiku, Ari De Niro, Blue Dot Sessions, and Broke For Free.

Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

If you’ve got a question for our Ask Sam hotline, give us a call! We’re always looking for rabbit holes to dive down into. Leave us a voicemail at: 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837). Don’t forget to leave a number so we can call you back.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to WWOOFing

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Looking for a relatively cheap way to spend a few weeks abroad? You might want to consider World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, or WWOOF. Have an aversion to mud, farm animals, and learning on the job? Maybe reconsider that first suggestion. But for those of you who are looking for an adventure, on a budget, Sam and Molly have composed a “guide” for would-be WWOOFers to think about before taking off–from how to make sure your visa is in order, to embracing the awkwardness of close quarters with strangers, while still maintaining your dignity. 

VISAS ARE COMPLICATED

Sam and Aubrey in a place where they WWOOFed without a visa, because they are a couple of rule breakers.

Sam and Aubrey in a place where they WWOOFed without a visa, because they are a couple of rule breakers.

When you WWOOF, you don't get "paid" in the traditional sense, but what you are doing is working in exchange for room and board. And in some countries, you're not allowed to WWOOF unless you get a visa issued by that country. That needs to be done in advance. You can't just fly to the country where you plan to WWOOF and say, "I'd like a visa, please!"

Claire WWOOFed in Sweden and Spain for two months with no problems, but when she went to Ireland, she and her girlfriend were stopped in customs. Ireland, as it turns out, is one of a handful of countries that require a special visa just for WWOOFers and other work exchange programs, called a working holiday visa. Claire and her girlfriend were detained, their mugshots were taken, and they were kicked out of the country. Not ideal.

Other countries consider WWOOFers to be just like any other tourist, like in Europe where you can stay for just three months. Sam and Aubrey tested the limits of that rule when they WWOOFed. They stayed in Europe for ten months, moving from farm to farm. When they were heading back to the US, a customs official in Iceland called them out on it. After a tense moment, they were eventually allowed to return to the US but were told they wouldn't be allowed back to Europe for three months. Crisis averted, but the lesson here is one all travelers should heed: make sure your papers are in order before you leave the country.

YOU'VE GOT TO BE GAME

Ian West holding one of the turkeys.

Ian West holding one of the turkeys.

Killing and cleaning chickens, hard physical labor, chickpeas upon chickpeas, fertilizing with your host's stored urine, all of these scenarios and so many more can be part of the WWOOFing experience. You need to be ready to roll with the punches, which could mean slaughtering poultry or adapting to a new diet. 

When Ian arrived on a farm in Oregon, within minutes he was helping kill and prep chickens for eating. What started out as a way to fill a few weeks in between finishing up a backpacking trip and starting a trip with a National Outdoor Leadership School wound up being a crash course in learning where your food comes from.

For Andy, who WWOOFed in New Zealand, most days were filled with hard physical labor, building a long fence, digging post holes for hours in the hot sun. After a full day he was famished, only to find that his meal would be chickpea burgers with hummus on top. Chickpeas on top of chickpeas is not the most satisfying meal. Another woman Sam spoke to worked on a farm where her meals were toast. Three times a day. Just slices of toast.

WWOOFing can be challenging and it's important to try new things you might not have otherwise tried, but it's equally important to know your own limits.

WWOOFING IS HARDER AS A WOMAN

Shea and her friend at one of their WWOOF homes.

Shea and her friend at one of their WWOOF homes.

To be fair, a whole lot of things are harder as a woman, and WWOOFing is no different. Shea had a couple of really uncomfortable moments WWOOFing. One of her hosts, a single male, would have her and her friend fertilize the crops using a mixture of water and urine that he had stockpiled. To be clear, it was his urine. On another occasion, a male host at one of the farms would take all of his baths in the stream, and then walk the property naked, with no warning. 

Aubrey struggled at one WWOOF location when one of her hosts would ask Sam to go prune trees and chop wood and then ask Aubrey to clean the kitchen. At first, she felt like it was a chore like the others, but after a while it became clear to her that her host thought she was useless.  

When you are choosing a WWOOFing opportunity, do your research before you choose a farm to work on, but also, don't be afraid to speak up or leave if you feel you're being treated unfairly. Man or woman, if you're in a situation where you, or someone you're with is not being treated with respect, stick up for yourself and for others!

YOU ARE ALL UP IN PEOPLE'S BUSINESS

Jacob heading to the fields with his WWOOF host's child in tow.

Jacob heading to the fields with his WWOOF host's child in tow.

Molly was fortunate to have a WWOOFing experience that included a big, beautiful farm house, with a private bath. Sam had a variety of experiences, good and bad, large and small. But quarters, in general, can be tight. It can start to feel claustrophobic when you're sharing space with relative strangers. 

For Jacob, the experience was particularly intimate and uncomfortable. The family at one of the farms where he worked was having marital problems. Serious marital problems. In the mornings he would hear the couple shouting at each other, and he was left tending to two toddlers who were clearly upset that their parents were fighting. On top of that, the patriarch of the family began asking Jacob for advice. Jacob was 24 years old, so imagine his confusion  when a forty-year-old father of two was asking him for parenting and marital advice. 

Your experience will definitely vary, but living in close quarters can be tricky and you may find that you are privy to very personal and, ahem, challenging conversations and situations.

BE OUR (GOOD) GUEST

A breakfast Molly ate while WWOOFing in Ireland.

A breakfast Molly ate while WWOOFing in Ireland.

WWOOFing is a two-way street. You're counting on the host to be gracious and fun, but they're counting on YOU to be a good guest. Sam's favorite WWOOF host was Maria Jesus who ran a cheese farm in Spain. Her experiences with WWOOFers run the gamut of great to just plain bad. One guest showed up, ate dinner, did laundry, showered, and the sneaked off in the morning without doing a speck of work.

At Maria Jesus' farm WWOOFers were given a place to cook for themselves and then she would go grocery shopping to stock the kitchen. On one occasion she had a pair of WWOOFers who didn't know the first thing about cooking and she had to teach them the basics, like how to cut a tomato. 

Molly's host in Ireland, Anne, was an amazing cook and incredibly accommodating. But just like WWOOFers, hosts have their limits. An Italian couple came to work on the farm and she found them delightful, but on the evening of their arrival the woman announced that she was vegetarian. Anne explained that ham was on the menu for dinner and the woman replied with: "Oh that's alright, I eat ham." This seemed odd to Anne, but her guest did in fact eat the ham and then ate the other meatless options. Eventually, the woman discovered that the ham had come from the pigs on Anne's farm, and became terribly upset and refused to eat any more ham. Farm to table was a little too close for her comfort, apparently.

Anne also has a few repeat WWOOFers that come to help out on the farm including Bob who despite having no background in farming, became a vital helper on the farm. The first time he arrived he stayed with Anne for 3 months and did everything that needed to be done. Bob puts his head down and works hard, something any WWOOF host can appreciate. So remember, you want to have a good experience, and your host has probably invited you into their home hoping to provide a good experience, but sometimes you have to meet in the middle. When in doubt, do your best, and treat people how you'd like to be treated!

YOU'LL PROBABLY LOVE IT...AT LEAST THESE PEOPLE DID

Jeremy enjoying some of the fruits of his labor.

Jeremy enjoying some of the fruits of his labor.

Everyone we spoke to about their experience loved it, would do it again, and recommended it to others. Even Shea who dealt with a naked host AND a host who stored his own urine to use for fertilizer. Even Jacob who became a defacto au pair and a reluctant marriage counselor. 

One more person who had perhaps the most unbelievable WWOOFing stories is Jeremy. He went to Spain, Italy, Israel, and Wales during a gap year between high school and college. In Italy he stayed in a castle on the outskirts of a little village with what sounds like the descendant of the feudal lord who used to rule the village. He ate wild boar, drank home-made wine, did shots of whiskey in the morning; he provided a slew of coming of age stories set in an idyllic Italian location. 

Soon after his Italian adventures, he traveled to Israel and worked on an herb farm next to the border with the Gaza strip. This was in 2009 when a new round of hostilities had kicked off and he said he could see rockets flying overhead from Gaza at night. An experience he will not soon forget.

These are likely not the experiences that a tourist gets while riding a bus though the historic district of old European cities. WWOOFing is a strange, difficult, and often times wonderful way to explore other countries, meet new people, and build up a stockpile of amazing stories to share with family and friends. 

Correction: Jeremy misspoke, he was in Israel in 2009, not 2007. This post has been changed to reflect that correction.

Outside/In was produced this week by:

Outside/In was produced this week by Molly Donahue and Sam Evans-Brown with help from: Maureen McMurray, Taylor Quimby, Hannah McCarthy, Jimmy Gutierrez, and Logan Shannon

Special thanks to everyone who responded and shared their sometimes shocking, always entertaining WWOOFing stories.

Music from this week’s episode came from Gillicuddy.

Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

If you’ve got a question for our Ask Sam hotline, give us a call! We’re always looking for rabbit holes to dive down into. Leave us a voicemail at: 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837). Don’t forget to leave a number so we can call you back.