4.23.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome. This is Marcia for RADIOI and to day I
will be reading National Geographic Magazine dated March twenty twenty five.
As a reminder, Radio Eye is a reading service intended
for people who are blind or have other disabilities that
make it difficult to read printed material. Please join me
now for the continuation of the article I began last time,

(00:22):
entitled The Fight to Save the Desert's most Tenacious Bird
by Jessica Kutz. In each tent, PVC piping extends from
the dirt, creating a six inch passageway to the human
made bureau. The tunnel measures about sixteen feet long and
descends to a depth of roughly four feet, which ensures

(00:44):
bureau's stakehool as outside temperatures increase. The tunnel connects to
a main den created by cutting a plastic fifty five
gallon drum in half to simulate the size of a
typical dwelling and owl might find in the wild. Thirty days,
the two birds inside each tent will be fed a
daily diet of three dozen of three frozen mice to share.

(01:08):
Once the canopies are removed, volunteers will return for a
week to provide more snacks while the animals get accustomed
to their new hunting grounds. The idea for such specifically
engineered and executed translocations began more than three decades ago,
when avid conservationist Bob Fox and his now late wife

(01:28):
Sam were volunteering to help injure animals at an Arizona
Game and Fish Department facility. In nineteen ninety one, Sam
was granted permission to foster a baby barn owl named Chia,
and the couple built a small aviary in their backyard.
When Chia was old enough, they were surprised to watch

(01:48):
him enthusiastically begin to foster displaced nestlings that required a
permit from both Arizona and the US Fish and Wildlife Service,
which encouraged the Foxes to open their own rehabilitation center,
a professional grade facility in the Phoenix suburb of Cave
Creek that houses hert raptors like barn owls, ospreys, and hawks.

(02:11):
It had to become a passion because the work is
so involved, Fox says. The Fox's home phone became a
sort of twenty four hour hotline from people who discovered
injured birds in Arizona. Burrowing owls are listed as a
species of concern, and the state's Game and Fish Department
has become proactive, recommending that construction sites be surveyed ahead

(02:34):
of any building so owls can be removed. Over the
past twenty years, Wild at Heart has grown to a
small staff and a larger volunteer cores, fielding increasingly frequent
calls for humane trapping and relocating. The idea for an
artificial burrow came from Sam Fox. There was no mechanism

(02:55):
for relocations Bob Fox recalls, and so when they were
ready for relief, Sam said, well, you can't just toss
them out. You've got to build something for them. The
rescue group ultimately designed nests that were inexpensive to build
and easy to install, but it faced a difficult learning curve.
One year, a single badger chewed through fifty burrows in

(03:17):
search of an easy meal. Another year, heavy rain led
to flooding, making the nests nests unlivable. The burrows now
feature mesh wire below the drum to protect the dens
from burrowing critters. Most of the pipe entrances are slightly
raised and surrounded by rocks, keeping them elevated in case
of flooding. The team also added wooden stake perches to

(03:40):
give the owls a spot above ground to scan for predators. However,
the real challenge happened once the tents came down. We
had these puzzles, says Greg Clark, the nonprofit's habitat coordinator.
The owls would lay lots of eggs in the tents,
and everyone thought that was wonderful, except some eggs were

(04:00):
being abandoned, and no one really understood that. Several years ago,
the Fish and Wildlife Service had questions about habitat simulation efforts.
In twenty seventeen, an agency study of Wild at Heart's
practices compared one hundred twenty two nest sites, some translocated
with others in undisturbed areas that didn't require relocation. For

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the next two years, Wild at Heart worked with an
independent team that included Martha Desmond, an ecology professor at
New Mexico State University, and David H. Johnson, founder of
the Global Owl Project, which provides evidence backed strategies to
help guide owl relocation. It turned out that Wild at

(04:45):
Heart had been placing too many owls together, six to
ten owls in the enclosures. That seemed to be a
big stressor for all of the owls and how well
the eggs would be brooded. Clark says relocating males in
breeding season marched to August caused another issue. The males
didn't have experience hunting in the area, and once the

(05:05):
tents came down, the free mice disappeared. The females often
abandoned their nests in search of better partners. Everything crashes
and burns, says Johnson. All of this led to high fatalities.
By affixing radio transmitters to forty three translocated owls and
forty two resident owls, the researchers could track the fallout,

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knowing that translocated birds always suffer higher mortality rates. In
this case, the death toll among them recently moved was
more than double, with twenty four translocated owls dying compared
with eleven resident ones. It was not a good situation
at all, says dead Desmond, But the new data inspired changes.

(05:47):
Wild at Heart now uses smaller tents, spread farther apart,
and only pairs the owls. Those steps, plus the continuous
feeding schedule, demand a lot from volunteers to find sites
that are protected from development and near good food sources.
Clerk is looking beyond big population centers, making it difficult
to recruit people willing to drive. Being limited to certain

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seasons for the releases is also a challenge because Waldette
Heart can't control how many owls it gets. Johnson, who
conducts research with organizations around the world on translocation, says
that waldett Heart stands for the sheer number of owls
it receives. In a typical year, it has around two
hundred owls that need to be relocated, but in peak

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home building years that average rises to more than two
hundred fifty. Lately, renewable energy has added to that pressure,
with over a hundred owls being relocated in the past
two years. Because of solar projects. Many relocation sites can
house only about fifty birds if the sites are full
Uprooted owls might stay longer in the aviaries, where they

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may lose their fitness that can affect survivability when they're released.
In search of solutions, the team has begun to build
relationships with some of the solar developers that are moving
into existing owl territory. Long Road Energy, a company developing
around ten thousand acres in the area, recently agreed to
leave thousands of acres undeveloped. It's also working with the

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non profit to build new boroughs on designated land. Owls
are adaptable, Johnson says. We can be successful. We just
have to think through our methods a lot more. That's
what's changing now. Two months after the tents were taken
down at Martin Farm, Jennon Reedon, a biologist at Wild
at Heart, drove across the dusty grassland, weaving between widely

(07:44):
spaced borough sites which were marked by their wooden stake purchase.
By now, the relocated birds should have fled or taken roost,
and below ground the owlets were getting ready to fledge.
Redon spotted something in the distance and slowly rolled to
a stop. Breezing her binoculars wore a better look. Through
the lenses, she could see a family of owls, complete

(08:04):
with eager fledglings, stretching their wigs for some test flights
at five weeks. They don't necessarily leave, but they can
fly well, Readen says, and if they know how to hunt,
then they'll be independent. On top of the burrol, a
juvenile owl stretched its wings while another got a running
start and took off in flight, completing a short loop

(08:24):
before returning to the ground. Because the fledgings weren't banded,
it was hard to tell if they were the progeny
of the translocated owls, or perhaps owls from elsewhere in
the area. In a typical release, around a quarter of
translocated owls might stay and breed. They usually lay about
six eggs, the rate observed in non translocated owls, but

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not all end up surviving. On average, a new owl
family can raise two juveniles, marking this making this family
one of the luckier ones. Inevitably, some owls move to
natural burrols they liked better. That's part of why the
arid grasslands of Martin Farm were chosen in the first place.
The area has good proximity to natural burrow builders like

(09:08):
badgers and ground squirrels that still populate surrounding fields that
have yet to be developed. Crucially, none of the owls
were returned to the land they came from, which has
since transformed into construction sites for housing developments or solar fields.
Redent saw Cooper's hawk circling far above the little owls.
It was a potentially dangerous predator, but she didn't seem

(09:31):
concerned the family could always retreat underground or take their chances.
Offering them that opportunity felt like its own kind of success.
Burrowing owls in a booming megacity built on the flat
expanses of the Sonoran Desert, Metropolitan Phoenix is growing dramatically
as it absorbs farm fields and wild scrublands trained favored

(09:52):
by burrowing owls. In a unique effort to save the
underground nesters, experts and volunteers have relocated hundreds of hours
away from encroaching development. Next. Hunting for my Father's Butterfly,
a daughter's epic quest to find one of the world's
rarest butterflies, a species named for her father by Rena Effendi.

(10:16):
My father once told me that the average life span
of butterflies is seldom more than a few weeks. Obsessed
with them since he was a boy, he caught thousands
during his lifetime using pins and tweezers. He'd straighten their
wings on a wooden spreader, not a single antenna damaged.
He'd then affixed the insects to a foam board by
piercing tiny needles through their thorax, and apply chemicals to

(10:38):
preserve their bodies and wings. He'd meticulously arrange butterflies and
moths according to their species and family in display cases.
With the help of a magnifying lens, he'd inscribed their
Latin names on labels smaller than a sunflower seed. Encased
in glass. His specimens glistened. My father, Rustam Effendi, was

(10:59):
a Soviet Azerbaijani lepidopterists, a pre eminent authority on butterflies
and moths of the Caucasas region. In my childhood home
in Baku, Azerbaizan, he was a rare guest. He spent
most winders hibernating in his studio apartment in a different
part of the city, waiting for the butterfly season to begin.
In late spring. As soon as the last patches of

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snow melted on the lower plains, he'd journey into the
mountains to study, hunt, and collect. He'd bring back cocoons
in jars, caterpillars squirming in match boxes, and butterflies folded
into envelopes, all of which he fussed over with the
keenness of a mother tending to her newborn. He dedicated
his life to his work and died in his mid

(11:42):
fifties when I was turning fourteen. I hardly knew my father.
My memories of him are disparate snippets, a collection of
faded photographs and conflicting accounts. Over the past three decades.
As a journalist and photographer, I became fixated on reconstructing
the story of his life. Years ago, I came across
his Wikipedia page and clicked on a link that led

(12:04):
me to a picture of a modestly colored butterfly. The
description underneath read Satirus efendi, species of the Nymphalidai family.
At the bottom of the page, I learned that Yuri Nekrutenko,
a Lepidopterus from Ukraine, discovered a new butterfly species in

(12:25):
the Caucasas in nineteen eighty nine and named it in
honor of Rustom, his close friend and colleague. Later I
found out that Yuri had joked with my father at
the time, since you've only had daughters, your surname will
live on with a butterfly. Let's hope it does not
go extinct. But his namesake is perhaps one of the
rarest butterflies in the world. Only a single generation hatches

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between mid July and mid August, flying in its mountainous
habitat ten thousand feet above sea level two withstand harsh conditions.
Setyrus efendi has furl like scales on its wings and
a dark brown color that may keep it warm. Its
most distinguishable physical trait is two black markings like eyes

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with white pupils, each glaring from the center a corner
of the wings. For two weeks, the insect flutters over
the Zengezer Ridge, which spans a hundred miles across the
border between Azerbaijan and Armenia, two countries in the grips
of a decade's long conflict. As one of the few
lepidopteras in Soviet Azerbaisan, my father captured numerous species, each

(13:30):
one stored at the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences Institute
of Zoology in Baku, where he worked for more than
three decades. Many years have passed since, and much of
his collection is turning to dust. I searched for mentions
of Setyris efendi in scientific works he authored in his
field journals and among the remaining specimens in his collection,

(13:53):
but found no trace of it. I concluded it was
one of the only endemic species he hadn't caught. I
wondered if I could my father's hunting grounds to find
the butterfly. I laid out a path retracing my father's footsteps,
consulting the maps he had made of the places he
had traveled, a research area that is now constrained by
the politics of the day. Despite his reputation as one

(14:16):
of the Soviet unions leading butterfly and moth experts, he
was never able to obtain a doctoral degree because he
adamantly refused to join the Communist Party. The decision narrowed
his career options. Authorities forbade him from traveling outside the USSR,
so instead he criss crossed his home region of the Caucasas,

(14:36):
making his maps with black dots to show where he'd hunted.
A constellation of them run along the southeastern mountains toward Armenia.
The world he traversed in those days has changed dramatically.
When he died in nineteen ninety one, the Soviet Union
was on the brink of collapse and wars loomed in
the Caucasus. Today, the plains and mountain passes where he

(14:58):
had peacefully hunted more than forty e years ago would
be largely unrecognizable to him. These changes wrought by time
and conflict, added new obstacles to my journey a hostile habitat.
Ideally I would have traveled over land from Azerbaijan to
Armenia as my father had, but the countries are now
bitter rivals, their borders sealed and militarized. Since the early

(15:20):
nineteen nineties, they fought over control of Nagorno Carbash, an
autonomous region in the mountains of Azerbaijan home to a
majority ethnic Armenian population. In the thirty years of war
and occupation since the towns and villages my father regularly
visited had been reduced to rubble. The Zangaynzer Railway, his

(15:42):
main transportation across the plains, had long ago been dismantled,
its tracks repurposed as anti anti tank traps. Many of
the fields where he'd hunted for butterflies had been dug
out with trenches and littered with land mines. The conflict
is ongoing. Five years ago, Azerbaijan fought a forty four
day war to recapture the provinces surrounding Nigorno Karbak, which

(16:06):
it had lost to Armenia three decades earlier. A ceasefire
was broken by Russia and resulted in a handover of
large territories to Azerbaijan. Most recently, in the fall of
twenty twenty three, Agerbaijan captured the Autonomous Regions de facto
capital of Zenkendi Stepanokert, displaying displacing more than one hundred

(16:29):
thousand of its ethnic Armenian inhabitants. To recreate my father's commute,
a petitioned top government agencies in both countries. After months
of negotiation, Azerbaijan gave me permission to approach the Armenian
border from its territory with a military escort. On this trip,
I got to see the same mountain roads where my
father traveled by bus or hitched car rides from strangers,

(16:53):
but I was never allowed to cross into Armenia clues
from the past. In spring of twenty twenty two, I
was finally permitted to fly to Armenia from Istanbul to
Yerevan on one of the first operated direct flights in
two years. Ahead of the trip, I was curious if
there was some one on that side of the border
who still remembered my father. His former colleagues introduced me

(17:15):
to parkv Khazaryan, An ethnic Armenian taxidermist and insect collector.
A native of Baku, Parkhev sixty nine, now lives in
northern Armenia in his ancestor's remote village. Where I visited him,
we were like the two halves of the same apple,
he said of my father, who was twenty years older
than Parkhev, who is my teacher, my mentor. Parkhev had

(17:38):
fled to Azerbaizan amid ethnic tensions in nineteen eighty nine,
taking with him his most prized possession, eleven boxes of
preserved butterflies. In his sparsely furnished home, time appeared frozen
in the late eighteenth. In the late eighties, a bulky
old Soviet Ukrainian refrigerator held his rhinoceros beetle collection in

(17:58):
one room. Under the bed. I noted a green canvas
backpack identical to my father's. The sight of it brought
back memories of him packing for his hunts, fitting his
whole life into a bag like this, Bottomless like a
magician's hat, it contained jars, lamps, vials, match books, a
set of tools to spread wings, strips of paper soaked

(18:19):
in cyanide, poisoned for the butterflies and so much more.
From a stack of duck dusty boxes, Parkhev pulled out
a pink one full of pinned butterflies. Two caught my attention,
satirus offending. The mail was still intact, large and deep brown,
with velvety, furry looking wings. Parkhev told me he caught
the specimens on the Armenian side of the border, in

(18:41):
the mountains of Vayot's Zoor in the summer of nineteen
ninety one, just a few months after my father died.
It's not a coincidence. I caught it then, he said.
Roustam made himself known my father's tools. A few months
later in the summer, I returned to Armenia, this time
to search for the butterfly with Parkv, where he'd found

(19:02):
the pear in his collection more than thirty years ago.
Together we've traveled up the Serpentine Road in the mountains
of kayatt Zor in the back of a Soviet Army
all trained vehicle. We combed the idyllic mountain plateau carrying
translucent butterfly nets, round at the bottom, not pointy like
the regular kind. The net was attached to a bamboo

(19:22):
stick with a brass grip, just like my father's. This
is Rustom's technology. The net is in the shape of
a woman's bra. You go whoosh like that, said Parkuev
as he swung it as the sun set behind the
jacked rocks. On our first day we left empty hamden
Ah ross Dam. I hope you're watching us from up there,
Parkev said, pointing theatrically toward the sky. We've arrived at

(19:45):
ere Parnassos. We returned to the same spot every day
for a week, but the butterfly evaded us each time,
the mythical butterfly. Aside from Parkhev, there are only two
other people alive today who are known to have encountered
Satir effendi in nature. One of them is a Russian
entomologist named Dmitri Morbun, who observed a small cluster as

(20:08):
recently as twenty sixteen flying over the Zangezer Ridge in
the Nestivan Autonomous Republic and Azerbaizani Enclave bordering Armenia. For
three years, I enlisted Dmitri's help and expertise. It's a
truly mythical butterfly, said Dmitri, who told me my father's
work influenced his early career. The habitat is so remote

(20:30):
and inaccessible most scientists refuse to believe it actually existed.
Sertius efendi appears to have gone extinct in a few
of its early known habitats, including where it was first
discovered by Yuri Nek Rutenko, and its threatened populations are
even more vulnerable because the rise in global temperatures has
forced shepherds to graze their flocks at higher altitudes than

(20:53):
the animals feed on the same cereals, as does the
butterfly species. After ascending the wrong part of the ridge
on the first attempt, I came back to Nassivan in
the summer by air, circumventing Armenia Armenian airspace by flying
over Iran Dmitri joined me to identify the exact location
on Zeizer Ridge where he had found the butterfly several

(21:16):
years ago. The steep seven hour climb parts gree part
narrow goat trails was more arduous than my previous one.
I kept asking myself what am I doing? Unlike my father,
who was at home in the mountains, I have felt
more at ease in the city. About halfway through the climb,
my heart was beating frantically and I was dizzy with vertigo.

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When we finally reached the top, there were no butterflies
in sight. As I recovered the following day, Dmitri speculated
the shifting seasons made it difficult for us to predict
the timing of their hatching. My discovery. For a third
straight summer, I treked up the mountain in twenty twenty three.
Muscle memory had formed over time, and I was fueled
by my own stubbornness. Dmitrie accompanied me again, but on

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this trip opted to bring back pack horses and set
up camp for four nights. Temperatures dropped drastically after sunset,
and my tent flapped in the persistent wind. Every day
at dawn we ascended the ridge to hunt, and each
day we returned having seen nothing. After five days of this,
I was exhausted. I had hardly slept, and I had
begun to come to peace with the idea that I

(22:20):
would never seize a tearce offendi in flight. Yet I
also realized that my pursuit had achieved something else. It
had brought me closer to my father. I walked in
his beloved meadows and mountain peaks where I knew his
spirit roomed free. I met people whose faces lit up
as they remembered him. I'd gotten to know his old friends,
who opened a window into his life. I had come

(22:41):
to know him better than I ever did when he
was alive. As Dmitri and I packed up the camp
on our last day, the sun suddenly appeared and the
wind subsided, so we decided to search one last time.
While hiking, we came across a single bush of stepa,
an endemic feather grass, swaying gently in the wind, a
foods for the species caterpillars. The gray the grass was

(23:03):
a sign both hopeful and discouraging. We presumed more of
it had been consumed by live stock. Around noon, we
sat down for a break and I closed my eyes
to rest. When I opened them, I saw a large,
dark insect rapidly flying twelve feet above me. It's him,
it's him, I screamed, pointing. Dmitri sprang to his feet
and ran in the direction of the northern slope, bouncing

(23:25):
on rocks like a mountain goat. I ran after him,
but couldn't keep up. Dmitri confirmed it was definitely my
setyus Efendi. There was no doubt I spotted the male species.
As I stood up on the spine of the ridge,
scanning the slope, it flew right over me once again.
For a flash of a second, the brown shimmering wings
appeared in stark contrast with the sky and the sand

(23:46):
colored terrain. It's here, it's flying, I yelled again to Dmitri,
and we both watched it dive over the steeps Rocky
Cascade and disappear farther down the slope. These next articles
from in the April twenty twenty five National Geographic. Could
this really be the Holy Grail? By Becky Little? Lost

(24:07):
for millennia and surrounded in mystery, the Holy Grail is
arguably the world's most elusive Christian relic, but for centuries,
clergy at Spain's Valencia Cathedral have believed a cup in
their possession is the Holy Chalice of the Lord's Supper.
Many variations exist in Grail lore, but a common theme
is that it is the vessel used by Jesus at

(24:28):
the Last Supper and also used to catch his blood
at the crucifixion. In these tellings, it's a sacred object
sought by monarchs and king and knights like King Arthur
and Sir Galahad to prove their purity and virtue. The
Chalice of Valencia first appeared in Spanish historical accounts in
thirteen ninety nine, when the monastery of San Juan de

(24:51):
la Paiga bestowed it on King Martin of Aragon. One
of his successors, King Alphonso the Fifth, was likely the
first rus uller to suggest the cup was the Holy Grail.
This may have been a strategic way to legitimize his rule,
as only the most virtuous could obtain the relic, says
Martin Muveise, a medieval art professor at Utrecht University in

(25:14):
the Netherlands. To day, the chalice can be seen in
Valencia Cathedral's Chapel of the Holy Grail. At first glance,
it may appear as a solid goblet, but it's actually
three separate pieces, a simple stone cup, golden handles, and
a jeweled stone base. Next. Racing to save Hawaii's precious snails,

(25:35):
researchers are searching for radical solutions to protect these little
understood species. A century ago, the Hawaiian Islands were home
to more than seven hundred fifty species of land snails
almost all found nowhere else in the world, says David Sishko,
a wildlife biologist and National Geographic Explorer coordinating the state's

(25:56):
snail extinction prevention program. But in recent decades, forest clearing
and invasive predators like carnivorous snails have wiped nearly half
these little understood species off the map. Another hundred species,
including the Oahu land snail, face imminent extinction. Hawaiian researchers
have joined with National Geographics Photo Arc Species Impact Initiative

(26:21):
to hold off that fate by surrounding small acreages with
six foot high solid walls tricked out with booby traps,
among them, slick slides, snares, and electrical arrays to strap
stop predators. The aim to just keep the snails on Earth,
says Cisco, until better technology comes along. There is no
time left. It's now or never. By Jason Biddle next.

(26:46):
In eighteen eighty eight, National Geographic was founded by thirty
three bold thinkers, scientists, explorers, and scholars who aim to
reimagine the way we encounter and understand our world. They
were meeting a critical challenge of their time. Has changed
since then, of course, but at National Geographic. We are
still inspired by the idea that people driven by a
shared commitment to make the world a better place can

(27:09):
have an enormous impact. It's in this spirit that we
present the inaugural National Geographic thirty three, an initiative that
spotlights and onerous visionaries, creators, icons and adventurers from across
the globe who believe that our world needs imaginative solutions
and urgent action and our answering to call. This concludes

(27:30):
readings from National Geographic magazine for to day. The reader
has been Marshall. If you have enjoyed hearing this content,
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