7.10.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye and to
day I will be reading the Smithsonian Magazine dated July
August 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 first article titled scientists

(00:24):
are tracking worrying declines in insects and the birds that
feast on them. Here's what's being done to save them both.
In Vermont, researchers have investigated the types of creepy crawley
bugs that their avian predators consume and may have found
the answers to keeping them both alive. By Madeline Bowden.

(00:45):
Less than two hours after sunrise, with the shadows still
blue and slanting hard in a dense growth of balsam
firs and spruces, the baby bird blundered into a fine
black net strung along the ridge line of Mount Mansfield
at four thousand, three hundred ninety three feet, Vermont's tallest mountain.

(01:06):
Desiree Narrango, a conservation scientist with the Vermont Center for
Eco Studies or VCE, retrieved the rescued bird and with
practiced fingers spread one of its wings like a fan.
From the bird's mottled and rumpled feathers, Marengo could see
that this slate colored bird was a dark eyed junco,

(01:27):
a sparrow species found in various color combinations across North America.
The bird was just a few weeks out from leaving
its nest. It was too young to tell its sex,
but she was less interested in the bird itself than
in what it had been eating. Juncos are known as
seed eating birds. They spend their days rummaging through the

(01:49):
undergrowth searching for fallen seeds at feeders. They prefer smaller
grains like millet, but seeds don't provide the protein juncos
or any songbirds need to grow a new set of
feathers while they molt, and the protein this baby junco
needs to molt its blotchy, juvenile feathers and to grow sleek,

(02:10):
stone gray feathers on top and white ones below would
come only from bugs. In fact, ninety percent of the
more than ten thousand, seven hundred known bird species rely
on insects for food during at least part of their
life cycle. Even the most dedicated seed eating songbirds must

(02:30):
eat insects and other arthropods that many legged group of
creatures that includes spiders and millipedes, to produce eggs, to
grow new feathers, and to feed their young. Without insects,
in other words, they wouldn't survive. Unfortunately, insects are disappearing
at a rate of about one to two percent a year,

(02:52):
and the decline is not limited to just one species
nor just one group of insects. The data suggests that
the decline is widespread, even global. These findings have been
confirmed in hundreds of rigorous peer reviewed studies, says David L. Wagner,
a University of Connecticut entomologist and the lead scientist of

(03:14):
a program known as the Status of Insects, which coordinates
pertinent research on insect populations from around the world. The
weight of the evidence is clear, Wagner says, I feel
like it would stand up in a court of law. Narrango,
who was now one of dozens of researchers participating in
the project, was a city kid from Baltimore with her

(03:37):
heart set on becoming a zookeeper. Her undergraduate program at
the State University of New York College of Environmental Science
and Forestry required a summer semester at a biological field
station in the Adirondacks. She had never been camping or
even to the woods. On the tree crowded shores of

(03:57):
a mountain lake, she was captivated by the bouncy, fluty
song of an unseen bird. By the time she figured
out that it came from a white throated sparrow, her
future had been mapped to day. She investigates the relationship
between the worldwide decline and insects and a worldwide decline
in birds. The bird cradled in her hand up on

(04:19):
Mount Mansfield holds some of the answers to the mystery
behind these trends. Bees, butterflies, moths, flies, beetles, ants, and
a few other insects pollinate three quarters of the world's
flowering plants and crops. Their pollination services are worth up
to five hundred and seventy seven billion dollars per year worldwide.

(04:43):
Less well known is their critical role in helping dead
things disappear piles of leaves and rotting stumps, the rat
in the street, the elephant on the savannah, the contents
of your compost bin. Insects also feed on feces, cleaning
up the messes of wild and domestic animals. Dung Beetles

(05:04):
provide three hundred and eighty million dollars a year in
manure recycling for the American cattle industry. All of these
clean up activities create soil for new plant growth. Insects
feed many animals we eat, such as trout, salmon, and turkeys.
In some places, they feed us directly. More than two

(05:24):
thousand species of insect are eaten by people around the world,
and that's not even considering honey Bugs also keep each
other under control. Ladybugs eat the aphids in your garden.
Craying mantises eat flies, moths, roaches, grasshoppers, and more. Dragonflies
patrol the skies, eating flies, midges, and mosquitos. Some wasps

(05:50):
are clever parasites, paralyzing other insects, including some we don't
like to feed their young. Simply put, insects are vital
for them the survival of land based life on this planet.
Ellen Welty, a research ecologist with the Smithsonian's Great Plains
Science program says there are two groups of people who

(06:12):
study insects, those who look at them as pests or
carriers of disease, and those who study insects roles in
natural systems. While most insect researchers look for better ways
to control grasshoppers on range lands, Welty says she studies how,
for example, grasshoppers benefit grasslands by providing enough fertilizer through

(06:36):
their frasts that is, poop, to increase the yield of
next year's grasses, which outweighs the damage they do eating
this year's grasses. The Status of Insects project, led by Wagner,
helps scientists like Wealthy fill gaps and coordinate their research.
The network doesn't just focus on the glamorous insects such

(06:58):
as butterflies, be and dragonflies. Jessica Ware, the curator of
Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History in
New York and one of the project's principal investigators, leads
a research group for cockroaches and termites. These insects are
a nightmare in our homes, but are part of nature's

(07:19):
intricate workings outside them. Only two percent of cockroach species
are pests, while the other seven thousand or so species
are benign. Ware says, actually a lot of them are
really pretty, says Eliza Grames, a biologist at Binghamton University
and another project leader. Similarly, termites, which are a kind

(07:42):
of cockroach, break down old trees and are vital to
tropical forest health everywhere where, says they are an important
food source for birds when they swarm during mating. She
has even seen birds feasting on termite swarms in New Jersey.
The Insect Network project grew out of an earlier initiative

(08:03):
by Grames, who started as a bird researcher and became
an expert in large scale data analysis, and an entomologist
friend named Graham Montgomery. The researchers realized that many existing
research papers tagged with insect data were actually calculations of
birds food, so they designed a system to mine published

(08:25):
research for data about insect population levels. It was a
weird series of events, and now that's everything I do,
Grames says. Grames believes that repeating long term studies from
decades ago is critical for understanding why insects have declined.
While some issues are known, for example, habitat loss, non

(08:48):
native plants, artificial light at night, climate, and pesticides, scientists
need to know a lot more about the drivers and
consequences of the decline. To conserve in while protecting human needs.
Repeating previous bird and insect studies is what Nurrango is doing.
On top of Mount Mansfield, VCE scientists have been studying

(09:12):
birds there since the nineteen nineties. As the scientists weighed, measured,
and banded birds on Mount Mansfield decade after decade, they
also collected feathers, placing them in envelopes for future study.
Those envelopes sit in boxes in a corner of VCE's
lab in the village of White River Junction. Nurrango plans

(09:35):
to have those feathers analyzed for the natural variations in
their carbon and nitrogen isotopes, which will uncover clues about
each bird's diet. For example, she will be able to
tell if it ate mostly plants in their seeds, or
mostly plant eating animals such as caterpillars, or mostly animals

(09:55):
that eat other animals such as spiders. To have a
re in comparison, Nurrango's team collects feathers from six bird
species on Mount Mansfield, including junkos. Another scientist plucked a
tail feather from the rumpled young junco and snipped off
half of a still attached wing feather. Dropping the samples

(10:17):
into a small manilla envelope. Nurngo will analyze these feathers
for carbon and nitrogen isotopes too. Going one step further,
Nurrango also pricked a vein in the junco's wing and
gathered a drop of blood in a capillary tube. After
it is analyzed for isotopes, the blood sample will give
her an even more recent snapshot of what the bird

(10:40):
has been eating. That is not all the bird had
to offer. As it weighted its turn to have its
blood collected, it sat in a brown paper bag with
a piece of filter paper on the bottom. Narrango checked
the bag and yes, the baby junco had pooped there
while it waited, leaving a grayish smear on the paper.

(11:01):
This bird poop was scientific gold. Run through DNA analysis.
It would tell Narrango everything this bird had eaten in
the last few hours, right down to the species. It's
a level of specificity that has only recently become available,
and for scientists studying the interaction between birds and insects,

(11:21):
it's hard to beat. As Narrango and others collected data
on the birds. Zoe Picket, a VCEE summer intern and
undergraduate at Mount Holyoake College tended the traps set for
ground insects every week throughout the summer. Picket emptied dozens
of plastic cups that had been filled with a thick

(11:43):
liquid preservative and buried in the ground up to their rims,
waiting for crawling insects to stumble in. She folded the
filter containing the insects and placed it first in a
plastic bag, then in an empty plastic cat food jar,
and finally into her very yellow backpack. Pickett said the
multiple layers of packaging are vital since slugs, mollusks, not insects,

(12:08):
end up falling into the liquid and their smell is
uniquely bad. Back in the lab, hamber Jones, a VCE technician,
transferred the insect samples into a petri dish and examined
them under a microscope. Carabid beetles, a type of ground beetle,
were particularly interesting to the team because they were a

(12:30):
focus of a University of Vermont researcher who gathered data
on that spot thirty years ago. That researcher wrote a
report just on Mount Mansfield's caribid beetles, and Nerango's team
as identifying each species to compare results. They all look
small and black, Nrango said, but under the microscope you

(12:51):
can see the fine differences between them. Jones sorted the
creatures in the petrie dish, with the tweezer placing a
spider into one crimped edged aluminum dish, the spring tails
into another, and the mites, which lived up to their
name and a third. The dishes were labeled, dried in
an oven at one hundred and forty degrees fahrenheit for

(13:13):
twenty four hours, then weighed. The results gave the researchers
a picture of which insects were available for a ground
feeding bird like the baby junco to eat the week
the samples were collected. The night before the baby junco
landed in the research team's net, a strange shifting light
filtered through the forest not far from where the long

(13:35):
trail Vermont's End to end hiking route traverses the Mount
Mansfield Ridge Line. I sometimes wonder if hikers going by
think aliens have landed, Narngo said, a closer inspection would
not have dispelled their suspicions. The source of the light,
which shifted from blue to green to a white whose

(13:55):
secret ingredient is ultra violet sat in the middle of
what could have been an alien lantern, with the other
worldly light bulb supported in a mystifying structure of translucent plastic.
It was a moth trap, with the funnel below the
light to catch the moths drawn in from the surrounding forest.

(14:15):
Narrango had furnished the five gallon hardware store bucket that
sat below the filter with a jumble of comfy, cut
up egg cartons. The moths could rest among them before
a jar of ammonium carbonate also known as smelling salts
or Baker's ammonia, hidden at the bottom of the bucket
killed them. We are looking for non lethal methods, but

(14:38):
some species of moths you have to kill to identify,
Narrango said, And that's what they were doing in the past,
so we stuck with that. When she collected the bucket
the next morning and searched through the egg cartons, she
didn't find much. One spectacularly patterned geometrid moth better known
for its inchwarm caterpillars, and three micro leaf roller moths.

(15:02):
There was a cattis fly in the bucket, which is
a type of aquatic insect and a few tiny flies.
The hall let Narrango know which caterpillars are available for
birds on the mountain, as each of these moths was
a caterpillar once. She doesn't survey for butterflies because birds
don't eat them or their caterpillars. Often. Butterflies are colorful

(15:26):
because they are typically toxic or at least taste bad
to birds. She explains, not even their caterpillars make good
baby bird food with their flashy colors. She says, butterflies
are just trying too hard. Narrango emphasizes that the poor
catch is not an example of insect decline, but a

(15:48):
result of a particularly chilly summer night. This is what
makes insect research so tricky. If Narrango only sampled moths
on this chilly night in early August, she would get
a different idea than if she only sampled them on
the warm night at the end of May, when moths
were so plentiful on Mount Mansfield that they covered both

(16:10):
the inside and the outside of the bucket. This is
why she sets the light trap every week of the
field season. Though Narrango and her colleagues don't yet have
a final count of moths and ground insects or their species.
She noticed that they were collecting many fewer moths than
the research team had thirty years ago. They collected their

(16:32):
moths in a garbage can, Nurrango said she was using
a mere five gallon bucket. On the other hand, her
team was collecting more carabid ground beetles than were present
thirty years ago, and more of the beetles they collected
were high elevation specialists. This may be a climate refugia,

(16:53):
Nurrango said, referring to a place that remains relatively unchanged
during major shifts in climate. The top of Mount Mansfield
has been spared from the development happening in the world
below over the past thirty years. Narngo has an idea
of what's ahead for the baby junco and the other
birds on the mountain. She previously studied birds in cities,

(17:18):
and she found that in places with fewer native plants,
there were fewer protein and fat rich caterpillars, so the
chickadees she studied turned to eating spiders, which are lower
in fat instead. In these places, the chickadees laid fewer
eggs and fewer hatchlings survived to leave the nest Ram's

(17:39):
research shows that the quantity of insects available to the
birds matters when there are more insects in a habitat.
She says, birds raise fatter, happier chicks. Chris Elphick of
the University of Connecticut, who now helps lead the Status
of Insects Network, says, if you're a swallow, may be

(17:59):
some in or more like eating steak and two veg
and others are like eating lettuce all the time. Even
knowing the strong evidence of global insect decline, neither Grames
nor Narrango despairs over the fate of birds and insects.
They are optimistic that while they wait for policy changes,

(18:20):
simple everyday actions can make a difference. They advise using
fewer outside lights, which attract insects, distracting them sometimes to
the point of death from starvation or exhaustion, and making
them vulnerable to predators like spiders. It helps when lights
are motion activated and yellow or another warm color, since

(18:41):
insects are attracted to bright white light. They also recommend
using fewer insecticides. Marango knows from her own research that
planting native plants in a yard or even in a
pot on an apartment balcony can help provide high protein
insect wives food for birds. Planting a single tree can

(19:03):
make a difference, with an oak supporting up to five
hundred and fifty seven species of caterpillars. People may not
be motivated to save the insects for their own sake,
but a world without insects is a world without birds.
It's a world where no college student will hear the
fluty song of a white throated sparrow across a mountain

(19:25):
lake and have her life changed. It's a world where
nature offers no song to the rising sun. It's a
silent spring. In the long term, it would become something
even worse. Without insects, everything dies, all mammals, all reptiles,
all birds, and even humans. Hre says, if you want

(19:46):
to conserve any of those other things, including us, you
should want to conserve insects. What Naranngo did, after making
sure the junco's needle prick had healed, looked like a
magic trick, but it came merely from years of experience.
She fluttered her hands a set of maneuvers to give

(20:07):
the bird a firm launching pad, and suddenly the junco
was free. It flew into the blue shadows of a
patch of balsam firs near the top of Mount Mansfield.
It was time to find breakfast. Finally, from the June issue,
this simple but ingenious instrument helped the world measure carbon

(20:30):
dioxide levels in the atmosphere. Scientist Charles Keeling's invention had
a profound effect on scientist's understanding of the severity of
the climate change crisis. By Ashley Braun, to unlock the
secrets of the atmosphere, first, travel away from cities, forests, cars,

(20:51):
and people to somewhere the air blows clean, say the
top of a Hawaiian volcano. Bring two round glass flasks
volleyball sized, but with their air vacuumed out, wrapped in
surgical tape for safety. Point the glass nozzle jutting from
each toward that fresh air. Now, hold your breath and

(21:11):
walk at least ten feet into the wind. Open the valve,
let the air rush in, and well after the hissing
has stopped, close it back up. Then you can breathe.
Once you've done all that, says Tim Luker, a scientist
with the Script's Institution of Oceanography. Now you have an
air sample and I'm still amazed that it works. Charles

(21:35):
David Keeling established this method in the mid nineteen fifties
at the California Institute of Technology. Back then, scientists didn't
know how much carbon dioxide naturally occurred in the atmosphere.
Measurements varied widely. Keeling cracked how to measure it precisely.
Then he took this endeavor to new heights eleven thousand

(21:59):
feet above sea level. At a nineteen fifty six meeting
with their research director at the U. S Weather Bureau,
a precursor to the National Weather Service, Healing made an
ambitious pitch continuously monitoring CO two using a gas analyzer,
a high tech but as yet unproven tool for the job.

(22:21):
The bureau's new research station on Hawaii's Mona Loa Volcano,
with its high altitude and barren landscape, would prove to
be the ideal collection spot. Along with that continuous monitoring,
scientists would also gather five literre air flask snapshots sampled
in pairs at remote locations around the world, analyzing the

(22:44):
results under controlled laboratory conditions. Nearly on the spot, Kealing
was offered funding to build a CO two program, taking
it to scripts in Lojaala, California. He began measurements in
nineteen fifty eight. As months and years of data arrived,
Keeling's rigorous work revealed two global phenomena, Earth's plants inhaling

(23:08):
CO two each summer and exhaling at each winter, and
CO two levels unrelenting annual increase. The undulating graph marking
the atmospheric CO two concentration would become known as the
Keeling curve. On January twenty ninth, nineteen eighty two, at
the Moana Loa Observatory, ANAA employee first filled glass flask

(23:35):
I four fifty seven when atmospheric CO two levels measured
three four one point two eight parts per million ppm
analyzed at the script's lab. This sample also could now
reveal CO two's fingerprints from sources like living things, fossil fuels,
and volcanoes. In the early nineteen eighties, Luker joined Keeling's

(24:00):
in Lejalla. The researchers were grappling with major questions of
global carbon math from the ocean to the sky. Activities
like burning fossil fuels and making cement release CO two.
But only half of the carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere,
land based plants, and the ocean to a limit absorbed

(24:22):
the rest determining those fractions and limits. The mathematical destination
of fossil fuel CO two was a contentious scientific question,
complicated by the burning of the Amazon rainforest to clear
land for farming. Essential to much of this work was
understanding how and where the planet's cycles, one of its

(24:44):
most widely distributed elements through the atmosphere, ocean, and land.
Those answers hissed out of glass flasks like I four
fifty seven, gathered at stations from near the North Pole
to Muana Loa and from the tiny Christmas Island to
the South Pole. In his later years, Charles Keeling reflected

(25:07):
on the slow footed public response to growing evidence of
climate change. People, he wrote in nineteen ninety eight, should
heed the rise in atmospheric CO two concentration as serious
and less proven to be benign. He died in two
thousand five. On June seventh, twenty twenty two, flask I

(25:29):
four fifty seven took its own last breath on Moana
Loa before embarking on a different journey, one to the
Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, curator Kristin Frederick Frost
remembers the flask arriving at the museum, perfectly cradled in
its custom padding. She marveled at the box's design, made

(25:52):
to ship fragile flasks all over the world. One of
my big regrets is not collecting the box. We had
to send it back, she says. When the flask took
in its last sample in twenty twenty two, atmospheric CO
two levels registered four to twenty one point thirty six ppm,
a concentration that Luker calls unbelievable. When the instrument first

(26:16):
began collecting samples in nineteen eighty two, CO two levels
had been eighty ppm lower at that point. The fires,
the droughts, the floods, the powerful hurricanes, that was all hypothetical,
he says, and now we're living through it, with global
CO two continuing to rise faster than expected. The script's
team is part of a monitoring effort trying to understand

(26:39):
why the Los Angeles Megacity Carbon Project, a collaboration between
SCRIPTS and other organizations, seeks to zero in on the
localized sources and forms of pollution in southern California cities
to better address it flask samples, still deduce sources co
two fingerprints. It's almost like a christ still ball the

(27:00):
glass flask. Lucre ads. It's just stunning that such a
simple invention could have such a profound effect. Finally, ask
Smithsonian from Mary Condon. Does anyone ever wear the jewelry
in the Smithsonian's National Gem Collection? The answer is from
Russell Feather, Gem Collection Manager, National Museum of Natural History.

(27:23):
Generally not, though there have been a few rare exceptions.
In the nineteen sixties, Marjorie Merriweather Post and Polly Logan
made arrangements to wear some of the jewelry they had
donated while the Gem exhibition was closed for renovation. Michelle
Pfeiffer wore many pieces from our collection for the March
nineteen ninety five issue of Life magazine, including the Hope

(27:45):
Diamond and the Mackay Emerald, an Art Deco piece that
once belonged to a diva in the New York Metropolitan Opera.
Many other items in our collection were worn by famous
people in their previous lives, from royalty to Hollywood stars.
This concludes readings from the Smithsonian Magazine for to day.

(28:05):
Your reader has been Rebecca Shore, thank you for listening
and have a great day.