9.18.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye, and today
I will be reading the Smithsonian Magazine dated September October
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 The

(00:24):
New Science of aero Ecology reveals so much about the
amazing creatures that populate the skies and how humans can
ensure their survival. The sky above us is a complex ecosystem,
just like the land and sea. A new field of
research is bringing a fresh understanding of the birds, bugs,

(00:45):
and other species that live there. By Jim Robbins. Each
year on September eleventh, visitors gather at the National September
eleventh Memorial and Museum in Lower Manhattan to watch an
art NAE installation called Tribute in Light. Two Ramrod straight
beams pierced the night sky, representing the fallen Twin Towers

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and all the people who perished from the attack. Each
beam is made using forty four blazing seven thousand watt
xenon spotlights on a clear night. People in the New
York area concede the display within a sixty mile radius.
Its beautiful, soul stirring poignant. The light show is also

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mesmerizing to passing birds. Early September is the peak of
fall migration along the Atlantic Coast, and birds from the
northern United States and Canada, from warblers to sparrows to nighthawks,
are streaming south through the skies above Manhattan. Once the
tribute switches on, something comes over them. Researchers using weather

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radar and other types of remote sensing found in twenty
fifteen that the number of birds in the vicinity increased
from five hundred to nearly sixteen thousand. As the birds
enter the columns of light, each beam measuring forty eight
feet by forty eight feet, they become so mesmerized that
they forget themselves and their journey. They circle zombie like

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inside the beams in growing numbers, calling out loudly, and
their circling grows lower in altitude. If they fly too
low in this disoriented state, they risk crashing into buildings
or onto the pavement. Last year, on September eleventh, I
joined a group of binocular bedecked staff and volunteers from

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the New York City Bird Alliance atop the Battery Parking Garage,
the staging ground for the light show for the group's
annual all night vigil. Some of the volunteers had personal
connections to nine to eleven. They'd lost loved ones or
a limb, or otherwise suffered trauma that day. Looking out
for the birds is part of their healing. The light

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show's producers and their equipment were stationed beside us on
the roof of the garage. Around ten thirty, as the
birds appeared to descend into the danger zone, the aptly
named dust and Partridge, director of Conservation and Science for
the Alliance, asked the production company to switch off the
installation immediately. The sky went dark and the loud call

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of confused birds ceased. After fifteen or twenty minutes, the
lights went back on. Insects get no such consideration. From
our perch on the garage, we could see them wander
into the source of the light beams and disappear with
a loud zap and a puff of smoke. Partridge signaled
three switch offs before midnight, and after that the birds

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stayed out of the beams until daybreak. If we weren't there,
the situation would be very different, he told me. After
the all nighter, we would quite literally have thousands of
birds becoming exhausted and falling from the sky or colliding
with buildings nearby. The vigil that night was a practical
application of a young field called arrow ecology. For a

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long time, scientists who studied flying creatures focused on their
earth bound activities nesting, foraging, and mating. Because of a
lack of technology, their time in the sky was largely
left out. In the nineteen forties, George Lowry, an eminent
ornithologist and zoologist at Louisiana State University, organized volunteers to

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document night time migrations of birds as their silhouettes crossed
the face of the moon. But as recently as two
thousand eight, such studies were still rare enough that Thomas Kuntz,
a bat biologist at Boston University, wrote an influential paper
titled arrow Ecology, Probing and Modeling the Aerosphere. He urged

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fellow scientists to regard the space above the ground not
as a transitional void between point A and point B,
but as a complex ecosystem in its own right. Rob
del a US Geological survey researcher in Bozeman, Montana, expanded
on the idea in a twenty thirteen paper called the

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air space is habitat. It's out of earshot, it's out
of eye shot, but it's filled with life. Dial told
me it's amazing. Some like in the ground where we live,
to the bottom of the ocean, untold numbers of creatures
swirl above us, their movements and intentions largely unknown. Countless

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flying insects pollinate plants and provide food for an incredibly
wide variety of other creatures. What role does the aerosphere
play in their movements, their hunting, their reproduction, even their evolution.
With new advances such as g p S trackers, thermal imaging,
and powerful radar, the study of the aerosphere has now

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developed into a full fledged scientific field. Some eleven thousand
species of birds and fourteen hundred species of bats spend
part of their lives in the air. Common swifts, for example,
spend up to ten months at a time on the wing.
Albatrosses can likewise go months without landing on solid ground.

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The bar tailed godwit has the longest non stop migration
in the world, leaving southern Alaska and flying for more
than a week night and day to New Zealand. The
bar headed goose migrates over the Himalayas, with reported sightings
over Mount Everest more than five miles above sea level.

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The atmospheres also filled with populations of microbes so abundant
they boggle the mind. Every day, eight hundred million viruses
fall from the sky on every square meter of the Earth.
If some cause disease, others contain DNA that could be
essential to life on Earth. Early humans benefited from a

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snippet of viral DNA that now plays a role in
our nerve communication and higher order thinking. Researchers recently published
a study that sampled microbes attached to dust circling in
the atmosphere and identified two hundred and sixty six types
of fungi and three hundred five types of bacteria. Even

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the dust, while not alive, plays a role in living systems.
Significant amounts of phosphorus, calcium, magnesium, and potassium travel on
the jet stream from the Gobi Desert to the forests
of California, where they fuel a nutrient poor environment, nourishing
trees that include the giant sequoias. The study of the

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sky is breathtakingly interdisciplinary. Deal said it includes fundamental forces
such as wind, atmospheric pressure, temperature, sunlight and moonlight, and gravity.
A recent study found that geomagnetic storms, which give us
the northern and southern lights, appear to disrupt the magnetic

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sense that birds use for navigation, causing fewer to fly.
Those that did fly during the auroras had a more
difficult time finding their way. Another recent study found that
solar eclipses suppressed bird's activity, though not as profoundly as
the sun setting at night. Nothing has changed life in

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the air as dramatically as people. In the last century
or so, the Earth's lower atmosphere has gone from virtually
empty of human intrusion to extremely cluttered in many places.
The sprawl of brightly lit cities, the clusters of glass buildings,
the growing clouds of air pollution, the proliferating aircraft, the

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emergence of drones, the rise of cell towers, and the
development of wind turbines and solar panels have all affected
flying creatures. The warming climate is also increasing turbulence, raising
their heat stress and reducing their ability to lift up.
Because warmer air is less dense and presents less resistance

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to flapping wings. A twenty nineteen study found that since
nineteen seventy, birds in the US and Canada have declined
by three billion nearly a third. Ninety percent of that
decline was concentrated in twelve families of common birds, the
ones we see every day. Writing for The New York Times,

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John Fitzpatrick, former director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology,
and Peter P. Mara, former director of the Smithsonian Migratory
Bird Center, called this a staggering loss that suggests the
very fabric of North America's ecosystem is unraveling. After domestic cats,
which kill more than one billion birds across America each year,

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the second leading human related cause of death in the
U S is collisions with the built environment, which kill
up to a billion annually. Thirty birds in the US
die every second. The plains of eastern Wyoming are among
the windiest places in the continental U S. Near the
tiny town of Rolling Hills, with antelope and deer wandering

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freely through its quiet streets, hundreds of wind turbines have
been erected atop the hills. Wind is one of the cleanest,
most cost effective forms of renewable energy an integral part
of the effort to break free from fossil fuels and
slow a warming climate. Yet many birds and bats are

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killed when they collide with turbine blades. While the full
impact is not yet known, its considerable. Next Era Energy,
which generates more wind and solar energy than any other
company in the world, owns a subsidiary that had to
pay eight million dollars in fines in twenty twenty two
for killing at least one hundred and fifty eagles in

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Wyoming and New Mexico. A company owned by Pacific Corps,
a grid operator in the western US that draws about
a fifth of its energy from wind power, also paid
millions in fines and restitution for killing at least thirty
eight golden eagles and three hundred thirty six other protected birds,

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including hawks. The six thousand or so wind turbines at
Altamont Pass in California are especially deadly. Hundreds of burrowing owls,
red tailed hawks, and kestrels are killed every year, along
with dozens of eagles. Some experts think the number of
birds felled is higher than we know. These companies are

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now working with arrow ecologists to find solutions when I
visited the Glen Rock Rolling Hills Wind Facility, which is
owned by Pacific Corp. Deal was on the ground. He
believes there are a wide variety of invisible yet critical
habitat niches in the aerosphere. One of his studies showed

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that birds surf wind formations to migrate with less effort.
Eagles and turbines are after the same thing, Dial said,
and they are doing it in the same airspace. Counting
mortalities is an important step. We watched as a border
Collie named Scotty ran across the dry grass on a
long leash, sniffing the ground. His handler, Heather Nootbar, is

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the co founder of a nonprofit called Canine Conservationists, and
she and Scottie had been contracted to locate and count
birds and bats killed by turbine blades. Above us was
a towering, slowly spinning wind turbine that cast a moving
shadow on the ground. The deaths of golden eagles draw

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the most concern. These majestic creatures have a wingspan that
can exceed seven feet and possess keen eyesight as much
as eight times more powerful than our own. The ferocious
winds over these treeless planes make this some of the
best eagle habitat in the country. As the birds soar
overhead and scour the ground for prey, they can spot

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a scurrying rabbit up to three miles away. There are
only around forty thousand golden eagles in the US. They
are not endangered, but their populations are shrinking in some places.
A number of factors are to blame, from starvation in
the nest to illegal shooting and lead poisoning from ingesting

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game riddled with hunter's bullets. Collisions with wind turbines are
high on the list. If you increase any one of
those causes, said Todd Katzner, a US Geological Survey biologist
who studies soaring birds, it could be the thing that
pushes the population into further decline. Birds don't just fly

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through the wind. They use it in complex ways. For example,
they harness something called horizontal roll ortices, upward moving convection
currents that enable them to soar with little effort, even
into headwinds. By expending less energy in flight, they have
more to devote to hunting and breeding, which translates into

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higher survival rates. Researchers haven't pinned down a single cause
that makes birds collide with wind turbines, which spin at
roughly one hundred and fifty miles per hour. But one
experimental approach uses artificial intelligence to identify nearby eagles. Systems

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like identiflight suggest they can spot an eagle more than
half a mile away and shut off a turbine's motion
to prevent a collision in about thirty seconds. The technology
works well in some places, but there are drawbacks. The
units are expensive, and in places with a lot of eagles,
the cost of frequently shutting off the turbines may make

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the proach untenable. Deal fifty five remembers being drawn into
the world of birds at age nine. My dad showed
me a scarlet tanager. He said it was different than
seeing a robin and a blue jay. I realized there
was diversity out there, and so I started watching birds religiously.

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At the University of Illinois, he tagged birds with radio
transmitters and followed them from below. In those days, biologists
used antennas that needed to be within several miles. You
follow it as best you can wherever it Goestel said.
In more than one case, he and a colleague drove

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all night on rural roads in the dark across state lines,
tracking a migrating thrush. While we watched the dog at work,
Deal told me about a small study in Norway in
which one blade out of three on turbines was painted black.
Collisions declined by seventy two percent. There are now studies

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of painted blades under way in South Africa, Italy and
elsewhere to see if the approach works in more geographical
settings with other bird species. As the field of arrow
ecology progresses, Deal believes it could lead to arrow protected areas,
akin to the role of marine protected areas in the ocean.

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These will be places in the sky that are particularly
critical not only to large numbers of birds and bats,
but also to insects. For example, Deal and a team
from Montana State University have been monitoring a radar station
about two hundred and forty miles away near Cody, Wyoming,

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which he set up to study army cutworm moths, large
which brown insects with white spots on their wings, also
known as miller moths. The larvae of those moths feed
on canola, wheat, and alfalfa. Their survival is vital to species.
Many miles away. After they metamorphose, they journey by the

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millions across the grasslands and into the rocky mountains, where
they sip nectar from the riot of wild flowers that
bloom in the alpine meadows. Prowling, grizzly and black bears
turn over rocks to feast voraciously on the swarms of
moths known as bear butter because they have such a
high fat content. One bear can eat up to forty

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thousand moths each day. Diel's colleague Jason Chapman, a researcher
at nanjingg Agricultural University in China, focuses full time on
the arrow ecology of insects, using radar and floating nets
tethered to balloons. Skyborn insects are are to study because

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they are generally too small to wear a transmitter. What
is known is that many migrating insects take advantage of
the wind to cover long distances, and researchers are still
stumped about how that plays out. Several species of moths
in the noctuid family follow this pattern. They only migrate

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on nights when the high altitude winds are beneficial and
will take them in the correct seasonal direction, Chapman told me.
And then they fly up high five hundred or six
hundred meters or maybe even a kilometer and get into
these very fast moving, favorably directed air streams, at which
point they can travel really fast all over. How they

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know when the winds are favorable and where they are
going are just a couple of the mysteries researchers are
trying to solve. Because insect migrations are multi generational, how
they pass information about the turn trip to their offspring
is still largely unknown. You are trying to study something
that's inherently difficult. Deal said of arrow ecology. The migrations

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might be taking place more than two miles up in
the air, over water, or at night. It's very difficult
to figure out what's going on. That's why the field
relies heavily on remote sensing, from thermal imaging to bioacoustics,
even tracking from a space station, as well as valuable
radar systems. It can track the mass movement of migrating

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birds across very large scales. It can also track birds
migrating across the continent at night, which is when most
birds travel to avoid predators and take advantage of cooler
temperatures and less wind. In North America, seventy percent of
terrestrial birds migrate, and eighty percent of those migrate at night.

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A system of one hundred and fifty nine weather radar
stations known as NEXAD or Next Generation Radar, has proved
helpful for tracking migration. These stations are so sensitive experts
say that they can detect a single bumblebee thirty miles away.
A major drawback, though, is that the system can't distinguish

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between species, just identify flying creatures and their collective mass.
Data from radars is sometimes combined with the sounds of
bird calls gathered by microphone arrays on top of buildings.
This combined information can generate an incredibly detailed forecast of
bird migration. A project called bird Cast, which is operated

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by Cornell, Colorado State University, the University of Massachusetts Amherst,
and the University of Illinois Urbana Champaigne, offers data to
the public and a digestible form at the birdcast web site.
During migration periods, simply type in the name of your
county or state and you'll be able to find the

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number and species of birds passing through bird cast is
also a valuable research tool. The data shows, for example,
that birds are becoming trapped in the world's expanding lightscapes,
circling endlessly until they fall to the ground, exhausted, or
crash into windows and walls. This seems to be happening everywhere,

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all the time, said the University of Delawares Jeff Bueller,
a leading aero ecologist. The insight led to an international
campaign urging people to turn off unneeded lights in specific
corridors during spring and fall migrations. The data helps reveal
how migration routes and times are shifting in response to

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climate change. Bird physiology also comes into play. Researchers have
identified a molecule in bird's eyes called cryptochrome, which seems
to react to the planet's magnetic field through quantum entanglement,
allowing birds to see and follow it. Andrew Farnsworth, a
migration ecologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, hypothesizes that

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birds suffer from light pollution because wavelengths of light activate
that molecule in ways that are not expected, and therein
lies the disorientation. It swamps the signal that birds are
expecting and with which they evolved. Experts are also studying
how birds fly. Even though Leonardo da Vinci made groundbreaking

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observations about bird flight back in the fifteenth century, there
are still many mysteries about how they do the things
they do in the aerosphere. At the University of Montana,
Flight Lab director Brett Tubalski and his PhD student Reme
del Planche have been filming Eurasian collared doves that are

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pulled off course as they fly in a wind tunnel.
Each birds placed in a wind tunnel with measurement tools
strapped to its back as it beats against the wind.
Flying in place, computer controlled gusts nudge the bird off course.
High speed cameras placed above the bird records its destabilization

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and nearly instantaneous recovery from the artificial perturbation. Understanding this
mechanism could offer clues about what lies ahead for birds
as the planet warms and turbulence increases. At the Smithsonian,
the Feather Identification Lab at the National Museum of Natural

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History has spent years analyzing remains from bird strikes to
better understand which species intersect with specific types of aircraft.
The lab's manager, Karla Dove says her team will have
an even greater role to play with the expansion of
drone delivery systems. These devices work and the bird air

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scarce more than traditional air vehicles. She says. I think
as long as birds and humans fly together, we will
have bird strikes. But with a little effort and data,
we can reduce those risks and help save the birds too.
Some solutions have already been found and implemented in New
York City. The Javits Center, a convention center in midtown

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Manhattan that takes up four blocks along the Hudson River,
has been called Darth Vader because so many birds flew
headlong into its sprawling walls of glass, but the building
is now considered one of the most bird friendly in
New York. In twenty thirteen, enormous expanses of conventional glass
were replaced with windows that have a pattern of tiny

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squares barely perceptible to humans but noticeable to birds. In
twenty fourteen, the acres of traditional roof were transformed into
one of the largest green roofs in the city. It
hosts a scedum meadow, an easy to maintain cluster of
succulents that has become the largest herring Gull Rookery in

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New York City. A one acre vegetable garden and ten
thousand square foot orchard also on the rooftop provide harvests
that feed convention goers. The NYC Bird Alliance just recorded
its seventy third species on the rooftop. New York City
has also moved to rain in its glow. The city's

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government buildings are now required to have their lights turned
off at night during migration periods. Partridge of the Bird
Alliance told me about a morning visit recently to the
garden atop the Javits Center amid the city's concrete canyons.
I was having the greatest moment sitting in this habitat

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on top of a roof in Manhattan and having multiple
warbler species singing all around me. He said to me,
that is the future of cities. Green spaces built with
bird safe glass, and cities darkened at night for migration.
It's a whin, he said, not only for birds, but
for people too. Next ask Smithsonian, you've got questions. We've

(26:14):
got experts from Frank Oranter Rochester, New York. Where did
the Big Bang take place? The answer is from Peter
Edmond's astrophysicist Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. The term Big Bang might
bring to mind an explosion from a central point expanding

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outward in all directions. In fact, scientists think that the
Big Bang did not happen at a single location in space.
It occurred everywhere at once. This is a challenging concept
to grasp, but Arthur Eddington offered an analogy in his
nineteen thirty three book The Expanding Universe. Imagine all the

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galaxies in the universe as points on the surface of
an empty balloon. As the balloon expands, the galaxies all
move away from one another, but there is no single
point on the surface that the galaxies are expanding away from.
Note that this analogy considers only the two dimensional surface

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of the balloon, so the actual center of the balloon
isn't part of the imagined universe. This may help explain
how the universe can have no center and yet be
expanding equally in all directions. Finally, a letter to the
editor from David Weinstock, Fairfax, California, peanuts creator Charles Schultz

(27:39):
Life in a Nutshell July August twenty twenty five had
the courage cartoonists drawing animals didn't need. His introduction of Franklin,
a black character added after Martin Luther King Junior's assassination,
may have cost him a few readers, but it helped
heal a century's old fracture that still needs work. Schultz
was heroic as well as empathetic. This concludes readings from

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the Smithsonian Magazine for today. Your reader has been Rebecca Shore.
Thank you for listening, and have a great day.