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Hello and welcome to the American Birding Podcast from the American Birding Association.

My name is Nate Swick.

I am the host of said program, at least most of the time.

There's a couple episodes back there where I'm not.

It's the last Thursday of the month, and that means this month in birding, but before I get to that conversation, I have one thing to note about the conversation that you're going to hear.

So the panel and I talk about the mysterious bird deaths in New Mexico. You've probably heard about those.

Those are probably all over your social media timeline and what possibly could have caused them.

Well, literally the day after the panel recorded our conversation, the ABA, we, meaning

the ABA, posted an article on the website by Jenna McCulloch, a bird researcher in

New Mexico about those deaths and with some data-driven

explanations for what caused them. And I'll tell you about that now. It was not necessarily the

smoke. A lot of people think it was the smoke, not the smoke. Evidently, it was likely this massive

overnight temperature swing that killed off a lot of the insects,

which may have already been lower than usual because of a relatively dry summer.

So this explains why the species that were affected were primarily insectivores that was predominantly

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