09-23: 50 Years of Songbird Maps with Miranda Zammarelli

The American Birding Podcast

naswick

Science, Birding, Hobbies, Travel, Birdwatching, Leisure, Aba, Ornithology, Nature, Birds

4.7 • 632 Ratings

🗓️ 5 June 2025

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

An interesting study discussed on the monthly This Month in Birding segment led us to Miranda Zammarelli, a PhD student at Dartmouth who has taken 50 years of hand drawn paper maps of bird territories at a New Hampshire forest, collected over many years by Dartmouth students, and brought those maps into the modern era to learn about how bird territories ebb and flow over the seasons. It's a great story of how the path of discovery winds its way from one researcher to the next. Miranda joins us to talk about her work. If you'd like to see what the maps look like, check out this write-up about her project.

Also, the Breeding Bird Survey and the Bird Banding Lab are set to be eliminated if a budget bill passes the US Senate, greatly threatening bird research not only in the US, but across the hemisphere. Learn more about it and what you can do.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode is brought to you by Zeiss Sports Optics.
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0:21.2	Visit zyce.com slash nature to learn more or find a dealer near you.
0:30.0	Hello, welcome to the American Birding Podcast from the American Birding Association.
0:34.2	I am Nate Swick.
0:36.5	I got my breeding bird survey packet in the mail a couple weeks ago,
0:39.5	all the various forms and whatnot for the three routes that I run every year. Two of them
0:44.8	near my home here in North Carolina, third just across the border near Martinsville, Virginia.
0:50.8	The BBS is definitely the birding highlight of my summer. It's certainly one of the highlights
0:55.8	of my birding year. I've talked about it here on the podcast a number of times. I love the yearly
1:00.9	check-in with these sites. I love challenging myself to meet or exceed previous years totals. I love
1:06.3	the possibility of finding new birds at various sites or even new birds for the roots, as happens from time to
1:12.9	time. And I love especially that my data is going to this long running community science
1:18.7	initiative, started by Chandler Robbins himself in the 1960s, that has given so much to bird
1:24.9	conservation. I am but three little drops, but all of us together make this essential well of bird data
1:32.4	that can and has informed so many important decisions about bird conservation.
1:38.0	I also felt a little melancholy about this year's packet because if Congress and the current
1:42.1	U.S. administration has its way, it could be the last
1:45.3	I received for a very long time, maybe ever. Because the U.S. Geological Survey's ecosystem's mission area,
	...

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