09-41: Take It or Leave It: Trumpeter Swans, Probability, and the Internet of Birding
The American Birding Podcast
naswick
4.7 • 677 Ratings
🗓️ 9 October 2025
⏱️ 73 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It's not hard to get birders talking about some of the big questions in our hobby. And this time we go back in the archives of Birding magazine to collect some historic hot takes for another edition of Take It or Leave It, the discussion panel for the most opinionated birders. This time we welcome Tim Healy and Martha Harbison to talk about Trumpeter Swan introductions, the proper plural of binoculars, and whether the internet was a good thing for birders.
Also, don't forget to bid on some great original bird art from our Bird of the Year program.
Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and please leave a rating or a review if you are so inclined! We appreciate it!
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the American Birding Podcast from the American Birding Association. |
| 0:09.2 | I am Nate Swick. I'll keep the intro short this week. We've got a big discussion coming up |
| 0:14.2 | in the main part of the episode. I do want to remind folks, though, that the original |
| 0:18.6 | ABA Bird of the Year art from the entire history |
| 0:23.3 | of the program is still available at ABA auctions. |
| 0:26.8 | I know some folks will be waiting to the end to see where the bids are before they |
| 0:30.7 | throw their hat into the ring, the old eBay strategy. |
| 0:34.3 | I've got a good pair of backup slash kids binoculars once using that strategy. It works. |
| 0:39.2 | Anyway, check it out. We at aBA.org slash auctions. That's auctions with an S because there is |
| 0:44.5 | more than one. On the show, this time around, historical hot takes from old issues of the |
| 0:50.9 | ABA's birding magazine. Be shocked at how the discussions we have had over |
| 0:55.9 | the years are super relevant to birders of today. Turns out we had many of the same concerns then |
| 1:02.8 | as we have now. Tim Healy and Martha Harbison join me for Take It or Leave It after this week's |
| 1:09.8 | Rarebirds. |
| 1:19.1 | This is your rare bird focus for the first week of October 2025. |
| 1:24.0 | Lucky Pelagic birders on a boat out of Bodega Bay, Marin County, California encountered a waived albatross this week. This is a first ABA area record, |
| 1:30.8 | obviously a California first as well. Waved is one of the very large, spectacular even |
| 1:36.8 | North Pacific albatrosses. It breeds almost exclusively on the Galapagos Islands and has |
| 1:42.2 | been anticipated in ABA area waters for a bit now, especially as other Galapagos breeding birds like Nazca Booby and Swallow-Telgull have occurred more regularly. |
| 1:52.0 | The former is now annual in the ABA area. |
| 1:56.0 | This record is still a significant outlier from previous extraliminal records of waived albatross. |
| 2:02.0 | There are a handful of Costa Rica records off the Pacific coast of that country and at least |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from naswick, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of naswick and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.