10-02: A Post-Pandemic Birding Journey with Ed Yong
The American Birding Podcast
naswick
4.7 • 677 Ratings
🗓️ 15 January 2026
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Science writer Ed Yong was an invaluable resource for many of us navigating the strange pandemic landscape. His writing about Covid-19 at The Atlantic earned him a Pulitzer Prize, but left him looking for an outlet to recalibrate after that anxiety-ridden period. Inspired by his own writing in his book, An Immense World, he turned to bird-watching despite not expecting to be any good at it. It has turned into a passion, a way to explore both his home and the wider world, and an inspiration for his writing.
Also, Nate shares his experience wrangling endemics in Puerto Rico.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the American Birding Podcast from the American Birding Association. |
| 0:10.1 | I am your host, Nate Swick. With all of the Bird of the Year talk last week, I didn't get to mention at all what I was up to during the break that the show took at the turn of the year. |
| 0:22.1 | Turns out I did do a little birding. |
| 0:24.0 | I went to Puerto Rico with my family. |
| 0:27.1 | Perhaps some of you out there have done some Caribbean birding before. |
| 0:30.7 | It is fun. |
| 0:31.8 | I think that the region is underplayed a bit. |
| 0:35.0 | Probably because of the proximity of Central and South America. |
| 0:38.2 | The Caribbean is tropical shore, but certainly doesn't have the species numbers that you can get |
| 0:43.3 | on the mainland. |
| 0:44.3 | But what it does have, what it does have friends are endemics. |
| 0:49.3 | So it was a family trip, not a birding trip. |
| 0:51.6 | While I was there for a week, I never really consider the possibility that I could get all of the PR endemic birds taken individually. |
| 1:00.5 | They're not all that difficult, and I think that if you were really serious about them, you could probably get all of them in a long weekend. |
| 1:07.8 | But I had other obligations and only one dedicated day just for burning. |
| 1:12.1 | So I was limited to what I could get on that day and what I could get just in places where |
| 1:16.7 | my family was going. |
| 1:18.3 | And look, in the end, I did pretty well. |
| 1:20.9 | I got most of them. |
| 1:22.2 | They're not really hiding. |
| 1:23.5 | Like the first endemic I encountered was the Puerto Rican woodpecker, which is the only |
| 1:28.7 | woodpecker on the island and can be found just by walking around and listening for woodpecker |
... |
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