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Hello and welcome to the American Birding Podcast from the American Birding Association. I am Nate Swick. Some of you might remember a conversation earlier this year with a this month in birding panel in which I recounted an online interaction I had regarding the effects of pishing on birds, whether or not it's harmful. My online adversary said it was. I came down on the

side that it's not, provided you're not pishing during nesting season, which honestly is minimally

effective anyway. I still feel that way, but there was some food for thought, especially with

those mob tapes, which are recordings of

angry titmice and are intended to impact a wide variety of birds ideally weirdo vagrants

or otherwise shy species mob tapes notably can be carried around on anyone's little pocket

computer i.e. phones not that it should come as any surprise to any of you, but I am hardly the only

birder with this sort of stuff on my mind. No less than Peter Pyle, one of the most

influential ornithologists in North America over the last couple decades. And I should note,

former podcast guest has a piece in the most recent issue of Burning Magazine, March 2026, that we of the

ABA have posted online for free about what he calls quote unquote electronic pishing,

essentially mob tapes, link in the show notes or front and center at aBA.org for your

reading pleasure. And it's a fun piece. There's a lot to discuss about it,

but I want to dial in on a specific part of the article,

which is relevant to one of the T-Mib panel's takeaways,

which was,

we wished that there was more data to look at

regarding the impact specifically of those mob tapes

on the birds of a given area.

So Pyle briefly mentions a Stanford student named Marty Freeland, who actually has been

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