Hub and Spoke. Audio Collective.

This is Rumbel Strip, America Heilman.

Let me see if I can get him to turn towards us. No, he's happy there.

Oh, look at him for a mate.

Yeah, you can see his dick his...

He's singing about, this is my turf and I want to find a mate. You know that's it.

That's basically it. He's basically right now thinking about, you know, getting laid and not getting killed.

That's my friend Brian Fyfer at Berlin Pond in Central Vermont a few days ago.

Brian is a writer and an educator and a field naturalist

and he used to be a professional birding guide.

And even though we've been friends for a long time,

he's never taken me birding, not because he wasn't

willing, but because I wasn't interested at all.

And then suddenly, when I turned 50, I got interested in birds. And ever since I've gotten interested in

birds, I've been sending Brian phone recordings every day of birds and saying,

what's that? And every time he writes back and he says, that's a Carolina wren.

A few days ago Brian took me birding during peak migration and for the first time in my life

I got to see an actual singing bird up close in a telescope, and it was amazing.

Brian knows all about birds and about dragonflies and butterflies.

He also knows where they live and what they eat and what it smells like and feels like where they live

And I think that my sudden interest in birds has more to do with that with some growing desire to know those places the way he does and to be absorbed in them.

Here's Brian.

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