This is outside in a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I'm Nate Hedgy.

Well, good morning.

This April, right around dawn, producer Taylor Quimby visited the World Trade Center complex in Manhattan.

He was there to meet a volunteer.

How's it going?

Good, how are you doing?

Thanks so much for letting me tag along. Of course. I already did a quick circuit just to make sure there were no no no nocturnal collisions before they got swept up. This is Melissa Breyer. She works in this neighborhood. But this morning she walked right past

her office building, her eyes trained on the ground. How did you discover the program?

Well, it was during the pandemic lockdown and everything was so

we're gonna go this way was so tense and hard in New York City. So I was getting a lot of emotional relief from looking at birds in Central Park on Twitter during spring migration of 2020,

because that was where in peak peak lockdown. And then a photo across my Twitter feed of a bunch of dead birds all on a sidewalk that were all found one morning.

And I was like, whoa. So then I just went down the dead bird rabbit hole. My whole

Twitter just became dead birds.

Melissa Breyer is what you might call a dead birder. She's one of a number of volunteers who look for migrating songbirds that have crashed into glass windows and

then plummeted to the pavement. She even documents her findings on an Instagram account called

Sad Birdin. And look at how beautiful they are there. They're so unusual looking.

They're look at a little hummingbird.

Wow.

Look that that was one morning.

You're holding one, two, three, four, five birds in each hand,

and there's another ten or so on the ground.

I found 41 birds that day according to my notes here.

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