This is BirdNote. I'm a Dave Enzilahadine, and I'm an evolutionary biologist in

training. Birds are the only dinosaurs here now. As someone with a life-long

interest in paleontology, this simple fact was, for a long time, what drew me to

birds. It was something I'd always tell people on guided tours of the

fossil collections on my local museum. But when everything shut down from

COVID and the museum closed for a three-year renovation, I began working at a

very different place. Three to four nights a week for nearly a year, I'd spend

12 hours in a warehouse, listing to the endless wearing of a labyrinth of

conveyors and oversized rumbas, carrying shelves full of merchandise.

One winter morning towards the end of my time at this company, I got off the bus

and decided to walk past my house to an area where I knew there was a pond I'd

never actually seen on foot. Barely tucked away from the noisy hustle of the

city, a different chorus greeted me. I've returned to the area for over a year

now, gradually learning the songs. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of the

performers, a dash of cardinal red, a grackle shimmering black, the yellow

flecks on a cedar wax wing. I still think of their extinct cousins and hope to

unite with them in a few years at the museum. But I have a new appreciation for

the dinosaurs around us, as they are, in the here and now. For bird note, I'm a

Dave Venselau-Dien.