Right now I am sitting in a hotel room in Katzien National Park in Vietnam.

It's the middle of the afternoon. It's pretty hot and humid out there

because this national park is in a low elevation tropical rainforest ecosystem.

There's a good chance it's actually going to rain here in an

hour or two as it so often does in the afternoon. This is unusual. I have never recorded a Science of

Birds podcast episode outside of my little closet at home that I use as a recording studio. So the audio

quality and character is going to be different.

I will of course process it after I record, but it's going to be different.

And another major difference here with this episode and the next few, and I'll explain in a moment,

is that they are unscripted.

Normally, you may know that I write a full script for each of my podcast episodes.

Word for word.

Because I'm traveling here in Vietnam and I'll also be visiting several other Asian countries,

I want to keep putting out podcast episodes, but I don't have my usual

way of producing them. So this is a little bit of an experiment. I'm kind of interested to see

how it goes and interested to hear from you guys, my listeners, what you think about this.

Because I do a lot of traveling for my work work and it would be kind of cool if I could

do this every so often and if you guys actually enjoy it. And if I enjoy it. So I'm expecting that I will

produce several shorter episodes like this sort of in the field as I'm on this particular

travel adventure. And then when I get home,

I will resume my normal way of doing things because I really like the process that I have and it

seems to work for you guys. So why am I in Vietnam and why do I have this larger trip in Asia?

...