Welcome to Learning English, a daily 30-minute program from the Voice of America.

I'm Brian Lynn.

I'm Anna Mateo.

This program is made for English learners, so we speak a bit slower, and we use words and sentences especially written for people learning English.

Here are the stories we have for you on today's program.

John Russell will tell us about bird watching in the U.S. state of Alabama.

I will return with words and their stories.

This week, I talk about doing too much or spreading ourselves too thin.

I'll return later with a science story.

We will end our show with The Lesson of the Day with Andrew Smith and Jill Robbins.

But first, a story about bird watching.

In flooded agricultural fields near the Tennessee River,

tens of thousands of birds called Sand Hill cranes

search for food such as berries, corn, seeds, and insects. The cranes come to the

Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge Center in northern Alabama during the winter. The yearly

movement, or migration, of Sand Hill cranes, brings many bird watchers who want to see the tall birds up close.

The bird watchers also come to see the rare and endangered whooping cranes that migrate in much smaller numbers to Wheeler. Many other birds can be seen,

including geese, ducks, bald eagles, kestrels, and hawks. Park ranger David Young described the area

as a birder's paradise, meaning it is a perfect place for bird watchers.

The cranes fly from the Great Lakes, an area far to the north, to Alabama each year.

The Sand Hill cranes started migrating to Wheeler for the winter in the mid-1990s.

Their numbers increased by a lot in the mid-2000s, Young said.

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