BirdNote Presents

Hear the latest from BirdNote on our other podcasts, Threatened, Bring Birds Back, and BirdNote Daily

Heid E. Erdrich is the author of seven collections of poetry. Her writing has won fellowships and awards from the National Poetry Series, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, Bush Foundation, Loft Literary Center, First People’s Fund, and other honors. Erdrich has twice won a Minnesota Book Award for poetry. Heid edited the 2018 anthology New Poets of Native Nations from Graywolf Press. Her forthcoming poetry collection is Little Big Bully, Penguin Editions, out Oct. 6th, 2020. Heid grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota and is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain. Read along with the poems below as you listen to the episode.

Timothy Steele is an American poet who has received numerous awards and honors for his poetry, including a Lavan Younger Poets Award, the Los Angeles PEN Center Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Robert Fitzgerald Award for Excellence in the Study of Prosody. He has taught at Stanford University and the University of California in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. Since 1987, he has been a professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles. Stele is known for his love of rhyme, meter, and traditional forms of poetry. He loves birds, and has had a number of poems inspired by encounters with them. Read along with the poems below as you hear them in the episode:

A native of Minnesota, Traci Brimhall is an Associate Professor and Director of Creative Writing at Kansas State University. Her first published collection, Rookery, features many poems about birds. “Birds just seem to have a kind of spiritual or symbolic weight,” Traci explains. “They feel somehow ancient or ethereal – timeless in a way, and I think poets are often attracted to things that have that sort of feeling.” But her interest in birds began with a common bird, the Red-winged Blackbird. “Perhaps that's part of the greatness of common things,” she says. “They’re so accessible, so ever-present.” You can read along with the poems featured in the episode on our website.

Wendy S. Walters is a non-fiction writer and poet, who holds a MFA/PHD in Poetry and Literature from Cornell University. She is the former Associate Dean of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons, The New School. Currently she serves as Director of the Nonfiction Concentration and Associate Professor of Writing, Nonfiction in the School of the Arts at Columbia University. While Walters was living in L.A. during the early 2000s, she wrote a chapbook, or short collection of poems, about the city called The Birds of Los Angeles. A number of themes are woven through the collection, including the Iraq War, trying to make sense of images, how we treat the things and people we love, and the birds that caught her attention. Prophet as Slow Bird Hollywood Finches Either I Watch a War on TV You can read the poems in today's episode on our website

This episode we're sharing "Timber Wars," from OPB. The show explores the fight over old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. And at the center of that fight was… a bird!

Answering the call to protect the birds and places we love

In the final episode of Grouse, host Ashley Ahearn returns to a lek in Washington with biologist Michael Schroeder and finds it scorched by recent wildfire. We’re all looking for hope right now, but Ashley says what we really need is the courage to keep fighting, loving and dancing, as the sage-grouse have shown us.

Environmentalists and politicians love the phrase “common ground.” In the latest episode of Grouse, host Ashley Ahearn explores the role of compromise in the face of major environmental loss. Does the sage-grouse have time for it?

No matter how we feel about it, the natural gas industry is an important player in our national energy supply — and the future of sage-grouse. Can the two co-exist? Host Ashley Ahearn travels to Wyoming for answers. She talks with a biologist who has been studying sage-grouse in oil and gas country for 20 years, and the vice president of an energy company that is trying to reduce its impacts on sage-grouse.