Episode 3 begins with naturalist Laura Sebastianelli, who has dedicated her summers to recording all the bird songs in Acadia National Park. We follow Laura on her chase to record the American Bittern, learn why it’s so important to record Acadia’s birdsongs, and talk to all sorts of ornithological experts along the way.

Catherine Devine 00:13 Hey everyone, welcome back to Sea to Trees. I'm your host Catherine Devine. Remember the naturalist from our last episode who was on a mission to record all the bird songs in Acadia, Laura Sebastianelli? This episode starts with her.

Laura Sebastianelli 00:40 you know, you'll see Redwing blackbirds chase off, you know, other birds that they you know, they do not want near their nest, you know. And you'll see that you know, anywhere with little birds chasing off the bigger birds usually a bird of prey or something, you know, they're like, "Get out of here." They're protecting their nest from predators.

Catherine Devine 01:03 My time with Laura was my first time birding. Laura let me try out her parabolic microphone. Great for capturing sounds in the distance.

Laura Sebastianelli 01:15 Okay, go ahead and pop these headphones out

Catherine Devine 01:26 Yeah, it's so clear, and it can hear everything from water.

Laura Sebastianelli 01:30 The water. There are better mics for this situation for ambient soundscape. You would use a different mic that has a wider field of target where a parabola is highly focused.

Catherine Devine 01:47 I popped the headphones on. It felt like the rest of the world dimmed for a moment. It was just me and the birds and the natural world. We stopped by a wetland at the base of Champlain Mountain near the Precipice Trail to see if we could hear the American Bittern. A bird Laura has been trying to record for a while now,

Laura Sebastianelli 02:08 because it's very difficult to walk in this area. I haven't spent a lot of time recording here. I always stop if it's early in the morning because I know that there are American bittern in here, which have a really wonderful sound, but I've never, I've never been able to capture it here. I heard it once here but you know, it wasn't able to record it.

Catherine Devine 02:35 and then... we heard it. This sort of gulping guttural swallow. Laura crept through the marsh weaving through trees and paths spider webs steep into the thick grassy meadow quick and quiet on her feet. She turned and shushed me. She needed absolute silence to record. I watched her collect tape from a distance. She stood absolutely still. Holding her large microphone out in front of her waiting to hear the Bitterns call. She captured the tape she had been searching for. But good tape can always be better tape.

Laura Sebastianelli 03:30 Like any bird that I'm recording, if this is this is good, but so is a chance we can get closer. I don't have headphones on, so I can't like venture out there. But what we can do is follow the trail and see is there's a better vantage point for it. This is stop number one, get anywhere from 30 seconds to two minutes and then do very short little thing so this is how we're gonna get here. Well let's see if we can get in another position for getting a closer sound recording.

Catherine Devine 04:02 And for the next hour or so we followed Laura around. Dashing and stopping and waiting and listening. Over and over and over again until she got it. The best, clearest closest recording of the American Bittern that she could muster, but I was a little confused. I didn't quite understand why getting this recording was so important. What's so special about the American Bittern?

Laura Sebastianelli 04:30 There aren't a lot to begin with up here. So, about once you hear the song through the headphones, I hope you do. You'll understand how cool and unusual it is. You hear it gulping and then make vocalizing and it's just it's just it's just a great sound and they're so secretive, otherwise, the you would never find it. I mean, their masterful camouflage.

Catherine Devine 05:10 Laura wasn't trying to record the bittern and for any particular reason. It wasn't that special to her. Laura saw the uniqueness in all birds, in all of nature.

Laura Sebastianelli 05:21 I think listening to birds, inspires people period. Birds inspire us. I think that's part of the connection.

05:31 The American Bittern population along with the population of many birds in and around Acadia National Park, is rapidly declining, mainly due to habitat loss, which unfortunately is a common tale in bird conservation. One of the biggest conservation projects taking place at Schoodic Institute is a partnership with Friends of Acadia and the National Park Service. The project seeks to restore wetland habitat functions, and see if that has an impact on the bird population. It takes place at the Great Meadow, a wetland that's been pretty disturbed. And because of that, it's pretty disturbing. Chris Nadeau, the Climate Change Adaptation Scientist at Schoodic Institute. Give me a quick rundown.

Brooke Goodman 06:16 So the Great Meadow although it looks like this beautiful wetland, when you drive by some of the overlooks - It is a beautiful wetland, it doesn't just look like a beautiful wetland - It's actually a really disturbed landscape. And so water doesn't flow through the wetland in a way it naturally should. And so the water, there's a lot of old roadbeds that go through the wetland that stop the water from flowing through. There's a lot of ditching in the wetland that actually causes the water to leave the wetland faster than it should. And then the big issue right now is that there's a really undersized culvert at the outlet of the wetland that actually allows water out too fast during dry spells. And so the way its just too dry, and during wet periods, it actually doesn't let water out fast enough. And so the wetland floods really deep. And so the park is about to go through a big resource management project to try to fix those hydrologic issues with the water. And so they're going to be breaching some of those old roads to allow the water to flow through, they're going to be plugging those ditches so that the water doesn't drain quickly. And they're going to be replacing that undersized culvert with a much bigger 12 foot culvert to restore the natural hydrology in that wetland. And so what we're interested in from a scientific perspective is whether those hydrologic changes that are going to happen in the wetland will affect the bird community in Great Meadow. And so, you know, birds are one of the biggest resources in that wetland. So a lot of people go to the Great Meadow specifically to bird watch. And so we want to know if they're going to change the way the water moves through the wetland, does that change the bird community? And so to do that, we’re using autonomous recording units, which are just the small recorders that record bird calls at certain times of the day. We've put them out in a few different places in Great Meadow, and then we've put them out in another wetland that's really similar to great meadow. It's called Gilmore Meadow. It has, it's really similar but the hydrology is a little more natural in Gilmore meadow. So we put some recording units out there too as a reference wetland. And this year, what we're really doing is just collecting baseline data before we make any hydrologic changes to see does the bird community kind of differ between those two wetlands and then in the future, we'll go back once the hydrology has changed. We'll put the autonomous recording units out again and we'll see if has the bird community shifted in Great Meadow because of the hydrologic changes.

Catherine Devine 08:47 So researchers at Schoodic Institute are trying to figure out what impact hydrologic changes in Great Meadow will have on the birds and Acadia. This is such a daunting task. This is where Brooke Goodman comes in, the Cathy and Jim Gero Acadia Early-Career Fellow in Science Research at Schoodic Institute.

Brooke Goodman 09:07 I'm in charge of our bioacoustics projects in the park.

09:11 Oh, and by the way, bio acoustics is the study of the production, transmission, and reception of animal sounds. Most of Brooke's work centers on these square box shaped containers called ARU's autonomous recording units. ARU's are these really sturdy recording devices that are used to record animals for long periods of time.

Brooke Goodman 09:32 So I'm holding a Swift One from the Cornell Lab and this is an ARU or autonomous recording unit. And what I can do with this is just put it out in the meadow and I can leave it out for a month or two months or however long as I want. And it will record data for me on an SD card. So it's a really effective way to capture bird data without having to go out into those wetlands every week or something to do a point count, which can be really difficult. So it helps us get a really good snapshot of what birds are in the meadow. And since there's no human out there counting them, we don't need to worry about our presence influencing their vocalization or what's around

10:15 Brooke spends her days going to different spots in Acadia, and setting up these ARUs by wrapping them around tree trunks or posts. In order to capture the birds in the area.

Brooke Goodman 10:24 We chose a bunch of sites to put up ARUs. And it's similar to point count where you want them to be like 350 meters apart, and you don't want them to record the same birds. And you have to figure out how long you actually want to put it out for. So for ours, we're putting it out for around a month on a 24 hour recording schedule. So our ARUs are recording like all day every day collecting a ton of data.

10:49 And this is where the Great Meadow restoration project fits in. Brooke's placed seven ARUs in the disturbed Great Meadow and three ARUs in a healthy wetland called Gilmore Meadow.

Brooke Goodman 11:00 And we're going to compare those two with Great Meadow being in relatively poor condition and Gilmore Meadow being in significantly better condition.

Catherine Devine 11:09 And she's going to use this comparison to try to assess if Great Meadow's restoration project impacts the bird population.

Brooke Goodman 11:15 So one thing that I'm doing is creating a baseline. So right now I'm recording our breeding birds here in the summer. And so it'll take a couple of years for the hydrology change to actually impact Great Meadow and change the vegetation and change the birds that occupy it. So I'm collecting data now. And we're hoping in five or so years to collect data at the same places at the same time in the same way and see how the bird populations have changed. So right now, this is all of our baseline. But this will be what we compare to in five years and see what the restoration efforts have done to the bird community.

Catherine Devine 11:53 She's hoping that a few years down the line, enough data will be collected to see if the restoration project in Great Meadow correlates with any changes of bird populations in the area.

Bik Wheeler 12:02 So the ARUs like through the summer is really looking more at. Like what is the bird community, like in Great Meadow, and in Gilmore, and then so this is like the we don't know what it is right now let's find out. Let's get the baseline. And then after the fact, we find out what it is and we see if it changed or not.

12:26 That was Acadia National Park biologist, Bik Wheeler. We spoke about the importance of using data to create baselines in conservation. Without a point of comparison, it can be difficult to assess the impacts of climate change and restoration efforts.

12:40 A huge issue in conservation is understanding if it worked, right. And so we may be able to measure on a really broad scale like okay, conservation of, of black ducks has been pretty successful because continent wide the population has gone up. But we don't know if it was Great Meadow that did it or not. Right. And so having these targets and these measurable results, I think is really super helpful. And this is I mean, this seems like it's just like methodological. But if we can set up a way that is like, like, follow this recipe and you'll know if your cake is good or bad, right is really key because right now what we have is we don't really have a recipe, and we don't really know what a good cake tastes like. So we're just hoping for the best

13:38 I liked what Bik said. An issue in conservation is that the researchers don't really have a recipe to follow to help out the birds in Great Meadow. But this study is a great step towards figuring out what the necessary components are to make the best conditions for these birds to thrive. When producing this episode, I found myself becoming more attuned to the intricacies of my surroundings. I began to hear birds everywhere. I found myself standing outside the grocery store just listening, seeing how many birds I could hear at once. At first it was just one but like your eyes adjust to light when stargazing. I realized bird watching or bird listening plays by similar laws. The more I looked, the more I listened. The more there were, an exercise and intention, a break from chronic human centered myopia. Remember Bridget Butler from the last episode, the self described Bird Diva and naturalist from Rutland, Vermont? When I was talking to Bridget, this topic of attention kept coming up. And how something as simple as your own noticing can create ripples in the world of conservation.

Bridget Butler 14:47 And so there is this tie in with science as well. That I see in this work where it's creating a personal connection to place, the land and the birds there over time. And I think that's this other key piece is that, especially as we look at global climate change things happening along those lines here in Vermont, we just had a huge flood event that affected all of us greatly. So I think we're seeing that on the ground as well, in our everyday lives, and how can a practice of connecting with birds in this way help us form a deeper understanding of the landscape, and then our role in being stewards of that landscape. And so it does become a personal and emotional thing. I think that's the other piece that's missing in a lot of our science and conservation work right now, is allowing people the space to be in relationship with nature, and not just look at birds or the land as an object or a resource to use or to delight in. It's, it's becoming more relational.

15:59 One of the big challenges in environmentalism is that we're conditioned to feel this disconnect between the, quote, natural world and the, quote, human world. But nothing exists in isolation. No matter where you go, birds are there too. It's taken me a while to notice that and it's incredibly egocentric and human centric. But it's incredibly normal to I like to imagine that one day, more people will care about the birds around them. And consequently, the greater environmental picture to getting others to notice is the biggest challenge.

Brooke Goodman 16:32 One thing I like about Acadia and just getting to talk about to visitors is like people who maybe don't have such easy access to nature go to the National Park to get that access. And this is where I can introduce them to things like birds and like the park rangers can take them on programs. I think that's just like a fun thing about Acadia, like people coming here are might not actually have that access as easy as I did as a kid which I'm very grateful that I did because it got me into this career.

17:02 Thanks so much for listening to Sea to Trees, a podcast from Schoodic Institute at Acadia National Park, a nonprofit partner of the National Park Service, inspiring science, learning and community for a changing world. Acadia National Park is on traditional lands of the Wabanaki, people of the dawn. A big thanks to this episode's guests. Laura Sebastianelli, Chris Nadeau, Brooke Goodman, Bik Wheeler and Bridget Butler. Sea to Trees is hosted, produced and edited by me, Catherine Devine. Catherine Wang provided production support, and Catherine Schmitt is our senior editor. Our music was written by Eric Green performed with Ryan Curless and Stu Mahan and recorded in Midcoast Maine. The cover art was created by Sarah Luchini. Sea to Trees is possible through generous support of the Cathy and Jim Gero Acadia Early-Career Fellowship, the National Park Foundation, National Park Service, and Schoodic Institute.