Lynn Scarlett, Editor of El Tecolote, sat down with author Scott Weidensaul, who spoke at a joint Santa Barbara Audubon/Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History event about his latest book, The Return of the Oystercatcher: Saving Birds to Save the Planet. This abbreviated version of that interview is Part I. Part II will appear in the Fall El Tecolote.
A Lifelong Fascination with Birds
Lynn: Scott, in the preface of your latest book, The Return of the Oyster Catcher, Saving Birds to Save the Planet, recognizing a world fraught with so much destruction, you write that, “We must remember to take a moment of calm and recharge.” And then you add, “there is no better way to do so than in the company of birds.” How did your journey with birds begin?
Scott: I can’t really tell you, because I have been enraptured with birds for as long as I can remember. I don’t have a spark bird. I kind of came out of the womb fascinated by nature in general. I was, I have to say, when I was younger, a bit more serious herpetologist than trying to be an ornithologist. Especially snakes, [I] really loved snakes. And not just because my father was terrified of them. But with birds, I just can’t remember a time when I wasn’t fascinated by birds.
Half a Million Hawks in a Day
Lynn: Your bird journey has become your profession, a profession of observing, learning, engaging, and especially, writing about nature and about birds, whether their migrations, their disappearance, their comeback, their intersection with people, and more. That journey has taken you many places and engaged you in many experiences. Can you highlight several that really stand out as especially instructive, inspiring, or intriguing?
Scott: Well … where do I begin? Goodness. Well, actually, there’s been a couple. I’ve been interested in raptors, particularly ever since I was a kid…. I’ve been really fortunate to see some of the biggest concentrations of raptors on the planet. In fact, I was part of the team in 1992 that did the first kind of full season survey of raptors … in Veracruz. We were part of a team that first documented the migration there. And nobody had any idea that there were 4 1/2 million raptors passing through Veracruz, Mexico, in the fall. We were really excited. The first day that we were counting, we counted, like, eight or nine thousand Mississippi Kites and Broad-winged Hawks and Swainson’s Hawks, and then 20,000. And then 40,000, and then it stopped. We had a couple of days of rain. When the weather cleared, it was just this astonishing flood of birds—kettles of 30,000 or 40,000 Broad-winged Hawks. Again and again and again, all day long. You have no time to think. Wow! And this just went on hour after hour after hour after hour after hour. At the end of the day, when the flight finally stopped … we all got together to tally it up. And it was, like, 411,000 hawks. Oh, my Lord! And I remember clearly thinking, nobody’s going to believe us, and actually, nobody did. We were told that we had grossly inflated the numbers that we were counting—that there’s no way that there were almost half a million hawks going through. Well, now we know. Million-bird days are not unusual…. So that is one memory, for sure.
“It was, like, 411,000 hawks. Oh, my Lord!”
And then, also, when I was working on my last book, A World on the Wing, I traveled to northeastern India, to Nagaland, and saw these just millions and millions of Amor Falcons under migration. And that’s by far the densest concentration of raptors. Wow! Nocturnal roost sites, where there’d be tens of thousands of them pouring out at daybreak. Just astonishing, astonishing numbers. Oh, wow! I mean, that’s just two [memories].
Why Birds Are the Perfect Barometer
Lynn: So, shifting gears a little bit, your latest book has the subtitle, “Saving Birds to Save the Planet.” Why do you see bird conservation as holding such an elevated role—a role beyond the birds themselves, to the well-being of people and the planet?
Scott: Well, because I think birds are the perfect barometer. There’s so many of them: 11,000 species around the world. They have these incredibly complex migrations. They’re found in every ecosystem on the surface of the Earth, except maybe … the polar ice cap in Antarctica. And if we can figure out a way to have a planet that works for birds and all of that complexity, it’ll work for everything else. And right now, we’re not doing particularly [well]. I try to be very clear-eyed in this book that there’s a lot of problems facing birds. But it’s also possible, seeing this in my own life, to bring back species that we thought were on the brink or completely gone. You know? Bald Eagles, Peregrine Falcons, Ospreys.
Raptors, DDT, and the Long Road Back for Bald Eagles
Lynn: In your most recent book, you offer a brief history of the last century or more of bird trajectories from astonishing abundance recounted by Indigenous peoples and by early American explorers to devastating destruction, both of bird populations and their habitat. Can you highlight several momentous efforts on the road to bird conservation in the U.S.?
Scott: I think there are a couple. I think raptors and waterfowl would be a few best examples of that. And with raptors, the conservation work started at the private level. I mean, this was [in the] early 20th-century. The government hated raptors, and, you know, there was little or no enforced legal protection, [even] for the ones that had paper protection in statutes. It was a single woman, a woman named Rosalie Edge, who founded the world’s first sanctuary for Birds of Prey, on a ridgetop in Eastern Pennsylvania, where people up until that point had been shooting thousands of hawks and eagles and falcons every year. So, she bought the mountaintop and started Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, which is the Mother Church of Raptor Conservation around the world. And the place where I got hooked on raptors when I was 12, on a day that I can point to and say, that day changed my life, because I got hooked on raptors … and I got hooked on migration that one day. So, of course, in the years after World War II, then, we get into the DDT era, but I think we tend to overlook that that was just the coup de grace.
You know, we’d had centuries of raptor persecution leading up to that point, and … DDT kind of pushed them over the brink. I graduated high school in 1976. In the bicentennial year, there were fewer than a thousand Bald Eagles in the [lower 48 states]. And if you had told me that 50 years later, on our 250th national anniversary, there’d be 400,000 of them, that would have seemed like an acid trip. And yet, here we are.
“There were fewer than a thousand Bald Eagles in the lower 48 states. … 50 years later … there’d be 400,000 of them.”
So, with raptors, it was a combination of, you know, a long slog by private conservationists, NGOs pressuring state governments for years, and then eventually, the federal government to provide full Migratory Bird Treaty Act protection to raptors. And then, you know, the policy decisions that took organochloride chemicals off the market. And then you had, again, private entities, like the Peregrine Fund, like Cornell’s Tom Cade, and folks like Heinz Meng, and others, who figured out how to restore falcons in captivity and the techniques to get them back out into the wild. And then women, like Tina Morris, who figured out how to apply those techniques to Bald Eagles, and we’re off to the races.
Waterfowl: Boom, Bust, and Wetlands
Lynn: Scott, you said you had two examples—raptors and then waterfowl. And that’s a very different story. Can you share your thoughts on that?
Scott: Sure. With waterfowl, like you say, we went from incredible abundance to almost complete annihilation, and then slow recovery, and then collapse. We’ve gone through these kind of seesaws with waterfowl. A lot of that has to do with the quality and protection of wetlands…. But, you know, we’ve also, as a country, made the conscious decision that we’re going to save waterfowl. Starting in the 1980s with the North American Wetlands Conservation Act (NAWCA), with the North American Waterfowl Management Plan, is where we set up mechanisms to protect and restore and enhance wetland habitats … and started coordinating with our partners in Canada and Mexico, because these are transnational birds. They don’t, you know, stop at the border. And we put a hell of a lot of money into it. What? Two billion dollars, I think, since NAWCA was enacted, in federal funds with, like, $4 billion in private match, plus whatever significant amounts private groups like Ducks Unlimited are throwing into the fight. If you build it, they will come. If you create good wetland habitats.
Now, a recent Supreme Court Decision that restricts the definition of wetlands for protection is going to be a real problem. The [current] interpretation of the Clean Water Act is not doing anybody a favor, certainly not doing ducks any favors, and we’ve seen a slippage in waterfowl numbers. None of this is inevitable. And none of it is permanent [if] we keep an eye on the ball and keep pushing. I’m fairly confident that if things start to get bad again for ducks…. There’s a lot of duck hunters over on both sides of the political aisle. That is a really unifying aspect of conservation. I have no doubt that we will put resources into waterfowl conservation. Unfortunately, that may not be the case for every other species [that depend] on those wetland habitats that have lost federal protection.
When Conservation Succeeds Too Well: Geese
Lynn: When I listen to those tales, the trajectory for conservation has several notable features. Pesticides, water, people, climate—the list goes on of threats to birds. When I look at the trajectory for conservation, one of the notable features is that of complexity. There’s no single recipe for success. The tale of each bird is different. I wonder if you can dive a little deeper, describe some of that complexity, considering both the complex people and nature factors. Maybe consider the complexity that you describe in your book of Canada Geese and Snow Geese, when conservation is too successful and some of the challenges of what you do when you get too much [population increases].
Scott: Yeah. Who would have thought that we’d be at the point with geese that we’d be talking about control more than protection, especially given the fact that almost all of these largely nonmigratory resident flocks of Canada Geese are descended from a small handful of birds in a subspecies that was thought to be extinct and were brought back by basically one guy. You’ve got four million Canada Geese in North America almost all of which can trace their ancestry back to either an egg or a gosling that a guy named Forrest B. Lee in Minnesota held in his hands in the 1960s. Amazing! You mentioned Snow Geese. The problem there is, you’ve got eight-, 10-, 15-, 20-million Snow Geese, all going back up to the Arctic to these really jam-packed breeding grounds, where they have just chewed a lot of the really sensitive [forage] on which many other animals, and especially migratory shorebirds, depend—just chewed that to mud. It’s a conundrum…. One of the things that we’ve seen, just since I finished writing the book, is that there have been some really significant declines in Snow Goose populations because of avian influenza to the point now where some waterfowl managers are starting to express concern about the trajectory and Snow Goose numbers. Wow! Because they’re so tightly packed. I mean, we’ve had massive declines in places like Pennsylvania and Delaware…. So, you know, nature’s kind of balancing the scales there a little bit. But, yeah, the complexity of it. You have to kind of pivot from: we can do everything to save this newly rediscovered giant Canada Goose that we thought was completely lost to: “Oh, we got so many giant Canada Geese everywhere.”
The Human Side of Conservation
Lynn: You talk about another kind of complexity. How do you get people to embrace practices that will make a difference [like not using lead bullets]? But you also talk about farmers, and agricultural practices have a big impact, especially on grassland birds. You highlight practices of a few farmers. Russell Davis is one of them that you mentioned. Talk a little bit about that people factor, and how one transcends, say, opposition to changing practices.
Scott: I think most wildlife managers will tell you that wildlife is relatively easy to manage. It’s the people part of the equation [that] is always the most challenging. One of the things that I think that bird conservation is doing right now is employing social science to figure out how to talk to people about birds, even if they’re not birders … if not [to] make birds important to them, at least to show them how they can make some fairly simple changes in their lives, it will benefit birds [and] may actually benefit them as well. My wife’s been doing environmental conservation education stuff for most of her career. And, her attitude is, like, what took you so long? You know, it’s always been about changing human behavior.
So maybe you should actually be talking to people who study how to change human behavior. Maybe that’s an important part of wildlife conservation. But it makes it much more challenging…. But it also, in the end, makes it much more effective. Because if you can’t change human behavior, you’re just spinning your wheels, you know?
Lynn: Continuing on the people theme, talk a little about some of your insights on working with people.
Scott: Well, again, it’s just, if you’re going to suggest conservation actions to help birds, they’re inevitably going to have effects on people. And if you’re talking about the ranching country, in farm countries, [or] in marine environments, to save seabirds, where there’s going to be impacts on fishing communities. Talk to those people early, find out what their concerns are, find out where their pain points are, so to speak. You know, what are the lines that they’re unwilling to cross? What are the areas where compromise might be possible? Find out what misconceptions they have. Sort of meet them where they are, rather than expecting them to make this long journey to where you are and embrace bird conservation.
Staying Hopeful in Hard Times
Lynn: Given that complexity, including, in particular, the complexity with people, a second feature of the conservation trajectory is the endless swinging pendulum. From passage of iconic laws, like the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, or the North American Wetlands Conservation Act, for example, to the evisceration of both laws and funding that had been part of the tales of success. You write that “the warning signs are flashing.” What most concerns you, and how do you sustain optimism within that context?
Scott: It ain’t easy! Right now, it is not easy…. I finished the book in March of 2025. We were, like, two months into Trump 2.0. And I knew it was going to be bad, but I got to say, I don’t think any of us knew it was going to be quite this [bad]. We were already in a hole, and we dug that hole a whole lot deeper. There’s no question about it. I guess I take solace, and I try [to get] optimism from the fact that we have underestimated the resiliency of nature over and over and over and over again. To go back to my background, I grew up in the anthracite coal region of eastern Pennsylvania. And there were rivers that I knew as a kid that were biologically dead and the color of traffic cones. I mean, orange. That river, Little Schuylkill River, is now a blue ribbon stream. There are otter and Osprey and Bald Eagles living on that river. We just need to give nature half a chance. Now, do I wish that we weren’t starting from such a really god awful place, and do I worry about what the next two years are going to entail? I just read that Trump is kicking bison off federal land out west.
“The only way recovery is impossible is if we don’t try. So let’s try.”
