World War Tree: The Agony and the Ecstasy of Competitive Bird-Watching

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Pablo Torre: Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

[Sound of a bird call]

Pablo Torre: Ah, the North American podcaster. A modern species of extreme abundance. One defined as much by its curiosity as by its tweets. Right after this ad.

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Pablo Torre: So this is appearance number four for you, Mickey?

Mickey Duzyj: Fourth time, yeah.

Pablo Torre: It's no exaggeration to say that you are perhaps our most honored and weirdest correspondent.

Mickey Duzyj: I'm going to make some business cards. That's flattering, thank you.

Pablo Torre: I mean, you've allegedly broken the law for us, sawing down a goalpost. Had to go away after that for a little bit. You revived your former life as a goth tennis player. Also, you literally shoveled s*** for us, investigating Nikola Jokic's horse racing obsession. So what have you brought us today?

Mickey Duzyj: So Pablo, we are living in a golden era of side quests. Whether it's learning to get fit or hiking up a mountain, learning to play a new instrument, this is a real moment where maybe because work life in 2025 leaves a little bit to be desired, or it just gives us a great excuse to get off of our phones and tablets. All of these pastimes are really booming.

Pablo Torre: So just to preempt what I think you're about to do here, you're staging an intervention for me.

Mickey Duzyj: Well, I'm worried about you, Pablo. I mean, we've even reached the point where subjects of yours are tweeting that maybe you need a hobby.

Pablo Torre: You've also, I think, astutely understood that the best way to get me to do something is to Trojan horse it in the form of an episode of this show.

Mickey Duzyj: But I need a hobby too. So I've brought a solution actually for both of us. It includes plants, which you love.

Pablo Torre: I do.

Mickey Duzyj: And it includes tweeting. And not the tweeting you're kind of thinking, but this kind of tweeting.

[Sound of a bird call]

Pablo Torre: Oh, God.

Mickey Duzyj: Pablo, that song that you just heard, that siren song is the sound of your very own new nemesis bird.

Pablo Torre: Okay, so to just understand the concept of the nemesis bird, which is stunningly not a thing that PTFO correspondent Mickey Duzyj just made up for us, we do need to go back about six months or so. Because Mickey is a very busy and Emmy-nominated documentarian and artist and animator whose original illustrations you can see as this episode unfolds over on our YouTube channel. But in a rare bit of free time earlier this year, Mickey found himself at a party, a party that can best be described as...

Mickey Duzyj: Elderly. Elderly. Okay. And as the subject of hobbies came up, I was doing my usual, "I don't have a hobby and I could probably use a hobby," yada yada. And as I was doing that, an older gentleman stepped up through the crowd and he was carrying a bottle of wine. And he came over to me, topped off my wine glass and cryptically asked me if I had ever had a nemesis bird. And it was such a spooky moment because he's staring at me. At which point Mickey realized that he wasn't at any old old person party. He was being watched. He was being watched by an increasingly tipsy group of largely bald and very serious bird watchers. The kind of obsessive competitors, in fact, who would argue about records and statistics and asterisks and honor. All of which turns birdwatching into something like a sport.

Pablo Torre: And so now I'm visualizing the binoculars, the bucket hat, the birdwatching sort of regalia.

Mickey Duzyj: All that gear, that glorious gear. And collectively, they all kind of flock together and started to tell me that having a nemesis bird is actually the most epic side quest you could ever have. Because a nemesis bird, it turns out, is a flying Moby Dick. It is the creature that keeps eluding you. And sure, if you only cared about statistics, you could technically just lie and say that you saw your nemesis bird whenever you wanted. Because birdwatching, not unlike pickup basketball, does rest upon a certain code of honor in self-reporting fouls. As it were. But the oddest thrill of the chase itself is kind of the whole point of this hobby in the first place. You may know where this nemesis bird nests, when it migrates, and yet, despite repeated quests to lay eyes on its feathers, it remains a ghost. Which is a torture felt by birders of all ages, all across the world, as we'll see. But sometimes you could still hear it without seeing it, which sounds like it's even more torturous than if you can't see or hear it at all.

Pablo Torre: So in that case, this bird is not merely ghosting you, but kind of haunting you.

Mickey Duzyj: Yes, that's the best way to put it.

Pablo Torre: And just to be clear about what you're haunting me with already, that sound is the sound of...

Mickey Duzyj: I'm not going to reveal too much more about your nemesis at this point. Because I really want you to come to appreciate the real agony and ecstasy and even almost spiritual religiosity of this practice of birding.

Pablo Torre: I've previously spent my life considering birdwatching probably to be the lamest of all hobbies.

Mickey Duzyj: Yeah, I feel like a lot of our viewers and listeners may be thinking that very same thing to themselves right now.

Pablo Torre: Totally.

Mickey Duzyj: And six months ago, I was right with them before it was kind of my side quest outside of my old person party. And some of these people have traveled the globe to see thousands of birds each. Some have vanished into thin air amidst having a war with other mysterious birders. Or else they've spanned decades and continents, bushwhacking through rainforests, climbing up active volcanoes, just to see their one single nemesis.

Pablo Torre: So I should say that I think I actually, at this point in my life, appreciate birdwatching in theory more than you used to. I have gone to Central Park, for instance, and stared up at a tree among other people, looking at Flaco, the now deceased escaped Central Park Zoo owl. I've seen red-tailed hawks in Washington Square Park attack squirrels and shit. I have been a rubbernecker, if not a watcher. I just didn't realize that today, apparently I would get, to mix the metaphors here, a personal white whale.

Mickey Duzyj: You will come to appreciate things like this. So this sound.

[Sound of a bird call]

Pablo Torre: Which, the more I hear it, feels like a crowd at a baseball game sort of building an applause to root on a pitcher.

Mickey Duzyj: So that sound, Pablo, is actually the mighty tail swish of the roughed grouse.

Pablo Torre: Okay, I see you're doing the David Attenborough thing now.

Mickey Duzyj: And that Pablo is actually a close relative of the longtime nemesis of just one of the many birders that I met for you.

Sharon Steitler: My name is Sharon Steitler, and I'm known online as Bird Chick.

Mickey Duzyj: And Sharon described to me the satisfaction of finding your nemesis as being this kind of ecstatic experience.

Sharon Steitler: So when you do finally see a bird that you've been looking for, it's a dopamine rush. It is a high. I mean, I get this sensation in my chest. And it's up there with having a 16-year-old scotch or a really amazing orgasm. I mean, it's just actually I kind of describe my perfect day as getting the trifecta of birding, bike riding, and banging. If I can have that, that is a perfect day.

Pablo Torre: Shout out to Sharon. Shout out to Bird Chick. This, by the way, is the big, beautiful bill I was hoping for. Birding, bike riding, and banging. It's the much better BBB for all the obvious reasons.

Mickey Duzyj: So Sharon's search for her nemesis bird, the spruce grouse, coincided with a period of time in her life where she was also going through a divorce.

Sharon Steitler: So right before the pandemic, my marriage ended and I went a little wild. And some people were talking to me about showing me spruce grouse. And the adult son of a friend of mine was like, "Sharon, I'd really like to help you find it." And thinking about the other person, I just said to myself, I was like, "I wonder if I just started offering like, I don't know, blowjobs for a spruce grouse, if that would be a good dating strategy." I was just thinking out loud. I'm single now. I don't know what to do.

Pablo Torre: What I'm finding out today is that somehow the bird watching episode is also the most explicit one we may have done to date.

Mickey Duzyj: So Sharon actually gets in so deep that she starts dating a guy who actually has the same nemesis bird as her. A tale as old as time.

Sharon Steitler: It's like, okay, the world's falling apart, but we're going to get a spruce grouse. While biking alone in Alaska. I see this dark blob in the road moving and swishing its tail, and I just knew, and I gasped and I stopped and I tried to untangle myself.

Mickey Duzyj: She tries to untangle from her bike. Her bike falls over.

Sharon Steitler: I'm trying to set up my spotting scope that I had in my bike pannier and I'm on the ground.

Mickey Duzyj: She manages to take what she calls a craptastic video.

Sharon Steitler: [In video] Oh my God, there's a second one coming in. Holy s**t. Holy s**t. Oh my God. Be cool, Sharon. Be cool.

Pablo Torre: What's funny about that video is that the Blair Witch-style narration belies the absolute focus and clarity that we get on this video, which we're showing on YouTube, by the way, of the bird. You can very clearly—I mean, Mickey, and it is—it's a big, beautiful bird. It's presenting. It's swishing its tail feathers. It has like a red sort of crown deal on top. It's really puffed up and strutting its stuff.

Mickey Duzyj: So Sharon describes this moment almost like seeing a celebrity, like seeing George Clooney.

Sharon Steitler: Somebody might get super excited seeing George Clooney walk down the street. It might be cool, be cool, don't freak out. Because if you freak out, the bird's going to freak out and the bird's going to go away. You want to stay here and you want to watch it. You don't want the bird to think you're a weirdo.

Mickey Duzyj: She describes it as a top five life moment. So just to complete the picture here, here's a photo of Sharon right after seeing the spruce grouse. So what you see as she's wearing her bike helmet and her sunglasses is her celebrating, pumping her fist into the sky, framed by evergreens, as if she just scored the game winner in the World Cup. Just look at the ecstasy, Pablo. It is, dare I say, an orgasmic level of satisfaction. And given that, I mean, don't you wish that was you?

Pablo Torre: So one big thing that Sir David Attenborough will not tell you, as much as I love the BBC documentary Planet Earth, is that the world of birding has been shaken by a lot more than merely the tremors of the human orgasm. It has been overwhelmed by technology and electrified by a civil war for its soul. But before we continue this parade of competitors whose eccentricities will truly rival those of the birds themselves, you should know that in the United States, the bird started going from something to be shot and worn to something to be watched and counted not that long after the actual Civil War. Around the late 1800s, a much more humane brand of birding emerged. An ornithologist named Florence Bailey wrote a series of books and field guides aimed more towards an amateur audience. And the most famous of these books was a book called Birds Through an Opera Glass.

Mickey Duzyj: And an opera glass, for the record, is like a pair of kids' binoculars with a stick.

Pablo Torre: Yeah, and they're things that the upper class use when they go to performances. These are golden. But moving from the scope of a rifle to opera glasses brought a totally different enthusiast into the world of birding. And in 1901, thanks to the work of an enthusiast and ornithologist named Edmund Sellis over in England, the term birdwatching was hatched. He, like other ornithologists, would also kill birds to study them. But then Dr. Sellis had this epiphany. On June 23rd, 1899, at precisely 3.15 in the afternoon, he began to watch a pair of Eurasian night jars. The night jar, as Dr. Sellis wrote in issue 699 of The Zoologist, quote, "harmonizes to absolute perfection with the sandy ground, dry sticks, and pieces of fir tree bark, amongst which it so often lays its eggs. I once belonged to this great poor army of killers, but now that I've watched birds closely, the killing of them seems to me as something monstrous and horrible."

Mickey Duzyj: So the last century of birding has actually been really, really interesting. What started as just a really scientific study or just this hobby of rich people has increasingly become more and more of an everyman's activity.

Pablo Torre: I mean, it is even popular, it turns out, among your balding friends at that old person party.

Mickey Duzyj: Absolutely. Contrary to popular belief, it's not just popular among the hairless, as I discovered when I met the man that they call Birding Jesus.

Charles Clarkson: Is it okay if occasionally I call you Jesus as well? If you would like to, yes, I have no qualms with that whatsoever.

Pablo Torre: This is not an exaggeration. If you are not watching on YouTube, this man looks like Jesus if he loved birds and also had a perm.

Mickey Duzyj: So Birding Jesus, aka Charles Clarkson, is the director of avian research for the Audubon Society of Rhode Island and someone who also runs a very successful bird touring company. Charles told me that the barrier to entry is so low nowadays that birding, as a hobby even, contributes $300 billion in revenue to the United States.

Pablo Torre: $300 billion?

Mickey Duzyj: Yeah, and that over a million people are employed in the American birding industry.

Charles Clarkson: I am inordinately happy to sit and watch one of the most common species for hours just do its thing so I can better appreciate its behavior, its evolutionary history. So one of the biggest things for me that brings me great joy is when I go to the tropics, these incredibly speciose countries where you've got thousands of species present, to have a client of mine who's on one of my tours see these really charismatic, beautiful birds that I've seen thousands of, but to see one right in front of them and then to see the look on their face and to hear the "oh my God" that comes out of their mouth when they see this bird is just such a rewarding and amazing experience to me that it's a kind of a cup overflow moment for me. My quest is to make sure that I can, prior to my death, captivate as many other people as possible with the beauty of nature and the mystery of humanity.

Mickey Duzyj: So I spoke to a few romantics like this who commented on the always-on quality of birding. So when you're commuting to work, you could be birding. If you're smoking a cigarette on your lunch break back behind the restaurant, you could be birding. One of my spiritual new friends actually called it a "lifetime scavenger hunt." But there are others. There's a subset of birders who get way more hardcore and competitive about it, keeping elaborate lists on birding apps and trying to stay atop these leaderboards of who's got the most birds seen in their life.

Pablo Torre: So these are the volume shooters.

Mickey Duzyj: Totally. Yeah, total volume shooters. And these people are known as big listers because all of these people will log their life lists, usually on websites or apps. The biggest app is an app out of Cornell called eBird, which is sort of like the Wikipedia meets JSTOR for birding. It's moderated by volunteers, and also the data is kept for scientific purposes. So you log in, you log your geolocated checklist, and you can be sure that it's safeguarded along with like half a billion other sightings that this digital community has pulled together. But you should know that Birding Jesus has a problem with eBird.

Charles Clarkson: I think it has helped to lower that barrier. But eBird is also largely responsible for the gamification of birding. This is an app that creates leaderboards where people can compare themselves and their bird lists to the lists that other people have submitted. And it does tend to expose that dark underbelly of competition where people are acting in their own self-interest and they have this singular mission, which is to best the other competitors.

Pablo Torre: This is beyond David Attenborough now. This is getting a little real according to Birding Jesus.

Mickey Duzyj: You have no idea.

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Pablo Torre: So, birdwatching, very possibly an actual sport. And as I realize now that this is also clearly a story about the humans involved, that I need to know who the f*** my nemesis bird is. Who is the official nemesis bird of Pablo Torre Finds Out?

Mickey Duzyj: Well, I haven't told you because I haven't introduced you yet to the absolute GOAT of birding. The former senior inspector for the U.S. State Department is this guy named Peter Kastner.

Peter Kastner: Does it work better with the reading glasses or not? I would say without, just because it has some shine. Okay. My name is Peter Kastner.

Pablo Torre: So the greatest birdwatcher alive is an actual spy.

Mickey Duzyj: Not a spy, but Inspector Kastner did tell me that...

Pablo Torre: He's not a spy, but he's an inspector.

Mickey Duzyj: ...that after 36 years working in the Foreign Service, living in places from Afghanistan to India.

Peter Kastner: I was in a fairly high-stress business as a diplomat, and I found that whether I was dealing with a plane crash or visiting an American in jail or talking to a family of a deceased American, getting out in nature was just a wonderful way to disconnect, to refresh, to re-energize my spirit, and just enjoy.

Pablo Torre: So just as a matter of scouting here, what makes Inspector Kastner the GOAT?

Mickey Duzyj: So Inspector Kastner is the world's preeminent big lister.

Peter Kastner: I am kind of crazy about numbers. I have always had a real connection with numbers, and I don't know why. If I'm tuning a radio and the proper volume is at number 13, I'll change it to 15 or 10 or 12. Because I can't have it stop on a prime number. It's just not right. It's got to be an even number. It's got to be divisible by five. It's got to be 10. I mean, 10 would be perfect. So it's just an affliction that I have. But to me, 10,000 is like the ultimate. And it's interesting because it's resonated a lot in the birding community. I think a lot of people see that as not the holy grail, but certainly an almost unattainable goal.

Pablo Torre: 10,000? Like, we should just do the math here for a second because how old, Mickey, is Inspector Kastner?

Mickey Duzyj: Inspector Kastner is 72 years old.

Pablo Torre: Okay, so let me just do some math here. So 72, 365. All right, so we're looking at 26,298 days.

Mickey Duzyj: Oh, and also he said that he started birding at four years old.

Pablo Torre: That's all right. So take that out. Excuse me, yeah, 365, that was four minus that. Okay, taking out 1461. Inspector Kastner has spent 24,837 bird-watching days on Earth, which means that 10,000, I mean, he's saying that he intends to see a new bird species every other day for the span of his entire life, which seems, needless to say, impossible.

Mickey Duzyj: It does, but you got to realize that this guy is in the Guinness Book of World Records. He was the first person to see an example of every single bird family in the wild. And he's also the only recreational birder who's ever discovered an actual new species of bird. He discovered this bird called the Cundinamarca antpitta in Colombia.

Pablo Torre: What is the all-time scoring list? What does that ranking actually look like?

Mickey Duzyj: So you should know that a life list that is over 8,000 species is considered insane. There's a list with only 32 people on it that have ever gotten that number. And only 10 people all time have ever had lists over 9,000.

Pablo Torre: And so the all-time record is what then?

Mickey Duzyj: So it was thought before Inspector Kastner came along that the all-time long list record belonged to this British-Canadian guy named Philip Rostron. He's got a list that has 9,763 on it. And Inspector Kastner was climbing the list through eBird, which again is the Wikipedia of birdwatching, with the community of scientists who were monitoring the progress. But the inspector also used a separate website called Igo Terra, which is kind of more of an IMDB.

Pablo Torre: Which is less academic fact-checking.

Mickey Duzyj: There's more species available. So Inspector Kastner, he made a pretty big deal out of it in the birding community.

Peter Kastner: I had it all planned out. I was going to do it. My 10,000th bird was going to be a wonderful thing called a tufted puffin.

Mickey Duzyj: Which he would get on U.S. soil. In Oregon, standing on U.S. soil. I mean, this is going to be the best. After going to 195 countries and territories. And then all of a sudden...

Peter Kastner: Then came along Dr. Jason Bourne. I mean, Dr. Jason Mann.

Pablo Torre: Oh. Jason Mann.

Mickey Duzyj: This Jason Mann shows up and he's almost behind me.

Pablo Torre: Who the f*** is Dr. Jason Mann?

Mickey Duzyj: So Dr. Mann, as far as I can tell, is an American healthcare investor who's living abroad in Hong Kong. And he'd been logging his bird sightings on this other, less popular birding website called surfbirds.com. So out of nowhere, Dr. Mann's list pops up on Igo Terra, which is like a legit site, and where Inspector Kastner had been climbing gradually the leaderboard past the 9,000 mark. When Dr. Mann shows up, suddenly he's right there and he's got over 9,000 as well.

Pablo Torre: So what you're telling me is that this is the real-life Dragon Ball Z meme in which a guy has a power meter and he's saying, "It's over 9,000."

Mickey Duzyj: It's over 9,000! What? 9,000? That is literally what's happening now. Yeah, totally.

Peter Kastner: And the race was out. I became aware that Jason Mann had moved his list to Igo Terra and that he was only 50 birds behind me. I said, "Holy moly, this guy has caught up 300 birds in three months. That's a little unusual." So since I had put my plans out there, I snuck off to Taiwan. And I really absolutely snuck off. I didn't tell anybody I was going except for one guy. In fact, I'm not sure I should say this in public, but I kept birding in eBird as if I was in my backyard while I was in Taiwan. I have a streak of like 7,000, 8,000 days in a row that I've done eBird checklists and people actually follow me and they say, "Oh yeah, well I see your eBirding in Florida or I see your eBirding in Malaysia," whatever. So I kept eBirding in my backyard and I didn't put the birds in in Taiwan until I left Taiwan and then I erased all the erroneous data and replaced it with the Taiwan data because I didn't want anybody to know I was there.

Pablo Torre: Try not just read between the lines of Inspector Kastner. He's alleging that something nefarious, something maybe a little dishonest, may be afoot.

Mickey Duzyj: I mean, the race to 10,000 at this point goes full cloak and dagger with each man crisscrossing the globe in this high-stakes pursuit to reach the finish line first.

Pablo Torre: Right. Now I have McGuire and Sosa. Now I have the two of them barnstorming around the world, competing, keeping up with each other.

Mickey Duzyj: In this world, it was that big. So Dr. Mann is in Colombia where there are tons of species of birds. So Dr. Mann takes the lead when he's there in Colombia. Inspector Kastner sees this. He decides to go from Taiwan to the Philippines.

Pablo Torre: Well, hello, Inspector Kastner.

Mickey Duzyj: And then on February 9th, 2024.

Peter Kastner: I just posted a photograph of myself and the back of my camera showing the orange tufted spider hunter with a little sign saying 10,000. And that was it.

Pablo Torre: So this is where birding, big listing becomes actual sports. He's doing the Wilt f***ing Chamberlain thing.

Mickey Duzyj: Totally. He has his big round number. And he looks so happy in the photo too. So the inspector posts these photos everywhere. He puts them on IgoTerra. He posts on eBird. He posts on Facebook. This is a top moment for him. And it seems like Inspector Kastner has won this epic race. But then it actually comes out that Dr. Mann had actually done his own post just 12 hours before.

Pablo Torre: 12 hours? Claiming that actually he was the first to 10,000. Oh my god.

Mickey Duzyj: So, Dr. Mann's production values here seem to be even greater than Inspector Kastner because he has a graphically edited, like, digital medallion he's given himself in gold where it says "10K" and then has "lifetime birds" underneath.

Pablo Torre: Is that fake? Did he put fake confetti, like golden confetti? He's like sweaty in a jungle, but he's like superimposed confetti. And it says, "New world record, Jason Mann," and has a little illustrated bird on the side. This is his trophy for the world.

Mickey Duzyj: And the reaction is what?

Peter Kastner: So Inspector Kastner says that with these things happening at the same time. After a lifetime of nobody ever coming close to 10,000, and two people doing it and claiming it on the same day is just nuts. And the birding world exploded. It really did.

Pablo Torre: It's a little suspicious. Dr. Mann, is he legit? Like, what do you think? What do you know?

Mickey Duzyj: So Dr. Mann did not respond to many texts and emails that we sent him over the last few months. And he keeps a very low profile online. He even took down a bunch of his LinkedIn profile after we initially reached out to him.

Pablo Torre: So I'm now just doing some cursory research into Dr. Mann. And there's this thread on birdforum.net. It's a comment thread. And the quote, I think, says what many viewers and listeners might be thinking. Quote, "Either this guy is the luckiest birder alive, having rediscovered several lost species, or his list is not to be trusted." End quote.

Mickey Duzyj: Yeah, so a lot of the species that Dr. Mann had on his IgoTerra list did raise eyebrows. Inspector Kastner said that it would be headline news, for example, to see or hear a bird as rare as the New Caledonian nightjar. You'll remember from the great epiphany of 1899 in issue 699 of The Zoologist, the song of the nightjar. But this is no ordinary nightjar, Pablo. The New Caledonian nightjar has not been seen on Earth since 1939.

Pablo Torre: Which is all to say, I suppose, that if you had in fact found such a nightjar, you would not bury it on your list. You'd be shouting this from the rooftops. Or treetops, for sure. I'm looking at just the other pages available to me on birdforum.net. And here's the quote from one of the pages. "Jason Mann reports several dozen extremely fishy species that besides him, no one has claimed to have seen for decades. Some occur only in war regions, on islands that can only be visited by scientists, on remote mountains that can only be accessed via helicopter. These include the following near-mythical species: The bare-legged swiftlet, the buff-breasted saberwing, the buff-breasted buttonquail, the scaled flower piercer, the Sulawesi woodcock, the Papuan whipbird, the Taliabu bushwarbler, the Kangian titbabler, the blackthroat, of course."

Mickey Duzyj: This now is like an NC-17 rated birdwatching episode.

Pablo Torre: Oh, and we haven't even gotten to a very important birding term.

Mickey Duzyj: What term have we somehow not gotten to yet?

Pablo Torre: That's jizz, Pablo.

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[Sound of a refrigerator door opening]

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Mickey Duzyj: So I should disclose that you got me. Yeah, I'm hooked. I think that's very clear to everybody now. I am ready to start collecting some nice big round numbers on one of these many apps available to me.

Pablo Torre: So we all know that you get your ecstasy from competition. But let's recall that before we got distracted by the dirty birding names here, that our friend Charles... Birding Jesus.

Mickey Duzyj: Right, Birding Jesus, mentioned that big listers actually represent the dark underbelly of birding and kind of like the gamification of what should be a spiritual experience. So I got Charles to talk about this race to 10,000. And Jesus got angry, Pablo.

Charles Clarkson: I can't fathom the idea of spending large sums of time and money to go to some faraway location, only to zoom around the country in a very short period of time, jumping in and out of cars, just to see one bird, check it off a list, get back in the car and drive to another location. There's nothing else that, for me personally, is as impressive as the lords of the air flying all over our planet. And so they've always been a source of my motivation. And in many ways, they are a pretty consistent source of my happiness. Viewing them as a source of competition, even on a personal level, to try to set a goal of seeing X number of species. And to me, that's kind of the antithesis of why I love birds. The lords of the air being the birds and not the people.

Mickey Duzyj: So consider the nemesis bird, Pablo. It's not about finding it or not, even though it seems to be. It's really about the search, investigating, interrogating, noticing things, being out of cell phone service, to not be immersed in cyberspace, but actually be immersed in reality. And after doing that, you can witness these small, majestic miracles.

Pablo Torre: So, I mean, you're probably tweeting right now.

Mickey Duzyj: I have multiple tabs open for the record. But to hear Jesus tell it, for a bird watcher to actually successfully find their personal nemesis bird, you almost have to put yourself in a sensory deprivation chamber for your soul.

Pablo Torre: Okay, I'm closing my other tabs.

Mickey Duzyj: So Birding Jesus's longtime nemesis bird was the rufous-vented ground cuckoo, which is known as the ghost of the forest for being really one of the most elusive birds on earth. They spend their time chasing ant swarms through the jungles of Panama and Colombia, and there are all sorts of birds and other organisms that use them as a food source.

Charles Clarkson: So after 30 trips down to the jungle over, you know, 10 years, as Charles was walking by himself through the jungle, he heard the call of an ocellated antbird. He refers to this call as the holy grail of antbird calls, because those birds only really hang around the most massive ant swarms. And so, my heart rate went up and the swarm seemed to be a few hundred meters off the trail. So I plunged headlong, bushwhacking into the rainforest, as I typically do. As I transitioned from this very high-light environment, I had to let my eyes adjust to this low-light environment. I started seeing more and more birds. I would see woodcreepers. I would see flycatchers. There were toucans on the ground, motmots in the trees. Antbirds. And they were all kind of profiting from this army ant swarm which was absolutely massive and it just sounded like it was pouring rain because of all of the ants kind of scouring through the leaf litter. And as I was kind of surveying the scene, I saw this blur of a bird that just disappeared over the hilltop. And based on its jizz, which is a birding term that refers to a general impression of shape and size, everything about this bird screamed, rufous-vented ground cuckoo. So my heart absolutely stopped. And yes, in case you were wondering, Jesus wept. Yes, well yes, I did have tears in my eyes. It wasn't a nemesis bird of mine because it was a bird I wanted to check off a list. I was just absolutely captivated, enamored, fascinated by this group of birds that have evolved this incredibly unique lifestyle. This one individual would then choose to spend an hour and a half in close proximity to a human. It was just, I felt a very special experience. So after a while, I called my wife and I whispered to her as I was kind of sobbing, "I found my bird. I'm staring at a rufous-vented ground cuckoo right now. It's just a few hundred feet away from me." To which she responded, "That is so wonderful. I'm so happy for you. I'm going in the Home Depot. I'll call you later."

Mickey Duzyj: So the question now, Pablo, is, are you a believer?

Pablo Torre: I could not be more subscribed to the religiosity that you've brought me here.

Mickey Duzyj: All right, so I asked Birding Jesus himself to help us choose the official Pablo Torre Finds Out nemesis bird. And he had looked at some charts and lists on your behalf. He considered a couple of wood warblers for you, like the ovenbird. Charles also liked a bird called the American redstart. It has big orange spots. But we thought maybe that was a little too trumpy for Morning Joe Pablo.

Pablo Torre: Fair.

Mickey Duzyj: But then Birding Jesus settled on your nemesis, which is the northern parula.

Pablo Torre: The northern parula.

Mickey Duzyj: Beautiful bird. Pretty small bird. A beautiful yellow belly. That's technically called its bib.

Pablo Torre: Its bib. All right. Noted.

Mickey Duzyj: They tend to live in the Caribbean, but they fly up to eastern North America to nest at this time of year, which is migration season. Its song... [song plays] Can we play that one more time? So Charles told me that the song of the northern parula is actually so high-pitched that people that start to lose their hearing lose the ability to detect your nemesis bird's song. Which feels like a bit of a metaphor that I am unable to currently translate fully.

Pablo Torre: It's a young man's bird.

Mickey Duzyj: Right. A thinking man's bird. And so, what do I do? What do we do? So Charles told me that of all places, the birding mecca is really Central Park. We're going to go to Central Park now.

Pablo Torre: You want to take me to Central Park. We're going.

Mickey Duzyj: I mean, let me just ask you this. What other kind of reporting could deliver a transcendent, orgasmic moment of joy? And Pablo, Jesus has risen. Please meet Birding Jesus.

Charles Clarkson: Hello. There he is. How are you?

Pablo Torre: What the f*** is happening?

Mickey Duzyj: So if you're not watching on our YouTube channel right now, what is happening is that we are being called to gather our gear by Birding Jesus.

Pablo Torre: My wife is Catholic. She hates that you guys are calling me this.

Charles Clarkson: There's nothing more Catholic than Harrison.

Pablo Torre: And so we followed him out of our studio and toward the elevator here at Meadowlark Media. It just occurred to me that Meadowlark is named after a bird.

Charles Clarkson: It is one of the most imperiled birds in all of North America.

Pablo Torre: Really?

Charles Clarkson: Yeah, 75% of the entire population has disappeared since 1966.

Pablo Torre: Oh, that's how I'm at. And what's the... It's a grassland. And it turned out that I had a lot of questions for our guide, whose government name, once again, is Charles Clarkson, about New York City's whole birding ecosystem. What's your sense of a red-tailed hawk eating a rat?

[Sound of subway descending]

Pablo Torre: As we began descending into the subway, I couldn't help but feel this burning desire, a deep, almost primordial urge, to turn this episode into a nature documentary. And yes, to hire David Attenborough.

Voiceover Guy: Ah, the North American podcaster. A modern species of extreme abundance. One defined as much by its curiosity as by its tweets. An exotic subspecies, however, known as the Filipino American Podcaster, or FAP for short, has become increasingly difficult to find outside of the studio and out in the wild. But all of that changes as we land on planet Pablo. This afternoon, the podcaster has camouflaged himself, swapping out the trademark blue cardigan of the species for the cheap blue vest of the common birder. Our rare sighting begins during spring migration outside the American Museum of Natural History.

Pablo Torre: You see that? So we have the pigeons with the falcon on top of the needle behind it. Well, f***ing cool.

Voiceover Guy: Before long, the podcaster ventures into Central Park. Also known as the Madison Square Garden of birdwatching. A veritable mecca. Even if one of its most colorful residents is a Baltimore oriole.

Pablo Torre: I guess it makes sense for a show that is definitely a sports show to see the mascot of an actual sports team.

Voiceover Guy: The obsessive Filipino American podcaster travels in a flock, most often with an extraordinarily endangered breed, the freelance reporter.

Mickey Duzyj: When you said that the parallel might be watching us, I thought about Predator. Oh, yeah. You know, hiding in the... Slathered in mud. Yeah. That's what we got to do. We are doing that, technically.

Voiceover Guy: And on this day, they're guided by a true wonder of nature. Indeed, a mythological creature who simply goes by the name of Birding Jesus.

Charles Clarkson: So, American robins are singing. Yeah, we've got some vocal activity. American robins are singing.

Pablo Torre: I just love them. I just point to my ear and suddenly Birding Jesus is like, "That's an American robin."

Voiceover Guy: The podcaster is jubilant.

Pablo Torre: This is a great friend to have.

Charles Clarkson: Yeah, everybody needs a birding friend, I think.

Voiceover Guy: Suddenly, the freelance reporter sniffs out a lead.

Mickey Duzyj: You were saying that kind of the migration period is wider. Most of the time, males arrive on territory prior to females so that they can compete with one another for access to a territory...

Charles Clarkson: ...and provide the pending females with all the resources they need to build a nest...

Mickey Duzyj: ...and then assess the quality of the male based on the territory he was able to procure.

Pablo Torre: Show me what you got.

Mickey Duzyj: Exactly. Pending females is also a good band name, by the way.

Voiceover Guy: The podcaster, hungrier than ever for content and thirsty as they come, seeks his prey.

Pablo Torre: The name of my nemesis bird is the northern parula.

Charles Clarkson: The northern parula, that's correct.

Pablo Torre: The northern parula.

Charles Clarkson: Last year, there was one documented right here in the Ramble. So we are still within the realm of possibilities of finding a northern parula.

Voiceover Guy: So driven is he by the algorithm, the podcaster will stop at nothing.

Pablo Torre: We will find them. We will. Wherever they may be hiding. Even...

Charles Clarkson: The caveat here is they weigh as little as five grams.

Voiceover Guy: ...and especially at the incontrovertibility of the elements.

Charles Clarkson: ...and pick out the movements of birds that are moving around in a canopy that's being pelted with rain.

Pablo Torre: Nobody said this question was going to be easy.

Charles Clarkson: That's right, and it shouldn't be. This is a nemesis bird.

Voiceover Guy: Nothing can stop the podcaster and his very own brand of climax.

Pablo Torre: But here's the thing about a nemesis bird... We have not seen the nemesis bird yet.

Charles Clarkson: But the nemesis bird also hasn't seen us. Canada goose.

Pablo Torre: Canada goose.

Charles Clarkson: Yeah, Canada goose.

Pablo Torre: Canada goose. Wait, the jacket or the bird?

Charles Clarkson: There's a northern cardinal making a chip note behind us. Over here. You're hearing far more than you're seeing, so boning up on the vocalizations of birds is an absolute essential aspect of data collection or birdwatching in general.

Pablo Torre: I've been stunned by the amount of boning that goes on in the bird watching community in general.

Charles Clarkson: I'm sure, yeah.

Pablo Torre: It's a... A randy sport.

Charles Clarkson: It is a romantic pastime.

Pablo Torre: Yeah, and even the rain, the wet...

Charles Clarkson: The wetness.

Voiceover Guy: The podcaster is distracted.

Pablo Torre: The clouds sort of shrouding, hiding, but also revealing. It's very beautiful.

Voiceover Guy: Which is precisely the point of bird watching.

Pablo Torre: Beginning to get it. Yeah, yeah. Kind of beginning to get it. Instead of podcasting. I've greatly enjoyed this. Even though we have come up very empty and very wet. The northern parula has evaded us. But I don't want to give up yet.

Charles Clarkson: Good, and you shouldn't.

Voiceover Guy: It has been, as the Filipino American podcaster himself might say, an exclusive skeleton key for a time machine into the Kremlinology of what you might call the last American monoculture, with nothing less at stake than the very nature of nature itself.

Pablo Torre: What I've found out is that even though I've gained a nemesis, I've also gained a friend. Absolutely. Thank you, Birding Jesus.

Charles Clarkson: You're very welcome. I'm so happy that I could facilitate this very wet day in the park. Before we go, though, I have a very New York City way of us continuing our quest. I've put together a series of flyers. An original. "Have you seen this bird?" with a black and white photo of the northern parula. So I think we should hang it up.

Pablo Torre: Oh, and you have the tearaway tabs at the bottom. 51385Pablo.

Charles Clarkson: That is actually our hotline. Put that up like that.

Pablo Torre: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 51385Pablo, the northern kingbird need not apply. We're coming for you. Emphasis on coming.

Mickey Duzyj: Don't say that.

Pablo Torre: Is that too much? Is that a little much?

Mickey Duzyj: No comment. It's your show.

[Sound of Pearl Jam music]

Pablo Torre: At first, Pearl Jam. Sorry, is this... Have I got the wrong program? Slightly confused. And that for the record was not the real David Attenborough. It was actually some guy named Guy. And you can find Guy over on cameo.com slash a voiceover guy UK. But this has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production named after one of the most imperiled birds in all of North America. And we will hopefully talk to you next time.

[Ad break]

Pablo Torre: In too many Chicago neighborhoods, access to fresh food is a luxury, not a given. Gardeneers is working to change that by supporting school garden programs that empower students to grow their own produce, learn about nutrition, and fight back against systemic food injustice. These aren't just gardens. They're pathways to health, education, and equity. Learn how you can help at Gardeneers.org. Let's grow food justice in Chicago together.