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Using Birdsong to Check a River’s Health
Birds can tell us a lot about the environment.
© Harry Collins
John Zaktansky leads the Middle Susquehanna Riverkeeper Association, which is using recording devices to identify birds by sound on different parts of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. John’s hope is that the birds ID’d by these recorders can help create a health report for the river as an early warning system for toxic pollutants, contaminants and other threats.
BirdNote®
Using Birdsong to Check a River’s Health
This is BirdNote.
[Eastern Wood-Pewee song]
Birds can tell us a lot about the environment. Some of them, known as indicator species, depend on clean water and what it produces – such as food for fish-eaters and flycatchers, like this Eastern Wood-Pewee.
[Eastern Wood-Pewee song]
John Zaktansky leads the Middle Susquehanna Riverkeeper Association, which is using recording devices to ID birds by sound on different parts of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania.
John Zaktansky: It's cool to see species that you know that are there, but you just don't see regularly. I mean, we're not out 24-7 watching for species as much as we'd like to be. So, things like pewees, or the saw-whet owls or the screech owls.
[Eastern Screech Owl whinny call]
John Zaktansky: And then — the extra excitement of living on a waterway and knowing that that bird is in your waterway regularly, knowing that that means that your waterway is clean, to know that you have maybe a Mallard or a Wood Duck living in your area, and then all of a sudden, you see the vocalizations double, triple, quadruple when it's raising its young.
[Wood Duck chicks calling]
John Zaktansky: It's just kind of neat to see because you can actually follow the life cycle of these bird species living in your backyard.
John’s hope is that the birds ID’d by these recorders can help create a health report for the river as an early warning system for toxic pollutants, contaminants and other threats.
[Eastern Wood-Pewee song]
Learn more about how birds are helping riverkeepers track water quality on a special season of the Bring Birds Back Podcast. Listen in your favorite podcast app or at BirdNote dot org. I’m Trisha Mukherjee.
[Eastern Wood-Pewee song]
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Producer: Mark Bramhill
Managing Editor: Jazzi Johnson
Managing Producer: Conor Gearin
Content Director: Jonese Franklin
Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Eastern Wood-Pewee ML104109801 Hal Mitchell, Eastern Screech Owl ML168804731 recorded by Wil Hershberger, and Wood Duck ML584843971 recorded by Alex Pellegrini.
BirdNote’s theme was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
© 2024 BirdNote March 2024
Narrator: Trisha Mukherjee
ID# PodBBB-32-2024-03-06 PodBBB-32
Reference:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2021.633160/full
Trisha Mukherjee
NarratorSights & Sounds
