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Thursday April 22, 2021 vol. CXLV no. 39
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Earth Day Edition
Designed by: Dimitar Chakarov
FEATURES
Despite a pandemic, Birding Society spreads its wings By Rachel Sturley
head features editor
It’s 6:54 a.m. on a Friday. The wind blows southward, the birds are chirping, and 1.4 miles from campus, three figures stand on a wooded path, eyes trained on a small brown creature skulking along the edges of a marsh. They are virtually unidentifiable as a junior and two first-years from Princeton University, donning masks, big black binoculars, and hiking attire. The identity of the heron they carefully observe might elude less trained eyes, but to these three students, it is clearly — and surprisingly — an American bittern. Rare for these parts of the Charles Rogers Wildlife Refuge, this sight makes the early wake-up well worth it. After the well-camouflaged bittern leaves their field of vision, the birders confer excitedly before falling silent again and turning back to the wooded path. Every once in a while, the natural ambience is broken by “pishing,” where one birder alternates “p” and “sh” sounds to imitate an alarm call and coax birds out into the open; other times a member of the group calls out a species name, and the rest of the group stands on high alert, scanning the skies. These three friends all happen to be members of the Princeton Birding Society (PBS), a group of students dedicated to ornithological education, conservation efforts, and the practice of birding. As spring migration picks up
and the local bird population swells, they have gotten into the habit of meeting for small, informal bird walks in nearby nature reserves. “On a bird walk, I am always focused,” said Claire Wayner ’22, co-founder of PBS. “I’m listening a little bit harder. I’m looking around for movement in the sky, and in trees and bushes.” “It’s kind of like hide-andseek,” she continued, “but with amazing, colorful feathered things that move.” In the popular imagination, noted Wayner, birding evokes an image of an elderly couple in “nerdy clothing”: cargo vests, bucket hats, clown-size hiking boots. But Wayner and other young birders at Princeton are eager to revitalize the art of birding — not just as a hobby but also in the hopes of cultivating a love of the natural world that will motivate people to save it. In the face of a rapid decline in bird populations, even something as small as a walk reminds these members of all that the world stands to lose. “On a bird walk, all you hear are other people’s footsteps and the chorus of birds singing in the trees,” said Willow Dalehite ’22, an ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB) concentrator and the current president of PBS. “And it’s just a really wonderful sound. Sometimes I go outside and then I realize that, in the background, I’m hearing so many birds. And I imagine what it would be like if they weren’t there, and it’s just completely different.”
JULIAN GOTTFRIED / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN
Birders build their niche Wayner and Joe Kawalec ’21 both came to Princeton with a long-standing interest in conservation and birds. Wayner, who started birding at age 11, was a member of a community of young birders back home in Maryland and was eager to find similar connections at Princeton. During her first semester on campus, she perceived a disappointing lack of birders on campus. However, that spring, she received an exciting email through residential college listservs from Kawalec. “He was looking at starting a bird feeder project. And I was shocked,” Wayner recalled. “So I emailed him really frantically and was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, we need to have a meal. We need to talk about birds.’ And we got lunch.” Kawalec, an EEB concentrator, hadn’t started birding until the summer before his second year at Princeton. Eager to combine his academic interests with personal hobbies, he spent that summer exploring the natural spaces around his home in East Brunswick, N.J.
The email Wayner saw was a call for volunteers for Project FeederWatch, a citizen science project run by the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology. Tracking what birds come to feeders nationwide in the winter provides ecologists with crucial data for analyzing patterns in migration and survival. In his sophomore year, Kawalec started a branch of the project housed in the Princeton Garden Project with the help of a grant from the High Meadows Environmental Institute. Wayner’s and Kawalec’s shared interest in birding and conservation propelled them to start PBS. Wayner described how they gathered petition signatures and “went through all the hoops” of making the group official through the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students (ODUS) that spring, before organizing their first birding outing in May 2019. Both remember feeling anything but optimistic about that walk. It was a Saturday morning at 7 a.m. and, to top it off, fell right in the middle of finals period. But 18 students came,
and the Princeton Birding Society was born. Both Wayner and Kawalec have a photo from the walk framed by their desks and describe the walk as one of their favorite PBS memories. “It’s been so exciting to watch this very enthusiastic, dedicated group of undergraduate birders form,” said Cassie Stoddard, assistant EEB professor and faculty advisor to PBS. “I’ve just been in awe of what they’ve been able to accomplish and the kind of excitement that’s bubbled up on campus.” The group quickly expanded their nature walks beyond the local area. They petitioned ODUS to grant student groups access to Enterprise vehicles, which allowed PBS to arrange trips off campus to birding sites such as Cape May, N.J.; Hawk Mountain, Pa; and Barnegat Light, N.J. PBS adapts to campus restrictions Like all other aspects of campus life, PBS had to make major adjustments to continue running this year. Under the See FEATURES for more
PHOTOS
PROSPECT
Natural beauty on Princeton’s campus
Three poems to read on Earth Day By Aditi Desai senior writer
Poets frequently pay homage to nature — whether it be to the single sprouting cherry blossom or the blade of grass that bends toward the sun. Words, much like nature, glisten with the beauty and surprise of life. So, this Earth Day, celebrate the environment around you by delving into some modern poems which inspire and enlighten — poems that remind us of the reliable rhythms and spontaneous movements of nature. Micro-minutes on Your Way to Work (Brenda Hillman, 2018)
See VISUAL ESSAYS for more CANDACE DO / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN
In Opinion
Kelsey Ji urges Princeton students to “dedicate this Earth Day to the animals who have always had it much harder than humans, especially in this past year.”
In Opinion
“Thinking through / these things each week, you cross / the bridge: gold coils, fog, feelings … / syllables also can grow younger like / those jellyfish” Capturing the thoughts that one can have while traveling, Brenda Hillman’s
Hannah Reynolds shares how climate change is impacting her community and notes Princeton’s negligence and complacency in the climate crisis.
“Micro-minutes on Your Way to Work” is an ode to place. “Place” in this poem straddles the line between metaphor and reality, crossing geographies with language that recontextualizes several different kinds of movement — the mind’s movement, the Earth’s movement, and the movements of cultural awareness. 14 Love Songs (Elizabeth Jacobson, 2019) “Could this be what it’s like for trees to lose the green from their leaves? / At noon the light shifts and the pond turns / into a mosaic of opaque green ice. / Orange carp rise in these cold watery chambers to breathe at the surface.” In a series of 14 vignettes, Elizabeth Jacobsen confronts a nostalgia for love through her description of the varied dimension of nature around her. Jacobsen explores all that nature has to offer, from its ability to transform and shift over time to its proximity See PROSPECT for more
In Puzzles
Our Earth-Day-themed puzzle from Bryan Boyd is best completed outdoors.