Reflecting on the competition and connection

It's considered this where every day we go deep on one big news story At NPR, we bring listeners to the front lines of conflict. We report on political upheaval. We also share people's passions, like for the natural world.. Sarpest. Where is it? Sharpest. Good Yeah, that's really good. Holy We are listening to the sound of some teenage birders. So we're using our scopes to try and find an owl on that pipe out there across the river or across the pond we're just trying the water to black skimmers Everyone Yes they are. Skimmers? Look, they're flying very low. The wings are Oh yeah I see. Do you guys see skimmers? Yeah. we just had a skimmer B boys were competing last month in New Jersey Auduban's forty third annual World series of Birding It just is that you have it's an entire day from midnight to midnight. And this is Natalie Escobar, an NPR editor who spent that entire day with them And the goal is that you have to count as many species of birds as physically possible within the borders the great state of New Jersey. Natalie recruited colleague Ava Berger to join her as she crisscrossed the state So I'm not someone who was in the birding worlds. So I didn't know what to expect, but did I expect us to actually be following around three teenage boys for twenty four hours? No, but they genuinely go for twenty four hours Consider this, every story presents challenges for reporters. Sometimes that means keeping safe in a war zone But what does it take to tell the story of teenagers chasing hundreds of birds across an entire state? Coming up, we'll hear from the reporters who pulled an all nighter and tried not to get sick in the back of a minivan all in pursuit of that story From NPR, I'm Arian Fledida It was It's consider this from NPR When NPR's Natalie Escobar and Ava Berger set out to cover the world series of birding, they hadn't realized just how committed the three teenage boys they were following would be to tracking down as many bird species as possible So for the Week's repeporter's notebook, I asked them how the boys organized their day. They have it planned out by the second. They would be amazing radio producers to be honest. They had entire Google sheets saying at midnight, we're going to be here. fifteen minutes later, we're going to be here. A certain bird is only going to be in a certain spot for like a very short period of time in some cases. Yeah, and what you can't account for, even though they try to account for everything is if they're actually gonna see the bird they w to see in that one spot. And their dad, Jeff, O dad, ye Jeff Tin, he explained it to us like this. You know, that's a part of the game that, you know, hopefully you spot a bird And if you don't, you got to just suck it up, move on. There's lots of surprises, right? You're going to have peaks and valleys. we're going to be on our way to see a bird and it's going fly right across the car and they'll pick that up and then they don't have to go to that spot. And sometimes you'll show up to a spot looking for an owl and the owl just't doesn't Is he getting shushed? Yes, I wanted to play that day because he was getting shushed. They're not shy about shushing. they've shushed us. They shushed me, they shushed Dava. And it's not personal. I picked that up really quick but I was like, oh, okay, this is this is They're focused, they're serious and they're accounting for every second And they were trying to break a record. They were trying to spot more than two hundred birds. species in twenty four hours How Do you verify that they've actually heard or seen the birds that they say they've heard or seen? Is it just like the honor system? How does it work? Yeahes. so there are competition rules that you know, everybody has to adhere to the For the vast majority of the birds all of them, all the people on the team have to hear it or see it and they all have to agree on what bird they saw. So one thing about birds is that there's a lot of them that look like each other, famously shore birds and gulls, but they have to all be in agreement. And You also can't play the bird calls in order to try to get a response, but if you're really good like these teenagers are, you can imitate the bird calls to try to get a response. So One of them was doing the Call of the Great Corned Dwl, which was really cool thought that I heard an owl Oh I was like, oh my gosh, like no, no. That was him. That was him. Things they can do though is that they can also clap to try to like to like stir up the birds a little bit without stressing them out And they can also do this thing that birders do call pishing. It's like this Sissississ,ississ And for whatever reason, that makes the birds a more active, mayaybe they'll come out of their hiding spot. we did ask them the question of cheating because that was something on our minds. I mean Why not just say you saw it? Why not just put it in, get one extra bird? And their answer was immediate. I don't think we've ever had an incident though that we like lied about it. Already we've had two birds. we had the monk that they didn't see and then we had the Iree y'all that I' here. so I feel like we're pretty honest about that These kids didn't actually win the competition. they came in second place. was that You know You're an objective journalist, You they there just record what happened, but was it hard to see them fall three bird species short of the trophy I was a little devastated for them and I'm not gonna lie. You get really invested when you're hanging out with them for twenty four hours. but a lot of it is luck. A lot of it is like you're at the right place at the right time. and it works in both directions. Sometimes that you get unlucky, sometimes you get lucky and you see something that you wouldn't have otherwise. Yeah, last night, like Jack said, we were a little annoyed A And I guess this morning too, just like But I'm not focusing on like we lost. I'm focusing on the fact that you know we got second in our division with two hundred and six species and we had an amazing time and made some amazing memories. We can use this as a learning experience for other years. The other team simply saw more birds, the flying penguins. The flying penguins. Give them, give them their due. They are rivals too, I will say. They were swapping notes at the end They're really careful to not reveal the locations of specific birds that they saw, like where their nest sites were 'cause like they are rivals You know, we cover a lot of serious stories at NPR, a lot of tragic stories, a lot of sad stories, a lot of important social issues Um But you know, we also like to do stories like this and people really like them. F stories, stories that take people out into a community with people just doing cool things. Why was this a story? you wanted to tell I just thought about how beautiful it would sound and how beautiful it would look People really connect with stories about the natural world. People really love birding Also, one of the things I realized as I got further and further into getting to know this group, getting to know this team and their dads is I don't know, I always hear stories about how teenagers are always on their phones and you know teenage boys in particular might have trouble forming deep friendships. And just this really flies in the face of that Also that seeing Parents and their kids just really bonding and having this moment. you know, Dads who love their son so much that they'll spend twenty four hours driving them around in a van eating what they were like eating chips and M and Ms and drinking Rd Bll and but also sons who like really want to hang out with their dads and go birding and spend all this time with them. I felt kind of like I was crashing this like really sweet moment. I will just say mean Gen Z as a member of Gen Z, we get a bad rep. And I think this really showed, I mean, it was posted on the MPR Instagram and it got a ton of attention. And the top comment was the kids are all right And I loved that. I think that really summed up what we were trying to show and what these kids were doing. And just to your point of the stories we cover, I mean this week I was covering the Epstein files and we cover these stories that are really difficult and really hard and having some messy wonder in our lives is very beautiful, and that's what these kids gave to us Well, I've been speaking with Natalie Escobar and Ava Berger about the reporting on the World series of Birding. Thanks to both of you for coming by. Thank you. That was so much fun. Thank you. This episode was produced by Vincent Aovino, It was edited by Adam Rainey. Our interim executive producer is Courtney Dorning Ps consider this from NPR, I'm Adrian Fladibo