The joys of reporting on 3 teenagers chasing glory in the World Series of Birding

0:00Natalie Escobar:It's Consider 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, and we also share people's passions, like for the natural world.

0:15Ava Berger:Oh, a nest! Whoa! Whoa! You have to pin that. Pin, pin, pin, pin. I'll pin a nest. Sharpie nest. Where is it? Sharpie nest is good. Yeah, that's really good.

0:24Natalie Escobar: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.

0:35Ava Berger:Do you guys see in the water two black skimmers? Everyone? Both? Yes, they are. Skimmers? Look, they're flying very low. The wings are pointed. Do you guys see two black skimmers? Wow.

0:46Natalie Escobar:Yeah.

0:47Ava Berger:Dad, we just got a skimmer.

0:48Natalie Escobar:These boys were competing last month in New Jersey Audubon's 43rd Annual World Series of Birding.

0:55Ava Berger:So the gist is that you have, it's an entire day from midnight to midnight.

1:01Natalie Escobar:And this is Natalie Escobar, an NPR editor who spent that entire day with them.

1:06Ava Berger:And the goal is that you have to count as many species of birds as physically possible within the borders of the great state of New Jersey.

1:16Natalie Escobar:Natalie recruited colleague Ava Berger to join her as she crisscrossed the state.

1:20Ava Berger:So I'm not someone who was in the birding world. So I didn't know what to expect. But did I expect us to actually be following around three teenage boys for 24 hours? No, but they genuinely go for 24 hours.

1:34Natalie Escobar: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.

2:00Natalie Escobar:From NPR, I'm Adrienne Flerido.

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2:28Natalie Escobar:Sometimes about really big things, but most times, the little mysteries are the best. Our lost and found is currently filled with pants. I don't know. I've never seen this happen.

2:38Ava Berger:Wait, this is true?

2:39Natalie Escobar:This is true. Mysteries of every size, each week. This American Life, wherever you get your podcasts.

2:53Natalie Escobar: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 reporter's notebook, I asked them how the boys organized their day.

3:15Ava Berger:They have it planned out by the second. They would be amazing radio producers, to be honest. They had an entire Google sheet saying, at midnight, we're going to be here. 15 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 going to see the bird they want to see in that one spot. And their dad, Jeff, Otis's dad, yeah, Jeff Train, he explained it to us like this. You know, that's a part of the game that, you know, hopefully you spot a bird.

3:52Ava Berger: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. And so we're going to be on our way to see a bird and it's going to 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 doesn't, doesn't.

4:15Natalie Escobar:Is he getting shushed?

4:16Ava Berger:And yes, I wanted to play that tape because he was getting shushed. By his son. They're not shy about shushing. They shushed us. They shushed me. They shushed Deva. And it's not personal. I picked that up really quick. But I was like, oh, OK, this is. They're focused.

4:30Natalie Escobar: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 200 birds species in 24 hours. How do you verify that they've actually heard or seen the birds they say they've heard or seen? Is it just like the honor system? How does it work?

4:46Ava Berger:Yeah, so there are competition rules that, you know, everybody has to adhere to. 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 shorebirds 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 horned owl, which was really cool.

5:32Ava Berger:I thought that I heard an owl. And 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, stir up the birds a little bit without stressing them out. And they can also do this thing that birders do called pishing. It's like this...

6:00Ava Berger:And for whatever reason, that makes the birds a little more active. Maybe they'll come out of their hiding spot. And 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. The honor system. So I think we keep each other in check too. I don't know if we've ever had an incident though that we lied about it. Like already we've had two birds that we had the monk that they didn't see. and then we had the screenshot of that in here. So I feel like we're pretty honest about that.

6:40Natalie Escobar:These kids didn't actually win the competition. They came in second place. Was that, you know, you're an objective journalist. You're there just to record what happened. But was it hard to see them fall three bird species short of the trophy?

6:53Ava Berger:I was a little devastated for them, I'm not going to lie. You get really invested when you're hanging out with them for 24 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 uh and i guess this morning too uh 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 206 species and we had an amazing time and made some amazing memories and we can use this as a learning experience for other years.

7:36Ava Berger:The other team simply saw more birds, the flying penguins. The flying penguins! Give them their due. They are rivals too, I will say. They were swapping notes at the end. They were really careful to not reveal the locations of specific birds that they saw, like where their nest sites were, because they are rivals.

7:55Natalie Escobar: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. But, you know, we also like to do stories like this and people really like them. Fun stories, stories that take people out into a community with people just doing cool things. Why was this a story that you wanted to tell?

8:16Ava Berger: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. But I 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 sons so much that they'll spend 24 hours driving them around in a van eating what they were like eating chips and M &Ms and drinking Red Bull.

9:10Ava Berger: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, I 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 NPR Instagram and it got a ton of attention. And the top comment was, the kids are all right. And I love 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.

9:44Ava Berger: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.

9:56Natalie Escobar:Well, I have 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.

10:06Ava Berger:Thank you. That was so much fun. Thank you.

10:08Natalie Escobar:This episode was produced by Vincent Acovino. It was edited by Adam Rainey. Our interim executive producer is Courtney Dorning.

10:20Natalie Escobar:It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Adrienne Flerido.

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