This ‘fairyland’ bog is a beacon for winter birders – and a sponge for the climate

8:19Chris Bentley:Sparky Stensas hopes all those birds will keep visiting for generations to come. But he says as the climate changes, the cast of characters taking wing at Sac-Zim Bog is going to change too.

8:31Rich Hoeg:For me, it's been an existential crisis, you know, buying up all this beautiful bog, lands, peatlands. You know, what is this going to be like in 100 years or 200 years or whatever? And I don't know, but we're purchasing and protecting habitat. Whatever it is, it's going to be habitat.

8:51Chris Bentley:It makes you feel a little better thinking that it's going to be home to something. Maybe not the same species that it is today. Absolutely. For now, at least, it's home to 4 ,000 species, including rare birds. And countless people flocking to northern Minnesota to see them.

9:15Chris Bentley:I was curious about those listening devices installed at Saksim Bog, so when I got home, I called up Rich Hoag. He's a naturalist in Duluth and volunteer with Sparky Stensos' group, Friends of Saksim Bog. And he's the one who built some of those devices by sticking together a microphone and the tiny computer board called Raspberry Pi. It connects to BirdNet, the AI-powered database of bird songs run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology that powers the app Merlin, which you might have used if you've ever wanted to shazam a bird call. If not, check it out sometime. Merlin is free and pretty cool to use.

9:53Chris Bentley:Hogue put all that stuff into a rugged box with a data storage card, and voila, you've got what he calls BirdNet Pi.

10:01Rich Hoeg:I'm a retired techie, and I had always been intrigued with birds here in northern Minnesota. I had pet birds. I was the person that had to fill the bird feeders we had at our house. And when I was a kid, even when I was like seven or eight years old, I was allowed to go traps and around the forest by myself and be home by supper time.

10:25Chris Bentley:In his retirement, Hogue is still exploring the woods. He's got several of those listening devices planted all over the Arrowhead region of northern Minnesota that stretches along the shore of Lake Superior, including one in his own backyard. He says bioacoustics have revealed a hidden world around him. Like when his home device told him he had sandhill cranes in town.

10:48Rich Hoeg:And I go, no way. This thing is totally messed up. Because I live in the boreal forest and there's just no way a sandhill crane would be there. But I went and listened, and I realized the device actually heard sandhill cranes migrating overhead that night. And I've had the same thing happen with golden-eyed ducks, common loons. And so I actually get identifications for birds that are flying overhead, if it's relatively quiet out. You know, if it's windy, then not. But still, I've been really surprised.

11:23Chris Bentley:Recordings from Saks Zimbog are also informing scientific studies at the Owl Research Institute in Montana and the Natural Resources Research Institute at the University of Minnesota, where Alexis Grindy from The Nature Walk earlier says listening devices can log birds that are hard to see, like nocturnal owls. With multiple units recording in different locations, Grindy says they can even pinpoint which trees birds are using, how their migrations might be shifting, and how their fledgling young are doing when they're too small to leave the nest.

11:56Rich Hoeg:We can answer all those questions just by listening to birds, which is pretty cool.

11:59Chris Bentley:So it's just like a microphone you put out in the box?

12:01Rich Hoeg:Essentially, it's like an old-school boombox, and you strap it up. It's really durable. The batteries last a pretty long time. And then the complicated part comes when you take it back to the lab and you have to run it through all these different models to look for finders and say, is that a road? Is that an owl? What exactly is the noise that's coming through? they're saying different things right some calls mean one thing other calls mean other things so you can understand what the sort of conversations that the birds are having throughout the breeding season and make some inference that way

12:29Chris Bentley:as birds are having conversations yes definitely they're always having conversations you got some of that video but they communicate with each other they

12:37Rich Hoeg:give warning systems to each other so the bird community itself we sometimes just think about males singing to attract females but they actually are communicating with each other all the time. Here's where the food is. Let's go together. There's a predator over here. One predator eats one bird. That might be good, but also it's more likely that the neighbors are going to get eaten too. So there's a lot of value in sort of cooperating in a neighborhood, if you're a bird probably.

13:03Chris Bentley:I had that conversation with Grindy while we were trying to spot a northern hawk owl. We didn't find one then, but I did see one another time in a wilderness area nearby that I later learned was one of Rich Hoag's sites for monitoring as well. He often records northern hawk owls there, he says, and imagines them scanning the frozen forest with their yellow eyes, speaking a language meant for non-human ears.

13:35Chris Bentley:We'll be right back. We're coming in from the cold for this last story on today's show. I'm going to hand it over to Robin Young for a few minutes.

13:47Rich Hoeg:We've spoken with author Stephen King many times over the years. He's a favorite guest. Most recently, he spoke of his children's book, Hansel and Gretel, a reimagining of the classic tale. But he also became reflective about getting older and having more to write. Bruce Springsteen said something that struck me as very apropos to my situation. Say what? Stephen King went on to speak eloquently about Bruce Springsteen, who said, by the way, that basically life is short. We finished the taped interview. It was lovely. And then this. Okay, I'm going to ask you one thing. I once said on the air, I felt mizzled.

14:26Rich Hoeg:And of course, it's misled. So it's in that spirit. I think you meant to say apropos. Apropos, and what did I say? Apropos. Apropos. Which is now one of our favorites. When I was a kid, I used to think that those animals that run around out west were coyotes. Yeah, I used to think that the parts of a story were the dentals. They are actually the details. Hey, we have a segment here. Can we ever use that for our next recurring segment? Absolutely. Oh, yeah. I mean, it helps people. Use Koyot. Don't worry. We gave Stephen a chance to correct himself, and here we are, our semi-regular segment on mispronounced words.

15:14Rich Hoeg:Reminder that Stephen and I and all of you out there are not alone. We asked around our home station, WBUR in Boston, for some confessions, beginning with Morning Edition host Tiziana Dearing and her mispronounced word. Homage, which I thought was hummage. And I found out I was wrong the first time I heard somebody say homage. And I was like, what is that? And they tried to explain it to me, and I said, that's hummage. And they said, oh, honey. Vigilant. I am convinced that it should be said villigent. Demon, but in my head I read it as demon. So like if there was a book called The Demon Hunter, my brain would say The Demon Hunter.

15:59Rich Hoeg:There was a band called Behemoth, which I read somewhere and said, I wonder what this band Behemoth is all about. Last year I was recording something and I said that something would be my demise. What I do know is that my coworkers will never let me live this down. It will probably be my demise. Bedraggled, I think, is close enough. I said it and probably still say it in my mind. Bedraggled. Bedraggled. You wake up in bed, you're looking a little raggedy. Bedraggled. Detritus. It's detritus. But I was ready to do a newscast when an NPR newscaster said detritus. I was seconds away from sending a little correction when I thought that maybe I should include the correct pronunciation.

16:50Rich Hoeg:And I looked it up and touched my tail between my legs.

16:55Chris Bentley:Whom amongst us hasn't mispronounced a word? My moment of shame was when I was pretty young, asked to read aloud from a book in class, and said, determined, instead of determined. I still remember the laughs, even from the teacher. But hey, there's no shame. Even Stephen King does it. There's lots more to that conversation. Robin even brings in two expert pedants of pronunciation, who wrote the book on it, literally. You can find that conversation about mispronounced words at hereandnow.org.

17:35Chris Bentley:But that'll do it for us today. Here and Now, Anytime comes from NPR and WPR Boston. Today's stories were produced by Karen Miller-Metson and me, Chris Bentley. Today's editors were Todd Montt, Michael Scotto, and Sheep O 'Feary. Technical direction from Caleb Green and James Trout. I wrote the theme music with Max Liebman and a veritable behemoth of audio engineering and musicianship, Mike Moschetto. Our digital producers are Alison Hagen and Grace Griffin. and here at NOW's executive producer is Alan Price. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with you soon.

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