What ospreys can tell us about climate change

0:00WBUR Podcast, Boston.

0:08We're concerned because osprey populations to our south, from the Chesapeake through New Jersey, have absolutely collapsed. Ospreys are mighty birds that hunt fish from the sky. What's causing their populations to plummet?

0:35It's Friday, July 31st, and this is Here and Now Anytime from NPR and WBUR. I'm Chris Bentley.

0:44Today on the show, sure, painting is hard, but try rendering portraits and cityscapes using a typewriter. From a distance, it just looks like a drawing, but when you step closer, you start to see all of these hidden messages. Also, everything you ever wanted to know about synesthesia, the phenomenon of senses commingling. For instance, every day of the week has a color, a number, a shape. Sometimes things have a smell that I can think of, or a temperature, or a texture. See the world in a new light, or a new taste.

1:21But first, if you've ever seen an osprey in the wild, you know they're impressive birds. They're ferocious fishers, scouring oceans and lakes from the sky, then plunging into the water to rip out their prey. Spending time near ospreys can expose you to some surreal sights, like seeing the sun glint off the silvery scales of a fish as it soars overhead, grasped in the bird's talons. But along the Connecticut shore on Long Island Sound, scientists and citizens are noticing a troubling change in the local population of ospreys. They're having fewer chicks. In fact, this past year, observers documented the lowest number since 2014.

2:04That's why Anthony Brooks and producer Lynn Managon wanted to catch up with some researchers in Connecticut for a closer look at how the birds are doing. Oh, there's a nestling's head. Now I can see one little baby. This is the nest that I believe had two eggs in it. That's Lisa Lovejoy from Branford, Connecticut, a nest observer for the Connecticut Audubon Society. She trains her binoculars on four osprey nests and says she's been seeing evidence that the birds are hungry. The last time I checked on this nest, the adult in the nest was chirping. And you could tell it was like, you know, calling for its mate to bring food.

2:48Whenever I have recorded them, about a half to three quarters of them have smaller fish than in previous years. But they are catching fish. They're just not catching the large fish, the larger fish. That could explain an increase in nest failures. That's when the osprey's nesting attempts end before any chicks successfully hatch or leave the nest. It's been happening up and down the East Coast, and now it appears to be starting in Connecticut. It could be due to overfishing, which means less food for the birds. To understand more about this, we spoke to Miley Bull, Senior Director of Science and Conservation for the Connecticut Audubon Society.

3:31Miley, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks, Anthony. Good to be here. Give me a sense of where you are right now. What are you looking at? Right now, I'm at the confluence of the Housatonic River. and the Long Island Sound at the border of a 840-acre salt marsh called the Charles E. Wheeler Wildlife Refuge. And I'm standing on our observation tower, which is a perfect perspective of the entire ecosystem here. All right. So tell us what you've been observing recently about the health of their population. What have you been seeing? Well, we've been monitoring this population since about 2014. and since 2014 the population has been increasing incrementally almost every year until about last year and it looked like the population began to waver a little bit and we're concerned because um osprey populations to our south and from the chesapeake through new jersey have absolutely collapsed right and so my understanding is ospreys nearly went extinct because of the pesticide DDT before it was banned in 1972.

4:43Are you concerned that we might be heading in that direction or that there's something like that happening to this population? Yeah, not so much on the chemical level, but possibly on the food level. If the food declines for ospreys, they can't raise their young and produce the way they had in the past. So apparently it could be a lack of prey that the ospreys are suffering from now or may be suffering from now. We've had some of our monitors notice that there have been some osprey nest abandonment, maybe some young, maybe starving. But we're not sure yet. It's still in the middle of the season.

5:25OK, that was Miley Bull with the Connecticut Audubon Society. Let's now hear from Miley's colleague, Matt Joyce, who manages the Audubon Society's coastal center in Milford, Connecticut.

5:40So we've actually just seen one of our osprey kind of just soar past us, probably no more than 10 or 15 feet away from the tower, with a fish actually in its talons there. I don't know if it was maybe a mackerel or it could be a menhaden, and there's another one. So good fishing today at least. Good fishing today, at least. And if there's a shortage of fish, what happens? I mean, does the mother come back to the nest and have to choose which of her fledglings get the fish or how does that work? So yeah, Osprey have adopted a strategy, they've evolved a strategy which is common across a lot of different bird species where the eggs hatch asynchronously.

6:22So one egg will hatch and then you might have the second egg hatch one to two days later. And then if you have three or four eggs that means that third or fourth chicks obviously going to be at a disadvantage being anywhere between you know five to seven days younger and a lot smaller. What's generally thought to be the case is that the bigger chicks do dominate resources when they're coming in, and if there is plentiful resources, they will be sort of first to the table, as it were. When, you know, food is scarce, then, you know, the mother or the father bringing in the food will, will, you know, prioritize those older chicks to ensure that there is at least some of the chicks that survive rather than spreading it too thinly across three or four and losing all of them.

7:03I see. Can you talk about why this matters so much? I mean, what's the big concern about diminished numbers of osprey? What do we stand to lose if we don't take action and figure out what's going on here? Well, you know, Osprey, you know, as Miley said, they're an iconic species. I think we'd all be poorer for not having them in the sky and being able to see them. But there's also, you know, they're what we term an indicator species. They're excellent for research because they're very prominent when they nest. And as they are at the top of the food chain, they can give you a really good idea of the health of all of the different levels down the food chain.

7:46Species like menhaden, for example, act as a link between things like plankton, which form the base of the food chain, to those predators further up the food chain. So if osprey is suffering, it stands to reason that other species like striped bass or seals or dolphins, or let's not forget human beings as well, are going to lose that link between the primary producers in an ecosystem and those at the top. All right. Well, Matt Joyce, Conservation Science and Coastal Manager for the Connecticut Audubon Society, thanks so much for this report on the health of the osprey population. We really appreciate it.

8:24Well, thank you. Thank you for your time. I really appreciate it, too. We've got some osprey nest cam footage at hereandnow.org. Coming up in a minute, Robin Young speaks with an artist working in an unusual medium, an old typewriter. Stick around.

9:12assistance can help get your trip back up to speed. Learn more at AllianzTravelInsurance.com. British artist James Cook is only 29, but his work is going viral, not just in the UK where he lives, but around the globe. Among his recent pieces, stunning portraits of the philosopher Plato, cityscapes from New York and London and Paris, a detailed Wimbledon, which he was asked to create sitting on center court, which must have been something to see because he uses a typewriter to make his art. In fact, he chooses from about 100 of them that he owns, mostly vintage, and the artwork is black and white, but other pieces use splashes of color, which we might have to explain to younger people, is because typewriters use these ribbons that you put on them and lace through and the keys hit the ribbons.

10:03James Cook joins us now from London. Welcome. Hello there. How are you? I am fine. And we have to tell people to, how to say this, run, don't walk to our website here now.org because we're going to be posting a lot of these pictures there. They're incredible. Do you find yourself, by the way, having to explain to younger people what it is you're working with? Yes, all the time. It's really funny. If I have an exhibition, there might be like a family that comes along to see the work. and I distinctly remember that there was this family and they had children about seven or eight years old and they were seeing typewriters for the very first time and they came away confused thinking that oh typewriters they're used to make drawings so they had no idea that there was technology that didn't have screens.

10:50And this was the internet or the iPad of its day when it was in 1874. It changed everything then. How are you doing this? First, the backstory, because you were influenced by someone else. So for me, typewriter art started back in 2014, and it was simply an art class project where my art teacher had said to the class, okay, students, we want you to go and research artists that have used technology in interesting ways. And for me, it was one particular artist who really inspired me. And his name was Paul Smith. He was an American-born artist, born, I think, around the late 1920s. And he was born with cerebral palsy.

11:37And as a child, his parents gave him a typewriter because due to his condition, he couldn't hold a pencil. So they thought, well, let's give him a typewriter because pressing the keys on a typewriter is much more simple than having to hold pencil. Amazing. He had this passion for art. He found that using the typewriter gave him that mechanical control to be able to produce his own drawings in this incredibly unique way. Well, and it might be simple to hit the key, but there's nothing simple about this, I would think. I'm going to pull up something now that I'm just going to look at. Okay, here's a portrait of a young woman, and it's pretty realistic.

12:15It looks like it's a pencil sketch, and yet I look closer, and how did you get the skin on her face? Well, oh, that's the at key, the A with a circle around it, done over and over and over again, tight and close to each other. And then her sweater, which looks like it's knit. The knitting is actually the word Wednesday over and over and over again. How do you decide what keys to use, how you're going to sketch it out with the typewriter to be as realistic as it is? Yeah, I suppose because I've done it for over a decade now, you kind of begin to learn which letters, numbers, punctuation marks kind of work for different subjects.

12:56Like you described there, the at symbol is really good for skin tones because it has quite a large surface area. So you can do really soft shading, whereas, you know, if it's something like a cityscape. So I love drawing city skylines. And so anything that's like a horizontal line would be an underscore, whereas a vertical line would be the shape of like a capital I or a lowercase I. That's bricks right there. Pretty much, yeah, bricks. So, yeah, lots of capital I's placed next to each other. And the way that I use the typewriter is a bit like, I don't know if you remember the Etch-A-Sketch toy.

13:29Yes. So instead of just typing line by line as if you were writing a letter, I might use the typewriter to move to different positions of the page just by pressing some of the knobs and levers. And what I will do to begin with is I'll swap out a fresh ribbon with an old one so that it has just a very small amount of ink on the ribbon. So when you're typing onto the paper, it's just very faintly leaving an impression. and it's only once I'm happy with that that I can sort of fully commit to the drawing and then I'll swap it out with a fresh ribbon and then I can start the drawing properly but it will take weeks weeks yeah a single artwork can take me uh three to four weeks to do so within the space of a year I'm really lucky if I can get 12 drawings done which is why one of my big questions was we went online it appeared that you were selling these for you know in the low hundreds oh yeah aren't you aware of tom hanks the typewriter collector i think he could kick up a little bit more than that all the time and effort you put into this these are masterpieces oh thank you that's very kind of you to say i mean so tom hanks he he actually signed one of my drawings i did a portrait of him um it was a long time ago now so i sent him this portrait that i typed and months and months went by and then in the post box i saw playtone productions and there was the portrait and it had a little message saying, thank you, James, this is super.

14:56And he'd signed his name, Tom Hanks. Yeah. And he has a huge collection of typewriters and there are people who adore typewriters still, but what you do with them, talk about some of the other things, parentheses, that makes sense that they'd be great for, you know, pupils in someone's eye when you're doing portraits. You also do hidden messages. Yeah, definitely. So one other thing I love to do is to take the typewriter out of the studio and actually bring it to location. Because I think there's something really marvellous about having this really unusual kind of antiquated machine on the streets.

15:30And what I will do is I'll hide coordinates. And for people that look very closely at the drawings, those coordinates, they could work out where my next location is and where I'm going to be next. So that's just one example. Sometimes it will be the history of a location. So it could be, for example, you know, the history of Times Square. It could be like sort of jokey things. One more recent example would be of Wimbledon, and I had typed all of the iconic tennis players into the drawing. What I really like about typewriter art is because, again, you're using the language to make a drawing. From a distance, it just looks like a drawing.

16:07But when you step closer, you start to see all of these hidden messages. Right. You mentioned Paul Smith, the man who had cerebral palsy and innovated this artwork. You would take magnifying glasses and look at his work to see, well, what is the little detail? How did he do this? And people can zoom in on yours as well. Again, we have them at hereandnow.org. So I'm seeing the Golden Gate Bridge, which is just stunning. Then what's the water? I'm looking close. Oh, it's the word Golden Gate Bridge over and over and over again. When you zoom in, you see that. But when you are pulled out, it looks like just waves.

16:41Yes. It's just lovely details like that. I also question in the drawing of the Golden Gate Bridge, why is it called the Golden Gate Bridge when it's red? but yeah there's lots of kind of witty satirical things as well I like to so for example the Wimbledon one originally I've gone to them to ask was it possible for me to come and do a project and they'd said no and as a joke on the front door of center court I put a sign that said no typewriters allowed just to be a bit cheeky well you understand from reading that you use your own photography to try to really see what you're doing before you start doing it.

17:20And for aerial views and things like that, you might use Google Earth, Street View, 3D building data. The only big problem is that it's not like you have a backspace. You've said if you make a mistake, the whole thing is ruined. Why? Haven't you heard of Whiteout? Yeah, but here's the thing, right? So if I was to use Whiteout over a long time, so like 10 12 years it actually cracks perishes so if someone was to buy the original picture from me I think they'd be a little bit annoyed in like 10 years time if they start to see the drawing cracking so what I say to people is there are mistakes in every single drawing but I always try and find ways of hiding them and people quite often point out spelling mistakes in my drawings so but I do you know again it's just in some ways it's kind of a compliment because people are studying the drawings really closely.

18:08And I think it's really hard for people to engage with art, just generally. So the fact that they're spending time to look at these drawings in greater detail is a compliment. Just there's so much to your work. Really appreciate you, James Cook, for what you're doing. Oh, it's my absolute pleasure. Thank you very much. Again, British typewriter artist James Cook. You can find his artwork and a link to more at our website here now.org. And real quick, James, we understand you have a book coming up, portraits of your favorite authors. Can you just tell us one or two? So 50 authors across many centuries hidden in each of the drawings are lots of messages about the authors and some of my favorites, William Shakespeare's and Judy Blume.

18:51That's a range right there. Thank you so much. We look forward to that. Thank you.

18:59coming up have you heard of synesthesia when people can taste words or hear colors maybe you even have it for those of us who don't we're curious what that's like after the break indira lakshmanand finds out

19:19for most of us our senses live in separate rooms we hear music with our ears we see colors with our eyes, and time is just a number on a watch. But for about 4 % of the population, those rooms have no walls. It's a neurological phenomenon called synesthesia, from the Greek for a union of the senses. That means those people can see time, hear colors, or even taste words. Our next guest lives in a world where time itself has a physical geometric shape. Scientists who study synesthesia say it could help us better understand human perception. Dr. Mary Spiller is a cognitive psychologist and senior lecturer at the University of East London, who not only studies synesthesia, she has it herself.

20:05Mary, welcome. Hello, thank you for having me here. So Mary, you've spent your career studying human perception, but you didn't realize that your own brain was wired differently until you were a PhD student. Tell us about this oval that has surrounded you since childhood. Yes, that's correct. So for me, time is months of year in an oval shape. so it's an oval in front of me at sort of waist height with January near me and August opposite me. As I said I've always experienced this I always thought that's just how everyone saw the year and then I remember as a child talking to people about it talking about family and finding out pretty quickly that no not everyone experienced it like this.

20:43I kind of didn't really think much about it and then many years later started my PhD I was studying grapheme colour synesthesia which is when people have coloured letters. So every time they see a letter, hear a word, they get colour experiences. And then I was at a conference listening to people present all of their synesthesia research. And there were all these talks about time-space synesthesia. I was sat in the audience thinking, doesn't everyone do this? Like, surely this is how everyone and I sort of had that moment where I was like, oh no, I'm a synesthete. Fascinating. So they're all different kinds of synesthesia.

21:16You have time-space. give us the examples of the other most common forms. Yeah, so I've mentioned what we call graphene colour synesthesia. So this is when letters or numbers, written units, give the person with synesthesia an experience of colour. So it could be like the letter A might be blue or the letter F might be green. And then there's sound colour synesthesia, which again is quite common. This is when music or sounds give people experiences of colour. Sometimes these are just straightforward colours. sometimes these amazing visual arrays of all kinds of exciting sort of colours and shapes and different textures that they experience so listening to you know classical music or something can be a very sort of visual experience for people with this form of synesthesia as well as the the lovely sounds that they're hearing other forms include word taste synesthesia so people when they hear words they taste things it's not very common but the people that I've spoken to with it and sometimes say it can be a bit uncomfortable when some words don't have a nice taste and they have to say the words or they have to hear the words.

22:22So that's one of the drawbacks there, I think, for that form of synesthesia. All right. Well, for a long time, skeptics said that this was just a vivid imagination, but scientists now have physical, measurable proof that these experiences are real. There was a fascinating recent study about how eyes react to seeing colours that are not really there, like seeing the number five as red. Tell us about that. Yeah, so when we see different shades of colour externally, like when we're looking around the room around us, our eyes, our pupils will change shape depending on the brightness of the colour.

22:59And so what these researchers did is they got people with synesthesia to have their synesthetic experience. So they were presented with letters or numbers, but with no color and they measured their pupils and how they changed. And they found that depending on the brightness of the synesthetes color, so different letters have different colors, depending on different numbers have different colors, their pupils did change in the way that they predicted as if they were seeing real colors. So they were not seeing colors, they were not showing anything, but their pupil size changed as if they were seeing colors.

23:31Well, let's talk about the neuroscience behind this. Since the 1800s, scientists have been struggling to figure out how synesthesia develops in the brain. There are now two prevailing theories. Explain to us, is this a glitch in the brains of certain people or something else? So it's definitely not a glitch. I can guarantee that. So the first main theory is that there's different parts of the brain that are involved and that there's usually no feedback between those parts of the brain. The neuron, the connections are there, but activity just goes in one direction. With synesthetes, it's thought that the activity goes in both directions between those parts of the brain.

24:10The second theory is what's called the cross-activation theory. And this one, I think there's a bit more evidence to support. So when we're born, we have loads of neural connections in our brain. And we all go through this phase where the connections, the non-useful connections kind of disappear. And for some reason with synesthetes, those non-useful connections do not all disappear. And so they get these extra connections that are still there, remaining all the time from birth. It's a genetic reason. That's a different story. But scientists are working on the genetic side of it. But those extra connections are there.

24:43And then because of those extra connections, you get these kind of extra sensory things happening. So when they hear music, they don't just hear music. The visual part of the brain is also activated and they get the colour experience that way. So extra white and gray matter in these people's brains and higher structural connectivity. Okay, well, research shows that synesthetes are eight times more likely to work in creative roles than the general population. I'm thinking of jazz musician Duke Ellington, who didn't just see colors, he felt textures in music. He described the note D as looking like dark blue burlap.

25:21The composer Franz Lischt would tell orchestras to play certain notes a little bluer to get the sound that he was seeing. Pop star Billie Eilish recently spoke about her experience with synesthesia on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. Let's listen. I don't know why it exists, but my brotherhood has it. I have it. My dad has it. A few people I know have it. My mom does not. It's a thing in your brain where you associate random stuff to everything. So, for instance, every day of the week has a color, a number, a shape. Sometimes things have a smell that I can think of or a temperature or a texture.