Birding the gender gap

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0:30for financing details. Based on EPA estimate of 2024 large full-line automaker fleet-wide fuel economy. EPA Automotive Trends Report 2025. Before Achilles found glory and Odysseus eventually found his way home, someone had to compose the Iliad and Odyssey. But was their credited author, Homer, even real? Hi, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy show that takes history seriously. And we are traveling back to 8th century BCE to trace the origins of the Iliad and Odyssey, epic poems that became backbones of Western literature. Join me and my fantastic guests as we unpack the stories of ancient Greek culture, war and triumph and have a laugh while we do it.

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1:19All right, if people can take their seats, we'll get started. We're sitting in a hotel ballroom in a small beach town on the northeast coast of the United States. It's Sunday morning. It's also Mother's Day in the U.S. But the 200-odd people gathered today are not here to clink their glasses and give their moms flowers. They're here for an awards ceremony. It is my pleasure to welcome you to the 42nd annual World Series of Birding Awards Brunch. How about a big round of applause for everybody here? The World Series of Birding is an annual tournament held in Cape May on the southern tip of the state of New Jersey.

2:01It's a 24-hour race where teams compete to identify the greatest number of bird species. The tournament had finished just 10 hours earlier and awards were given out in a whole range of categories. The overall winners ended up spotting almost 200 different bird species. But one of the biggest cheers of the morning was given to a team that barely got a fifth of that total. One of their members got up to the microphone near the end of the ceremony. Hi everyone, my name is Stephanie Bilke and I'm a member of the Galbatrosses.

2:41The Galbatrosses are one of just a few all-female teams, and they were not expecting to win the World Series of Birding. In fact, the last time they competed, in 2019, they were second to last behind a team called Tiny Tots, made up of literal toddlers. But this year, the Galbatrosses were back. And while it would have been nice to spot more bird species than a team that could barely tie their shoelaces, that wasn't their goal. They had a much more difficult challenge for the tournament, and one that they had set solely for themselves. to only count female birds. The reason they're doing it, coming all this way and essentially losing on purpose, is that for a very long time, no one else was counting female birds or studying them.

3:33Which raises an important question. What happens when science overlooks half the animal world? From the BBC World Service, this is the documentary. I'm Daniel Simo with Birding the Gender Gap.

3:54So our second attempt to look at some birds. Hopefully we'll get a little bit more lucky. About 27 hours before the brunch, the galbatrosses were out in the field, standing by a roadside in a state park called Belle Plaine State Forest. They're on their binoculars, scanning a tree line of imposing oak and pine trees. It's a little past 7 a.m., and they've been out for more than two hours already, and they have yet to find a female bird.

4:28Spotting females is hard. When we think of a typical bird, like, say, a cardinal or a blackbird, with their bright colors and their distinctive calls, what we're often thinking of is the male of the species. Finding females takes a keen eye, a sharp ear, and often a lot of deduction work. If it's making the female sip and... The galbatrosses just heard a bird making a sip sound, which is commonly associated with the oven bird. Two of the four members are debating whether it's possible to even identify a female oven bird. So Stephanie, if it's making the sip sound and you look at its crown and it has a really dull crown, Would you consider that to be, that's two data points of suggesting it's a female.

5:16That's Martha Harbison trying to convince Stephanie Beelke, her teammate who'd get the cheers the following morning. Martha is a journalist and has an encyclopedic knowledge of bird facts. But Stephanie seems unconvinced and will need more evidence. Stephanie is the ultimate skeptic and I'm like the ultimate optimist. So the two of us are going to be battling it out all day today about whether or not we can count something as female. Stephanie wins out this time. They decide not to count the oven bird. They're still at zero. Both Stephanie and Martha, as well as some of the other members of Team Galbatross, work for the National Audubon Society, the premier bird conservation organization in the U.S.

6:01They all have decades of birding experience, and their skills are finely honed. This is evident about half an hour later, when they finally spot their first female, a brown-headed cowbird. Notice how they can hear a cowbird's chatter call, among many other sounds in the forest, and immediately identify it.

6:26The female cowbird!

6:31Our first female is a cowbird. Woo-hoo! High five! You guys kind of did a little dance, too. That was sweet. Oh, my God. The brown-headed cowbird is small, about 20 centimeters in size, and they spotted it by sound alone. Think about that. In a dense forest with dozens of different bird species, all making a range of calls, whistles and chips. They were able to identify one little female bird high up in the air. And the amazing thing is that for a very long time it was assumed female birds couldn't even sing. And for that we can thank or blame one man, Charles Darwin. Darwin is most famous for his theory of natural selection which explained how animals evolved traits to help them survive.

7:29Those best suited to their environment are more likely to reproduce and then pass on their traits to future generations. But natural selection doesn't explain everything. It doesn't account for the bright red plumage of a northern cardinal, the extravagant tail of a peacock, or the elaborate dance of a bird of paradise. That's where Darwin's other theory, sexual selection, comes in. Sexual selection is just the idea that not everybody is as lucky reproductively as everybody else. That's Crystal Kane. She's an associate professor in biology at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. So some males and some females are going to do really well.

8:09And so the historical idea with sexual selection is that males will compete with each other for access to females. Sometimes they can compete by fighting with each other. Sometimes they compete by what we call indirect methods. And those indirect methods are specific traits that attract females, whether it's color or songs or dances. And as females prefer that, that leads to more and more complex evolution of those things in those males. And so you get things like peacocks and birds of paradise where they have just like a ridiculous amount of color, a ridiculous amount of traits. Or even the song of, say, a nightingale, which like super complex, lasts for a really long time.

8:48but the whole purpose behind those things would be to attract a female.

8:55The theory of sexual selection got a lot of things right, but it also presented an incomplete picture, one dominated by the battle between male animals for the right to reproduce. Males were cast as competitive creatures, full of action and vigor, in contrast to the poor, drab, docile females. We just kind of assumed that females were these passive bystanders. If they're doing anything at all exciting, it was just choosing which male that they were going to interact with. And so there's this idea that females are kind of all the same and there's no variation between them. They're just selecting males and that they don't have anything else going on in their lives other than laying eggs, right?

9:39That they're not having to compete with each other for anything. And so by kind of ignoring everything about what was going on in a female's biology and what a female needs and what a female wants, we've kind of missed out on this entire story of what is shaping females in that context.

10:00The story remained incomplete for more than a century after Darwin. From the Victorian era that he lived in until the feminist revolution in the 1970s, science mirrored culture, where women were considered secondary to men. But then in the 90s, thanks to a new generation of women scientists working at universities, as well as technologies like DNA analysis, those gaps in the story finally began to get filled. It turns out that female animals do compete. They do perform elaborate rituals. And the birds, they do sing. In fact, it's now estimated that more than 70 % of female songbirds actually sing.

10:43That's a big jump from the original estimate of, well, zero. But even as these discoveries emerged, the textbooks and the field guides that birders relied on were still focused on the males.

11:01in fact perbita saha one of the founders of team galbatross credits this realization as the inspiration for the project she remembers working for the magazine team of the national audubon society in 2017 we published an essay by ken kaufman who is a very famous birding author and naturalist. And he wrote an essay about how he'd been birding for decades, but something he had only realized recently was that he didn't give the same attention to female birds as he did male birds. Ken noticed it wasn't just him, that the broader community of field guide authors and ornithologists had focused primarily on male birds.

11:45So he wrote a personal essay reflecting on that and how much better he had become as a birder by just focusing more on females. So I was like, well, if Ken can do that after being an expert birder, like, I could start now. And the World Series of Birding just felt like a very concrete way to try and do that. Perbita first asked Martha, who sat in a cubicle nearby at the office. She then put out a call to colleagues across the country. She heard back from a few of them, and so began the Galbatross Project, their effort to raise awareness around female birds and the formation of Team Galbatross.

12:28And, you know, when we did it, when we came down to Cape May that first time, we learned a lot, but we realized there was still a lot more to learn. But we also saw how excited the other birders got about what we were doing. And then it was like, OK, well, no one else is really trying to gather this knowledge just in like a practical way. Two of the members from the 2019 team couldn't make it this time. But the group this year works well together and has a great balance of talents. So far, though, even with this crack squad of bird experts, they're having a hard time. They've still only identified one bird.

13:11We asked Martha what the goal for the day was. 32. So the first time we did this, we ended up with 31 species of birds. And so our general goal is to try and get 32. Just, you know, one up. One in two hours. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, we're currently at one. So it's a challenge. Actually, we're going to need to walk this way because if I'm not with the group, they can't count the bird. Martha's referring to one of the main rules of the World Series of Birding. To counter bird, all the members of the team have to spot it. This prevents teams from spreading out geographically and instead forces them to stay together and move as one.

13:56And there's a lot of moving. Either in the car. You got everything? Got it. Moving from location to location. Or on foot. seeking a better spot, the whole time looking for different kinds of birds. Oh, those are the geese. Hi, geese. The tree swallow. Too prathomitary. Oh, maybe a feely nest. And soon, all that moving and all the dedication finally pay off. Yeah, we got male and female. Finally. Oh, wow. They find chipping sparrows and house finches by a picnic area near a lake. Oh, I see. Oh, just flew down? Yeah, just flew down. Oh, yeah. They find ospreys and blackbirds in a nature reserve.

14:40They even go to the southernmost tip of the peninsula to a beach crossing where they spot mourning doves, barn swallows, and Carolina chickadees. Before too long, the numbers start to really add up. Yeah, what are we up to? Twelve. All right. Twelve. Came out of the car at 16. That's 17, I think. And then we added four, so we should be at 20 then. At one point, the team hiked through the dunes, braving howling winds off the beach just to get a better look at an American oyster catcher in the distance. The bird is so far away that Martha needs to use a$2 ,000 spotting scope called the maven to spot it.

15:18They're using it to home in on a tiny fleck on its eye hoping it will help them identify the female. If you look at an oyster catcher, if you look at its eye if it looks like it has a gigantic malformed pupil like a big gnarly like black pupil it's actually a regular pupil and then there's a black fleck like pigments in the iris that make it look weird and that when they've caught oyster catchers and then did DNA analysis is like 95 percent confidence that it's a female so it's a really easy way in the field to when you're studying oyster catchers uh to find the females is just look at their eyes sometimes that's what it takes a tiny fleck on the eye and confidence levels born out of dna analysis and other times the deduction is much simpler and more basic look at the laughing goals sex on the beach they're two there's a bunch yeah they're all like two yeah like that Like two, one in front of the other.

16:27Man. Two pairs mating right there, and then there's three. There's three total mating at the same time. Oh, my God. A wondrous moment.

16:41Statistically, odds are at least one of those mating goals is a female. But it's not certain, since there's a lot more homosexual behavior among birds than people realize. Then again, when they spot their seventh mating pair, they're happy to assume that one of them must include a female. That brings their total up to 30 different species. It is now past three in the afternoon, they've been at it for more than 10 hours, and they're just two away from their goal of 32. And on to another location.

17:19all these different landscapes and habitats and the many species they attract are one of the main reasons why the world series of birding takes place here in cape may on the small peninsula in one of the least glamorous states in the u.s but there's another thing that makes it unique here's jessica gozo the team's navigator and the only local to new jersey explaining the reason it billed itself as the World Series of Birding is because Cape May likes to think of itself as actually the capital of North American birding. And so Cape May is one of the two locations in the eastern U.S., the other one being Duluth, Minnesota, that is really famous for these visible migration phenomena.

18:02This visible migration happens in the fall as tens of thousands of songbirds migrate south overnight. Then suddenly, many of them turn around and fly north again as the sun rises. Researchers think it might be a way to course correct to avoid flying over the sea, but it leads to this incredible sight. It's just so spectacular and so unique and you, I mean, you can actually see them in broad daylight, whereas, you know, a lot of times forest songbirds and whatnot are migrating at night. And so, yeah, you go to the right place on the right morning and you'll literally have birds flying at your face.

18:41Like I've had them land on me like yeah it's very cool yeah having thousands of birds flying at your face might sound like a horror story to some but to bird lovers who see it as a fairy tale cape may sits on a perfect geographical spot in fact this kind of location in a temperate region of the northern hemisphere is exactly where much of the early study of birds took place where a lot of the field guides were written. This created a geographical bias in the research, and with it, another reason why female birds got ignored. You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service.

19:30Hello, Greg Jenner here. I'm the host of You're Dead to Me, the BBC comedy show that takes history seriously. Every episode, I pair up a top historian with a fantastic comedian, and we have a lovely, funny fascinating chat about a different subject from world history and in this new series we're beginning with an epic voyage through the story of homer the iliad and the odyssey and that's with kyle smith bino joining us and then we'll be learning about francis galton and the racist discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with desiree birch we'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with rachel parris so if that sounds like your sort of thing listen to your dead to me wherever you get your podcasts.

20:08Thank you. Bye.

20:13So our world's kind of a really lopsided planet. That's Crystal Kane again. And what she means is that the northern and southern hemispheres are very different. The southern hemisphere has a lot more water and water tends to keep temperatures more even. The northern hemisphere has less water, but much more land. And because you have those really large land masses, that has enormous consequences for the animals that live there. In the northern hemisphere, you have much more extreme seasons. What happens is you wind up having species that migrate. So most of the scientists who were studying these birds lived in places like the UK, the US and northern Europe.

20:54The birds they observed lived there, but only in the spring and summer. And those birds also migrated a lot. What we now know is that when birds start migrating, the females lose color and the females lose song because migration is such a costly behavior to evoke. And so the species that all these northern hemisphere researchers were studying were some of the most recently evolved species and had lost their female song and female color. If those researchers had gone beyond their northern bubble, they might have noticed things could be a lot different. So if you go in the tropics and you go in the southern hemisphere, the majority of the females are singing, and a lot more of the females are either as elaborately colored as the males in the same way and look just like the males, or they're elaborately colored but in a different way than the males.

21:48If you do go to the tropics in Central America, one bird you might find is called a golden-winged warbler. It's a small migratory songbird about 12 centimeters long, and it holds a clue as to why learning about females is so important. It's really beautiful if you see it. Ruth Bennett worked hard to find golden-winged warblers when she was in Honduras completing her postgraduate research. The males have this black triangle under the mask, a bright yellow crown, really dramatic bright golden wing bars. And they're a pretty spectacular small migratory songbird, but hard to see. The number of golden winged warblers in North America has been declining.

22:32And not much was known about where they spent the winter. So the fact that I found these birds in Honduras was great. Nobody had studied them before in Honduras. And I found quite a significant overwintering population of them. As part of her research, Ruth would go out into the field at sunrise. She'd walk around and stop every 500 meters to see if there were any golden-winged warblers in the area. She'd then take out a small Bluetooth speaker and play the vocalizations of the species. For males, they respond to that. They're territorial even on the winter grounds. They pop out of the vegetation and they chip, and you can tell that the bird is there.

23:14females are more difficult. Sometimes they will do that. Sometimes they'll stay where they are and just chip really softly. And so I had to get really good at detecting that female chip note to determine, yes, I think a golden wing is there. If she heard a chip, Ruth would wait to spot the bird visually. And if she saw it was female, with a duller crown and a gray mask, she counted it. She would then walk another 500 meters, stop and do the same thing again. Over and over and over again. And she found something surprising. A lot of the areas I found were male dominated. So as I would do surveys for golden wing warblers, I would find male after male after male.

24:02And maybe every 10th bird would be a female. And then I had one site I worked in that seemed to be totally female dominated, but I couldn't find any other sites like that. She thought that seemed odd, the way the two sexes were segregated. Some sites with all males, some sites all female. But it wasn't until much later, once she had gathered all her results, when she connected the dots. She took out a map and looked at the dots. And I noticed very obviously doing that, that in the mountains, up these mountain trails I had been surveying, I detected almost 100 % male golden-winged warblers. And in this dry agricultural valley, I was detecting almost exclusively female golden-winged warblers.