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

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WVUR Podcasts. Boston.

When there's a lot going on in your life or in the world,

it can be good to get outside, if you can.

Even some unassuming places are full of wonder.

Most people think of this as a useless swamp.

4,000 species.

Magical useless.

This is here and now anytime from NPR and WVUR.

I'm Chris Bentley.

We've got a special bonus episode for you today.

Off the news, as we say it is.

But some things are timeless.

For instance, who hasn't had the experience of saying a word out loud

that you've only read and been met with a gallery of blank stairs?

And then realizing we're more likely being told,

than saying it wrong in your head the whole time.

There's no shame in mispronouncing a word, even Stephen King does it.

I used to think those animals that run around out west were coyotes.

I used to think that the parts of a story were dentals.

They are actually the details.

Coming up at about 10 minutes, Robin Young shares one of her most embarrassing moments on air.

But first, I was up in northern Minnesota in February, crunching through snow,

wrapped up like a mummy in my ski clothes, looking for moose.

That was for another story we had on here and now anytime.

If you missed it, look back in the feed to February's installment

of our environmental series Reverse Course.

And while I was there, I went about a place famous among birders,

chasing owls, hawks, and rare songbirds from Canada.

It's called Sax Zimbog.

I guess I'm becoming a bit of a birder myself as I get older,

which is a reflection for another day, maybe.

But I wasn't ideeing birds on my own.

I visited with a team of expert guides from Minnesota.

Crazy, crazy, right there.

Nothing stops a chat between birders,

faster than a flash of feathers in the sky.

That's kind of the day, that's one of the birds that nest here.

That's Sparky Stensors,

Pishing, or calling the bird.

He founded Friends of Sax Zimbog for moments just like this.

Stensors is one of my guides on a February walk

through this unique habitat about an hour north of Duluth,

which draws wildlife enthusiasts from all around the world this time of year.

People like Peter Burke from Colorado.

I'm owner of Rocky Mountain Birding,

and I bring a group here every February.

So you got a lot of birds in Colorado, why couldn't it in a soda?

For the owls.

I come here for the owls,

and we'll be looking out for the short-year owls,

long-year owls,

saw what owls,

and if we're really lucky, a boreal owl.

What's it like to see an owl?

Humbling.

Yeah, I mean, these are just little feather balls

that can survive minus 30 up here,

like it was nothing.

Owls are awesome.

And they look right back at you in the eye.

We human visitors to Sax Zimbog have to bundle up,

but it's a ball me getaway for birds coming from Canada.

It's the Arctic Riviera.

The Arctic Riviera.

The resorts in this Arctic Riviera

include a patch of wizard-evergreens

that lurch out of a squishy earth.

Like some of these 30-foot tall trees may be a hundred years old.

This is an old-growth forest right here.

It kind of blows people's minds when you say

this is an old-growth forest,

because it just looks like a stunted,

scraggly part of the taiga in Northern Canada or something.

What seems like an unassuming landscape in winter

is teeming with activity for birders who know where to look.

But even eagle-eyed birders can't spot everything.

So the friends of Sax Zimbog recently installed

homemade listening devices to capture bird calls around the clock

and analyze the sound with the help of AI.

It's helped them study elusive visitors like Connecticut warblers

and Northern saw wet owls.

These boreal birds are so chill.

They don't care too much about humans.

It doesn't boreal mean chill and wetting.

I think that is correct, yeah.

Boreal birds may seem chill,

Stenso says,

but their lifestyle is threatened by the warming climate.

Take that Canada J,

who's flyby stopped us in our tracks earlier.

They're very vulnerable to climate change

because what they do is they cache food in the winter

and preparation for the breeding season

where they need more energy.

Alexis Grindy of the University of Minnesota

is another one of my guides on today's Nature Walk.

But as the winter is warm up,

some of those things that they cache,

like chunks of meat from a deer on the road,

for example, those will rot

and so they don't have as much food stores.

Basically as they go into the breeding season,

so we're seeing declines in overall productivity

and declines in population,

especially at this other edge of the range.

Grindy says it's just the start of a northward shift

in bird communities that will likely continue for decades,

which is why conservationists are fighting to protect

refugees like Sac Zimbog.

We've recorded over 4,000 species of plants and animals

in the Sac Zimbog.

And most people think of this as a useless swamp, right?

4,000 species.

Magical useless ones.

Deeper into the woods,

we step onto a boardwalk

to carry us over a landscape

that's rippled with three-foot hummocks.

It looks like the whole bog has goose bumps.

In summer, this is a lush grove of orchids, carnivorous plants,

and thick mats of sphagnum moss.

Which is amazing, and it's sort of like,

you know, Lord of the Ring situation,

where you feel like you're in a very land world.

It's so thick and it's cushy and you can lay on it,

and then you go down and it's just wet.

So there's just this amazing sort of deep layer of it.

If this wetland is a fantasy world, as Grindy says,

its sorcery is scrubbing climate pollution.

Stensus, called sphagnum moss,

the unsung hero of carbon sequestration.

But back in the frontier days,

white settlers initially saw it as unformable wasteland.

So they dug ditches to drain the bog.

Everything sort of starts decaying,

I guess, at a faster rate and releasing that carbon.

The trees that are adapted for those environments

can't grow there anymore.

So we plug the ditches, the water comes back,

and now it's sort of the game of,

how do we restore the entire ecosystem function?

A study by the Nature Conservancy found

re-wedding peatlands in Minnesota would soak up so much carbon

it'd be like taking almost one and a half million cars off the road.

It says the Nature Conservancy's Jim Manolis.

It's just one of our greatest opportunities for carbon storage.

They cover about 3% of the earth's surface,

but store about 30% of the world's carbon on the land.

On our way out of the woods,

we spot hairy and downy woodpeckers,

red-breasted nut hatches,

wild turkeys,

an evening graze beak with black and white wings

and a golden swish over its eyes

like it's furrowing a breached unibrow.

And...

Nice pine growth beak.

Oh, pine growth beak.

Oh, that red, really beautiful male.

They're a fun winter visitor

that everybody loves to see.

Sparky Stensus 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 Zimbog

is going to change too.

For me, it's been an existential crisis, you know,

buying up all this beautiful bog,

lands, peatlands, you know, what...

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.

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

walking to northern Minnesota to see them.

I was curious about those listening devices

installed at Sac Zimbog.

So when I got home,

I called up Rich Hogue.

He's a naturalist in Duluth

and volunteer with Sparky Stensus' group,

Friends of Sac Zimbog.

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 Winathology,

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.

Hogue put all that stuff

into a rugged box

with a data storage card

and voila!

You've got what he calls BirdNet Pi.

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 summertime.

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.

And I got 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.

Recording's from Sachs 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.

We can answer all those questions

just by listening to birds,

which is pretty cool.

So it's just like a microphone you put out in the box.

Essentially, it's like an old-school

boom box, 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 me one thing,

other calls me another thing,

so you can understand what the sort of conversations

that the birds are having throughout the breeding season

and make some inference that way.

Birds are having conversations?

Yeah, definitely.

They're always having conversations.

You got some of that video.

They communicate with each other.

They 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.

There's 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

and sort of cooperating in a neighborhood.

If you're a bird probably.

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 Hogue'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.

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.

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 a very

a propo 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 missled.

And of course it's misled.

So it is in that spirit.

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 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 if we,

you know, for our next recurring segment?

Absolutely.

Oh, yeah.

It's someone that helps people, you know.

Use coyotes.

Don't worry.

We gave Stephen a chance to correct himself.

And here we are.

Our semi-regular segment on mispronounce words.

Reminder that Stephen and I and all of you out there

are not alone.

We asked around our home station,

WVR in Boston for some confessions,

beginning with morning edition host Tiziana Diering

and her mispronounce word.

Hamash, which I thought was Hommage.

And I found out I was wrong the first time I heard somebody say Hamash.

And I was like, what is that?

And they tried to explain it to me.

And I said, that's Hommage.

And they said, oh, honey.

Vigilant.

I am convinced that it should be said, villageant.

Demand.

But in my head, I read it as Demand.

So like if there was a book called The Demon Hunter,

my brain would say The Demon Hunter.

There was a band called Behemoth,

which I read somewhere and said,

I wonder what this band BAM off is all about.

Last year, I was recording something

and I said that something would be my Denise.

What I do know is that my co-worker

will never let me rip this down.

It will probably be my demise.

Bedrackled, I think, is close enough.

I said it and probably still say it in my mind.

Bedrackled.

Bedrackled.

Wake up in bed.

You're looking a little raggedy.

Bedrackled.

Detritus is detritus.

But I was ready to do a newscast

when an NPR newscaster said to Tritus,

I was seconds away from sending a little correction

when I thought that maybe I should include

the correct pronunciation and I looked it up

and touched my tail between my legs.

Who 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 here and now.org.

But that'll do it for us today.

Here and now,

anytime comes from NPR and W.B. We're Boston.

Today's stories were produced by Karen Miller-Metson

and me, Chris Bentley.

Today's editors were Todd Mont, Michael Scatto,

Kishiko Thierry.

Technical direction from Kayla Green

and James Trow.

I wrote the theme music with Max Liebman

and a veritable Beth Hemoff

of audio engineering and musicianship,

Mike Mosquetto.

Our digital producers are Allison Hagen

and Grace Griffin.

And here and now's executive producer is Alan Price.

Thanks for listening.

We'll be back with you soon.

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