A Conversation With Harry Jones, Ph.D.

This episode features Harry Jones, Ph.D., an applied field ecologist who, in addition to his scholarly pursuits and conservation efforts, is a frequent guide on bird walks hosted by the Northern Arizona Audubon Society.  We chat about his work at the intersection of community, landscape, population, and conservation biology, the joys of birding in northern Arizona, and his recommendations for birders related to identification and conservation.  In addition, Dr. Jones offers students interested in pursuing graduate education and employment in the field with sage advice regarding academic planning.   Truly, there is something in this episode for everyone.  Since we chatted about participatory science, I’ve taken the liberty of adding a link below to information on Audubon’s Christmas Bird Count.  

Relevant Links:

https://motus.org/

https://www.birdpop.org/

https://www.nps.gov/im/scpn/index.htm

https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/

https://www.audubon.org/community-science/christmas-bird-count

Thank you for listening.  Please visit our website and subscribe to our Instagram feed.

• Website: https://www.northernarizonaaudubon.org
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Transcript

…Welcome. This podcast is brought to you by the Northern Arizona Audubon Society, the voice for birds in Northern Arizona since nineteen seventy two. We envision a future in which birds are thriving in Northern Arizona and throughout the world. Visit our website to learn more about this dynamic organization and the work it does for the love of birds and nature, especially in our part of the world. Hi, and welcome to the podcast.
My name is Matt Anderson, and today, I'm thrilled to be talking with doctor Harry Jones, an applied field ecologist working at the intersection of community, landscape, population, and conservation biology. Harry is the Southwest Avian Oncologist at the Institute for Bird Populations. Many of you know him from one of the bird walks he leads for the Northern Arizona Audubon Society or his participation in last year's panel discussion on career pathways held at Northern Arizona University. Welcome, Harry. Thanks for having me, Matt.
Glad to be here. This is great. Well, so you work at a pretty busy intersection. Yeah. You make it sound like I do a a whole lot more than I do, I think.
But, yeah,
I've touched on a lot of those topics over the years. Yeah. Well, let's talk about this a little bit. As an applied field ecologist, you use your research and the research of others to solve real world problems. What are some examples of the roles and responsibilities of a field ecologist?
So field ecologist, I think it's a very broad term, and it really encompasses a wide variety of different job types. I think maybe most often when we're talking about that, we're thinking about sort of a wildlife ecologist type position with…either a government agency, a state agency, or perhaps even a sort of more applied research academic position. But broadly speaking, ecology, right, is studying organisms, their interactions with each other and with the abiotic aspects of the environment and doing it in a field setting. So we're sort of setting ourselves apart from lab work, genetics work, which is all very interesting. but traditionally, at least, a field ecologist is somebody who's going out into nature to record observations, to collect data sort of in person in the field, quote, unquote.
They come in a lot of flavors as I mentioned, but a lot of the work that I do has focused on…
using field observations of birds in this case and their environment to help answer applied questions about how humans are impacting bird habitats, what aspects of bird habitats are important for birds, which is a very simple question, but a lot of times in science, it's the painful demonstration of the obvious. Right? So a lot of times we spend a lot of time and effort to demonstrate…
it requires going out and collecting lots of data in the field to get to that answer. What are some of the successes that you've seen in field ecology with birds in particular, and what are some of the remaining challenges? I think it's a really exciting time to be a field ecologist. I mean, I I do think that field field ecology in general maybe is considered a little bit more old school. Right?
It was sort of something that was much more common probably in the fifties, sixties, seventies, and modern genetic techniques and modern lab techniques, which are really important and have advanced science tremendously, have perhaps on some level made field data collection a little bit more outdated. I I think there's there's some truth to that. There's still important uses of field ecology projects. so for me, I think one of the great things about the kind of work that I do is working hand in hand with federal land managers, designing questions, answering questions that are of interest to management on topics that relate to how can we best manage our public lands for birds and other wildlife…
Codesigning that, codesigning projects with partners, transmitting information to those partners, and getting to kind of have your finger on the pulse of natural systems. You know, a lot of the work that we do is monitoring, and so that's seeing how year after year in places, organisms populations are changing in relation to outside factors, whether it be climate, whether it be any kind of other factor. I do think that I lean more on the side of these are exciting times than there are a lot of challenges. I I would highlight there's been a plethora of really cool technology that's emerged in the last few years to enable us to understand more than ever about ecology, the lives of North American birds, all birds everywhere really. Part of that is movement ecology, putting little transmitters on things, understanding where they go, being able to figure out, like, who specifically is shade coffee farm, my you know, this this individual thrush spent the winter on is really exciting.
Also, the the ability to use these recording devices, so autonomous recording units or ARUs, they're sometimes called, where we can now collect lots and lots of recordings about…
vocalizations that birds are making in the field and have a really fine grained idea of when is it vocalizing and even get at questions like the phonology or the timing of their breeding season based on when they're being vocal or not. How does that technology work, Harry? Do you have it is it in a static location and listens to Yeah. So traditionally, you would deploy they come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but we're talking about like a small waterproof box, maybe a little bit bigger than your average smartphone and you would attach that to a tree trunk or to some place out in nature and you could leave it out for as long of a time or a short of a time as you like and essentially program that to record over a specific set of time and over a specific set of days, and it's essentially if you had a human observer sitting out there in the forest nonstop, right, for Mhmm. Three months straight, well, you would get all kinds of interesting observations, and you'd hear all kinds of cool things.
The challenge in the past has been that's great, but then you have, you know, gigabytes of data on the back end, and what do you do with it? But now we've really reached a point where with algorithms, we're able to ID those vocalizations rapidly and without having a human listen to them all the time. And that's really permitted that technology, I think, to expand and to answer a lot of questions where before it was just too prohibitive to have people listen to Mhmm. Thousands of hours of recordings. Right.
Right. Wow. That's pretty exciting. And so I know that there are there's technology that involves sort of backpacks that then that need to be retrieved in order to access the data. There's the motor system where birds are pinged as they fly through a particular part of the world near the listening station, and this is a technology that I hadn't heard of.
Are there others that,
people are starting to embrace now? Well, those are sort of in that vein of things that can measure where and when birds are moving. MODIS is cool because it passive tags, so the bird just needs to approach a tower and then it will ping. There are a lot of other technologies, things like miniaturized GPS transmitters, ones that actually use light geolocators. So they're actually Mhmm.
those are often tags that have to be retrieved, but they're actually using the length of the day to determine the latitude and longitude of the bird. And it's often been a more cost effective. So we're talking more ballpark than very specific location data. But really with the pace of miniaturization of these things, it's been crazy how since I started research, we can now have even smaller things that we can put on even smaller birds and get at really cool very highly detailed pathways of how they're moving, where they're going. It's I think a better way of kind of connecting the hemisphere, understanding migration.
We've always understood it kind of as a big phenomenon as and rightly we should, but understanding the specific movements of individual birds is a very personal

thing to look into and study and and appreciate. So I think that's that's kind of a fascinating thing just to look at the
…

year down to South America and back up to Arizona or wherever. Well, you've totally got me on board with this exciting times thing. This is really some pretty cool stuff. Yeah. Touch on this more later if you like.
I guess I would just say one of the challenges right now, I think, is research in general and science more generally has become an issue where I think there's there's been a a national debate about funding for it. How much should there be? And I think it saddens me a little bit as a scientist that…there are some people who have sort of lost some faith in the research community. What can research do for us? And I think that's a bigger societal question that goes beyond field ecology or ornithology, but I would say that's probably one of our biggest challenges because ultimately I think if people aren't trusting science and trusting scientists…then we have a big problem.
Ultimately science wants to generate information that can be of service to the public, can be of service in this case to land managers for a variety of topics,
and I think that that's probably our biggest our biggest issue right now I see, as I see it in field ecology is that loss of faith and how can we regain trust in science and scientists and the work that they're doing because obviously I think it's very important to have people on board with the science we're doing and to have people understanding and engaged with it. That is not just something that exists often some Right. Vacuum, you know, in the ivory tower that is something that it people can engage with and understand in in their day to day lives or in their jobs. So can you describe a typical project and your responsibilities on that project, like, from beginning to end? What does one of these things look like from start to finish?
Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna talk a lot about some of the kind of monitoring work that I've done, which is has been in very close partnership and collaboration with the National Park Service. So…overall, just to paint you kind of a broader sketch or picture of what this looks like, the National Park Service is actually required by law to monitor various aspects of the ecology within its parks,
and so the Institute for Bird Populations has partnered with NPS for a long time in a variety of places to year after year faithfully go back to these same locations within National Parks, including some very beloved and well known ones like Yosemite, like Grand Canyon, and actually count birds, right? Which is, which sounds simple, but when we actually break it down into what that involves, there's a lot of steps. So the the first step in any of these big projects is making sure that we're on board with our collaborators. Really, the very first step is designing where we're gonna go, when and where we're gonna survey, obtaining permits…communicating with our park service partners so that they're aware of where we're going. A lot of the work would involve hiring a field crew, training that field crew, and then when we actually are planning to go collect that data in the the field, there's a lot of logistics that involve where we're gonna stay, methods of transportation, making sure that everybody is well equipped in terms of safety, having a safety plan.
Once we've actually completed the data collection, that's usually usually about two and a half months of actually being in the field. So we would we would say go to a park for a week,
be doing surveys over the course of that week while we're usually car camping. and then we would have a few days off and the whole cycle begins anew. Uh-huh. So at the end of the two and a half months, there's a whole process of then collecting that data and cleaning it, making sure that all the observations are correct, that there's not missing data. And that is a process which really involves close collaboration with the park service, my park service colleagues.
I work really closely with the Southern Colorado Plateau Inventory and Monitoring Network, which is all things federal has a lovely acronym of SCPM. But, you know, they really are playing a a very important role in making sure that we have spatial data from GPS units. Mhmm. We have the actual survey data. We have data on conditions during the survey.
Like, was it windy? Was it cloudy, was there a lot of environmental noise? And so all that needs to be cleaned, all that needs to go live in a database somewhere, and ultimately that needs to be published online and available to federal scientists, federal land managers, and the public as well. So that cycle is not really complete until we've generated the data that's been cleaned and published and is available for others and for our federal colleagues to use. That's a really involved process and it revolves, I'm sure at the end, lots of peer review to make sure that,
everything is has been reviewed as carefully as possible. And I think that that speaks to the point that you made earlier about the credibility of the information that we've been given by scientists like you, that's really important stuff. Yeah. In fact, part of the I would say the biggest component or maybe the component I stress the most about during this process is when we have seasonal field crews to collect…these bird survey data. So we'll they're point count surveys, which are they sound simple.
You go out to a point in nature, you listen, and you write down every bird that you see or hear for seven minutes. Sounds really easy, but the problem is, of course, that you have to learn all the calls and songs of every bird at that location, and you have to not just learn it, but you have to be at a point where it's sort of muscle memory that you're hearing it and you're writing it down, you're not wondering what was that, I can't quite remember that, and so the biggest issue here for us is we want to make sure that we get it right, we want to make sure that the seasonal crews are getting it right, and so we invest a lot of time and effort, three weeks of training…
with the test at the end to make sure that people are able to identify things correctly because ultimately, they're out there by themselves. I can't go around behind everyone and make sure that they're getting it right. And so I think that's there's a big concern about not misidentifying things, about Sure. Making sure they're getting the numbers correct because ultimately this is, you know, this is the basis for decision making at the parks and elsewhere. And if we're not collecting it correctly in the field, then everything downstream from that is sort of invalidated.
Wow. That's fascinating stuff. Because as a consumer, I just see the end product, and it's really interesting to hear all about the, effort that goes into making sure that you've got reliability and validity that you need in the field. Absolutely. Yeah.
So what are some of the conservation efforts that are on the horizon that you find particularly exciting, particularly here in Northern Arizona? Yeah. I mean, I think there's there's a diversity of stuff as far as projects that IBP has has been involved with or may be involved with. You know, there's a lot of interest right now in the pinyon jay, which is a very distinctive bird of our pinyon juniper woodlands in Northern Arizona,
the sort of blue crow. It it's a fascinating bird in terms of its ecology because it's closely linked to the pinyon pine. It's also an interesting bird because it's currently being a candidate to be listed under the Endangered Species Act. Interesting. And so that has been made it a target for a lot of research and a lot of interest in research.
What's maybe not so well known, but it's kind of an interesting little flagstaff nugget is that some of the original studies of the pinyon jays ecology were actually done on a flock in downtown flagstaff as folks may know by Russ Balda who was a professor at NAU for many years and the town flock quote unquote of birds that he studied for I think over thirty years at least thirty years, is the basis for much of what we know about pinyon jay ecology. So the pinyon jay in Flagstaff are kind of really closely linked in terms of, like, this very nerdy topic of of their research at least. I love that. That's amazing. That's a flex staff nugget indeed.
Yes.
but yeah. So there's there's a lot of interest in that, doing inventories for that species. There's also been a lot of concern, and I think rightly so, about wildfire in, you know, Northern Arizona and throughout the west. So some of the projects that we've been interested in is when we land managers are clearing pinyon juniper or they're thinning it to remove some of the trees off the landscape, in theory you have less biomass and you have less possibility of there being a fire, but what are the consequences for wildlife when we do that? How can we balance taking care of our wildlife and preventing wildfires?
And then I think there's also a lot of questions when we do have wildfires, you know, and it pains me to say this the, you know, like the Dragon Bravo fire on the North Rim last summer, what happens afterwards when we have these mega fire events that burn hotter, that cover larger areas than anything that folks can remember. So how are wildlife and birds responding to that? It's sad on one hand but it's also an opportunity to learn about what's happening on the other. We're actually, for better or for worse, that fire burned through about three quarters of our monitoring plots on the North Rim and I'm kind of excited to see what's gonna happen over those over the next five years, ten years, this year. Right?
So I think that's that's kind of a another topic that folks are really interested in. This topic of thinning and then this topic of wildfire and how those affect wildlife. Wow. Interesting stuff. Some really important research for the next decade.
Yeah. We're a little bit into the unknown on some level in the southwest. There have been patterns of of weather that have been unusual Mhmm. And how are wildlife responding to that? How are how should land managers be responding to that?
I think there are questions that are of interest and I and I think are practical value moving forward. Absolutely. So you've got a great vantage point to see how all of these organizations work together to help birds in the places that they need. In your opinion, how have organizations such as the Northern Arizona Audubon Society and others with similar missions contributed to the health of birds in their habitats? I think in a lot of ways.
And I I think fundamentally, maybe the simplest way is by bringing together people who have a passion for birds and an interest in birds, whether that's through community events, through bird walks, and also helping people who have that interest realize that they have that interest. So I think people go out on a bird walk and find it fun and want to do it, then birds and birding are on their radar and I think it's really exciting as somebody who's been the beneficiary of that in my past to…
instill that love or really help people realize that they have that love of birds, and then that can become a lifelong interest and a lifelong love. But I don't wanna underplay the science aspect of what Northern Arizona Audubon does either. Right? I think that they've invested in MODIS towers, which we were talking about, those tags where we can actually track movements of birds…across North America, really across the Western Hemisphere, which is very exciting. there has been talk of…a banding station, so that's that's a little sneak preview maybe, but, to talk to to ways that we can incorporate, science in in terms of expanding our knowledge of Northern Arizona birds and ways that we can incorporate science in terms of giving local students the capacity to do science and giving them the opportunity to learn about science because I think that's the the next generation of ornithologists and conservationists and land managers, and it's really valuable to have that experience early on as somebody who has been very fortunate recipient of a lot of that, understand how important it can be to sort of give people that opportunity when they're an undergraduate or when they're a graduate student.
Nice. So I wanna get back to this,
idea about bird walks that you lead and the benefits of that to those who participate. I attended a bird walk that you led at Kachina Wetlands, last weekend and was once again completely blown away by your ability to see and hear birds that were hidden for the rest of us. Let's talk a little bit about how you became such an expert in this. how how and when did you, Harry, develop your interest in birds and habitat and nature and those things? Yeah.
And I maybe you have somewhat more nontraditional story about this because I feel like I've talked to many people who are like, oh, yeah. You know, I grew up essentially outdoors, but I, unlike maybe some of our listeners, was not fortunate enough to grow up in Flagstaff. I I grew up in a very suburban setting in Indianapolis, Indiana, which was a fine place to grow up, but it didn't actually have a lot of access to the outdoors. It was sort of you had to make your own access to it. So for me, I think my interest in birds started at bird feeders.
You know, my parents would put out two or three feeders and things would come in. As a kid, I think I was very observant. I liked looking at nature, looking at things, and inevitably the question came up what's that species, what's that one? And so next thing you know there was a field guide involved. I was looking at species,
but I but I think it was also, something that…it didn't there wasn't like a light switch for me. It was something that happened over years and having opportunities to spend time in nature and realizing, oh, this is fun. Whether that was like a summer camp and then later on opportunities for internships and field courses when I was an undergrad, I think that all contributed on some level. But I, but I have to say if there was one moment where I really fell in love with birds completely. It was when I was a kid, my parents decided to take me and my brother on a surprise trip to Costa Rica.
And this was just mind blowing for me at the time and still is. And we ended up going to a cloud forest and the kind of national bird of Costa Rica is the quetzal. It's a beautiful green Right. Bird with long green tail. And so we went to look for the quetzal.
And as it happened, mister quetzal was not home that morning, possibly because we showed up at, like, nine thirty, and it was very late in the day. We were after all, I think, six and seven, so it wasn't we weren't up for the pre dawn hike. And…
seven or eight year old me…threw an absolute hissy fit because he didn't see a quetzal. And we had the most kind…and knowledgeable local guy who sadly whose name escapes me, but I was just kind of having fits all day. At the very end of this bird walk that morning, he pulls me aside and he motions me to come to the front of the group. And at the side of the trail, there's this beautiful female umbrella bird, which is a very rare species in that place. And he really sort of had me look at it in details perched up perfectly.
We got the chance to look at it, and he said people come to this preserve from all over the world to look for this bird, and most of them don't get to see it. And how lucky are we that we get to see it? and that really like dispelled all the unhappy feelings about the quetzal. And, I was I was absolutely thrilled that we got to see the super rare bird and super enthusiastic about birds moving forward. So I think that that was I look back on that and I can say that was kind a seminal moment in my love for birds and my love for nature.
What a great story, Harry. Thank you for sharing that. Sure. It's really terrific. And you, like the guide that you just mentioned, have contributed immensely to people's knowledge and enjoyment of birds and the walks that you've guided for Northern Arizona Audubon Society.
How have you learned to identify birds and their behaviors and their their calls and sounds so well? It's just really a phenomenal skill. What I one thing I will say to people who are interested in birds or birding is that the good news is that there's not, like, some secret knowledge that's kind of locked away. Right? Like, the one of the great things about birding is that you can do it wherever you want in the world, and you don't necessarily have to be an expert or develop a lot of expertise, spend a lot of money,
on education or whatever to do it. So I mean, this is gonna sound maybe a little bit anti climatic, but some of it is really experience. Right? If you've seen ten thousand…pick me nuthatches, then you really start to get a very good understanding of how they look, how they move, where they like to live, what kinds of sounds they like to make. And so I do think that there's a part of it that's really just putting in the hours Right.
Anytime out in nature. Doing the reps. But I think there's also components where you can really help yourself, and that's learning some of the basics…of ID. And so I think you could probably break that down into maybe five different categories. Okay.
So and then this these are things that I like to to draw people's attention to when I'm guiding or when when I'm out birding with folks. So those are alright. Let's see if I can get them all on the first try. Size and shape of the bird. Okay.
Field marks, sort of distinctive aspects of the bird's plumage or feathers. The time of year and location where you're birding, and that's sort of like birding by probability as I like to call it. So you can tell if it's if it's winter, if it's summer, if it's migration season, whether or not birds are likely to be present. Behavior, right, because birds behave in very predictable ways. I like to tell people to think about it like your best friend.
Right? Like you probably know how your best friend moves and acts, and if you walked into a busy cafe and you just saw your best friend from behind, like you couldn't see their face, you would still know it was your best friend through a thousand different subtle little ways of their behaving, and birds are like that too, you know. Once you get to know species you really understand are they shy, are they bold, are they, you know, species that like open areas or deep dark forests, And then of course the last aspect and maybe the hardest aspect is sound. Right? Learning to identify birds sounds and that's a wonderful exciting place to go, but it's also a little overwhelming and made a lot easier by applications like Merlin Sound ID that have made it a lot more accessible to people, available for free.
So I think we're in an exciting place where there's a lot of great resources. Focusing on those five elements is a way that anybody could become a stronger birder. Mhmm. You clearly love guiding and do a great job at it. What are the things that you enjoy most about it?
For me, it's it's really sharing the love I have for birds with others. I think it's really exciting when someone else gets to see a lifer, which probably all our listeners know, right, is like the first time you see a species in your life and you really only get to do that once. So it's a very exciting moment. And more generally, taking people to places that are exciting, showing them species that excite them is something…
being able to share an excitement about birds with with other people who feel the same way is really empowering and it's really a positive moment for everybody involved. But that's a big part of it. It's just bringing joy to other people and being able to take joy in the fact that you share a hobby and you're able to be part of a community of bird watchers. Nice. Yeah.
Well, we were sure lucky to have you as a guide last weekend. It was it was a fun time. It certainly was. So as part of your academic journey, which we'll talk about in a little while, you've had a chance to bird in many locations, both in the United States and abroad, starting off as a seven year old in Costa Rica. based on your experiences, what makes Arizona and particularly Northern Arizona such a such a special place to bird?
Absolutely. it is a special place in part because it has such a diversity of of landscapes and habitats. It's sort of a truism in ecology that the more habitat types you have the more species you're gonna have because you have birds that specialize on each of those different habitats and here in Northern Arizona we're really blessed with this amazing elevational gradient from the top of Humphreys Peak all the way down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon or the bottom of the Mogollon Rim Mhmm. Sedona and the Verde Valley. And so because of all those elevations and habitats, we have a ton of birds.
And we're also kind of at the confluence of different sort of ecoregions, you could say. We have the the Rocky Mountains to the north east of us. We have the Sonoran Desert to the south of us and the Chihuahuan Desert, and then we have the Great Basin kind of to the northwest of us. And so we're kind of a big natural crossroads where we have a lot of bird species that are coming from those four directions, and it results in a really great mix of species. It's an exciting place to bird really at all seasons, which is another fun thing about it.
Winter is not just juncos. Right. Now we Though it might seem that way. Yeah. We got our Lewis'.
We got our Exactly. Northern Harrier…
at Kachina wetlands. Yeah. So I just loved how you were able to convey information to birders in a really expert but completely accessible manner. Walk us through briefly your academic progression from high school to where you are now. I'm really interested in how you got to the point you are now where you've got this really wonderful expertise that you can share with others.
Yeah. I feel very fortunate that I've had a lot of really wonderful mentors over the years at kind of different steps of that progression. It sometimes seems when you tell these stories like it's sort of like a straight line that you I set out one day to become an ornithologist, and here I am. But, of course, it's never really like that. You know, it's always a very winding road.
So but with that caveat, I I was lucky enough to work as an intern. There's an ornithology center at a local city park in Indianapolis. And, like, the man who had set that up, Kevin Carlson, took me under his wing, no pun intended, and I ended up spending a summer working on a research project there, helping them with banding, doing all kinds of bird related activities. That was really exciting and really eye opening because I didn't high school me kind of realized…
what the possibilities were, you know, what the potential was. And I ended up going on to do an undergraduate degree in biology, but also in French literature. And I and I say that just

because there was a moment, I'm sure there's an alternate universe, I always tell

people where I almost went and got a master's degree, and
…
universe, I think there's another Harry who's doing something completely different, and maybe he's just as happy. But, you know, like, it wasn't there were definitely moments where instead of getting that master's degree, I ended up opting to spend five months living in the cloud forest in Peru, and that was like as a seasonal technician for a bird project. And that was just absolutely mind blowingly amazing. We were camping. It was cold.
There was no hot showers. The food wasn't particularly good, and I should know because I was one of the people cooking it. That's partially why the food wasn't very good, but I

loved it. I loved that experience of being a field ecologist, of being out

nature, of seeing a…
tropical bird community for the first time. And so that set me on a course of, you know, I want to do more of this, and I ended up working for two or three of these seasonal tech positions. And eventually I thought I would really like to go back to school and get a degree that would enable me to do bird research. So the next step on this journey after these seasonal stops in California and Puerto Rico, a few other places. I ended up in Gainesville, Florida at the University of Florida, and I was lucky enough to to do a master's degree there, and then I ended up doing a PhD as well.
But I really learned so much from my lab mates there, many of whom were much older and much wiser than me, or at least much wiser. I don't know if they're much older. And then I also learned a lot from the graduate students who I worked under as a seasonal technician. I learned a lot about what I was interested in in terms of research, what I wasn't interested in, what kinds of jobs were available. In truth, like, I think I learned more from these people who I was lucky enough to be working and studying alongside than in a lot of the formal courses that I took.
After I completed this PhD, it was May of twenty twenty, a great time to find a job,
and I was cast out into the world. Right. With a lot of luck, I ended up landing upon IVP, and I realized that was a really wonderful fit for me and my interest because they do a lot of applied research in an NGO context, and they work really closely with federal partners. So that research is going directly towards management and decision making…in the national parks, which I think are really wonderful American treasure. And to be able to do my little part of keeping them wonderful is is really fulfilling.
That's a great story. It's a great evolution and really inspiring for people who are thinking about careers in ornithology and bird related activities. What advice do you have for them? Who people who are starting off now, people maybe who are in an undergraduate or a high school situation and thinking that they love birds and would like to make this a career. Sure.
I mean, I think one thing that you really can't go wrong with, right, is capacity building, like giving yourself the skills, whether that's GIS, whether that's learning how to miss net birds, and I realized that these opportunities can be harder to come by, but anytime you can give yourself skills like that, you can be involved with projects…
mentors, I think those all contribute tremendously to both your understanding of what you like and don't like because I think that's really important if you want to go on to do research and also your skill set because having that skill set is going to be helpful for leveraging that into a graduate school position, maybe, or a job, depending on what you want to do. You can never go wrong with that. I also think that talking to lots of people about networking, right, I think this is like a trope, trope of all tropes, but it's true. Right? Like the connections you make along the way, the bird world, the bird research world, it isn't that big at the end of the day.
Some of the people I worked for as a tech, I ran into again at conferences ten, fifteen years later. Some of them were giving the keynote address at those conferences. So, you know, it is a pretty small world and being able to put your name out there, get to know people, I think those are really wonderful, really wonderful things to be doing in general and especially in the research world. And then I think right now, things are a little bit influx. I think we have to be honest about that.
They're a little bit influx about federal research money and actually jobs within the federal government. We have to learn to be adaptable. Our path towards our dream job isn't as straight or as clear as we might like, but being adaptable and being resilient are really wonderful traits that all all biologists, especially field ecologists, can cultivate right now just because the landscape might look very different two years from now or five years from now. Mhmm. Certainly, things are more in flux now than they have been at any point in the last ten years in terms of the job market, academia, you name it.
And so I think it boos all of us to be, myself included, to be flexible and understanding. And I think that's that's a good trait beyond job searching. It's a good trait in life to to learn to live with uncertainty and also to be flexible about what your possibilities are and the routes you might take to get where you're trying to go. Mhmm. I love the notion of capacity building.
That just makes so much sense. As an undergraduate, were there classes that you found most helpful in either charting a course for your future or preparing you for that course? Yeah. I I think there's things that were sort of fall into the category of, like, oh, yeah. I could see that coming.
So I I actually didn't take a GIS class, and I've been kicking myself for years.
I didn't take a botany class, and I discovered that turns out knowing things about plants is really important. so being a well rounded ecologist, I think, can't hurt at all. As well as in this day and age, you know, we do so much work with coding in R, you know, understanding basic statistics. Like any of that will lead you astray just because they're all very useful skills. But I also think, you know, somebody said this to me in grad school and it really stuck with me, as a scientist you're a writer and…if you're writing things that people are not reading you're not a very good scientist, right?
Your your ability to do science is partly your ability to communicate that science to other scientists in the general public. Sometimes people say, oh, I guess all that French literature stuff wasn't really useful in the end, and I actually tell them no, I think it was very useful because a lot of my job today still is writing and having that a little bit of that kind of humanities writing ability, the ability to quickly read and summarize things, these are traits that we sometimes see in the humanities that are very useful in science too, because scientists have to write well in order to do their job well. So I think there's, it's not all just science classes, like you can bring a lot in from your other experiences. And I mean, I even remember a story about somebody who built a whole PhD project around rock climbing to get to the nests of rosy finches in the mountains in Utah. So I think there's a lot of skills that you can bring into science, things that you're uniquely good at, and I wouldn't discount those just off the bat.
There's things that maybe you're really good at that aren't traditional science skills that could be very useful down the road. Wow. What an encouraging thought. That's really terrific. So, Harry, what advice would you have for people who are undergraduates in terms of considering a graduate program?
What kinds of things should they prepare for and know about grad school before they apply or enter? Yeah. I think there's a few things. One thing is really…
if you aren't exactly sure what you wanna do in grad school, I think there's absolutely nothing wrong with taking some time to work as a seasonal tech, taking some time away from it to think about what you like and don't like. Because realizing halfway through a grad program that, oh, actually, this isn't really what I wanted or this isn't the topic that I really wanted to be working on is not a very good feeling. Beyond that, I think it's really important to think a little bit about who you're working with. So, obviously, there's programs that are good and not good. But at the end of the day, you're typically gonna be working with…one professor who's gonna be your major adviser for a master's or for a PhD, and your relationship with that person is crucial.
On some level your relationship with them, their research interests and how nicely they mesh with your own is kind of more important than the strength of the program more generally. If that's not a good fit, then you're not gonna have, in my experience, very good…
experience in grad school. Sure. and I and I think it's partly their research interest, and I also think it's partly…their management style. Some people are more micromanagers, some people are very hands off, and I'm not saying one is right or wrong, but I do believe that for most people they work better with one or the other. And so ask a lot of questions of a professor you're considering working with, that's the place to start.
You reach out to individual professors whose labs you're interested in, and then you ask them if they have availability, and you ask them, can I do a project on this? You start the conversation that way, but you should also talk to their grad students particularly if you're at a point where you're interviewing to be in their lab or you're applying to be in that program…because they're going to give you the honest answer too. Right? How is this person to work with? And I think that there are personalities that just don't always work well together regardless of the science and regardless of the other stuff.
And that is really the biggest pitfall when you have people who just don't have personalities that mesh well, and then people are kind of, quote, unquote, trapped in a degree program with a setup that doesn't work so well. Mhmm. So figuring out as much of that in advance, I think, is gonna save a lot of heartache later on down the road. Wise words. That's true.
In the words, voice of experience too. I think I really appreciate that. That's great. Harry, I'm so sad that we can't continue this conversation on and on and on. But for the sake of time, I would like to redirect us back to organizations and Okay.
Participatory activities,
in in science that all of us can engage in to perhaps even help you with research in the future by providing data. What can organizations and individuals do to support research, such as becoming informed consumers, valuing science based research, which I think you did a nice job explaining the importance of earlier, engaging in participatory activities such as the Audubon bird counts and things like that. Yeah. I I mean, there's a lot of things, and I think you've touched on several of them. In terms of participatory science, Going out and birding and putting things on eBird is actually generating data that scientists are using every day.
But beyond that, you know, if you if you're interested in birding and you want to help science yourself, there's ways that you can help by participating in Christmas bird counts, which happen in just about every major city in the US every year. They tend to be like run by volunteers and by birder, so it's not a bunch of PhDs who are doing this, it's regular quote unquote people.
there's also the Breeding Bird Survey, which if you're a really crack birder, that's a volunteer led program that's sort of the premier bird monitoring effort across the United States. But I think there's also showing up for organizations that do research and conservation with your time, volunteering your time, with your money. And I I promise this isn't just a sales pitch to get everybody to donate to IBP, but those donations do make a difference particularly in the realm of NGOs and what they can do. And also with your advocacy, talking to your elected officials, emphasizing the importance of science, the importance of funding things like the Breeding Bird Survey, which there had been discussions about defunding earlier this year that was very much on the table for a while. So the more that the public speaks up about efforts like this and their importance to them, I think that that does make a difference.
It moves the needle in congress and also closer to home. There's other things you can do, of course, as far as just making your your home more friendly to birds, but I think that goes a little beyond the realm of research specifically. Great. Fodder for another interview with you with you. I can't wait to do it.
Harry, it's been such a pleasure talking with you today. Thank you for the time, and thank you for all the work that you do on behalf of birds and the places that they need. I wish you all the best and look forward to joining you again on one of your wonderful bird walks in the future sponsored by the Northern Arizona Audubon Society. Yeah. Thanks again.
Thanks for having me, Matt. It's been a pleasure. Yes. Yeah. It's been really fun.
Thank you. We hope you've enjoyed this podcast. Please visit our website at northern arizona audubon dot org and consider joining the Northern Arizona Audubon Society or your local bird group to support the work they do to help birds. And above all, we hope you will continue appreciating and protecting birds and the places they need.