114 - Why Birds Get Lost: The Science of Vagrancy and Range Expansion

115 - How Baby Birds Learn Everything

Last week on a camping trip, I had three moments that made me laugh out loud — and then sent me down a rabbit hole about one of nature's most entertaining and overlooked stories. A young downy woodpecker was earnestly pecking a metal pole. A juvenile blue jay locked eyes with me and immediately fled in apparent horror. And on a snag in the woods, a baby barred owl stood hollering for its mother like a very indignant toddler. None of them knew what they were doing yet. And that, it turns out, is exactly the point. Two Strategies: Precocial vs. Altricial Not all birds are born equal. Precocial birds — ducks, killdeer, turkeys — hatch with their eyes open, down feathers in place, and the ability to walk and swim within hours. Altricial birds — songbirds, woodpeckers, owls, eagles — hatch helpless and blind, entirely dependent on their parents. The difference comes down to survival strategy: ground-nesters need mobility fast; cavity and platform nesters can afford slow, intensive development. What That Woodpecker Was Actually Doing The downy pecking my metal feeder pole wasn't malfunctioning — it was running experiments. Young altricial birds have their core instincts baked in, but the skill of knowing *where* to apply them takes time. The pole was a data point. An incorrect one, but the bird was calibrating. That's how it works. The Screaming Owl on the Snag Young barred owls go through what birders call the "branching stage" — when they've outgrown the nest but can't fly yet. They climb out onto nearby branches and do exactly what mine was doing: hollering. The parents still come. They feed the young owl for weeks, gradually requiring it to work harder for each meal. That outraged noise on a snag eventually becomes the composed, silent presence we associate with owls. Fledging Is Not Graduating When a young bird leaves the nest, it's not independent. A fledgling robin hopping badly across your lawn, looking lost or even injured, is almost certainly fine. The parents know where it is. Don't rescue it unless the bird is visibly injured or a predator is present. How They Find Their Way Here's what genuinely amazes me: baby birds hatched in the Northwoods this summer may fly to Central or South America this fall — without a map, often without a parent. Young indigo buntings learn to navigate by watching the rotation of the night sky during a specific developmental window. Researchers altered the apparent sky in planetariums and shifted the birds' internal compass. A brain the size of a walnut doing celestial navigation before its first birthday. The next time you see a young bird doing something completely ridiculous — pecking a metal pole, fleeing a harmless human, hollering from a branch at 10 a.m. — you're watching competence being built in real time. It's one of the best shows nature has to offer. Find me at jillfromthenorthwoods.com or email jill@startwithsmallsteps.com. TIMESTAMPS * 0:00 Introduction — three campsite moments * 2:40 Precocial vs. altricial — two birth strategies * 8:16 The branching stage — why owls scream on snags * 12:09 Fledging: what it really means * 16:23 Navigation — finding south without a map * 19:19 What parenting looks like when success means goodbye Jill’s Links http://jillfromthenorthwoods.com [http://jillfromthenorthwoods.com] https://www.buymeacoffee.com/smallstepspod [https://www.buymeacoffee.com/smallstepspod] Twitter - https://twitter.com/schmern [https://twitter.com/schmern] YouTube @BuzzBlossomSqueak [https://www.youtube.com/@smallstepswithgod] By choosing to watch this video or listen to this podcast, you acknowledge that you are doing so of your own free will. The content shared here reflects personal experiences and opinions and is intended for informational and educational purposes only. I am not a licensed biologist, ecologist, or wildlife professional. Any nature observations, identifications, or suggestions offered should not be considered a substitute for professional scientific or environmental guidance. Always follow local regulations when observing or interacting with wildlife and natural spaces. You are solely responsible for any decisions or actions you take based on this content.

114 - Why Birds Get Lost: The Science of Vagrancy and Range Expansion

In July 2023, a volunteer doing routine piping plover counts at a Wisconsin wildlife area saw a flash of pink out of the corner of his eye. He stopped. He looked again. He started making phone calls. What he was looking at was a roseate spoonbill — a large, flamingo-pink wading bird with a spatula-shaped bill — last confirmed in the state in 1845. Within days, birders were driving from hundreds of miles away, fifty people showing up on a Saturday just to stand at the edge of a wetland and look at a bird that had no business being there. So how does that happen? And what does it mean when it does? The Vocabulary: Vagrant, Accidental, Wanderer Not all out-of-range birds are the same thing. A vagrant is a bird that shows up outside its normal range — unusual, but not unheard of. An accidental is rarer still: a bird so far outside its range that a sighting is essentially a once-in-a-lifetime event. That spoonbill was an accidental — the gap between sightings was 178 years. A wanderer is something else: typically a young bird in its first couple of years, still sorting out navigation, following instinct or wind or food somewhere further than planned. Four Mechanisms That Send Birds Off Course The first and most intuitive is weather. A bird riding the winds ahead of a storm system can end up hundreds of miles off course. Tropical storm remnants and hurricane tails are particularly dramatic — when Hurricane Laura moved through in August 2020, magnificent frigatebirds (birds that belong over warm tropical ocean water and almost never touch land) turned up over the Mississippi River, with sightings as far inland as Tulsa, Oklahoma. Experienced birders have learned to look for rare sightings in the hours after major inland storms. The second mechanism is genetic — and this one is fascinating. A small European bird called the blackcap warbler was the subject of landmark research in the 1990s. Two populations of the same species migrate in different directions — one group goes southwest in autumn, the other southeast. Researchers crossbred captive birds from each population and raised the offspring in total isolation, with no parents to follow and no experienced birds to imitate. When tested, the young birds flew compass headings that averaged out between their parents’ routes. The migratory direction isn’t learned. It’s encoded in the genome. A bird flying the wrong direction isn’t making a mistake the way a human would — it’s executing a program that has a bug. The third mechanism is inexperience. A UW-Madison wildlife ecologist described juvenile birds as being like a 16-year-old driver: they know how to drive, they just don’t know how to go where they want to go. Young birds have the hardware, the instinct, and the fuel-burning capacity to migrate. They just haven’t made enough trips to lock in the route. They overshoot, drift, follow the wrong flock to the wrong landform. The fourth mechanism is population pressure. When a species has a strong breeding year, more young birds compete for limited resources and push further from their normal range. The roseate spoonbill was already appearing in unusual numbers in the Great Lakes and New England from 2018–2021 before the Wisconsin sighting in 2023. That wasn’t random. It was a population large enough to start edging northward. When “Getting Lost” Becomes “Moving In” The ibises in a Wisconsin marsh I love to visit tell a different story. White-faced ibis and glossy ibis began showing up in small numbers, then in larger ones, then across multiple counties. By 2025, the Southern Wisconsin Bird Alliance was writing about regular sightings at many locations. Black-necked stilts followed a similar arc: considered accidental in 1991, first documented nesting pair at Horicon Marsh in 1999, and now dozens counted in a single season. I was just at Horicon on vacation and counted 14 in a single outing. That’s not a bird getting lost. That’s a bird finding a new home. The Bird List Is Not a Closed Document What’s happening in the Midwest right now with spoonbills, ibises, and stilts is a reminder that a state bird list isn’t fixed — it’s a living record. The birds your grandparents birded for are not exactly the birds you’ll find today. Some species have declined. Some have moved north. A few have shown up in directions no one expected. And we now have tools to track all of it in real time. eBird is a continuously updated, crowdsourced map of bird sightings contributed by millions of observers worldwide. When that spoonbill showed up in Wisconsin, it had statewide recognition by the end of the day. You don’t have to be an expert to contribute — a free account takes five minutes to set up, and every checklist you submit makes the record more complete. You become a citizen scientist. What looks like a casual afternoon at a retention pond might turn into a data point that changes what scientists understand about a species’ range. Book Recommendation If you want to go deeper into the science of bird navigation and migration, I recommend A World on the Wing by Scott Weidensaul. It covers the biology of how birds navigate, what researchers are learning from tracking technology, and how tools like eBird are transforming our understanding of bird movement worldwide. Accessible, well-written, and genuinely eye-opening. Jill’s Links http://jillfromthenorthwoods.com [http://jillfromthenorthwoods.com] https://www.buymeacoffee.com/smallstepspod [https://www.buymeacoffee.com/smallstepspod] Twitter - https://twitter.com/schmern [https://twitter.com/schmern] YouTube @BuzzBlossomSqueak [https://www.youtube.com/@smallstepswithgod] By choosing to watch this video or listen to this podcast, you acknowledge that you are doing so of your own free will. The content shared here reflects personal experiences and opinions and is intended for informational and educational purposes only. I am not a licensed biologist, ecologist, or wildlife professional. Any nature observations, identifications, or suggestions offered should not be considered a substitute for professional scientific or environmental guidance. Always follow local regulations when observing or interacting with wildlife and natural spaces. You are solely responsible for any decisions or actions you take based on this content.

113 - Reading the Sky: What Storm Colors Are Telling You

Why does the sky turn green when a tornado is coming? Why do storm clouds go black? And what does a 19th-century volcanic eruption in Indonesia have to do with one of the most famous paintings in the world? In this episode of Buzz, Blossom & Squeak, we finish our spectrometry series by bringing it closest to home — reading the colors of the sky itself, and learning what they’re telling us. The Blue Sky: Our Baseline A clear blue sky is the result of Rayleigh scattering — a process identified by British physicist Lord Rayleigh in the 19th century. Sunlight traveling through the nitrogen and oxygen molecules of the atmosphere scatters the short blue wavelengths far more powerfully than the long red ones. The result: blue light bounces in every direction, filling the sky, while red and orange travel a more direct path. Our eyes also favor blue over violet, which is why the sky appears blue rather than purple even though violet wavelengths exist. Sunsets, Sunrises, and the Long Path Through Air At sunset, the sun’s light must travel at a much longer diagonal through the atmosphere before reaching our eyes — roughly 30 times more atmosphere than when it’s directly overhead. That means more scattering. Blue goes first. Then green. Only the warm wavelengths survive: orange, crimson, deep red, pink, gold. Every sunset is Rayleigh scattering happening live. Krakatoa, “The Scream,” and Volcanic Purple When Krakatoa erupted in 1883 — one of the most violent volcanic events in recorded history — it injected billions of tons of sulfuric material into the upper atmosphere. For months afterward, sunsets around the world turned extraordinary shades of blood red, violet, and even green. In London, people thought it was a fire on the horizon. Fire departments were dispatched. And in Norway, a decade after the eruption, Edvard Munch described the blood-red sky he saw while walking with friends — the moment that inspired “The Scream.” That painting may be, in part, a spectral record of Krakatoa’s aftermath. Dark Clouds and Why They Go Black Clouds start white because tiny water droplets scatter all wavelengths equally, producing white light. As storm clouds grow taller and denser, their thickness blocks light from passing through entirely. A towering cumulonimbus reaching 40,000 to 60,000 feet absorbs rather than scatters — and the cloud that was white becomes gray, then dark, then nearly black. The darkness is measuring the cloud’s water content. The Green Sky: A Warning You Can’t Ignore The sickly yellow-green of a tornado sky is one of the most visceral color signals in nature. The leading explanation: the deep red-orange of late afternoon sunlight, already stripped of blue by the atmosphere, mixes with the intense blue light scattered inside the massive water column of a supercell. Red plus blue-green equals that unsettling cast. Hail intensifies it — ice crystals absorb red and scatter blue-green wavelengths. If the sky goes green, take cover. The sky is a giant spectrometer, and it’s always telling us something. We just have to know how to read it. Jill’s Links http://jillfromthenorthwoods.com [http://jillfromthenorthwoods.com] https://www.buymeacoffee.com/smallstepspod [https://www.buymeacoffee.com/smallstepspod] Twitter - https://twitter.com/schmern [https://twitter.com/schmern] YouTube @BuzzBlossomSqueak [https://www.youtube.com/@smallstepswithgod] By choosing to watch this video or listen to this podcast, you acknowledge that you are doing so of your own free will. The content shared here reflects personal experiences and opinions and is intended for informational and educational purposes only. I am not a licensed biologist, ecologist, or wildlife professional. Any nature observations, identifications, or suggestions offered should not be considered a substitute for professional scientific or environmental guidance. Always follow local regulations when observing or interacting with wildlife and natural spaces. You are solely responsible for any decisions or actions you take based on this content.

112- Why Is Water Blue? The Science of Color in Lakes, Oceans, and Ice

Why is Lake Superior almost black on a stormy day and impossibly blue on a calm one? Why does the Caribbean look turquoise when it's made of the same H2O? And what's happening when glacier ice glows that eerie deep blue inside a crevasse? Water doesn't have a color the way a cardinal has red feathers. What we see when we look at water is physics in action — selective absorption, light scattering, depth, biology, and the geometry of the sun. In this episode we break down exactly how it works. Why Pure Water Is Blue at All Water molecules absorb light selectively. They absorb energy at the red end of the spectrum more readily than at the blue end — it has to do with how the hydrogen and oxygen atoms vibrate at frequencies that match red and infrared wavelengths. So as sunlight enters water and travels deeper, the reds disappear first, then orange and yellow fade, then green weakens. Blue and violet penetrate deepest. The blue light that survives gets scattered back toward your eyes. A single glass of water is barely detectable. A deep lake or ocean makes the filtering unmistakable. Deep Blue: Lake Superior and Open Ocean In deep, cold, clear water — away from river mouths and shorelines — selective absorption plays out fully. By 30 feet, red disappears from underwater life almost entirely. By 30 meters, saltwater has absorbed nearly everything except blue. Lake Superior behaves like a small inland ocean: deep, cold, and clear enough that on a calm day with nothing stirring up sediment, it can appear impossibly, purely blue. That blue is not reflection — it's what's left after everything else has been filtered out. Turquoise: Why Tropical Water Looks Different Tropical water like the Caribbean involves a second mechanism: a pale, reflective bottom. The water is shallow enough that light reaches the sandy or coral floor, reflects back upward, and passes through a thin column of water on its way to your eyes. The red wavelengths still get knocked out, but you get some blue-green light mixing back in with the blue — giving you that bright, warm turquoise. The shallower the water and the more reflective the bottom, the brighter and lighter the color. That's why it can look almost mint green over white sand in just a foot or two of water. Glaciers, Sea Caves, and the Blue Grotto When light enters a glacier through compacted ice or a sea cave through a narrow underwater opening, something beautiful happens. The ice or water column absorbs the reds, and concentrated blue scatters in every direction through the confined space. In a glacier crevasse, that creates the sensation that the ice is glowing from within. In the Blue Grotto at Capri, light enters through an underwater opening, reds are absorbed by the column of water, and blue illuminates the entire cave and its walls. Same physics. Different stage. Tannins, Algae, and Living Color Not all water color comes from light physics alone. Tea-colored rivers carry dissolved organic material — tannins leaching from decaying plant matter upstream. Algae blooms can turn a lake green, and certain bacteria produce red and pink pigments as a kind of biological sunscreen. Pink lakes like Lake Hillier in Western Australia and Lake Retba in Senegal are colored entirely by living organisms, not by chemistry. The biology of a body of water can override its physics entirely. Whitecaps, Clouds, and Equal Scattering When waves break, they trap millions of tiny air bubbles. Those bubbles are large enough to scatter all wavelengths of light equally — not just blue. Every color comes back to you at once, and the result is white. The same reason clouds are white: water droplets large enough to scatter the full spectrum. A whitecap is, in a sense, a momentary cloud forming at the surface of the water. When a sea that was deep navy suddenly goes pale and foamy, the water hasn't changed — its physics has. Structural Color: Blue Jays and the Same Rules Blue jays have no blue pigment in their feathers. Their barbules contain nanostructures with air pockets that scatter blue wavelengths and absorb red and orange — the same selective physics as the ocean. If you find a blue jay feather and hold it at the wrong angle, the blue disappears. Cardinals really are red; blue jays only appear blue. Hummingbird throats, dragonfly wings, glacier ice, and the open Pacific are all playing by the same set of rules. Jill’s Links http://jillfromthenorthwoods.com [http://jillfromthenorthwoods.com] https://www.buymeacoffee.com/smallstepspod [https://www.buymeacoffee.com/smallstepspod] Twitter - https://twitter.com/schmern [https://twitter.com/schmern] YouTube @BuzzBlossomSqueak [https://www.youtube.com/@smallstepswithgod] By choosing to watch this video or listen to this podcast, you acknowledge that you are doing so of your own free will. The content shared here reflects personal experiences and opinions and is intended for informational and educational purposes only. I am not a licensed biologist, ecologist, or wildlife professional. Any nature observations, identifications, or suggestions offered should not be considered a substitute for professional scientific or environmental guidance. Always follow local regulations when observing or interacting with wildlife and natural spaces. You are solely responsible for any decisions or actions you take based on this content.

111 - Spectrometry in Space: What Every Planet Is Telling Us

We've never touched Mars. We've never scooped up Pluto's frost or sifted through Jupiter's cloud layers. And yet scientists can describe the chemistry of every planet in our solar system with remarkable precision. This episode is about how that's possible — and why the colors you see when you look up at the night sky are some of the most information-rich things in the universe. The Philosopher Who Said It Was Impossible In 1835, French philosopher Auguste Comte declared that the physical composition of stars and distant worlds would forever lie beyond human knowledge. Within 25 years, he had been proven wrong — not by luck, but by a fundamental discovery about what light actually carries. The story of Kirchhoff, Bunsen, and those dark lines in the solar spectrum is one of the most dramatic reversals in the history of science. How Planets Speak in Light Planets don't generate their own light — they reflect the Sun's. But that reflected light isn't the same as what left the Sun. As sunlight passes through a planet's atmosphere and bounces off its surface, specific elements and compounds pull out their characteristic wavelengths. The result is a spectrum full of gaps — a chemical fingerprint that survives billions of miles of travel to reach our telescopes. A Tour of the Solar System in Color Each planet has a story written in its reflected light. Mars's rust-red surface broadcasts iron oxide chemistry and a history of possible liquid water. Venus's blinding brightness hides an atmosphere of carbon dioxide and clouds made of sulfuric acid droplets. Jupiter's banded cloud layers reveal ammonia ice, and Neptune's vivid deep blue comes from methane filtering out the red end of the spectrum. Even the difference between Uranus's pale blue-green and Neptune's rich blue turns out to be a story about atmospheric haze. The Doppler Twist Spectrometry doesn't just identify what worlds are made of — it can measure how they move. The same Doppler shift that changes an ambulance siren's pitch as it passes you also shifts light from a moving source. Scientists use this to measure a planet's rotation speed without watching it turn. More remarkably, this technique — Doppler spectroscopy — is how the first planet orbiting a sun-like star was confirmed in 1995, and how hundreds of exoplanets have been found since. Reading Atmospheres Across Light-Years Transit spectroscopy takes this further still: when an exoplanet crosses in front of its star, a sliver of starlight filters through the planet's atmosphere, picking up chemical fingerprints that survive the journey across hundreds of light-years to reach us. Scientists have already detected water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane in distant exoplanet atmospheres. What researchers are ultimately searching for are biosignatures — chemical combinations that could only be explained by life. We haven't found them yet. But the tools are ready. Light is not just light. It's a message — and if you know how to read it, the universe opens up in ways a 19th-century philosopher could not have imagined. Next episode, we're bringing spectrometry back to Earth, where the same techniques are being used right now to track greenhouse gases, ozone, wildfire chemistry, and pollution plumes in real time. Jill’s Links http://jillfromthenorthwoods.com [http://jillfromthenorthwoods.com] https://www.buymeacoffee.com/smallstepspod [https://www.buymeacoffee.com/smallstepspod] Twitter - https://twitter.com/schmern [https://twitter.com/schmern] YouTube @BuzzBlossomSqueak [https://www.youtube.com/@smallstepswithgod] By choosing to watch this video or listen to this podcast, you acknowledge that you are doing so of your own free will. The content shared here reflects personal experiences and opinions and is intended for informational and educational purposes only. I am not a licensed biologist, ecologist, or wildlife professional. Any nature observations, identifications, or suggestions offered should not be considered a substitute for professional scientific or environmental guidance. Always follow local regulations when observing or interacting with wildlife and natural spaces. You are solely responsible for any decisions or actions you take based on this content.