10-06: How to Make a Meadowlark with Johanna Beam

Hello and welcome to the American Birding Podcast from the American Birding Association. I am your host, Nate Swick. Here at the ABA, we have recently announced our destinations for the ABA's Community Weekend Program for 2026. If you are unfamiliar with Community Weekends, they are free birding events hosted by the ABA and local partners. The idea being to get out there and meet some people, do some birding at some local patches all around the ABA area. They usually involve a couple bird walks on Saturday or Sunday, a workshop and a social birds and beers type event. We don't have solid dates for some of these yet. Those will be coming along shortly. So keep an ear out for that. But this year, we will be heading to Philadelphia in May, Cradle of American Ornithology, Albuquerque, New Mexico in August, St. Louis, Missouri in September, and Charleston, South Carolina in November. I personally hope to be involved in a couple of these. I am almost certain I will be in Charleston at least. That is not too far for me. I can drive down there. That's always nice. I imagine that the Community Weekend in Albuquerque will have birders making an attempt at some southwestern ABA area specialties like Chihuahuan meadowlark, which until recently was a subspecies of eastern meadowlark, but is now a species in full, thanks largely to the work of my guest this week. How do you like that say, Wei? Johanna Beam is a former ABA young birder, a bird taxonomist, and the researcher you can thank for the Chihuahuan meadowlark on your life list. She joins me to talk about how to build a species, accountable species that is, from the ground after this week's rare birds. This is your Rare Bird Focus for the beginning of February 2026. The last few years have seen a significant increase in both species of bean geese in the ABA area. The species pair was, until recently, seen primarily as an uncommon but nearly annual visitor only to Alaska, but has been recorded several times now in the West, across Central Canada, and in the Northeast, prompting identification discussions at every turn. Bean geese was split into tundra and taiga varieties in 2007, and tundra has always been the more common one, but it is a difficult ID challenge. All that makes a pair of taiga bean geese in Port Renfrew on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, earlier this month all the more exciting. It represents a first record for the province, first of any bean goose for BC for that matter, and the third for Canada after previous records from Yukon Territory and Quebec. There is also a record from nearby in Washington. This is the second taiga bean goose in the ABA area for this year following a bird in upstate New York last month. That is the rarity highlight for the period. For the full list of rarities from around the ABA area, check out the ABA Rare Bird Alert on Fridays at aba.org slash rba. You can also follow along with all the rare bird news in our ABA Rare Bird Alert group on Facebook and on ABA Community. In 2022, birders in the ABA area welcomed a new species to the checklist and to many lifeless chihuahuan meadowlark. It had for years been considered a distinct subspecies of eastern meadowlark and a likely, you know, quote unquote good species. But there are many steps to take before a population makes it eventually to your life list. And in a lot of cases, you need a motivated student, a young student to start down that path. I am excited to welcome that very student, now doctor now, to the show, Joanna Beam, Dr. Joanna Beam. Now, congratulations, doctor of Chihuahua Metal Arcs, no doubt. How are you, Joanna? Thanks for having me, Nate. Yeah, it's great to be here. I'm doing well and doing a lot of cool bird research and have been. Yeah. Yeah. So this is, this is not Joanna's first time on the podcast. She was part of a young birder crew that participated in the champions of the flyway many, many years ago. And I was, uh, had the good fortune to be their driver. Uh, so it's great to see you again. Always great to touch base. So many of those people on that team have ended up doing really cool bird stuff. So, uh, it's neat to see everybody, where everybody's gone since then. Yeah, it's very interesting because all of us, I think, have ended up in grad school throughout the years. So it's kind of an interesting segue from us being heavily into birding as sort of youngsters and then changing our career trajectories to the birds that we end up watching. Absolutely. That's another kind of interesting topic I wasn't planning on going into, but we can go into it a little bit. Obviously, you're a passionate birder. You've grown up as a birder. You were involved in the AVA's Young Birder programs for many years. And now you're doing actual cutting edge bird research in a way, giving back to the birding community by getting us a lifer here. Did you always want to work in birds? Did you always want to go into academia? No. So I kind of knew I wanted to be a scientist from a young age, but I wasn't sure where that would lead me. Yeah. What that actually meant as a young person? Yeah, yeah, for sure. When I was a freshman in high school, I really didn't know that I wanted to be in ecology. I actually thought I wanted to be a astrophysicist. And then it turned out that I didn't like physics. So yeah, interesting, interesting thing there. And then I thought I wanted to be a vet. And then I realized that maybe ecology would be my focus. And then once I started And really getting into birds, I realized that that would be my path forward. And I didn't really know what aspect of bird research I wanted to get involved in. But that was probably when I was in my junior year of high school that I kind of made that realization. Are you able to kind of draw on those years as a young birder in the work that you do now? Does it inform a lot of the work that you're doing now? It certainly informs a lot of your curiosity, I'm sure. yeah it informs a lot of the curiosity which is i think a direct driver into what gets us going and asking some of these questions about why things are different why do they sound different why do they behave differently um and yeah so it was actually my my whole trajectory with metal arcs started when i found a lillian's eastern metal arc at the time um at my home patch in colorado and I was really interested in trying to figure out what that population was and why it looked different and why it was sort of this distinct population of eastern metal arks because eastern metal arks do have a lot of subspecies throughout the range yeah they're much more wide-ranging than people realize I've seen eastern metal arks in the Caribbean too and they're they're quite different than the ones in my backyard more or less yeah for sure and like I've I went to Columbia last year and I got to hear the Eastern Metalarks there and they sound completely different than the ones up here, which was super cool to actually hear those differences. And they look a little bit different as well. So seeing that population of Eastern, of the Lillian's Eastern Metalark, first off when I was like, right after I came back from a young birder camp in Hog Island. And then I got really interested in it. And then I had, I got another scholarship. I think I actually got an ABA scholarship to attend Camp Chircala the next year. And then I got to see that population of metal arcs firsthand and get to hear their song. And that was even more fuel on the fire of wanting to study what was going on with these metal arcs. Again, as I had just finished high school at that point. Yeah, I was going to ask what came first, the science or the bird. It sounds like the bird came first. And then learning about the science and learning how you can use the science to answer this question that has been, you know, kind of on the surface of metal arc taxonomy for some time, but not conclusively answered. So how did you make that jump into like, I'm going to, I'm going to look at this and I'm going to get this bird split. Yes. Yeah. So I had it in the back of my head for a few years. When I first started college, I was at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, and there weren't a lot of opportunities to directly study birds there. So I ended up looking into transferring schools and I kind of wanted to go back to Colorado because I loved it there and I missed the mountains and the birds out there. And there was a new professor who had just started at CU Boulder who was doing speciation research in genomics and had recently published a few papers on interesting splits or potential splits or lumps like with the winged warblers, the blue-winged golden warblers, and then also with the red bulls. And I had kind of looked at some of those papers and I thought, okay, I'm going to just email this professor and see what happens. And I was, I had just finished my freshman year in college. I really had no business going down that pathway because I had never taken a genetics class. I didn't, I didn't really have any idea what I was talking about when I was proposing this idea, but I walked into Dr. Scott Taylor's office the summer between my freshman and my sophomore years in college and just proposed this idea of like, hey, would you be interested in working on the metal urcs of the Americas in doing some speciation work? Because there's one population that I think could be really interesting to study. It been studied before and it seems like a pretty clear cut story And he was game Yeah I was going to say I was sorry I was stepping away to Google something because I was like Scott Taylor, Scott Taylor. He's actually been a podcast guest. Yeah. We talked about the chickadees. He was the chickadee guy and he was doing work with them. So that's fascinating. It's so interesting to me that there are now, not to say that there wasn't before, but so many bird geneticists, bird academics are now taking a look at some of these kind of base questions that birders have been asking for a very, very long time, you know, and really taking a critical eye to them and figuring them out in ways that maybe we haven't been able to. The last decade, 15 years has been incredible on that front. And I think Dr. Taylor has been kind of on the front line of that in a lot of ways. Yeah. So he became, when he started doing research, he was sort of at the turning point in our ability to sequence the entire bird's DNA. And so previous to that, we've only been able to sequence really small parts. So really small sections, I mean, fractions of a percent of a whole bird's genome. And in the last about 10 years has sort of been the advent of this new age of genomic sequencing. And that has led us to sort of come after these answers to questions that, yeah, birders have been asking for a really long time and, you know, trying to get some answers to understand these species boundaries and subspecies boundaries that you haven't studied for the last 100 or 200 years. Yeah, it's great to see. I mean, I always think of ornithology as maybe the perfect field for academics and lay people to work together because these are questions that you as a birder know that birders have been asking and then you've got academics who are able to actually do the work. So birders are out here maybe providing this sort of army of unpaid field workers, making these observational, making these observations. And then the scientists can go on. Oh, that's interesting. I've got the resources now to actually really get to the bottom of these. And yeah, you're like in the last in the last 10 years has been. And as you say, that's that's probably been the main thing is now we can look at the entire bird's genome in ways that we couldn't before. Yeah, and not only that, we have access to eBird data from people who are going out and taking pictures of these birds and videos and audio recordings and making field notes. And it's all publicly available now. There really wasn't a database like that available until the last maybe 10 or 15 years. And not all of us scientists have access to a really good museum collection. and those have been invaluable to understanding these sort of boundaries between groups of species and birds and of course non-birds but now we have access to eBird data I mean you can just start looking at photos to understand what could be differences and try to get an undercover yeah try to get a feeling of what could be going on. So you're starting this work on the the metal arcs? What is essentially the first step? Well, aside from going to eBird and looking at photos and saying, these are very different. Where do you go from there? Yeah. So I first started out, we sort of decided on the scope of our question, knowing that they might have some differences in their song, but no one had looked at that before. And so we decided to add a song component, not a playback experiment because we didn't have enough time for that. I only had about two years work on this project and finish my undergrad degree at the same time. So we decided that, and then it was a matter of figuring out in the literature if there were any other interesting populations to study. So Western metalarks are generally considered to be one whole species with not a lot of subpopulations within them. There's been some debate of whether or not they form two subspecies or not. So we just prioritize getting samples from their entire range, but then Eastern metal arc is a whole different story where you have a really complicated mess with no clearly defined boundaries, especially in Eastern North America. So we had to try to find samples for all these places just using museums. So museums have gone out and collected various birds or have gotten window strike birds from the public. And then we were able to get tissue samples for them that we could use then for our genomic analysis. How many tissue samples are there out there? I've done some work in the bird lab of a museum here in North Carolina, and a lot of the older samples, you know, you don't have that stuff because they didn't think of it as important. But in the last, I don't know how many years, you take soft tissue samples as well, and you kind of put them in a little vial and stick them in the freezer, and you never know what's going to happen. Maybe someone's going to come along and use it, but it's there just in case. It's you. you're the one who's coming along to use it right yeah oh yeah and there's i would take a guess that there's hundreds if not hundreds of thousands if not millions of tissue samples out there for birds in these some of these museums and the place that i work at now the bird genoscape project we have our own collections of hundreds i think we're in the hundreds of thousands of feather samples which you can also obtain dna from so uh there's a lot there's yeah there's there's more out there than we can possibly research in the foreseeable future for sure. Yeah. Well, that's why you do it. You do it thinking that someone's going to use it down the road and you don't really know how it's going to be used. So that was one of my questions. Like you didn't go and sample Chihuahuan metal arcs on their range. You actually had access to however many samples already there, already frozen, already ready for you to take a look at in museums from across the country. Yeah, yeah. So we obtained samples from a few different museums across the country, including one from Canada. And I didn't need to do any sampling on my own. We talked about it. And meadowlarks are a grassland bird. Grassland birds are notoriously hard to catch in a misnet for banders. I would think so, yeah. So we were actually very happy that we didn't have to go down that route. Because meadowlarks, we're working on some more stuff now and they're just very difficult. fascinating. I love them, but they're not easy to catch. I did go and record some metal arcs in, so some Trowin metal arcs in Arizona. And that was the only field component. And really museums were the reason that I was able to do that research to begin with because limited timeframe and there were plenty of samples available. Yeah. So the audio component was something that was a little bit different. I know a lot of people who are looking at bird phylogenetics are, you know, increasingly interested in getting samples of the birds vocalizations, because, you know, even if we did not necessarily notice the differences between populations of these birds, the birds absolutely know who sounds right and who sounds wrong. Um, how many, how many different, how many different songs were you able to listen to? Dozens? Hundreds? I think it was. Were there metal arcs in your dreams? Metal arc songs in your dreams? Oh yeah, Yeah, 100% there were. Yeah. I think it was on the order of 80-some or 90-some different MetalArk songs that I used. So I used songs available on both Macaulay Library and Zena Canto. And yeah, I think it was somewhere in the 80s. And it was a lot. It took up a lot of my time because I did everything manually, which is one of the better ways to do it. because computers until more recently haven't been great at sort of automatically detecting differences in song. Of course, that's different in the age of more computational biology. There's a lot better ways to do it now than there were when I did it then. But yeah, it's been a few years. That's pretty incredible. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing how much has changed. Yeah. Just in the last, you know, eight years or so. So do you have still have songs on your laptop? Would you just, how do you how do you look at those you just sit and listen to bird songs and try and map the songs or or how do you tell the differences between them yeah so i i did this a way that i would i would change how i did it um knowing new methods but i used a program called raven pro so i would upload the songs into there um they were all labeled individually and then i would individually measure components of the song so its duration its peak frequency the lowest frequency frequency at the start of the song, at the end of the song. We came up with a few different ways. So I actually worked with Nathan. I always forget how to pronounce his last name. Oh, Pipo. Pipo. I know exactly who you're talking about. I can't pronounce his name. Yeah, I know who he is. Yeah. So I worked with Nathan Pipo. He was on my committee for my undergrad honors thesis. And we worked out some ways that we could try to quantify these differences in song just by hand. And you can kind of tell by year the differences in metal arc song, but it's much easier to look at a spectrogram or that visual component of the song to see what those differences are. And once we figured out what those things were, it was just a matter of going in and taking individual measurements in Raven Pro and then putting them all together and then running some analyses in R to look at those differences. How do the songs sound different to each other, to your air? Ooh, so Western metal arcs tend to have that garble that we all know in love yeah eastern metal arcs i always thought them is thought of them as sounding like they were in mourning they tend to sound very sad yeah um and trewalling kind of have that same feeling too that they're kind of sad um but they have a note usually have a note at the very beginning of their song that it starts out really low and it's really short and then it pops up to a higher frequency and then they kind of have these three long down sloping kind of sad notes that follow them So I kind of look for that when I looking at spectrograms of Chihuahua metal arc or or of metal arcs to confirm whether or not that could be a Chihuahua This is, this might sound like an odd question. Are you a musician at all? Yes. At least I grew up being one. Yeah. So you can read music, right? Yeah. Yeah. I always like, I feel like people who read music or come to birdsong from that, background tend to have a slightly different way of looking at it. Um, like I, I, I, I'm a musician. I read music as well. And, um, yeah, I love spectrograms for that because I can see the bird song in the spectrogram and I don't think that's, I think that really helps. Yeah. Yeah. It gives it a lot more visual aid and visual component to it. You can make the connection from the point on the spectrogram or on the, on the musical staff to the sound, or at least relatively speaking, even if you don't have perfect pitch. But yeah, it's, yeah, I always wonder, because I think I run into that a lot. I'm sure you do too. There's a lot of, there's a lot of musicians out there in the birding world. And I think it really helps them, I don't know, understand song, bird song, vocalizations in a slightly different way. Yeah. And I think it also helps us remember what some of these really subtle song differences are between these groups. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. But it definitely helped with that song analysis, making those connections. And I still feel like I'm better at metal arc song by spectrogram than by ear. Yeah. Funnily enough. I feel the same way with some warblers that I, that I see on the spectrogram and they hear, um, yeah, this sort of work, you really need to, you know, dot your I's cross your T's as it were to, to make the case that, um, that Chihuahuan metal arc is its own species. I was there any aspect of it that sort of, was there any aspect of it that sort of surprised you? Maybe something you had to work on that you didn't necessarily expect to need to work on? There was a lot more computational work than I think I expected. And at that point, I wasn't very familiar with working with programs like R or working on a command line, like running programs. Those are very much like grad school processes, programs. Yeah. And I, so that was really interesting to learn, uh, sort of the computer science behind all of this genomics work. And I grew up with my dad being a computer programmer, uh, sort of a research software engineer. Um, so I always kind of knew that that work was out there. Um, but I was always very resistant to it for whatever reason. I think there's, there's that part as a kid you're like I don't want to do what my parents do yeah um and that's it's still surprising to me that I've ended up in a kind of a similar vein um yeah by learning that yeah programming is actually a huge part of not just genomics but almost like every part of of research that we can do it's so true you don't go into ornithology thinking you're gonna do that but there you are yeah yeah I I was at Powder Mill um Nature Reserve and I was at their banding station helping out with an outreach event. And there was a group, I think they were seventh graders. And they were like, they were trying to get some idea of what careers were out there. And I was like, Oh, so you guys like computers? Like do any of you guys program? And they were like, yeah. And I was like, well, science could be a great career for you. And their eyes just lit up. They were so excited about it. And that was really exciting for me too. Because I was like, that was something I didn't know. And bringing that to other people was also really fun at a younger age that they can kind of have this idea of, well, yeah, I could be in science and do the thing that I love doing. And it's really needed because some of us scientists, it's not our jam. We're not always really good at it. It's not where you go into it. You go into it because you love nature, you love ecology, you have these questions. You don't go into it because you love programming. People who do that tend to go into computer sciences. But one of the things that's fascinating about this sort of, I don't know, the last half decade or so of bird work is that all these people from different disciplines are sort of taking a look at some of these bird questions and bringing their expertise to bear on it. And I think it's been super, super useful just for, to not only have this, this, this tool in your toolkit that a lot of, you know, ecologists or ornithologists don't necessarily have, or doesn't come to you easily, but also because you are looking at problems in slightly different ways because of your background than maybe an ornithologist is. And it's, it's combined to, to, you know, tell some neat stories. Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah, we wouldn't be able to do this without all of these other people and all of the other previous research that wasn't ever based in genomics. You know, people just going out there and measuring museum specimens for hours on end. Yeah. Or those interesting little nature notes that are published in various journals that are just like, oh, there's- For states, yeah. Yeah. Amateur people, yeah, amateur naturalists. Yeah. Yeah. So you've finished this paper. what are the results here? What was it? What I, I know it's what sort of what you expected, but was it as dramatic as you expected? Like, was there a real gap between these, you know, now Chihuahuan Ravens and sort of metal arcs in general? Yeah. You said Chihuahuan Ravens there. I said Ravens that get Chihuahuan Metal Arcs. I'll leave that in because people need to understand the struggle, but yeah. How, how different were these birds? Yeah. So it was actually really surprising. Um, I was running to class and running the R code to make this principal components analysis plot. It was our first pass at looking at this genetic data. And I was plotting it. Literally, I had my computer in my arm running to class, and my jaw just dropped because they were completely distinct groups. And a lot of times what you expect for these subspecies is that they are still maybe closely or closer related to their sort of parent or sister species. But in this case, Chihuahua metalarchs were as distinct from Eastern metalarchs as Eastern were from Western metalarchs. And that was not at all what we expected. And we found that same pattern when we made a phylogeny looking at how these species have been related to each other in evolutionary time. and we found that it looked like Chihuahua and Meadowlark had split off first before Eastern and Western had actually... Before Eastern and Western. Yeah, before they split from each other. That was not at all expected. It actually went against a previous phylogeny that was just using a really small part of the bird's genome, the mitochondrial genome, that found that the opposite pattern where Chihuahua was just split off from Eastern Meadowlark. So there might be some more complicated evolutionary history there that we will have to uncover. But it was a big shock to see that they were that different. So what does that look like on your charts, on your R? Is it like a big cluster over here and a big cluster over here? Yeah, so it looked like three clusters that were all distant from each other. Yeah. Yeah, including Western in there. And so we had a few different subspecies of Eastern metal arc within Eastern North America. We had, I'm completely blanking on the Florida population one, Argetula. And then we had Magna, Nominate Magna, which is sort of the normal Eastern metal arc here. The basic Eastern metal arc, yeah. And then we also had some ones from Texas. And we didn't really see any differences between those subspecies of Eastern metal arc. But clearly that population, that Chihuahuan metal arc group was extremely distinct. And we actually had two populations of Eastern metal lark that we were interested in. So our pectoralis was thought to be closely related to Lilian's or Liliania at the time. But it comes from more Southern Mexico. And those still grouped pretty strongly with our Toron metal lark group. Yeah, that was going to be my next question. Yeah, because you talked about those weird Colombian metal larks. I saw the ones in Cuba. like they're like really green instead of uh kind of yellow um so did you look at those at all were those those still were kind of nestled kind of safely in the eastern metal arc group for the most part so we didn't we didn't actually have any samples from the caribbean as far as i know there are like at least at that time there were no tissue samples available from cuba or from parts of the caribbean or even really anywhere south of mexico and very few available in Mexico in general. That's changed a little bit now. We have collaborators who are working on getting some metal arc samples from those areas for some future work that we're going to be doing. But yeah, it's really a question mark. I have a feeling just based on song that that subspecies in Cuba, Hippocrapis, is probably very different. There are island birds and island populations. Yeah, I mean, oh man, we'll see. I got to finish this postdoc first before I commit myself to any more big metal arc projects. But I have a hunch that that one's probably very distinct and that those other populations in Central and South America most likely are as well. And that's also because they occupy very different habitats, which is a big factor in driving some of these evolutionary differences. I feel like we've seen some of those species been split, broken up. those, those ones that kind of go into middle America and kind of break into weird kind of, uh, pop subpopulations. There are a lot of species that are sort of like that feels like metal art could be but of course you know sometimes they not sometimes they they move around much more than we give them credit for But um I guess that why you do the work Yeah Yeah And it hard to say because I think a lot of those meadowlarks are resident populations down there And some of our migrants, you know, those are because they all kind of congregate in the same area during the wintering range. They're maybe not so different because they still have a lot of those similarities. But resident populations, man, you just never know. You never know what's hiding in there. It's so true. So is this process that you undertook sort of typical for this sort of thing? If I were to decide that I wanted to make the case to split, I don't know, like Haida Gwaii Sawadal, a bird that was not accepted as a splitter recently. Just so upsetting. Oh, there you go. Would you approach it the same way? Yeah, pretty much. You know, I think there's a case for including a lot more different types of data now than I did then. So the work I did for my PhD, we incorporated plumage work to look at those kind of physical differences between birds, including how the birds see themselves. So using accounting for the avian visual spectrum, but also using environmental data to really kind of lock in these habitat differences. And then there's a lot more you can go into to look at how birds are adapted to their environment, which is sort of the trajectory that I'm taking now that would be really interesting for birds like the Haida Gwaii, Sawade Owl, which are probably have some unique differences there. Yeah, so I think incorporating more data is always, it's always, it adds to the entry and sometimes provides answers to questions, but oftentimes does give you more questions than answers, I guess. Yeah. But yeah. Well, I mean, there's an argument to be made that getting these birds on the radars of, you know, young birders who are looking for a career path, perhaps in ecology or ornithology to, you know, take on when they're in a position similar to yours is worth it, even if you don't get the ultimate split at the end. Oh, yeah, for sure. Because, you know, as you say, more eyes, more work, sometimes all it takes is someone just to sit down and do the work like you did with the Chihuahua Meadowlark. Yeah, absolutely. And I think young birders are particularly curious. I'm not saying that as you get older, you get less curious, but I think there's a natural curiosity in young people and especially birders who are really excited about finding new things. I think a lot of us get hooked on to that sort of addictive part of birding of finding a rarity. And then that, yeah, can just start to drive those questions. So it's a path I recommend for anyone who's interested in it. Are there any other groups of birds out there that are sort of interesting candidates for splits, maybe under the radar in the birding world? Are you actively seeking those out in your work now? Yeah. So some work that will hopefully be published soon is going to be with Yellow-Breasted Chats. So I've talked about them quite a bit at various conferences. And I talked about them at my talk that I gave last week that caught Ted's interest. And they have two subspecies in their range. And they're kind of cryptic. They don't really look that different from each other, at least to the average birder's eye. But they do occupy different habitats. and they do have a gap in their range. And I will hint that there's some interesting things happening between those two subspecies that we'll have to stay tuned for. It might take another year or two to actually get the potential split out there. Interesting. Because it's always a longer process. You usually get your paper published first. And then once that's available, then you can write a proposal to the NACC. But you have to write your proposal usually in like January. so that's that's something that's maybe for next year um but yeah i would say that one i would have said warbling vireo but those were they got that one yeah so that was another one very similar to chihuahua and metal arc that yeah we've sort of known about it but we didn't know like how different they were when you need someone to do the work so yeah yeah and i will say i think warbling vireo is one of those species that has some interesting populations throughout its range that we don't know enough about so some some birds that range into like baja california for instance are have some distinct aspects to them uh that are worth investigating and any really any species that has a range that goes into mexico or parts of central america is like you really got to look into it so i think warbling virios may may still have some interesting uh work to be done on it um it i'm just saying it might not be the end of the story it's i'm really happy that they were split um, that's been a long time coming. Yeah. Um, but yeah. Horned lark is another one that's interesting, not just to kind of throw it out there as 2026 bird of the year, but, uh, a lot of, a lot of subspecies in that one, including some weird South American populations that maybe have been considered in the past as a full species, but I'm not sure they were split. Yeah. There were, that was, it's been a long time. Yeah. So horned lark, it's great that you mentioned that. Cause that's what I'm doing a postdoc work on. Oh, there you go. Yeah. I am thrilled that they're the bird of the year. That was perfect. It was like, oh, yeah. I'm really excited about that. But horned lark are interesting, yeah, because they have a worldwide distribution, which is uncommon for really songbirds. A lot of times those end up getting split. And we saw that with winter wren getting split from- The magpie, yeah. Yep, the magpie is getting split. So, yeah, and horned larks, they're fascinating because there's, yeah, of that population in columbia uh there's a population that we actually don't have any samples from in the atlas mountains in morocco but then they go they go into parts of russia and siberia and like caucasus like sedentary populations in the caucasus this is stuff i i like read about just when i was learning about horned lark for her bird of the year so yeah a lot a lot of cool like kind of non-migratory populations in central asia too that potentially could be could be species Yeah, for sure. And not only that, they occupy crazy different habitats. I mean, you can have horned larks in deserts at sea level or essentially below sea level. And then you can have horned larks that are all the way up in the Alpine at 14,000 feet. And those are, I mean, those are physiologically, those are very different places to live. And so you would imagine that there could be some differences. There are also some physical, you know, plumage differences between them that we're going to investigate. but I would imagine that there could be some more splits in the future because I have a hunch that those Colombian birds are probably going to come out as very distinct. Colombian birds feel like the low-hanging fruit in that group. Yeah, yeah. And there was, so Nick Mason or Dr. Nick Mason, who's at LSU, did his postdoc on horned larks as well. And so there is some... It's actually on my list of people to talk to. Yeah, yeah. It's funny you keep talking to people that I've mentioned. I'm planning on talking to. Yeah. So some of his work, I don't want to spoil it too much, but did find that that Colombian population is distinct. So there was some work published in the last five years or so. So we'll look into that more and figure that out. And we also have samples from across the world. So we should get an idea of what's happening in some of those really interesting sedentary populations as well. Joanna Beam is the researcher to thank for the Chihuahuan meadowlark on your life list. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow for the National Science Foundation, working on all manner of bird genomics. So perhaps she'll be behind some future armchair lifers as well. It would not surprise me at all. Thank you so much for your time, Joanna. It's great to see you. And I'm so happy you're doing so well. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. It's been great to be here. The American Birding Podcast is brought to you by the American Birding Association. The ABA is, of course, a membership organization, and the best way to support it is to become a member. ABA members right now get a 10% discount to our online store, which now features 2026 Bird of the Year Horned Lark merchandise, including t-shirts, sweatshirts, and coffee mugs. You also get access to our magazines, all of our online resources, plus great discounts to our partners like Zeiss, OM System, and Beauty Books. You can learn more about all the benefits of membership in addition to helping support all of our free resources like this podcast at aviated.org slash join. Special shout outs this week to Ana Maria Aguirre and Justin Rippey of Goshen, Indiana. Kevin Warner of Meridian, Idaho. Jennifer Foster Adams of Arvada, Colorado. Jesse Malowitz of Houston, Texas. Katie Triust of Telluride, Colorado. Ross Rafferty of Westminster, Colorado. Craig Dobbins of Denali National Park, Alaska. And Janet Sashawa of Deland, Florida. All of them recently joined the ABA and noted this podcast as a reason for doing so. Thank you so much and welcome to the ABA. Executive director of the ABA and executive producer of this podcast is Wayne Klockner, who's a little surprised to learn that Chihuahuan Metal Ark wasn't just a smaller, feistier version of Eastern Metal Ark. Technical production is by John Lowry, who would point out that Chihuahuan Raven is, in fact, a smaller, feistier version of Common Raven. So at least that one kind of works out. Additional help comes from Maggie Fitzgibbon, Frank Izagari, and Greg Neese, who argue that all Metal Ark splits in the future should be named for dog breeds and suggest that the Cuban metal arc should instead be Havanese metal arc in event of a split. I suppose that makes them then meadowbarks. Very sorry for that one. You can find us online at aba.org. On social media, most everywhere is American Birding Association. On Blue Sky, we are at ABAbirds. Questions, comments can come to podcast at aba.org. I'm Nate Swick. Thanks for listening. Bird luck, Tom, and we'll be back next week.