10-18: Sharing Spark Birds with Jenn Lodi-Smith

Hello and welcome to the American Birding Podcast from the American Birding Association. I am Nate Swick. Next week is the biggest week in American birding in Northern Ohio. I'll be there. Will you? Not that we need it around here. Spring is popping off where I live. In the last few days, I've had first of year blue growth speak, yellow-throated vireo, bank swallow, ruby-throated hummingbird, loads, loads of summer tanagers, among many, many others. And to be honest, I'm barely looking for them. I just happen to be in places adjacent to appropriate habitat, a power line cut here where a prairie warbler is singing, an open field where grasshopper sparrows are doing their thing. You know how it works. migration in north america in april and may is easily one of the great nature phenomena on the planet right up there with the stuff that you see in nature docks from far-flung parts of the world i would put spring migration in eastern north america in particular up there with an okavango delta wet season or a cock of the rock lack or cetaceans in the southern ocean summer when it comes to dramatic nature doings. And it's going on right in your backyard, unknown and unremarked upon by millions of normal people, but not you. You know what I'm talking about. Anyway, I'm looking forward to getting up there and seeing some friends I only see once or twice a year, getting my retinas melted by Baltimore Orioles and yellow warblers. Excuse me, northern yellow warblers. Not going to get used to that one anytime soon. It will be a relatively brief trip for me I'll be around from Monday afternoon through Wednesday Heading home Thursday morning Say hello if we run into each other I'll have a name tag on, hopefully Oh, and send me your hot takes I'll be collecting them at BiggestWeek Or via email at podcast.aba.org I've received a few already Thank you to those people you know who you are Because we are doing a live membership drive For the ABA on May 19th I'll be hosting a live take it or leave it panel. Never done that before. Featuring friends of the podcast, Nick Lund, the birdist, Martha Harbison, hot take extraordinaire. I'm bringing out the big guns. Come with fire extinguishers at the ready. It will be sometime that afternoon. Follow the ABA on all the socials for info as it happens. That panel may or may not make it into the podcast feed. We'll see what I have in the hopper, but it will live on at ABA's YouTube channel at least. On to the show this week. What is your spark bird? What emotions did it prompt in you? How did it turn you into a birder? These are all questions that interest Jen Lodi-Smith, creator of the Sparkbird Project. She joins me to talk about all that after this week's Rare Birds. This is your Rare Bird Focus for the beginning of May 2026. It has been a great spring already for Alberta. We mentioned the province's first vermilion flycatcher last week. It was followed shortly after by the province's first record of Ross's gull found at Henderson Lake in the southern part of the province. This delicate little goal of the far north is notable anywhere south of the tundra. In fact, there's probably nowhere in the ABA area aside from maybe far northwestern Alaska where it occurs regularly. Churchill, Manitoba famously hosted a few nesting pairs, the further south known, many years ago. But that population disappeared in the 90s. It's become quite scarce across most of North America. But Alberta's most recent record means that in Canada, only Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island are left without this iconic bird of the far north. A pileated woodpecker, or pileated woodpecker, however you want to pronounce it, in Provo, Utah, is a first record for this impressive, mostly sedentary species in that state. The lack of large trees in the interior west would seem to limit the possibilities for pollinated woodpecker in the region, but a handful of recent records in southeast Idaho, those in the last several years, does suggest the possibility for this bird to disperse southward along the Wasatch Range. It's hard to see them getting much farther south than where this bird turned up, though. Those are the highlights for this period for the fullest of birdies from around the ABA area. Check out the ABA Rare Bird Alert most Fridays at aba.org. slash rba you can also follow along with all of the rare bird news in our aba rare bird alert group on facebook and in aba community the concept of the spark bird is one that many birders are familiar with it's the transformative moment or moments with a particular species that turns you from a normal person out there living their life free from the obsession of the birds around you into a real deal birder, or at very least a bird person. Their personal testimonies, and they frequently tell you as much about the birder as they do about the sparkbird themselves. Is that human element that Dr. Jen Lodi-Smith, the professor of psychology at Canisius University and scholar in residence at the Roger Troy Peterson Institute, finds most interesting? She created the Sparkbird Project to collect stories of sparkbirds and the birders associated with them. she joins me to talk about all of that. Hi, Jen. How are you? I'm great. Thank you so much for having me on, Nate. Long-time listener, and it's great to be on and celebrating sparkbirds with your listeners. Yeah, it's a great concept that I know that we have, yeah, a lot of birders kind of talk about. Let's talk about it more explicitly. You know, the idea of a sparkbird is when the birders eventually come across in their birding journeys, even if they don't recognize the actual experience as such in the moment every time. When in your birding career, for lack of a better word, did you first encounter the idea and what interested you about it? So your spark bird, spark bird, spark bird, spark bird, spark bird, spark bird, absolutely. The origin story. Yeah. So I came to birds sort of in midlife through my kids. My daughter, Maisie in particular, is her spark bird stories. I was born loving birds. I don't remember a time I didn't love birds. And it was really fortunate to have an ornithologist colleague here at Canisius, who was in the office upstairs for me and then next door to me. And she's an ornithologist. And she gave us a list of things with our young, you know, like four-year-old birder that we should do as she moves along. And one of them was to go to Hog Island Audubon Camp in Maine, which listeners, If you haven't been, go check it out. It's incredible. And we were there for family camps. They have teen camps. They have adult camps. They have all sorts of camps. But we were there for family camps. So as a family, eating good food, going on the puffin boats to see the puffins on Eastern Niagara Rock. And we were standing, waiting for the puffin boat. And I complimented the director on her tattoos. She had some forearm tattoos, Charlie Harper warblers. And she said, thanks. they're my spark bird and i naively you know we'd been birding a couple of years at this time a lot of that through the pandemic uh said well what's a spark bird and she told me and i was like completely fascinated and i we went off on the puffin boat it was incredible there were hundreds of puffins it was a fantastic day the whole rest of the week was spectacular but the whole time that the idea of spark bird was like kicking around in my head and certainly at other times professionally um i've been studying narrative identity and transformative life experiences and how people become who they are and how they change over time for over 20 years and so through that time i've definitely had moments of like i'm running around my cemetery and i'm thinking about when do people think that they are actually a runner um so you know like the concept has entered my mind in other interests and pursuits, but I think it was that spark bird was an existing concept in the birding community that people share their stories, that they know stories of like famous birders. You know, people start their memoirs with their spark bird story. And so it's this common shared narrative in the community. That was what really was compelling to me that there's this piece of birders that they know and they talk about and they think about for many of them. And I wanted to read all of those. And I truly thought that I was going to go online and I was just going to find them, that they were going to be, there was going to be a nice little internet archive of smart bird stories. And boy, was that not true. They were scattered everywhere. They were in episodes of podcasts and in books and in blogs. And so part of the project was really just to bring those stories together in a central place where people can go read each other's stories and enjoy those. And then from there to learn from those using my background as a personality developmental scientist. One of the things that is particularly interesting about them is that they only come retroactively. You know, you don't, you can't, well, I think it's impossible to recognize the spark incident, the bird that kind of sent you on this path until you've been doing it for a while. It makes me wonder if there's all these sorts of like aborted spark birds that like the bird never quite like made it to become a bird. I definitely have, I call them my near misses where like, I vividly remember watching a cormorant hit a power line and getting really interested. And I have some checklists in my old Peterson guide from that time, like all of these almost stories. stories and I would love to hear those from folks if you want to share them with the project. Um I do have at least one story Um and this is a student who now doing some research for the project where she has her spark moment recorded on video Oh wow So we can go back and like see that one moment But yeah, for most people, it's a retrospective process. And that's part of what we're really trying to do is help people think about that, help people engage with that. And in that process, we're making meaning. We're storing our lives. And that's what stories are all about for us as humans is connecting with other people, connecting more deeply with ourselves. And that's, of course, what Sparkbird stories do for so many folks. Yeah, I want to talk a little bit more about the project itself, too, because very few birders are sort of birders only. Many of us have come to it after we have established other kind of personal or professional interests. And we still maintain those interests, even if birds kind of take a larger piece of the pie of our lives. I always find it interesting how people will, how a person will kind of frequently see birding through the lenses of their other interests, be it academic or otherwise. The birding community is like kind of this kind of fascinating tapestry of people and interests that all coalesce around birds. And I love that about the community. And I think it's interesting that you've taken your professional interest and been taking kind of your personal interest in birding and mashed them together in kind of this interesting storytelling project. I don't know if I have a question. I just think that that's really interesting. It's one of the things that I truly, truly love about the bird. There are many things I love about the birding community, but that's one of them that somebody from an artistic background, somebody from a scientific background, whatever, whatever backgrounds we have, we not only that we can bring that to the birding community, but the birding community is there for it. they're excited to see all the different intersectionalities of birding and the rest of the world. And I remember Mike Sikopoulos, the editor at BWD Magazine, and I were talking about this, and he wanted to know sort of what are these other hobbies and interests and pursuits that people in the birding community have. And so that's now a question in our data capture system to be able to see whether it's quilting or photography or data science. There's really so many ways that we can help the birds with those skills. It almost feels like that moment where you take your personal interest and apply it to birds is almost a part of that spark bird moment because then you can see how birds can fit into your life. So that moment with you on the dock at Hog Island, was even though there wasn't necessarily a bird species associated with it, there was a moment there where your personal professional interests combined with this kind of burgeoning interest in birds in nature and created this whole new project. And that's a spark moment in and of itself. Oh, yeah. It's way more vividly a one-moment-in-time spark moment than my actual... I don't have... Like mini birders and somewhat ironically, I don't have a spark bird. Yeah, that happens too. I'm a spark people. And that's great. You know, we don't all need to have this sort of dominant cultural narrative of being Roger Torrey Peterson at 11, seeing a flicker and having your life changed. He is the kind of proto-birder in many ways. Yeah. Well, and I think he actually, we've been trying to do the history research here. We think he may have come up with the term spark bird as well from some old writing. And if any listeners know otherwise, I would love to hear about that. the folks at the Peterson Institute and I have been trying to track that down. You know, I think when we look at the broader literature of transformational experiences, right, and I used to teach our psychology of religion and spirituality class here at our Jesuit school. There's a lot of overlap there. I'll be honest. I am not. Like, I'm definitely not the first one to say this. Y'all have talked about it on the podcast. Peterson wrote about it, right? Like, it's been around for a while. And in the conversion literature, there's sort of these iconic one moment bolt of lightning type stories. And then there's the more, you know, slow change. And likewise, in our spark bird stories, we do absolutely have those. I can look back. I can say it was this one bird and this one moment and this one time. And then there's others who I call them the slow burns. Um, there are stops and starts where people have like this childhood spark and then they wander away from it for whatever reason. I think particularly, um, for, for folks who are sort of refinding themselves now, it was maybe like not cool for a while. Oh, does that speak to my experiences? Now it's cool. Now I can do this. Or it's becoming more normative. Or they just are more confident in themselves. And I think that's a lot of what we see in those midlife stories or the later adult stories. Yeah. Oh, that resonates pretty deeply with me because that is my own kind of personal experience. I mentioned before I have a couple spark birds or at least spark moments or moments that were sort of important to me, kind of setting me on the path to where I am sort of now. And they're both, they're separated by decades, to be honest. Well, a decade, I should say. And then, yeah, and then you come back to birding and you're right. That's a lot of it. You're more confident in yourself, more confident in your interests. You don't feel like, a lot of times being a teenager can be tough in a lot of ways. And certainly, you know, back in the 90s when there were not a lot of birders, I think young birders have it really good right now with a lot of ways to communicate with other people who are interested in this hobby. And of course, the kind of general cultural awareness of birding as a hobby going along with it in the last, you know, half, several years. Absolutely. But yeah, sometimes it takes a couple of times to really crack. Yeah. Yeah. As the mentor for our local Young Birder Club and the parent of a couple of young birders, like, boy, do they have it good. They've got camps. They've got online things. We've got Biggest Week coming up and they're going to be hanging out and swapping trading cards. And yeah, so much good stuff. Yeah, when I was a young birder, there was only one other guy in my state who was a birder, and we were always put up against each other. I don't know how healthy that was. Oh, yeah, probably not. Yeah, so it goes. So it goes. Now, I've said on this podcast many, many times, and I apologize to those of you out there listening who have heard me say it, but everyone has a bird story. Oh, yeah. Whether you're a birder or not, you have a bird story. Oh, yeah. And I think everyone has a sparkbird, maybe multiple sparkbirds for different iterations of their birding life. That's something we've been talking about a little bit here. it's one thing to say that like my spark bird was, I don't know, Wilson's Warbler just to grab a, grab an example, but it's the story that makes the experience special. It's the origin story. Everyone, everyone has an origin story, I guess. How do you bring out the story aspect of those observations among the people that submit to you? Because it would be easy to just say, Oh, my, my spark bird is green heron. And then just kind of ended at that. And that's great, but it's the story. That's the interesting thing. That's the evocative thing that connects you to all these other birders that are doing a similar, I don't know, project or process. No, that's such a great question. And it really goes back to my academic roots. So a lot of my program of research has been in the area of narrative identity research. So I'm trained as a personality developmentalist. That's what my PhD work is in. And I've always used mixed methods where we pair people's stories of transformative life events or personal change in some way with sort of traditional survey, particularly long term longitudinal data. And the Sparkbird prompt itself is a combination of the life story interview from a guy named Dan McAdams, who created this whole two and a half hour long semi-structured interview to look at people's stories of their lives and thinking about your life as if it's a book. And so it's a pairing of that and one of the prompts from there with a colleague Jefferson Singer's work on self-defining memories and memories that really stand out that oftentimes we share with other people when we're trying to help them get to know us. And so the Sparkbird prompt is a combination of those. And then it's evolved a little bit over time with the project around those things. Like it doesn't have to be one specific moment in time. It doesn't have to be a bird. It can be multiple stories. We have space for five different Spark stories. And then there's space to share whatever other great bird story you want to share. Because people really do love to share their bird stories. Oh, boy, howdy, do they? I wouldn't have, I wouldn't be doing this if they didn't. So yeah, that's great. So yeah, that's the sort of background in the scientific field of narrative. How do you solicit Sparkbird stories? Do you speak to different groups, different birding organizations and ask them to submit? Do you allow people to submit perhaps recorded diaries and then transcribe them into into words, because I think that would be, you know, the writing prompt evokes a lot of kind of middle school, high school issues. But, you know, if you get people to just talk about the birds that they've seen and the birds that they've experienced, a lot of times you could turn that into a story as well. How do you go about collecting these sparkbird stories from people whose experiences expressing themselves might be quite different? Yeah, no, such a great question. And one of the things that we have in the platform is while it's an open ended box where many people do type, you can drop a link to a recording and then my students can transcribe that. And sort of any way shape or form that the story comes in is great I have paper copies for people who don use the internet and they can reach out and do those I have large print format of that, sort of a lot of different variations and how we can do that data capture of the story. I've done some phone interviews with folks and transcribed while we were talking. Not a ton of folks have gone up for that one, but it's available for people who want it. And then just getting them themselves, I do programming around the country where I engage people with what I call retrospective nature journaling and have them think back on that moment, write about it. Illustrate it is really one of the things that many people have loved to engage with in their Sparkbird story. and along the way with those workshops, we get a little bit of backstory of the project and learn a little bit about the current findings. And folks who are interested, I'll be doing one of those at Biggest Week on May 16th. And we have more time with that one than many. And so we'll also be doing high points and low points, probably some nemesis bird type stories. Oh, yeah, the other side of the coin for the spark bird is the nemesis bird. Yeah. Playing around with other retrospective nature journaling. I think there's, and this is sort of a future line of the program of research, it combines the benefits of nature journaling with the benefits of personal journaling and therapeutic writing. And I really want to be digging into some of that from a research perspective on the process of that. Are there any common themes that you encounter among people sharing these stories? And just kind of as an aside, I think we both have been sort of aware that the COVID pandemic was such a kind of a weird and big boon to birding just in general. A lot of people discovered birding during the pandemic. I frequently encounter people who are pandemic birders who have now been doing it for half a decade now. So, yeah. Has that, did that change the narrative that you were, the narratives that you were receiving in the project? Yeah. So all the data capture for the project started after the pandemic. I started birding before the pandemic with my kiddos, but was not aware of Sparkbird as a concept until after, after the pandemic. So I don't, I, we could, we could certainly go and look at the, you know, sort of the archives and get some students to pull some of those archival stories. I don't know if we'd have the sample size to be able to do a pre-post, but COVID is certainly there. We also see this sort of technology boom, right? That so many folks have been talking about and, and the spike of birding that, A lot of our stories are coming from folks who have been sparked within the past five years. Yeah. The other really key thing from this thematic question that you asked is other people. Now, we only have 500 stories right now. This may be some sort of sample bias that people who are willing to share their story are perhaps more extroverted. go and take the additional surveys that come after you finish the main part of the survey, and we can do some norm comparisons of personality traits and the spark bird participants to, you know, national norm samples. But, you know, that is certainly possible. But in over two thirds of the stories, there's an interpersonal component where there's a teacher, a friend, a family member, you know, first date that involves birds and helps people notice what they aren't noticing before. So I think that's one of the biggest ones. And one of the most important take home messages is that like, just get out there and get your people out there. And eventually, because sometimes it's not in that one moment, it is my grandpa loved birds. I never really got it. And now, 30 years later, he recently passed away. I found his field guide. I found his binoculars. I went out and holy smokes, now I'm a birder. Right? So it doesn't have to be, because people ask me that, like, how can I make my kid into a birder? And I'm like, I don't know. Mine were born that way. Mine worked. So go figure, right? But, you know, maybe someday. And I think for, I really do think that if, when we say that it's, my person isn't a birder yet. You know, we look at folks like Amy Tan, who came into birding in her 60s, right? We look at, you know, Phoebe Snetzinger, right? It was this incredible, you know, first woman, first person to see 80,000 species of birds in the world. That happened in her mid-30s, right? So there's always that possible time. Yeah. Is there a most common species that appears in these stories? I think it would be difficult to pin down. I'm thinking either something that is very large and prominent, like maybe a great blue heron or, I don't know, like sandhill cranes. They kind of show up in places where people are. or a bird that already has a lot of kind of cultural, I don't want to say baggage, but heritage and just, you know, like a northern cardinal or an American robin or someone, you know, one of those birds doing things that perhaps a person didn't expect or showing up in a place they didn't expect. A lot of the experiences that I've encountered with people, you know, telling their sparkbird stories to me have to do with, you know, I didn't know that this bird was here. Yes. You know, even I didn't know that this bird was common. And then once I started paying attention, I started seeing them everywhere. And then I, you know, started wondering what else is out there, that sort of thing. So that is one of the most common themes. That was the other common theme I was going to mention, that it's that like, oh, my gosh, like the blinders have been pulled. And that, you know, we really we really do see the world in a different way. Um, and that's, you know, those stories are often like a scarlet tanager type story, um, or an indigo bunting, like something stunningly gorgeous, the warblers, like all the warblers. It's notable that you're doing your talk at the biggest week in American birding, because that's got to be like the, the nexus of spark bird stories for so many people, just because you get these, these close experiences with birds that even experienced birders don't always have close experiences with. And so, yeah, knowing that those birds are out there. Jamie Cunningham, the person who organizes so much of the festival, was sparked at the biggest week. You know, it's like it can create all this. But to go back to the most common, you hit the two most common. Oh, did I? Northern Cardinal is now, to be fair, I'm based in Buffalo, New York. So, again, this may be some of that sample bias of our current 500 there. you know, you look at the distribution map and, um, you know, it's, that's sort of a lot of where my sample is from for the Northern Cardinal. So folks who are out of the Northern Cardinal range, share your stories. Um, we will always be collecting stories. I don't have any plans to stop. Um, it's sort of, I use the analogy of a banding station where, uh, we're always bringing in new birds, but we love to have our old friends, uh, come back and visit in the longitudinal data capture part of the project um so uh yeah a plug to share your stories um so northern cardinal uh and northern cardinal sparkbird people share your stories to keep their numbers up uh but and then the other one is great blue heron oh wow all right you know because how can you not like you know like so you know northern cardinal is uh a lot of those are sort of nostalgic they're abundant and they're noisy. A lot of the most common birds have mohawks. So as a former punk rock girl, I love that. But one of the most important pieces when I get that question, because I get that question a lot, is that there's actually just a huge amount of biodiversity in the Sparks. Um, when there's over, uh, over definitely over 180 different species, I think we're closing in on over 200 species of birds on the list, um, of, of birds that are mentioned. There are like me spark people, um, our 500th story just came in and it was, uh, the movie, the big year. Oh yeah. I get that a lot too. Yeah. There's, there's, um, there's, uh, there's extinct birds. there's you know there's misidentified birds where like oh i saw this bird and then years later like in hindsight i did not see that bird um but you can still call it the spark bird so it doesn't have to be like factual right it doesn't have to be like i definitely saw this one right in this moment like if we did have that videotape for everybody we you know and could code for accuracy like that's not what it's important it's that meaning uh it's the experience yeah yeah um and And, you know, in theory, and this is something that we'll be able to test over time, that meaning will change. And that story itself may evolve as people's experiences and relationship with those moments change. Yeah. Is White-Eyed Vireo on there? White-Eyed Vireo is not in great abundance. That was mine. That's a good one. Noisy. Noisy is exactly. It's the noise that got me. It was the, it was the, um, you know, I was, I was, I must've been like 12 or 13, probably maybe even a little bit younger. I grew up on a, on a river was a mill pond. It was dammed, but the river was dammed. And so we used to float it all the time. And uh my my primary interests were catching turtles snakes and bugs And then you know what I very oh and a big willow stand right off the river was making tons of noise And I could not could not figure out what that thing was And I pulled the canoe in really close and I finally got a look at it. And we always had field guides around, so I pulled it out and figured out what it was. And that process was what really got me going on birding, the whole identification process of using the tools available to me and figuring out, you know, what everything is. And then of course, you know, it goes from there. So, yeah. And that's one of the things that really seems very present in these stories and that my students are coding for now is this like mastery experience that I saw this thing and like, oh, I did it. I was able to go to my field guide and ID that bird and awesome. And so that moment of mastery, wanting to create more of that, wanting to discover, wanting to know things. I love how birds make us curious. Yes. So many folks say this, that we can never learn all the things and that constant curiosity and creativity and learning is, of course, part of what's so compelling. And that that mastery moment is can start that. Yeah. I wonder to what extent the sort of modern, you know, it's not necessarily AI, but pattern recognition software that sort of identifies birds or helps identify birds for you changes the narrative to some extent. I wonder if that's going to be another kind of big sea change like the pandemic was for you, where you get people who are using Merlin to discover what the birds are around them. And then that is sort of the pathway towards, are you getting stories like that? We're starting to see those. And that's, you know, I think it's one of the ways where those tools are opening a whole new world of folks to the birding community. And, you know, of course, then we have the responsibility to teach them how to use that well and responsibly and, you know, like like all things with a bit of skepticism. Um, but, uh, at the same time that we have all of those bird curious folks out there, and then that opens the opportunity to the education opportunities to, um, building that investment. My, my dissertation work was on a concept called social investment, and I've continued to work in this. And a lot of what we study with social investment is like your job and your relationships and how these change you over time. And that's kind of stuff. But what we see is that when we become invested in a social role, we take on the behaviors and the norms and the expectations of that social role for better or worse sometimes. And so when we can help people embrace the concept that I am a birder, right? And you've talked about this on the podcast before, that sometimes that's sort of narrow and sometimes there's been some gatekeeping. And so if we can help people broaden that, then we can help them feel open to learning the ABA birding ethics. And we can help people learn about how to take care of their feeders properly and how to take care of their windows and how to take care of their birds and each other in the birding community by bringing them in. And so we all make mistakes when we are first birding. We all get overeager. overeager. Maybe there might be a little bit more proliferation of that with some of our digital technology right now. But it creates that space to bring people into community and be together. And sometimes community changing from that as well, which is certainly part of what we see. Yeah, that's really interesting. I do think there are certain kind of tenets that birding encourages more than other sort of professions or hobbies or avocations or what have you. things like honesty and community building and humility. And of course, there's all the sort of mental and physical health aspects of it. And of course, the environmental aspect of it, you know, maybe a lot of us tell us, tell ourselves that's what we do this for. You know, we're trying to encourage, you know, a broader base of environmental, of the environmental movement that can, you know, take on some of these big problems that birds are going to deal with. But, you know, at its core, birding is, we enjoy birding because it's fun. We enjoy seeing birds. And that is in and of itself progress in some sense. But I think it's interesting the ways that which birding is changing and the ways in which what being a birder means has changed over the years. And especially with regard to a lot of these sort of technological advances, quote unquote, into the birding community. It almost feels like we have a responsibility to kind of push people in it, not to push, encourage, not to force people in a certain direction, but encourage people in a certain direction. And yeah, do you see that in these stories? Do you see people having sort of an obligation or feelings that they have a responsibility to give people these experiences that were so formative to themselves? Yeah, absolutely. And some of the stories that I love the most are people who have their spark experience and then go into conservation work or education field and wanting to make sure that they carry that over for the next generation. In particular, one of the things that seems kind of unique for the birding community is intergenerationality. generationality, you know, that I can, I can take my young birders out and we will have four-year-olds and we will have 40-year-olds and we will have 80-year-olds all in the same field looking for woodcocks. And like, that's incredible. There, there's so few spaces where that gets to happen anymore. And we crave that as, as humans. And so that, um, we, we talk about a concept called generativity in my, um, my colleagues and the research that we do, um, that generativity of wanting to give back to the next generation, wanting to help ensure that the next generation, um, is caring about what we care about and has the skills and the expertise while, and I think this goes back to your point about humility for birders, also learning from those young people and um you know whether it is you know you have young eyes and you're going to be able to see that with cock silhouette against the sky better than me or the i just came back from costa rica with my kiddos and my daughter just she studied so hard and she knew 90 of what we were going to see there and so in the parking lot being of the gas station being able to say long-tailed silky flycatcher and have complete confidence that of course that's what she was seeing and um and then getting on it and that that ability for generations to learn from each other and cross connect and birding is um incredibly present in these stories and wanting to make sure that we continue that as a piece um i don't have strict numbers on that because my students are diligently coding away. And young folks who are listening and want to be involved in that research, let me know. We've got a nice team of folks around the country. Have any of the students that you've been working with become birders through the Sparkbird Project? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, we have a podcast as part of how we share out these stories. And the student who does our editing for that podcast, Kayla, now has become much more aware of birds. And so that's great. I'll be teaching a class. I'm on sabbatical right now, but when I come back in the fall, I'm teaching a class called the joy of birds and bringing my students along. So absolutely. Jen Lodi-Smith is the creator of the Sparkbird Project. If you want to read some Sparkbird stories or submit your own, I'm sure she would not say no to that. You can do so at spark-bird.org. The link is also in the show notes. So please check that out. Thank you so much, Jen. This was a really fun discussion. Yeah, thank you. I really appreciate being able to be on here and all the work that you do to help people learn once they've got that first work. Oh, that's kind of you. Thank you. Happy birding, everybody. The American Birding Podcast is brought to you by the American Birding Association. The ABA is, of course, a membership organization. The best way to support it is to become a member and get access to our fantastic magazines, all of our online resources, and great discounts to partners like OM System, Media Books, and Zeiss Optics. If you join or renew your membership before May 31st of this year, you will help unlock an additional $100 per member for the ABA as part of our membership drive. You can learn more about all the benefits of membership in addition to helping support all of our free resources like this podcast at aba.org slash join. Special shout-outs this week to Jennifer Kastner of East Lansing, Michigan, rhodie hollingsworth of oklahoma city oklahoma jessica and william mellis of ashburn virginia elizabeth porter of cambridge ontario joseph and rebecca provost of danielson connecticut nichamat suroff of owings mills maryland and jen schulteis of evansville indiana all of whom 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 looked at the bizarre webbing of a double-crusted cormorant's foot and wondered if there couldn't be a spork bird project to raise awareness of toady palmate bird species. Tactical production is by John Lowry, whose spark-burnt project to create a post-forest fire landscape to attract blackback woodpeckers to his yard is still hung up in the HOA permitting process. Additional help comes from Maggie Fitzgibbon, Greg Neese, and Frank Izagheri, whose spork bird project to help the Vulcan ojunko live long and prosper has been put on hold because the bird looks too evil to protect. Seriously, go have a look. You can find us online at ABA.org on social media most everywhere as American Birding Association. On Blue Sky, we are at ABAbirds. Questions, comments, and hot takes can come to podcasts at ABA.org. I'm Nate Swick. Thanks for listening. Perfect Tom. We'll be back next week.