BirdNote; All Fired Up about Birds - With Nathan Goldberg

BirdNote®

All Fired Up About Birds: Interview with Nathan Goldberg

Aired November 2012

Interview and writing by Chris Peterson

This is BirdNote!

[Call of Pacific-slope Flycatcher in an old-growth forest]

This past summer, we met 16-year old Nathan Goldberg at a camp for kids, who like him, are all fired up about birds. What starts such an interest and where can it lead? Here's Nathan:

"One day I'd go to the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago and I saw a bird called a Wood Duck, and I said to myself, being the seven-year old I was…'When I get older I'm going to see that bird, but in the wild! That's a life goal! I'm going to do it! It's gonna be on my bucket list!'"

[Call of male Wood Duck]

Nathan, what is it that interests you so much about birds?

"Birds do a lot of things… They're over 10,000 species…There's some birds that have been around as a family or a species for six million years. And we are not six million years old – we are nowhere near that. Birds have been around for so long they kind of remind you of your past and what was before you..."

And birdwatching?

"When I started birding I kind of just thought, "Cool, there's a ton of species out there and I'd love to see them all, …and so I'm sitting here meeting all these people that have kept track of every bird they've ever seen in their life – they call it their Life List – I'd never heard of that, and I was sitting there saying to myself, 'This is awesome! This is not just looking a nature and being out in the wild, and looking at all these things but you also get to list!!'...So, coming into birding, I just thought of it as just another great way to get out into nature, and it turns out to have been much more."

Learn about the camp for young birders on our website, and yes, Nathan saw his Wood Duck in the wild! Find us at birdnote.org

[Call of male Wood Duck]

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Bird calls provided by The Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Call of Pacific-slope Flycatcher [50339] recorded by G.A. Keller; male Wood Duck [2468] by G.B. Reynard.

Ambient provided by Kessler Productions, Carkeek Park.

Producer: John Kessler

Executive Producer: Chris Peterson

© 2012 Tune In to Nature.org November 2012 Narrator: Mary McCann

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