BirdNote; Rosalind Renfrew and the Upland Sandpiper

BirdNote®

Rosalind Renfrew and the Upland Sandpiper

Written by Dominic Black from an interview with Rosalind Renfrew

This is BirdNote. I’m Dominic Black.

Talking to Ros Renfrew is fun. She’s a conservation biologist at the Vermont Center for Ecostudies. She’s passionate about a whole range of conservation issues. And she loves – wait for it - grasslands. Like the Konza Prairie:

It’s just this beautiful, vast, rolling prairie, by the Flint Hills of Kansas…

It’s this rich, vivid biological realm that has Ros Renfrew entranced. And in particular, the birds that depend on it:

We had to learn how to catch this bird for a study, called the Upland Sandpiper. And this is like your ordinary sandpiper that you might see at the beach or at a wetland, except they only live in grasslands and uplands, they’re not associated with water.

[Upland Sandpiper http://macaulaylibrary.org/audio/50249]

And they have this kind of long neck, long legs, small head for their body, and there’s this long wolf whistle that they give when they fly and land.

[Upland Sandpiper http://macaulaylibrary.org/audio/50249]

And so I’ve been watching them for years and years and I finally got to hold one in my hand and it was just beautiful – the patterns on their feathers and their wings – to see one up close like that.

Ros Renfrew is a conservation biologist at the Vermont Center for Ecostudies. For BirdNote I’m Dominic Black

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Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York.

Upland Sandpiper [50249] recorded by G A Keller

BirdNote’s theme music was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.

Producer: John Kessler

Executive Producer: Dominic Black

© 2015 Tune In to Nature.org July 2016 Narrator: Dominic Black

ID #: UPSA-01-2015-07-06 UPSA-01

http://vtecostudies.org/