Welcome to this issue of Stumped by Nature, where we notice nature lurking just beyond our screens, curate a list of outside-y events in Austin, and build community with other folks in the thick of the startup ecosystem.
In this week’s issue:
How to become an entry-level birder
What to do with your molding jack-o-lanterns
Upcoming outdoors events + potential day trips
Let’s dig in!
-Nicole
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NATURE SPOTLIGHT
Introducing: the gateway drug to the Audubon Society.
Birding starts innocently enough. You step outside and notice a bird song. It’s nice—the song itself, the noticing something that’s always there, but usually swept into background noise.
But then it starts happening more often, the noticing.
You clock a bird on the way into the gym.
At school drop off.
At the kid birthday party at the park.
And this is how birding slips off the rails.
You notice the bird. The bird notices you. Do you wave?
Thanks to technology, entry-level birders can quickly scale from knowing only male cardinals to having a thriving mental index of common backyard birds, courtesy of an immediate feedback loop.
Birding Tools
Merlin Bird ID
Back in 2008, the team at Cornell Lab noticed something intriguing: their All About Birds website had a substantial volume of search queries with bird description riddles. Small, hoppy brown bird. Black and iridescent. Big and eating something on the side of the road.
With the help of a National Science Foundation grant, the team created Merlin Bird ID. (Merlin is a small falcon, and also a wizard.) Early versions walk birders through a progressive quiz, with “bigger than a goose?”-style questions and early-stage machine learning to surface viable bird matches.
Things escalated, and now Merlin Bird ID is an app that can ID over 11,000 birds, thanks to user-submitted sounds and photos, the passage of time + advancements in tech, and a boatload of experts annotating sound data.
Merlin Bird ID: the Pokémon GO of birding
The current version of Merlin Bird ID offers a Life List of birds as a rolodex of your bird encounters, and provides several ways to identify the most likely birds you’ll see or hear.
Fun fact: in my early app-assisted birding days, I thought my Merlin Bird ID was defective because I was clearly hearing an outdoors sound, but no birds were popping up. This is when I looked up and realized squirrels are (checks notes)…not birds.
Merlin: 1
Nicole: actively learning
This is eBird’s website landing page. Really.
eBird
The crowd-sourced, science-adjacent companion to Merlin, eBird lets birders document what they’ve seen and when. Or, more accurately, what they think they’ve seen.
To gather this data, the folks behind eBird made a bold choice: to trust the public to responsibly upload bird photos AND have full discretion with an open text field. What courage! What optimism!
You see where this is going?
Combine:
birds doing bizarre bird things
with
humans being the wild nature that we are
The result: stellar memes
For science!
What an incredible social commentary. A glimpse into unfiltered humanity. Stay tuned for #bannedfromebird merch.
To recap your birding tech stack:
Smash download on both Merlin Bird ID and eBird, and use your newfound power wisely.
Birding 101
With tools in hand, let’s shift to entry-level birding. The keywords here: noticing and curiosity.
Two approaches to consider:
Outbound Strategy
Go where the birds are.
Put on shoes. Take a little walk. Listen. When you hear something bird-like, pause. If you’re near trees, watch for a subtle twitch of leaves. It can help to close your eyes to triangulate the direction of the sound before zeroing in on movement.
Binoculars: optional, but obviously cool
Fanny pack: mandatory, packed with snacks
Alternatively, go to really any parking lot, especially if it’s food-tangential, and you’re bound to see grackles.
Inbound Strategy
Make an environment so inviting that birds come to you.
I’m talking bird feeder. Sunflower seeds. Native plants.
Invite your friends over. Don hummingbird wrist feeders and head-to-toe red and see who will be first to lure hummingbirds for a buzz-by.
This high quality rendering could be your reality.
To advance in birding:
Repeat regularly and savor your incremental learning.
You’ll start to notice when you don’t know something—when a new bird has entered the chat.
Eventually, you’ll find yourself at a street-side cafe at dusk in a seaside town. You’ll hear chimney swifts overhead and realize you haven’t heard them in Austin lately, that they’ve migrated, just like you, to this temporary place. And you’ll sit in awe at how incredible it is to be in a world so expansive and tiny and wild.
PARENTING TIP
Normalize asking kids what their favorite bird call is. Teach your offspring to mimic them. Start with the white-winged dove, described on Merlin Bird ID as bulky (which, rude), known for their lovely whap-whap-whap wingbeats and their distinctive who-who-who-whoooo call.
You’ve definitely heard a white-winged dove. And now you can notice it. And soon you can hear your child demonstrate it on command.
What a beautiful vacant stare you have!
Credit: Ted Bradford/ Macaulay Library
FRIENDSHIP TIP
Collaborate with friends to adopt a signature bird sound. Hoot at your pals during unexpected crossovers in grocery store aisles and school parking lots. Think of it as an elevated/platonic cat call.
May I suggest the grackle’s frazzled scream of existential crisis?
JACK-O-LANTERNS GONE WILD
If you’re experiencing the post-Halloween horror of an actively decomposing gourd, let’s address your options.
For not-waxy, not-painted, not glittery pumpkins:
a. Compost bin. Chunk it up first if you’re feeling particularly benevolent to the decomposition process
b. Chaos garden. Bury it in the yard to satisfy your soil + have the potential surprise vine next year
c. Feed the creatures. Light mold (read: not mushy or potent) is fine for most wildlife
For the bedazzled, sparkling, and/or liquified gourds seeping on your porch, you gotta let that one live out its purgatory in a trash can/landfill near you.
As for your 12-foot-tall skeleton, there’s really only one choice.
Festive!
UPCOMING EVENTS
🗓️ November 7: Rock the Park: Spare the Rock, Spoil the Child. This family-friendly concert at Mueller Lake Park amphitheater is always a blast
🗓️ November 8: Fire Discovery Day: at the Wildflower Center. Learn about how fire revitalizes the land
🗓️ November 8-9: Texas Book Festival: Y’all! Books! Authors! Readers! Thinking publicly!
🗓️ November 8-9: Austin Celtic Festival: Highland Games. Animals. Music. Kilts. Kilts!
🗓️ November 7-9, 14-16: Austin Studio Tour: Art. Artists. Does it get better?
🗓️ November 9: Austin Food & Wine Festival: Sunday tickets available!
🗓️ November 11: Mycorrhizal Fungi in Flux: at the Wildflower Center. Plants and soil collaborate. This talk seems absolutely nuts. Let’s compare notes after.
🗓️ November 13: Keep Austin Beautiful 40 year celebration at Umlauf Sculpture Garden
🗓️ November 13, 20: Lantern Tours at Laguna Gloria. Art + nature with lantern-lit, guided tours
DAY TRIP
🚗 November 7-16: Wurstfest | New Braunfels: Lederhosen recommended, but not required. Don a silly little hat, prepare to polka.
🚗 November 7-9, 13-16: Surreal Luck : Neon art and western wonder at Willie Nelson’s Luck Ranch
🚗 Through November 30: Texas Renaissance Festival: Such. Good. People. Watching.
LOCAL FARMERS’ MARKETS
👩🌾 Arboretum Food & Artisan Market Saturdays 11-3
👩🌾 Barton Creek Farmers Market Saturdays 9am-1pm
👩🌾 Lakeline Farmers Market Saturdays 9am-1pm
👩🌾 SFC Farmers’ Market Downtown Saturdays 9am-1pm
👩🌾 SFC Farmers’ Market Sunset Valley Saturdays 9am-1pm
👩🌾 Texas Farmers’ Market at Bell Saturdays 9am-1pm
👩🌾 Texas Farmers’ Market at Mueller Sundays 10am-2pm
CRITTER CORNER / SHOW AND TELL
This reader-submitted critter comes from summer of 2022 in NW Austin. After several months of relentless trash can pillaging, a bungee cord defense mechanism, and an enthusiastic/horrified neighborhood text thread, these wild boar slunk back into whatever hell pit they came from.
You know. Indoors is a really nice place to be.
I need to know your mundane wildlife encounters. Think of this as a driveway chat with your neighbor. I’m your neighbor now. Spill the tea.
POP QUIZ
Name three types of bird mentioned in this newsletter without scrolling back up.
HOMEWORK
You know you need to listen to a bird. Maybe even look at it when it’s talking to you.
That’s all for this week!
In the meantime, I hope you notify your acquaintances of your presence with an ornithologically accurate call of your choice.
-Nicole
OPTIONAL SIDE QUESTS
🪵 What’s this like for you? Email with your perspective.
🪵 Community is thrilling. Email with events I should feature or partnerships/collabs we could consider.
🪵 Is this newsletter not your vibe? Send it to your enemies to make them suffer too.
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