Texas Fauna Project

TRANSCRIPT

INTERVIEWEE: Kevin Burgio

INTERVIEWER: David Todd

DATE: September 12, 2025

LOCATION: Winsted, Connecticut

SOURCE MEDIA: MP3 audio file

TRANSCRIPTION: Trint, David Todd

REEL: 4217

FILE: CarolinaParakeet_Burgio_Kevin_Winsted_Connecticut_12September2025_Reel4217.mp3

 

David Todd [00:00:02] Well, good morning. David Todd here.

 

David Todd [00:00:06] I have the privilege of being with Dr. Kevin Burgio this morning, and with his permission, we plan on recording this interview for research and educational work on behalf of a nonprofit group called the Conservation History Association of Texas. This is for a book and a website for Texas A&M University Press. And is dedicated towards an archive at the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas here in Austin. I want to emphasize that he has all equal rights to use the recording as he sees fit.

 

David Todd [00:00:39] And that’s the plan for this interview and its taping, and I wanted to make sure that that’s okay with Dr. Burgio.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:00:48] Yes.

 

David Todd [00:00:48] Great, okay, well, let’s get started then.

 

David Todd [00:00:51] It is Friday, September 12th, 2025. It’s about 9.45 a.m. Central Time. My name, as I said, is David Todd. I am representing the Conservation History Association of Texas, and I am in Austin.

 

David Todd [00:01:06] We are conducting a remote interview with Dr. Kevin Burgio, who is in Connecticut, western, northwestern Connecticut.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:01:15] And Dr. Burgio holds a Ph.D. In ecology and evolutionary biology from the University of Connecticut. He is a spatial ecologist, conservation scientist, and a science communicator. He works as a conservation biologist with Terwilliger Consulting, and also serves as a subject editor for the journal “Avian Conservation and Ecology”. He has closely studied the Carolina parakeet and managed to piece together the historic range and behaviors of the bird by analyzing historical records, by looking at museum specimens, and by examining explorers’ travel logs.

 

David Todd [00:01:58] So, today we’ll talk about Dr. Burgio’s life and career to date, and also focus on what he can tell us about the Carolina parakeet, a fascinating story to say the least.

 

David Todd [00:02:10] With all that, I just want to thank you for being with us today. I really appreciate it.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:02:15] Happy to be here.

 

David Todd [00:02:16] Good deal.

 

David Todd [00:02:20] Well, let’s start with your early years. Can you point to any people or events in your early life that might have gotten you interested in nature or science or birds or maybe even at some age, the Carolina parakeet? And maybe in the course of this, you might tell us about Mojo, who I understand may figure into this story.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:02:44] Yeah, I mean, I’m from, you know, like, Boston. And a lot of people who say they’re from Boston are actually from like the suburbs or, you, know, the big area around Boston. I’m actually from Charlestown, which is a section of Boston. If you’ve ever watched the movie, “The Town”, that’s actually about the neighborhood I’m from. In fact, it was filmed in the neighborhood I’m from.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:03:09] And you know, so there’s not a lot of wildlife or anything there. It’s very developed, obviously.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:03:19] But I did move around a lot as a kid. When I was younger, when I was like five or so, my sister passed away unexpectedly and my stepdad and my mom just needed to get out. So, they bought an RV and we drove around the country for, I don’t know how many months. It was like four, five, six months. So, we went, so I went from living in the inner city of Boston to being out at Yellowstone and Yosemite and Grand Canyon. And to me, it was like an alien world. I’d never really seen anything like it.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:04:02] And So, I think somewhere down there stuffed in my subconscious that kind of freedom in open spaces and everything I think made a really big impression on me.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:04:16] And I moved around a lot and we ended up in northeast Connecticut in a pretty rural area where there was a lot of woods and everything. And I ended up spending a lot of time out in the woods and building forts and playing army and stuff with my friends. But it was it was really after my experience living in Boston, it was just amazing that I could just be out in the woods every day because there was just like a hundred-acre woodland right outside my house.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:04:51] So, I ended up joining the military right after high school because I just needed to get away from home. It was not a good situation for me. So, that was the easiest way out and I took it.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:05:09] But my parrot Mojo, I think one of the things that, because I first started doing research on monk parakeets, a naturalized parrot here in Connecticut. And I think what drove my interest about that was my parrot Mojo. He was a Timneh gray or an African gray, the smaller species of African gray. Um, and, uh, he hated everyone except for me, pretty much. He especially hated my mother. I don’t know why, but he was a really funny bird.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:05:51] But one time I was cleaning his cage and my step-grandmother opened the door, even though I told her that the bird was out because I was cleaning the cage. And Mojo just flew outside. It was like October, I think. It was, it was, you know, fall. And he just flew outside and we were all devastated because we’re like, “Well, that’s the end of that.” We put his cage out there with food and we saw him flying around for a couple of days and then he just disappeared for a while. So we were like, all right, “Well, RIP Mojo”.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:06:32] But a few days later, he must have been out for like a week. A few days. I was outside and my step-grandmother said, “Oh, I think Mojo’s on the roof.” So, I was eating like some French fries, you know, as I think they were like, Ore-Ida crinkle-cut fries. It’s a very vivid memory for me. So, I went outside and they were on a paper plate and I’m just sitting there eating. And then Mojo just flew down on my shoulder and he had this thing when he wanted food, he would just put his, you, know, his little claw up for me and I would just give to him and he would just start eating it. So, that’s what he did. He begged for some French fries. I gave him one and I walked in the house with him.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:07:13] So, but, you know, in, in thinking about it, you know, it’s October. I mean, here’s a bird from Africa. Um, and, you know, he was able to survive and it got pretty cold out. And he was able to survive for a week. And, um, so that I had that experience of having this like tropical bird, be able to hack it, you know in Connecticut fall.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:07:39] And so, after I got out of the military, I worked in a public health clinic for a while. And then I eventually started going to school. I didn’t start college until I was in my late 20s. And I was originally going to go to be a dentist, because I was a dental tech in the Air Force. And I was diagnosed with essential tremor. And I’d noticed it when I was working because I’d be making temporary bridges and crowns, and then my hands were shaking really badly. It was affecting my ability to make the temporary appliances.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:08:15] So yeah, I was diagnosed with a central tremor and they’re like, “Well, it could just stay as it is now for the rest of your life, just kind of mild, or a year from now, you may not be able to tie your shoes. We don’t know. We don’t know why a lot of people get it later in life, we don’t why some people get earlier in life.”.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:08:34] So, I had to like switch courses, because I was just like, “Well, I don’t want to be a dentist, go through all this training and then 10 years from now I can’t hold a drill.”.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:08:48] So, I happened to be taking an ornithology class because I’ve always been kind of interested in birds, probably from my experience with Mojo. Um, and it was like, “Oh, I get credit for going out and looking at birds. That seems pretty cool. I’ll do that.”.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:09:03] Um, And, uh, you know, quickly in the class, because I was older, I wasn’t afraid of speaking up in class and everything, the professor came up and asked me if I was doing research in anyone’s lab.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:09:16] And I’m like, I mean, my, I’m the first person in my family, uh to go to college and I’m also the second person in my family to even finish high school. So, I don’t come from a long line of academics, for sure. So, I was not aware that undergraduates could do research. It just wasn’t something, in my family, and I think probably a lot of working class and poor families, smart people go on to be doctors, dentists, lawyers, and that’s kind of the gamut of what smart people do, because they pay well. And everything.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:09:57] So I’d never really thought about doing research on birds until this professor asked me.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:10:05] So, I was like, “Oh, I can get credit for hanging out” and, you know, I guess the project I was counting saplings in the woods. And I’m like, “Oh, that’s cool. I get to get paid to walk around and get college credit for walking around and counting trees. I like that. That sounds cool.”

 

Kevin Burgio [00:10:26] Um, and, uh, part of the part of that, uh program, like they, they extended my work over the summer from a, uh NSF REU grant, Research Experience for Undergraduates. And part of, uh conditions of me getting paid to continue my work over the summer was that I had to develop my own project based on like invasive and naturalized species.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:10:53] And right around that time where it was clear to me that I had to come up with my own project, that I was down on the coast of Connecticut and I was just like practicing my bird watching and everything. And I saw a flock of monk parakeets, probably like, I don’t know, 15 of them, just sitting there drinking out of a puddle in the middle of the road right on the coast of Connecticut. And my first thought was, “Holy crap, somebody just lost all their parrots. They must be freaking out.” They had a flock of 15 of these things, because I had no idea that there were parrots that actually just lived on the coast of Connecticut.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:11:29] So, I was telling the professor about it, and she’s like, “Oh yeah, yeah, they live here. They live here year-round.” I’m like, “What? That’s crazy.”.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:11:39] So I started reading more about it. I’m, like, “Yeah. This is what I want to do.”

 

Kevin Burgio [00:11:43] But at the time in Connecticut, they were very controversial because they nest on utility poles and occasionally their nests, which can get really big and bulky, sometimes catch fire and cause power outages. So, the utility company down on the coast back in, this was like 2005, I think, 2006, they actually caught a bunch of them while they were moving the nests. They caught I think like 185 of them. And gave them to the USDA, and the USDA euthanized them.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:12:18] And that caused this huge controversy where, I mean, there were like death threats. It was pretty hairy here. There was lawsuits, death threats, proposed legislation to protect them.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:12:32] And so I was coming in maybe a year or two after that whole thing, when it was still kind of hot because the utility company was still removing the nests, but they weren’t capturing the birds anymore. And my advisor was like, “I don’t know, I don’t know if an undergrad should get into that. It’s very, you know, there’s a lot going on. There’s a a lot of politics, there is a lot of animal rights stuff, maybe.” And, but she’s like, “Well, you’re older, you were in the military, you could probably handle it.”

 

Kevin Burgio [00:13:01] So, that’s how I started working on, on, uh, parrots. And, um, and I kind of continued that work.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:13:10] And I mean, as a bridge to the Carolina parakeet. Um, uh, a lot of people at the time were saying, “Well, the, the monk parakeet should be protected because it’s a, it’s just kind of like a ecological replacement for the Carolina parakeet.”

 

Kevin Burgio [00:13:28] And, um, you know, so I started just reading a little bit about Carolina parakeets and I was like, because I didn’t know, I I’m like, “Well I don’t know, not all parrots are the same, right? I mean, they’re, they were all different. Uh, they all have different food preferences, they all have different habitats and everything. So, I mean, how realistic is it to say that this monk parakeet is an ecological replacement, kind of like a random de-extinction or rewilding experiment, you know?”

 

Kevin Burgio [00:14:02] So, I started reading about the Carolina parakeet. And you know, I started reading the Lewis and Clark travel, you know, all their travel diaries and everything, and they had noted seeing a Carolina parakeet in Nebraska north of Omaha. And I actually was, when I was in the service, I was stationed right outside Omaha, so I knew the area pretty well.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:14:29] And I was like, “Well, you know I bet you I could probably find where that is on a map”, because they were outside of a Native American settlement. Um, and so, I started looking into it and I found like the, where the village was, the, the settlement was, and I’m like, Oh yeah, I could, I could get the geographic coordinates for that. And then I could put, if I did, got enough of those, I could put them in a model and start looking at range, contraction, uh, maybe look at the pattern of extinction.” And that’s kind of what started the whole thing for Carolina parakeets.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:15:00] Like originally, Carolina parakeets were, were kind of just a fun side project for me. Uh, and eventually I’d spent so much time on it, I had to incorporate it into my dissertation. Uh, so, uh, yeah, that’s, that, so I think there’s a, you know, a pretty good through line of, of like being amazed by the enormity of nature while I was really young and traveling around the country, being torn away from like inner-city Boston, uh, to having Mojo the parrot and having him survive out for a week out in the fall, and then finding out that there’s parrots that live on the coast. It was just this huge just kind of series of coincidences that kind of led into one another.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:15:44] And without the professor who kind of pulled me out of that class to start all this, without her, I obviously wouldn’t be here. But now she ended up being my Ph.D. Advisor. She was also my first post-doc boss. And so, I’ve known her. She’s now one of my best friends and I’ve known her for you know, 20 years. But without her, there’s no way I’d be where I’m at now. So, that was another like great coincidence that happened that led me to where I am now.

 

David Todd [00:16:17] It’s, you know, it’s always interesting to see this sort of family tree of mentors and mentees and, you know, professors and students and you know how rich that whole, you know, relationship can be.

 

David Todd [00:16:29] Well, you mentioned Carolina parakeets and I was wondering if you could give us a little bit of a description of what’s known about them, what you found out about them. Maybe discuss a little about their life history and their ecological niche that they filled?

 

Kevin Burgio [00:16:49] Sure. Yeah. So, they’re unique. I mean, all species are unique, obviously, but they’re unique in being that they were the only species endemic to the United States. There’s another parakeet out in the West that used to live out in the Southwest, but now it’s only limited to Mexico. But they were like, they straddled the line there. They were in both.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:17:19] So, they’re, you know, the size of a, if you know what, a sun conure, just kind of like something you’d go in and see at Petco or something, you know like a typical parakeet or conure. In fact, their closest relative is the sun conure. And you know they’re green and they have this really cool red and yellow head. And so, they’re distinct, especially among the eastern avifauna in the U.S.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:17:53] So, it’s pretty hard to mistake them for anything else here, which made my job a lot easier when I was looking at observations of them. They’re like, “Well, yeah, I mean, what other parrot would it be? A green parrot with red and yellow on it.” So, that actually helped out a lot that they were the only one around.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:18:13] But they seemed to like really like bottomland, like wetlands, like sycamore bottomlands in their in their western range. And in their eastern range, they were in the cypress swamps. So, they were, you know, when we think about like monk parakeets, if you’re familiar with them, they live in very highly, like kind of dense human areas because a lot of them like to eat birdseed at bird feeders. And so, if you look at their ranges, like in the U.S., the monk parakeet, except in Florida and the Carolina parakeets, they almost are a negative of one another, meaning like where there are Carolina parakeets, historically, there are no monk parakeets. And where there are monk parakeets now, there were no Carolina parakeets.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:19:07] And so, their range, historically people would say, oh yeah, they live all the way up into upstate New York, all the out to Colorado, all the way down to Texas, all of the way over to Florida. And that’s a really large range for a parrot. Exceedingly – a really, really large range for parrot. Not a lot of parrots have ranges that big.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:19:33] And I started reading a lot about the observation, it’s fairly famous, the one up in upstate New York, and I’ve written about it, but that was. The fact that people saw it and remarked upon it is kind of a demonstration of how rare it was.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:19:54] So, I started to think like, ah, they probably didn’t really spend a lot of time up north here. So, the modeling I did kind of bore that out. Their range really was along the southeastern coast for the eastern subspecies. There’s, as far as we know, there are two subspecies. There’s the eastern one, which is east of the Appalachians, and then the western subspecies, that’s west of the Appalachians.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:20:19] And there are some color differences. I think there’s some size differences of some of their body parts. But so far, there’s been no genetic testing to see if they’re actually truly subspecies or if it’s just one species with some regional variation.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:20:39] Um, uh, so, but, so the Western one was kind of a creature of the like sycamore bottomland hardwood forests, uh like they spend a lot of time around rivers. And then the Eastern one, uh was, like I said, the cypress swamps.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:20:57] Uh they, and they had some really cool, unique things among parrots. They, uh they roosted communally in trees, like hollows. Um, and they would, they were known for sleeping by hanging their hook in wood and dangling down. Um, in fact, there are some barns out in Florida where that kind of like their, like their last kind of stronghold where there were notches in the beams in the barns where they would sleep, where they would hook their beaks in. So, I mean, that’s a, I wish there were a picture of it because it would be pretty wild.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:21:37] Um but they also have what’s called a fully feathered cere, so that area where their nasal part of their beak is. Them and monk parakeets are the only two species that I’m aware of that have a fully-feathered cere, and that is an adaptation that helps warm the air before they breathe it in, so that’s a cold adaptation. I mean, that’s what people think it is, and maybe it has another use, but that’s kind of the thought on that.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:22:08] So, for a while, people thought that monk parakeets and Carolina parakeet were closely related because they both shared this very unique trait among parrots, but they found out that genetically that they’re not all that closely related. So, that’s just a convergent evolution trait because they both live in some colder areas. So, yeah, I mean, the Carolina parakeet obviously unique that it lived in colder areas than most parrots here and especially in the Midwest winters.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:22:41] And you know, they ate a bunch of stuff that that other birds can’t, like sycamore balls they ate. They ate cockleburs, which are apparently toxic. And there’s like this whole kind of like urban legend that they were toxic because they would eat the cockleburs. And there are some stories about how people’s like dog ate one and died because, you know, because they’re toxic. I think there is some genetic evidence that that in fact is true. Someone did like a genome study a few years ago and found (I don’t do genomics), so they found evidence that there was, in fact, a gene that allowed them to eat it and not be killed by it. I don’t know.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:23:31] Anyway, they lived in flocks like many other parrots and they ate seeds, nuts, fruit just like a lot of parrots do. So, in that, they’re typical in kind of what their range of food and the only thing unique about them was that they would eat the sycamore balls and cockleburs. So, I mean, that’s kind of like a rundown of their basic biology and kind of their range and habitat preferences.

 

David Todd [00:24:14] And so, from what you’re telling me about the cockleburs and the sycamore balls, their role might have been as sort of, ecologically, as a seed disperser? Is that what they mostly might be described as?

 

Kevin Burgio [00:24:30] I mean, as far as I know, the only other bird species that could eat, that can actually eat a sycamore ball is the evening grosbeak, which are up in Canada. So, I guess if there were a bird disperser of sycamores, I don’t know that much about the biology of sycamores, so I don t know if they need a lot of help dispersing. But I guess, if they did and they needed a bird disperser, as I far as know, the Carolina parakeets would be the only one. Um, you know, I’m sure like squirrels and stuff probably lead it to, but I don’t know.

 

David Todd [00:25:05] Okay, all right. Well, so it’s interesting to me, and I imagine it’s a frustration for you, to study an animal that no longer exists as far as is known. So, I’m curious if you could tell us about the history of the observations that were reported or the specimens that were collected of Carolina parakeets. And if there are any that were found in Texas, you know, I’d of course be curious to hear that as well since we’re provincial in our little study here.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:25:41] Yeah, well, I’ll get to Texas. As far as I know, and I could be wrong. I mean, there’s hundreds of specimens out there. I’m not sure that there are any from Texas, but I can look at my database and get back to you about that. I did look at their history of observations in Texas before we met, and I’ll get to that in a moment.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:26:06] So, the history of observations is, you know, as Europeans came, the reason why they’re called Carolina parakeets is because this guy named Catesby, I think that’s how you pronounce it, saw one in Carolina, even though they’re not really common there. He was in Carolina. He saw one and he’s like, “All right, this is a Carolina parakeet.” Mark Catesby is his name. He was the first to put it in a book, and that’s how they got their name, even though they’re not really common in the Carolinas. That was, I believe, the 1700s.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:26:48] There is observations of them going back to the 1500s by the Spanish in Florida. I think the first observation of my database is in the 1560s, I think, or something like that. There was a fort down there.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:27:06] But, you know, as far as their population goes, you know, in the 1830s, when Audubon published his book, he said, I think he published it in like 1831 or 1835. And there he’s like, you know, basically, their population was fine up until like around 1800. And there’s been a marked decline since then. So, that’s the first kind of like assessment that anyone had made about their population. And, you know, looking at the data, it kind of does bear out that, you see what we’d consider fairly strong populations, and then 1800s, you could certainly see the decline beginning.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:27:56] But the thing that’s quite remarkable about this species and why I think it’s a really good one to study for looking at other extinctions is because this was a wide-ranging parrot. And, you know, like, just from a theoretical standpoint, larger range species are harder, it’s harder for them to go extinct because if something bad happens in one part of their range, they still have the rest of the range.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:28:20] As opposed to a really small range species because if something bad happens, like a hurricane, they only live on like an island in the Caribbean. A hurricane comes and flattens that island. I mean, you don’t have any reserves. It’s all gone.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:28:35] So a wide-ranging species, it’s harder for them to go extinct than other species.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:28:41] Um you know and seeing from, basically from 1800 to 1900, by 1900 the species was effectively extinct, because they had some pocket populations that you know with modern techniques maybe would have been able to be saved. You know, like the Spix’s macaw like how they had captive birds and you know they were rearing them and trying to release them on the wild. You know, had we had those techniques back then, perhaps at 1900, they might’ve been able to be saved.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:29:17] But I mean, they just had these remnant populations by then. So, within a hundred years, you went from being something that was, you know pretty, you known, common through, you know, roughly half of the United States to being essentially gone in a hundred years. And that’s, I mean, that’s a really remarkable decline.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:29:38] I mean you see the passenger pigeon and some other ones. But the passenger pigeons, the reason they went extinct is very clear. I mean people just shot them for food to the extent that there were just none left.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:29:51] But with the Carolina parakeet, it’s a little different. I mean people did shoot them as crop pests, but there is a lot of different things going on.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:30:01] So as you, there’s more and more sightings as more and Europeans come and explore the country in the 1800s. So, you know, you see like kind of this like gradual rise in observations. And then you see a lot of observations as people settle out there.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:30:22] And I think it became clear to like, you know, the scientists of the time, the ornithologists at the time by like the 1880s that they were on their way out. And so, you see as far as specimen collection goes, it’s like you see a trickle in the 1850s, 1860s, and then by the late 1880 and 1890s, you see huge influx of specimens , you know, shot and put into natural history museums because the ornithologists were like, “Well, it’s on its way out and if we’re going to have any specimens, this is the time. If we wait any longer, we’re not going to have any more.”

 

Kevin Burgio [00:31:04] So, I mean, while I don’t think that’s a major contributor, I’m sure it didn’t help, you know.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:31:11] So, yeah, so you just see like in the specimen record, but you look in the 1880s and 1890s, there’s a ton and there’s some in the early 19 aughts. And then, you know, by the 19 aughts, you see, I mean, it goes to like basically none because they only had these like pocket populations in these very rural hard-to-reach areas. So, that’s kind of the history of the observations and the specimen collecting.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:31:43] So, in Texas, it’s a little tricky because there’s not a lot of accounts of seeing them. I mean, I think it’s really clear that they were pretty common in east, like northeast of Houston, like Polk County, and probably until the 1860s, 1870s, they seemed to be fairly common out there. There’s some firsthand accounts of people that lived during that time. Some of them don’t remember them. You know, like around like the 1880s, 1890s, don’t remember them being around. There’s a few people who did, you know, but they were fairly uncommon.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:32:28] They had kind of like one of their last remnant populations along the Red River, like right up at the border there. So, in Texas, they seemed to be pretty common in the northeastern part of the state, which bears out because they had a pretty strong population in Oklahoma. They had a strong population in Louisiana, so it makes sense.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:32:57] There were some sightings as far down as San Antonio, but I think they’re questionable whether or not they really were a Carolina parakeet. They certainly could have been something else. I think if I remember correctly, the description of them wasn’t very clear.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:33:15] So as far as Texas is concerned, I mean, there’s a lot of observations of them around the Red River. And there’s a lot of anecdotal kind of historical remembrances of them in, you know, northeast of Houston. But there’s not a lot. It’s part of their range where there’s not a whole lot of information. And I don’t know if it’s because there are not a lot of explorers going around there and noting everything that they saw. Which, you know, certainly along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, you had people like all the time exploring there and, you know, talking about all the things they saw.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:33:52] So, I don’t know if, I don’t t know the kind of the history of settlement in Texas well enough to know if the birds weren’t there or people just weren’t talking about them. But yeah, so, I mean, in my estimation, I would say that their range probably extended maybe to about Houston, maybe a little further south, and up towards up north to the Red River valley and Oklahoma. So, I mean, that’s still a pretty big good chunk of land, considering the size of Texas, but it is a part of their range that there’s not a lot of information about, as far as I know. Anyway, there’s probably some book out there I just haven’t read yet that has like all kinds of information, but I haven’t found it yet.

 

David Todd [00:34:45] Yeah, you know, I’m curious, when people would report seeing one, how would they describe it? You know, what was their sort of emotional, more subjective take on seeing one of these birds? They seem pretty flamboyant.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:35:04] Yeah, yeah. I mean, some people, you know, like the people in northern New York saw it as a harbinger of the end times, because it was just a tropical-looking bird in the middle of, you know, the winter up in Schoharie, New York. So, they were, they clearly had a huge emotional reaction to seeing them.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:35:25] But in other in other cases, it was more like they were so common and plentiful, it wasn’t a big deal to see them. You know, I mean, there’s even a town, or a former town, in Arkansas that was just called Parakeet. And it’s a ghost town now.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:35:47] But, you know, so it really ranged the gamut. Some people were really excited about seeing them. Uh, some people just remarked upon like, oh, like, “We saw these birds out here and oh yeah, there were these parrots, you know, in, these parakeets.” And, you know, they, they tend to use like really kind of, I mean, the writing back then was a lot more, uh, at least scientific writing back then was a a lot more, um, you know Victorian. So, there was a lot of adjectives and, they called them like gay and you know and all those things because they were like, as you said, they were very colorful and chatty and very gregarious.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:36:26] So, you know, but I think people like farmers didn’t like seeing them. So, they had an emotional reaction, but it wasn’t positive. But well, I mean, actually I should caveat that with some farmers actually did like them because they ate like cockleburs, they ate a lot of weed seeds. So they liked them being around the farms because they did some rudimentary weed control for them.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:36:49] Whereas people who had orchards didn’t like them. I think one of the reasons aside from the fact that they’re eating your crop, they’re taking like one or two bites and trying to find the seeds and then just dropping most of the fruit on the ground. So, it’s not like they would just take an apple and just eat the whole thing. They would just eat a little bit of it. I think they were probably fishing for the seeds and then they would just drop it on the ground and then move on to another one. So, I mean, not that it probably would have changed anything, but I can imagine owning an orchard and watching these birds just like take one bite out of an apple, dropping it, taking a bite out an apple dropping it. I’m sure it wasn’t a very profitable thing to watch happen to your farm there.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:37:46] Yeah, but yeah, I mean, it’s like the explorers were generally pretty excited to see them because they were there to see new things. You know, a lot of them were European, you know, adventurers and they’re like, “Oh, look, there’s a parrot because I mean at the time there were no parrots in Europe.” So it was, you know, a unique thing to see.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:38:06] So, yeah, like I said, it just ran the gamut of levels of excitement and dread, I guess.

 

David Todd [00:38:14] Okay, well, this is interesting to hear about the observations and the specimens and the reactions.

 

David Todd [00:38:22] Well, I think that a big part of the story of the Carolina parakeet, unfortunately, is its decline. And I was wondering if you could help us understand more about why the bird declined and then apparently has totally disappeared. You know, I’ve heard lots of factors and maybe you can sort of tick them off as the ones that are major or minor or dubious.

 

David Todd [00:38:46] You know, you’ve mentioned these orchard owners, maybe they killed some to protect their crops. I think there’s a millinery trade I’ve heard. There’s specimen collection I think you mentioned, maybe pet use, habitat change. I’ve heard bee competitions might have been a problem. Avian flu. I’m just a lay person here. So, please disabuse me of my confusion. But it’d be great if you could touch on some of those.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:39:19] Sure. I mean, so, I mean the real answer, as far as I can tell, and I’ve been studying them for God like over 10 years now, is all of the above.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:39:31] I think, you know, without any real empirical evidence, disease played the most major role in their extinction. And Daniel McKinley, who is another researcher that devoted a good part of his career and life to studying them, kind of came to the same conclusion. And Noel Snyder, who kind of picked up the torch from there, also, you know, pretty much came to the conclusion that it was likely disease, though we don’t have any real evidence for it.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:40:01] And I believe more or less the same thing, because, and I think the real key to me is the rate of decline. You know, there’s a lot of birds and parrots that have been persecuted. Right? For pet trade, for maybe not the millinery trade because that kind of died out a while ago, but for whatever reason – as crop pests, for the pet trade – and sure it’s affected their populations in some more than others, but I don’t think that’s the only or the root cause of it.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:40:39] I mean, I think habitat loss was probably a big part and I think that is one of the reasons one of the western subspecies likely went extinct even though they had a much bigger range than the eastern subspecies and that was kind of the pattern of agricultural conversion.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:40:56] But with agricultural conversion also comes proximity to, you know, European fowl, chickens, geese, that might have diseases that were not previously in North America, and they may have, because of their proximity to farms and agriculture expansion, they may’ve been subjected to these new diseases and that may have caused it.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:41:28] I mean, based on my best guess without having any real empirical evidence, I would say what likely happened is that the Western subspecies, those birds, were tend to known to congregate at salt licks because salt is an important part of their diet, but they didn’t have ready access to it like the coastal birds do. So, they were well-known to congregate at these salt lakes in the Midwest.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:42:01] So, I could envision all these birds coming in from miles and miles around to all meet communally at these salt licks, and if some of them were sick, could have passed along the disease, and then when the birds went back to wherever it was they came from, took the disease back with them, and that coupled with being introduced to potential diseases from European, you know, fowl and everything, I think that, and the habitat loss in conjunction with that, I mean, my guess would be that was probably the main driver of their extinction.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:42:46] And the reason why it took the eastern subspecies much longer is because the areas they remain strong in like central Florida and the Santee River in South Carolina are areas that weren’t converted for much longer to agriculture. And in fact, the Santee River, as far as I know, is still pretty untouched because it’s just a swamp. But you know, I think the area that, actually the area they were pretty common was around Orlando, which you know certainly is not very hospitable for a bird that needs a lot of swamp and trees to breed and snags and everything.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:43:34] You know, so, so I think you know all of these factors contribute. It’s really hard to say, well, that was the main contributor and all the other ones were secondary. I think they all played a role. I don’t think that one, and maybe disease, but I don’t think one specific pressure was what did them in.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:43:57] So, I don’t think that like farmers shooting them was really the thing that did. A lot of people tell me like, “Oh yeah, they were hunted to extinction.” I’m like, to kill that many birds over that extent of a range. You know, I did some analyses, which I haven’t published, looking at the rate of their range contraction over time. And the western subspecies was losing like something like 20,000 [square] kilometers a year for a part in the mid-1800s, I mean, that’s a big space to be losing every year in range size. And in my mind, in order for hunting to have caused that, you would have to have somebody like an army out there shooting them whenever they saw them, you know? And I just don’t think that’s realistic. I mean I’m sure that farmers shooting them didn’t help their populations, but I don’t think that was the thing that did them in.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:45:02] But yeah, so the fact that the Western subspecies had to congregate at these salt licks, their habitats were converted earlier, because by the late 1800s, the Midwest, as you probably know, was just a farm. And, it wasn’t until much later that Florida was converted to orange orchards and other things.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:45:30] So, I think, and with that was proximity to the, you know, the farm animals and stuff like that. So, I think those two things would be really hard to distinguish if you’re looking at like models of range contraction because If the problem is the farm itself, because it’s taking up their habitat and introducing diseases, it would really be hard to disentangle the two because they’re linked. So, like any analysis of like that, those variables would be correlated, right?

 

Kevin Burgio [00:46:05] So, it’d be really hard to see that, get at, unless we found specimens that had specific strains of virus or bacteria that we could, but, I mean, these specimens are, you know, over 100 years old. The ones that are still whole have been like, you know soaking in alcohol or formaldehyde or whatever for, you know, over a hundred years. So the likelihood that we’d be able to find any kind of DNA from any kind of disease or bacteria or virus, I think is, I mean I’m sure someday or maybe now, I don’t know, somebody could figure it out how to do it. But as of yet, I don’t think anybody has, at least with the Carolina parakeets.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:46:52] And still even though, even if they did find evidence of some sort of virus, you still, I don t think you could really disentangle habitat loss and disease, at at least in a model, looking at range contraction.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:47:05] So, but to speak on the bees. Because that’s a really interesting one, and people have brought that up as a potential, because Carolina parakeets, like many parrots, rely on pre-existing cavities, usually tree snags, to nest in. And that’s one of the problems parrots generally have globally. And one of reasons why their populations are declining is because they need these dead trees in order to breed. And so, the Carolina parakeet was no different.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:47:42] So, one of the things that I tried to explore, which the data is just not there, and that’s one of difficulties of studying something that’s no longer here, is there’s not a lot of good data from the 1800s about like the European honeybee expansion. It’s not, that data doesn’t really exist.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:48:01] The closest I could come to maybe, maybe one day the modeling will be sophisticated enough to look at this, but essentially the native people said that, essentially, if you start seeing European honey bees, the white people are about like, I think it was like, you know, 10 miles, like coming down the pike, they’re 10 miles away, something like that.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:48:29] I mean, so maybe you could do some sort of modeling looking at it, like using a buffer on human range expansion or colonial range expansion at the time, but as far as I, and I tried really hard to model that.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:48:44] I mean, I have read that the bees and the Carolina parakeets needed very different size cavities, so it’s unlikely there would have been a lot of competition. Um, but one kind of maybe side, uh, you know, effect that the bees may have had is that a lot of times back then when people were looking for honey, they would actually just cut down the snag and collect the honey from there. So, it’s possible, again, this is another thing that probably didn’t help, is if people were cutting down a lot of snags because they had honey in them, that those snags may have also had sufficient cavities for the Carolina parakeets to nest in too.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:49:31] I don’t think that would probably be a significant driver of extinction, but again, it’s another small thing that didn’t help.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:49:42] So, I don’t know, like when I first started like researching them in earnest, I was like, “I’m going to figure it out. I’m going to be the one that says this is why they went extinct.”

 

Kevin Burgio [00:49:53] And, you know, like many things in science, you set out thinking that you’re going to find the answer and then what you end up doing is finding a lot of other information out, but maybe not the actual answer to the question that you had.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:50:06] Or you run into so many walls, you’re like, Well, maybe we’ll never know exactly how they went extinct with any kind of mathematical certainty.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:50:18] Since I’ve been studying them, I think it was since, what, 2012, 2011 that I really … It’s been like 14 years or so. It’s something I’ve had to come to grips with. I was just holding out hope that I could do it for my dissertation and all the modeling and everything I did, it just didn’t work out. There was nothing that we did that pointed the finger in to exactly what went happened. And I think that I have to live with the fact that maybe I’ll never know.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:50:48] Um. So, yeah, that’s, I mean, as far as I know, that’s probably the best explanation.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:50:58] I mean there’s some, you know, with habitat loss, there were certainly like along the major rivers at the time when there were steamboats and they needed to burn wood, a lot of the woodlands right around the major rivers were chopped down and the wood like kind of piled up, you now, on the side of the river for the steamboats to take on board.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:51:20] Again, since that was their preferred habitat in the Western, I’m sure that didn’t help either. And that’s another type of habitat destruction that may have played a role in all of this. So, farming, deforestation along major rivers to fuel the steamboats.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:51:41] Yeah, there’s just so much going against them, really.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:51:44]  And to look at the patterns of extinction and population declines of parrots globally, what you see is a very similar phenomenon where you have like a rapidly developing nation (at the time, the United States) going in, expanding and converting forest to agriculture, which is another thing that you see in developing countries and a lot of the countries that parrots are found, their highest diversity in the Amazon and Australia and Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, these are all rapidly industrializing countries, converting forest to grazing land like in the Amazon, and in gold extraction, all these things going in there and destroying these forests.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:52:43] And, you know, so it’s in many ways the Carolina parakeet should serve as a cautionary tale. You have these plentiful parrots, you go in there, start introducing them to diseases that they’re not familiar with, cutting down where they need to nest. Yeah, you’re going to see range contraction, you’re going to see population declines. It’s inevitable.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:53:14] So, you know, if there’s one thing, because people have always asked me, like, what’s the point? Why? There’s plenty of like declining species now? Why aren’t you spending your time and energy studying them as a way to save them?

 

Kevin Burgio [00:53:26] Which is a fair question. You know, like research money is limited. Research capacity is limited, you know. Why focus on something that’s already gone?

 

Kevin Burgio [00:53:36] And for me, the answer has always been, if we could figure out why they went extinct, perhaps we could find the key to conserving the species, the declining parrot species, now. Because if they can go extinct, given their huge range, like any parrot can go extinct.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:53:59] And the fact that I wasn’t able to point to a specific thing, I think makes it hard for me to make that case. But you don’t know if you don’t try, right? And I think a lot of good has come out of, you know, at least for me, at least learning techniques, tools, um, and thinking, thinking about these things has really informed me as a conservation biologist in the work that I do now.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:54:28] Um, but I think it’s, it’s also a story that resonates with people. As, as you noted that, you know it’s been covered very widely. Whenever there’s any new Carolina parakeet paper published, it’s always news. And I’ve been covered by New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine. I mean, I’ve written stuff about them that’s been published in the Washington Post. It’s been always big news because they’re America’s parrot, right? And they went extinct.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:55:03] And I think that we could still learn a lot and point to that as a cautionary tale to say like this parrot that’s beautiful, that was unique, that was once plentiful, went away because we weren’t paying attention. And let’s not have that happen again.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:55:28] So, yeah, I don’t know. It’s something I’ve wrestled with because at times it has felt like, why am I doing this? What’s the point? I’ve always wanted my research to matter, to have some sort of applicable kind of use in conservation.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:55:49] At first, it was really clear what the connection was, but as I learned more, or learned that maybe I wasn’t going to learn more, you know, I’ve had to really wrestle with that as like, you know I didn’t waste my time and I didn’t waste money and effort. We did learn a lot of important stuff here, if for no other reason, like the work, the coverage it’s received has garnered a lot of attention and maybe it’s helped people think about conservation and extinction in our, in our own backyards.

 

David Todd [00:56:25] Yeah. Well, you know, it’s interesting you’ve been mentioning the hopeful impact of your work on conservation efforts now. Do you think there was any significant effort in the 1880s, 1890s when the trajectory of the bird was pretty clear, to try to capture them, breed them, protect them. Or was it, was there just sort of a acceptance? What do you think was going on then?

 

Kevin Burgio [00:57:01] I mean, as far as I know, there weren’t any major efforts. I think near the end, some group, I think it may have even been Audubon or another kind of a proto-conservation group tried to protect the area in the Santee River. But at that point, I think it was probably already well too late.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:57:24] I mean, um, and. Yeah, as far as I could tell, nobody was really, I mean, they were not, people did try to breed them in captivity. They were notoriously hard to breed and, you know, that didn’t seem to work very well.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:57:44] Maybe with modern techniques, they may have been able to get them to be a little bit more open to breeding in captivity, but as far I can tell back then, it was kind of a hopeless cause.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:57:57] And, you know, you saw, like there were some back then, not necessarily with the Carolina parakeet, but with the heath hen, which is a kind of a prairie chicken, but endemic to the northeast, there were efforts where they took the whole population and brought it to an island. I think it was either Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard, I forget which. And then like a storm came and I think there was a fire or something and they all died. So, that kind of backfired.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:58:25] But at least it was an attempt.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:58:26] But I think with the Carolina parakeet, I have never read about such attempt.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:58:33] The only kind of thing that I read was there’s this ornithologist in Florida named Oscar Bayard. And he, up until the 1920s, 1930s, and even ’40s, I think, claimed that there was this remnant population that only he knew about in the middle of the nowhere in Florida. And he refused to tell anybody where they were, because he knew that as soon as he did, that the egg hunters would be all over it, that people would be going there and looking for them. So, he died never telling a soul.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:59:09] And I talked to Noel Snyder, who I guess I’m carrying the torch for Carolina parakeet research. And he told me that he had even gone to talk to his family, to see if there were any of his effects, like if they could find like his notebooks or anything, to see if he could find the notebook that had the information about where they were and he couldn’t. So, either it got lost in history or was purposely destroyed so that no one could find them.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:59:42] So, I thought that, I mean, in my mind, that’s probably the only thing really anybody did to try to protect them at the time.

 

Kevin Burgio [00:59:50] You know, like, certainly when they were on their way out, egg hunters were all, you know, Because eggs were a big hobby, collecting eggs was a big a hobby back then. So, there were egg hunters looking for them because they could get really good prices for a bird that was essentially going extinct.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:00:09] So, there are, some of the last observations of them are from the egg hunters. And it’s hard to take them very seriously because you don’t know if they were just trying to hype up the eggs that they collected to say that they were Carolina parakeet eggs so they could get more money for them. Um, and there are some eggs in collections now that, you know, presumably they could do some sort of DNA test on if there’s any like, you know, albumin or anything in inside, along the inside of the egg. Um, but as far as I know, there hasn’t been any real effort to do so, because I think you have to destroy it in order to, to sample it.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:00:46] And, um, so there hasn’t, as far I know (I mean, maybe someone’s doing it right now and I don’t know about it), been any efforts to really verify the legitimacy of some of these later egg uh caches that were found in like the 19 teens and ’20s.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:01:05] But you know the egg hunters there’s a lot of there’s, a lot, of lore. They’re notoriously known to lie to drive prices up for their eggs so you know whether or not some of, these last eggs we have as specimens and collections and everything, whether or not they’re really Carolina parakeet eggs – maybe, maybe not.

 

David Todd [01:01:27] Well, speaking of these eggs now, albumin and the DNA that may be held in them, Carolina parakeets, maybe, maybe not, I’ve heard that the Carolina parakeet is considered a sort of prime candidate for, you know, recreation for revival. Rewilding. And I was wondering what you’ve learned about that, you know, what the prospects are, what the realities are. You know, we’d love to hear from you about it.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:02:03] Yeah, I mean, philosophically, I understand that the technology being used to help like de-extinction efforts, you know, to resurrect a not necessarily the species itself, but kind of like a, because it’s not, if they brought back the Carolina parakeet, at least with the technology we have now, it wouldn’t be a Carolina parakeet purely. It would be probably a sun conure genome mixed with a Carolina parakeet genome. So, it would be not quite a Carolina parakeet. Maybe it would look a lot like one, maybe it would act a lot one, but it wouldn’t be the same thing.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:02:44] And with that, so I understand the technology they’re using can be used to help other, like declining species. That’s great.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:02:53] But I think trying to bring back a species, especially one that’s been gone for almost a hundred years, considering the amount of ecological and climate change that has occurred and will continue to occur, I think the money could be spent better elsewhere in conservation.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:03:12] There are species that are still here that are declining that could use that time and attention, in my opinion.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:03:20] I’m not one of these people to say like, there’s no merit in doing like the research that’s required for de-extinction because I think there is merit to it. But I think at this point that the money would be better spent elsewhere.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:03:34] You know, and I think a lot about, you know, the extinction of the Carolina parakeet. I mean, would I love to see Carolina parakeets? Yeah. Probably, me more than probably anyone on the earth.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:03:44] I mean I’ve spent, you now, the last 12, 10, 12, 13 years of my life thinking about them, publishing on them, doing research on them. I don’t think there’s anybody who would want to see one more than me.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:03:58] But I wouldn’t want that to come at the expense of another species that could have maybe made it, had people have spent more time and attention on it, but didn’t.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:04:09] You know, and there’s the reality that the niche that they, you know, lived in, for whatever reason, ceased to be sustainable for them a hundred years ago or more. And would the situation, the niche that they require be here now for them? I don’t think so.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:04:35] And who’s to say that maybe it was disease and you spend millions and millions of dollars to bring back and do all this stuff and take decades to get enough where you can release them in the wild? They meet a chicken and they all get some sort of disease and they all die. Because we don’t know what killed them all, really. If it was a disease, we don’t know which one.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:04:59] If it really was habitat loss, well, is that habitat really here anymore in sufficient space and time to sustain a population of them? Maybe, but is that niche, is that that habitat going to exist in 50 years from now? Maybe, maybe not.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:05:22] So, I just think there’s so many unknowns that it’s really hard for me to justify spending the time and energy to bring back a species that’s gone, that may not have a place anymore to protecting one that’s still here, that could be saved.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:05:41] But my opinion on the matter doesn’t stop anybody from trying. So, I just hope that if and when the time comes that whoever does try to lead some sort of de-extinction event or program with the Carolina parakeet would at least reach out to me to learn what they can about what’s most likely to be successful or not, because I mean, I think I’m probably, me and my co-authors, but I’ve been kind of the lead on all of this stuff. I don’t think anybody else knows more about them than I do right now. So, I would just hope that at some point that If they do it, they would reach out. Because if you’re going to do it (I can’t stop them from doing it), you might as well do it with the best available information.

 

David Todd [01:06:34] This may be sort of circling back a little bit, but I think that your interest in Carolina parakeets may trace back to the monk parakeets. And I was wondering if you feel that those monks or the sun conures fill an ecological niche that was once filled by the Carolina parakeet, or if they’re just distinct birds with different kinds of functions in the broader ecosystem.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:07:08] Yeah. I mean, I don’t think, I mean I don t know about the sun conure. I don t think they could survive in the cold as well as either the monk parakeet or the Carolina parakeet. And I think that the Carolina parakeets and the monk parakeets are so distinct from one another. You know, in their native range, monk parakeets are really kind of like a shrubbery kind of, like. You know, they’re expanding their range in South America now because they’re converting a lot of forests to grazing areas. And that’s where they actually do really well, where there’s a couple of trees here and there for them to build nests on, but it’s mostly like prairie and grass and shrub. That’s their habitat preference.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:07:54] And the Carolina parakeets were a forest species. They required dense forests. So, just in that, they’re very different. Like I said earlier about how their ranges in the United States now are almost like a negative or a mirror image of one another, because where there were monks, now there were no Carolina parakeets, except in Florida. And where there where there was Carolina parakeets, there’s really no monk parakeets, except Florida.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:08:25] So, I mean, I don’t think that they would, you know, in considering that the Carolina parakeets, they’re known for eating cockleburs and sycamore balls. You know, as far as I know, monk parakeets don’t eat those things. You know they eat a lot of things, they are generalists. Could they eat them? Maybe, I do not know. But it does not seem like they are in sufficient quantities where we know about it.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:08:54] And again, I think monk parakeets, especially in the Northeast, in like Chicago and many other cooler places, they persist. I think they persist with the aid of bird feeders, people feeding them in the winter. And without that, I don’t know if they would be as successful in the really extreme North parts of their range.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:09:20] So I just don’t, I mean, but then again, the Carolina parakeets didn’t really live in the Northeast either.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:09:27] So, yeah, I just don’t really see there being like a really direct one-to-one replacement for one or the other. And I think it would be hard for anyone to justify that as a reason to protect monk parakeets.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:09:44] I mean, protecting the monk period is another thing, I mean they’re naturalized and where they are now. You know, I think it would take a huge effort to get rid of them, and I don’t think anybody has the stomach to do it, which is fine. As far as anyone could tell, they’re not really having a huge effect on native populations. So, cool.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:10:07] I don’t know, I have mixed feelings about them. I mean, they’re beautiful birds. I spent a lot of time watching them and studying them. And if they start having an effect on native birds or they’re starting, there’s a lot more conflicts between them and like people and electric lines. I guess that would have to be something that’s revisited. Because I know in like Spain, they are trying to eradicate them there because they’re causing a lot of problems.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:10:37] But I don’t know, I don’t feel one way or another about them. It’s always cool to see them, I guess.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:10:45] But yeah, I don’t really think they’re a replacement for the Carolina parakeet.

 

David Todd [01:10:53] You know, it’s clear and maybe it’s no surprise after spending, you know, a dozen years or more studying these that you’ve thought a lot about Carolina parakeets. And I’m curious if you can just talk about sort of general implications and what meaning you might see in the loss of the Carolina parakeet as a species. Any kind of insights that you could offer there?

 

Kevin Burgio [01:11:26] Yeah, I mean, things that inspire people, you know, to protect nature and everything. You know, you often hear stories like, “Oh, I was at a zoo once or I was out and this like unique, something unique happened”, like there was some sort of behavior that sticks out in people’s minds when they’re younger.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:11:48] And I think having the Carolina parakeet be like kind of a a few hundred years ago, they were just in many parts of the range, just a common occurrence. But I can imagine if kids went out today and saw these beautiful parrots at their bird feeder in their backyard or in the trees, just making a bunch of noise, I think that’s part of the loss of them is that we don’t have, we don’t have the experience of going outside, unless you have monk parakeets, but they’re not nearly as beautiful, in my opinion, as the Carolina parakeets. We’re missing that. It’s part of our natural history that’s gone.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:12:39] And they were such a unique part of our natural story for half of the country. I think that our forests, our swamps, are much the poorer, not just ecologically, but from a human experience.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:13:03] I think this is why so many people are trying to will the ivory-billed woodpecker into existence because they’re such a majestic bird. And seeing them, I think, is really…. You know when you see a pileated woodpecker now, right? And you’re like, “Oh, wow, look at that thing, it’s huge!” Right? And to think about the ivory-billed woodpecker, and the reason why Carolina parakeets are always news is because they’re a charismatic species. It was one of Audubon’s best paintings.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:13:41] Um, and there’s something inside, I think, like America, that recognizes that it’s a huge loss. And I think that’s why it’s always big news. And I think that loss is as much ecological as it is the human experience. You know, I just, I mean, I don’t think it would completely have changed the world had they been able to persist. But I think if more people were able to go outside and see them, I think people would be more inspired to protect what’s here. And, you know, and hopefully like looking back at that and saying, hey, we had this amazing, beautiful, charismatic, beautiful bird that used to be here and now it’s gone. I mean, I’m just hoping that that can at least hold a candle to the experience that people would have had if they could actually still see them in their yard and understand that this is something that we need to protect. We can’t just sit back and let these beautiful things go away.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:15:04] So, yeah, I mean, not to make it about people, because I think a lot of people who do what I do realize that there’s like an intrinsic value to nature. Right? So, I’ve done research on parasite extinction and conservation, and people despise parasites, but they’re an important part of our ecosystems. And without them, some food webs would completely collapse. So, they’re integral to our functioning habitat to a world really.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:15:37] So, like, you know, I think conservation biologists for the most part understand that these things have value, even if they’re ugly, even if they do things that we find repulsive, but they have intrinsic value.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:15:51] But I think for the most part, a lot of other people need to see value in order to think it’s worthwhile. And there’s a whole, as I’m sure you’re aware, there’s whole line of conservation biology that tries to attach a cost or a value to the ecosystem services that bees do, for instance, or how much would it cost if bees didn’t exist to pollinate all of our crops? And I’m sure it’s like quadrillions of dollars, right? But those are costs that people don’t see because they’re not actually spending the money right now, right, because the bees do it for free. And so, it’s kind of a hypothetical value.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:16:34] And I think that the one thing that makes it a real value is seeing these things and feeling something when you see them. Because that’s the thing that has the value is that how does that thing make me feel? And how would I feel if that thing was gone? And for better or for worse, I think that’s just the way things are. Um, you know, we don’t see the value of something until it’s gone.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:17:02] Um, so, I think had the Carolina parakeet still been around and people could get that feeling of seeing them and, and, in valuing that feeling, um, uh, I think that would help a lot, I think.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:17:19] I don’t know if that answered your question. I kind of went off the rails there.

 

David Todd [01:17:22] No, no, that’s really, really helpful. That’s very thorough.

 

David Todd [01:17:27] Well, and I guess this is connected, but maybe a little bit different. You mostly, I think, have been talking about the bird as a species, maybe two subspecies, but, you know, as a group of them, a flock of them, a population. What do you think about the value of one of these Carolina parakeets as an individual? Do you think that they have, you know, the sort of individual merit and value of having a soul, something that’s distinct from, you know, the other parakeets that might be living in that same snag?

 

Kevin Burgio [01:18:07] I mean, in general, I would say that I think that animals, and parrots especially, are a lot more sentient than we give them credit for, in general. I don’t know if I necessarily think of things in terms of souls or not, but I do think in terms of sentience, of awareness of the world around them and being able to make decisions.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:18:34] There’s lots of new research showing that parrot essentially at the same mental capacity as like a five-year-old child, which is considerable. I mean, it’s not nothing, right?

 

Kevin Burgio [01:18:46] You know, there’s, you know, research with African grays that show that they can differentiate between and communicate differences between numbers and shapes and textures and materials.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:19:01] You know, so regardless if you think of souls or not, I mean, to me that’s a spiritual, not necessarily a scientific question, you know, I think that, you know, an individual Carolina parakeet was sentient, that it understood that it was a part of the world around it, that it made conscious decisions to do things.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:19:25] So, if, I mean anybody with a cat or a dog knows that like they’re making decisions. They can feel guilt, well, dogs, shame, you know, embarrassment, and I mean, so they have emotions, right?

 

Kevin Burgio [01:19:43] So, and I certainly believe that parrots do.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:19:50] So, you know, but I don’t, I mean, certainly an individual makes up a population. You know, without individuals, there is no population. And as a conservation biologist, I tend to focus on populations, like, does this species persist or not? But without caring about an individual, at least at some level, then the population doesn’t work, right?

 

Kevin Burgio [01:20:16] So, you know what I think, you know, like sometimes people, animal rights activists, might say it’s not worth the sacrifice of one or 10 if that means the rest of the population can persist. I mean, I don’t necessarily agree with that. I think if you have to sacrifice 10 to learn what you need to do to protect the rest, I mean, it’s not ideal, but it’s better to do that than to let all of them die, right?

 

Kevin Burgio [01:20:47] So, yeah, I mean, I guess it’s, yeah, I mean, there’s value, I think, in each individual, I think.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:20:57] But to me, the bigger value is in if the species persists or not. And that’s probably due in part to my training.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:21:06] You know, would I be happy if my parrot Mojo had died back in the day? Of course not. He’s a family member, you know, and I had emotional attachment to it. And I certainly knew that it was capable of thinking and being aware of itself.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:21:27] So I don’t know if that answers your question. But yeah, I do think there’s value in individuals, but not at the extent of the, of the whole, I guess.

 

David Todd [01:21:41] OK, that’s a nuanced answer to a totally complicated question.

 

David Todd [01:21:49] Well, so, I wanted to sort of pivot a little bit now and talk maybe not so much about just know, your Carolina parakeet experience, but maybe about science and society and, you know, how you see all the interweavings there.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:22:10] You’ve had a number of interesting roles in your career as an ecologist and biologist, from research at Hunter, consulting at Terwilliger, government with Fish and Wildlife, nonprofit with New York Audubon. I’m curious how you feel about these different niches of using your skills and your interests. You know, what sort of impact you might make, what do you think the pluses and minuses of those different attitudes and foundations are? Can you sort of help me there?

 

Kevin Burgio [01:22:55] Yeah. I mean, I have a lot of opinions about this.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:23:00] I think that in general, conservation is hard, and it’s hard because it’s a crisis discipline like medicine. You have, rather than an individual with a disease, you have populations that have, you know, they’re declining. There’s lots of different causes, just like in medicine. And there’s, you know, sadly there’s a lot more losses than wins, especially lately. So, emotionally, it can be a difficult field to be in.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:23:32] And I think there’s prevailing attitude, especially just in general in this field, that the people who do it are lucky to do it. And I think that kind of attitude, which I think is especially prominent in nonprofits, is that you should accept lower pay, more hours, because you have the luxury of doing what you’re passionate about. And so that luxury of doing something you’re passionate about is part of the pay, right?

 

Kevin Burgio [01:24:14] I don’t agree with that all. I think, you know, I’ve had 11 years of education, of post-high school education, four years of postdoctoral work, and a total of eight years of experience since my Ph.D. In any other field, that would be worth a lot of money and because you’re paying for someone’s expertise and experience.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:24:48] And I think there are certain sectors that do, I think, value the expertise and training that we have, or at least until recently with the federal government, I felt it was a place. Because I’ve been meandering a lot. And the reason why is because I have a daughter with my ex-wife and I have childcare responsibilities.  That means I can’t move from where I am within like an hour, hour and a half radius at most.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:25:23] And since I see my daughter, at least for a few days a week, if not more, every time I move away, I have to spend that much time, and she has to spend that much time, or time together in a car.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:25:38] So, because I’m limited geographically, it’s hard to find a job. And especially a permanent job. And that’s why I’ve been doing all of these temporary or term positions for so long, is because there’s only a few places I could work for a permanent position that are close to where I am now.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:26:01] And that’s one of the reasons why I fought so hard for remote positions and I’ve published work on how to work remotely as a post-doc. I’ve done a lot of interviews about it because I think that’s…

 

Kevin Burgio [01:26:14] I mean, I’m a white guy, right? I have a lot privileges. I understand that, but there are certainly a lot people that don’t have the same privileges that I am that are people who just can’t afford to uproot their life to move across the country or a different country to take a post-doc position that only pays like 50 grand a year. I mean the move itself would be what, you know, your take home pay, maybe a third of what that is?

 

Kevin Burgio [01:26:41] Or people have kids that they have to take care of. They have family members they have to take of, they can’t really move.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:26:50] So, I mean, I think COVID really helped people understand that, yes, remote work can actually work and in many ways is good.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:27:02] But I’m sorry, I’m kind of digressing here.

 

David Todd [01:27:04] No, no, you’re totally on track, I follow you. Please, continue.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:27:09] So, you know, so when I worked and have experience in nonprofits, the expectations are that you’re going to work like 80 hours a week and you’re going to take a lot less pay than you would otherwise.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:27:25] And, you, know, I think that there’s a lot that the nonprofit sector does good. I think that without them, that a lot of projects and a lot of species may not be doing as well as they are.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:27:40] But I do think there’s an inherent problem in a lot of nonprofits because the nature of it is there’s not enough money. And there’s enough money anywhere to do the work that we really need to do. And I think it comes back to values, that a segment of the population in our country doesn’t value it. Or is even antagonistic to the idea of it.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:28:09] So, that money, that lack of money plays a role in that when you apply for a grant, especially as a nonprofit, you have to promise the world that you’re going to do everything and you’re going to do it for less than anyone else. And what that does is that moves the cost onto your workers because now you’re expecting them to work longer and harder to meet these deliverables that you made because you need to persist as an organization.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:28:43] And you can’t persist if you actually charge the amount of money it would cost to do it because somebody else is always going to offer to do it for less.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:28:51] So that comes out in your employees. And I think there’s a reason why there’s a lot of burnout in nonprofit work is because you’re underpaid and you’re overworked and you care deeply about it and you are standing by and watching some small wins here and there, but a lot of losses. And it’s hard. It’s hard emotionally to know that no matter what you do, odds are that maybe you’ll save something, maybe you will protect something. But there’s a lot of other stuff you’re not going to be able to do. And which ones do you let go?

 

Kevin Burgio [01:29:33] And there’s the guilt of like, well, maybe if I worked a little bit harder, maybe this project would have worked out the way we wanted it to.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:29:41] And I think that’s incredibly unfair to us because of that attitude that like, well, you’re doing something that you love, so it’s okay that we’re going to only pay you like, $50,000, $60,000 a year when somebody with comparable experience and training and education in a different field would be getting three, four, five times that.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:30:10] And so, I thought I’ve been flailing around trying to find a home, right? To me, I would really like something stable at this point.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:30:24] As I’ve grown older and more experienced in this field, I went from being early on and as an undergrad thinking like, “Oh, we know most of things, right? We have science. Science has been going for hundreds of years. We know almost everything there is to know.”.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:30:39] And then as I became more educated and more experienced, I’m like, “Wow, we don’t know anything really. We know very little about the world, how it works.”.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:30:48] I mean, we know something. I just feel that I went from saying, “I’m going to change the world”, to like, “I just hope that I can do some good and get paid sufficiently where I don’t have to like freak out about money every two weeks”, which is where I’m at now.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:31:17] You know, like, yeah, I mean, I, I means at this point I have to get some money from my wife to put in my account so I could pay my car bill in two days because I’m working as a consultant, but the pay is sporadic because we’re waiting on the state to pay us, which they’re often months late in paying. And it’s not like it’s a full-time job.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:31:44] But I digress there.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:31:47] But anyway, I thought that my home was going to be the Fish and Wildlife Service. When I first started there, I started as a term, and I’m like, “The work culture here is great. We’re doing important work, but we’re not burning everybody out.” Like my boss was very understanding.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:32:07] I mean, I’m a disabled veteran. I have things that make it hard for me to go into the office every day. I mean I’ve been working remotely since I was an undergrad more or less. So, like 20 years almost, I’ve working remotely for the most part.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:32:29] Um, and I, uh, I, I really thought that the Fish and Wildlife Service was going to be my home. I liked the people. I liked the mission. I liked the work/life balance. I liked the pay. It was fair, I think.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:32:46] And, uh you know, obviously all that changed. I was offered a permanent position in the end of December as the regional energy coordinator, which was like a dream job for me. But I ended up turning it down because A), they were going to make me drive an hour and a half every day into the office or at least said that it was likely to happen and it certainly has happened. They were unwilling to work with my reasonable accommodation that I already had in the position I had where I only had to go in like once a week. And, you know, with all the changes. That I knew were coming in the federal government, I turned it down.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:33:32] And that was really hard to do because it was my dream job. Permanent. Doing something that I had just come to start to love as, you know, working in offshore wind and renewable energy. And, um, so that was hard.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:33:51] And then I lost my job in March, but I knew it was ending in February. They told us that we only had until the first week of March. And you know that effectively, you know…  Because for a long time, everybody’s like, “The federal government is the most stable job you can have. Right?” Because, you know, at least in our field, Fish and Wildlife Service, administrations come and go. But you know it’s stable. There’s people that have been there 20, 30 years.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:34:21] So, I was like, “All right, cool.” And now that, I mean, we’ve all seen that that stability is not necessarily guaranteed anymore. I think for the last 40 years, it probably was a very safe job. And so, now I’m like, well, I thought I found the place I want to be and now that’s gone.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:34:46] And would I even still want to work there, even if I did have a job there? Because I suspect that many of the people there are doing things that probably go against their ethics, their morals, their kind of ethos of conservation. And, you know, I give my hats off to people who have managed to stay and endure the changes that have occurred in the last six months.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:35:16] But I don’t know if I could do it, frankly. I don’t know if have it in me to compromise that much in order to get a paycheck. I don’t know. Maybe I could, I mean, maybe. Maybe now I might feel differently because of my financial situation.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:35:36] I mean this all comes back to money and whether or not people value conservation. And right now I don’t think people value it enough.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:35:45] I would argue that people haven’t valued it enough ever. And while it is a privilege to work in doing something that you’re passionate about, I don’t think that comes at the expense of your mental and emotional well-being.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:36:00] So what good is a field if half the people get burned out in 10 years? Or can barely pay their bills? Or have to take time away from their families to travel hours out of your way to go to work every single day? Or work 80 hours a week like I was expected to at New York City Audubon, where I just couldn’t do it because that means I would have to sacrifice time with my daughter, which I wasn’t willing to do.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:36:35] You know, so why is it a privilege to work in this field if you’re expected to sacrifice everything else? I don’t get it. I really don’t.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:36:48] And, you know, we do, I mean, a lot of us, the people I know, myself included, do this because we think it’s important. Because we think that without a voice, all of this stuff that holds us all together, the world itself, I just don’t think people have an appreciation for how much it does for us, even just pollinating crops, but just our emotional well-being, just being able to go outside in the woods.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:37:22] There’s tons of research that shows how important it is for people to get outside and be in nature. And it’s because it’s these intangible things that don’t show up in your bank account. I think that we’ve got to a point where we don’t value it unless it does those things.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:37:41] And I think the people like me and myself included see and understand that it’s important. And I thinking we are willing to make some sacrifices. I mean, I am, I certainly would take a job paying a lot less than I think I probably should be paid.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:37:57] I would work harder at a job that maybe wasn’t super great for my mental health. And I have. I’ve worked a lot harder that’s affected my mental health in some of these jobs because it is important. But I don’t think it should come at the expense of people that are doing it because it’s already a rough row to hoe. Just, just, yeah.

 

David Todd [01:38:24] Well, I was sort of taken with one thing you said in passing there about how important it is to do this work because you’re giving voice to sort of the speechless, the parts of the world that don’t talk in human terms. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your thoughts on science communication because it seems like there are a lot of even areas beyond conservation where the general public doesn’t really understand and maybe under-values science. And I know that’s an issue with conservation, where the issues are really complicated and they require some education, some tolerance and patience. And it takes people like yourself, I think, to interpret and explain it. And, I was curious what you see there.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:39:24] Yeah, well, I mean, I’ll say first that, you know, a lot of people that I work with and talk about think about science communication as dumbing down the message. I mean it’s something that is even outrightly like said: we have to dumb down the message so other people can understand it.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:39:47] I personally don’t like that phrase, Um, because I don’t think that in the end, I don’t people are dumb. And I don’t think, and I think we’ve spent, I think, we’ve gone, so like the history of science communication, right, is you look at like the ’80s, and there was this thing called the information deficit paradigm, where scientists thought that if we just could give everybody the information that we had, they would make the right decision. What it is, is that they just don’t have the right information.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:40:25] Um, and, uh, you know, I don’t, and it’s been proven that that’s not actually the case that, that, you know. And I think that to this day, many people still discount the, uh you know and I guess in our country, the American public and our, and their ability to understand things. I mean, a lot of climate change deniers know quite a bit about it. I mean maybe they understand and interpret things differently. But they certainly you know, like studies have shown that they do know quite a bit about it.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:41:00] And, you know one thing that really struck me when I was doing my post-doc in science communication, I was having this conversation with my boss and I was woefully naive.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:41:10] And I was just like, “I don’t get it. I don t understand how people can’t believe in evolution and climate change. I mean, it’s literally happening. There’s evidence all around us that it’s happening. Like, you can see it, you can feel it. Like you could see that diseases evolve within months and that we can see that. It happens. And with climate change, we could see it. The sea is rising, temperatures are getting warmer. Every year is hotter than the last. And so, how can people face evidence in front of their eyes and not believe it?”

 

Kevin Burgio [01:41:50] I mean, I mean there’s plenty of people that don’t even believe that the Earth is a sphere.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:41:56] And you know, she said to me, and it’s something that I think I’ll always remember, is she’s like, “Well, okay, you think they’re making really illogical decisions, right? Because there’s evidence. They’re ignoring it. And they’re stuck and canalized in this way of seeing the world, even though there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary.”

 

Kevin Burgio [01:42:17] She’s like, “Okay, just imagine you’re from a rural town in, I don’t know, in the deep South, and everybody in your town, your whole family, everybody are evangelical Christians.” (Not to pick on them, but just, it’s a group that tends not to believe in evolution or climate change.).

 

Kevin Burgio [01:42:36] And she’s like, “Okay, so say one day you decide that you’re going to believe in evolution and climate change, and you start telling everybody in you town that you believe in evolution and climate change.”

 

Kevin Burgio [01:42:48] “Well, what happens? You lose your support network, you become a pariah, you might lose some of your family. In the end, what does believing in evolution and climate change really do, day to day? What difference does it make in your life?”

 

Kevin Burgio [01:43:06] “It doesn’t. It doesn’t matter if you believe in evolution or not, or climate change or not. These things happen regardless if you believe in it. And it doesn’t really change our day-to-day decisions all that much, right?”

 

Kevin Burgio [01:43:21] “So, are you saying that they’re making an illogical decision to not believe in climate change?”

 

Kevin Burgio [01:43:27] “No, it’s a very logical decision. Why do they want to like alienate themselves from everybody they love and know? They don’t. So, what’s the point? There is no point.”

 

Kevin Burgio [01:43:38] And I think that’s to me that that kind of wraps up the problem with, I think with climate change now, because a lot of the communications we make are I think in a lot of ways like dumbing it down or thinking about your audience, well, there’s people that, regardless of what we say, are going to trust and believe us because their values already align with ours.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:44:07] And so, when we speak, I think a lot science communication is speaking to the people that we don’t need to convince. They’re already convinced. I mean there’s probably some in the periphery that good science communication might change their mind. Or might get them to believe more strongly in the things that we think that are correct.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:44:28] And I think what it boils down to, and this is just my own opinion, now, is I think we’re not reaching out to the right people. I think that our messages are not taking into account the life experience and the reality that many people live every day.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:44:50] I think a lot of people think that they see great science communicators like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye and all these people that are famous science communicators. But are they really reaching people who don’t believe already that science is the way that we should be looking at the world, that they don’t already believe in climate change and evolution and vote accordingly?

 

Kevin Burgio [01:45:21] I mean, because that’s ultimately what we’re talking about here. You know, like science communication, we’re like, “Oh, we want to educate the public.” But like, we want to educate the public because we want them to vote for people that also value science, that will fund science so that we can continue the work that we’re doing that we think is important.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:45:45] I mean, communication is supposed to change behavior. I mean that’s kind of the point of it, right? We want to change the behavior of people to get them to value the things that we value. And I mean, I think objectively are important, and should be valued. I mean, I think the more we ignore these things, the more the ecosystems collapse, the bigger everybody’s problems are going to be.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:46:10] And so, I think, you know, people ultimately care about people. You know and like I was saying, some of us believe the intrinsic value of nature, but not a lot of people do. So, you know, I think we need to start telling stories about people and how these things, believing these things, voting this way, will affect their day-to-day lives, for the better.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:46:45] And I think that that is kind of like, you know, because too much as being hoisted on the backs of the shoulders of scientists. You know, like if you’re an academic, you have to be a good teacher. You have to be a good mentor. You have to be a good scientist. You have to be good at getting grants. You have to be good at writing. You have, now you have to be good at social media. Now you have to be able to write for general audiences. And so on and so on, and so forth. You’ve got to be good like 900 different things. And nobody is good at 900 different things.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:47:20] And I think there’s a need for people who do science communication professionally, and there are some people who do it. But I think their needs to be embedded more in like research labs or in like departments. Or there are people who do communications in nonprofits. But to me, a lot of the communications in nonprofits are geared towards making more donations, and hyping the stuff that you’re doing so that people want to give you more money, and not really hyping the things that get people to care about these things in the first place.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:48:00] Because again, you’re hyping … your nonprofit’s hyping up, “Oh, look, we did this study, look, it got published, or we protected this area of land. Give us more money, so that we can continue this good work”, which is valid. I’m not saying it’s invalid.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:48:14] But like getting to people to understand why they should value it in the first place, getting that message to people who don’t already agree and subscribe to your newsletter. They already subscribed to your newsletter, they’re on board.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:48:27] And to me, it’s reaching other people and getting them to understand in human terms, what these decisions actually mean to them, their families. And you know, and why do these things actually matter? Why does it matter if you believe in climate change? Because on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t. But if you go to the polls and you vote for somebody who’s pro funding climate change research or renewable energy research, that has a tangible, maybe not today. 10 years from now, it certainly will matter.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:49:07] And I think people, in general, are hard to like future planning, and that’s part of the problem. I took this human ecology class when I was an undergrad. It was in anthropology. And it was really fascinating because one of my term papers was on, “Why aren’t people doing anything about climate change?” It was looking at like kind of the cognitive evolution of people, you know, of tribalism, and all these things that we evolved to, you know, be parts of groups so that we work together to survive as a group.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:49:47] And, you, know, ultimately what it comes down to is if you believe in the strictest evolutionary terms, then it makes no sense for any individual to leave a resource untouched. You know, because like we’re thinking about oil, right? We know that burning oil, or at least most of us know that, burning oil is going to and has already changed the climate, which will make our descendants, make it harder for them to live.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:50:18] But if I don’t take that oil out of the ground, someone’s going to do it. So, if I do that now, I maximize my fitness. I mean, this is a very crude example. I maximize my fitness and I have descendants to worry about.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:50:33] If I do not extract that resource and someone else does, maybe I do not have descendants that make it.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:50:39] I mean this is very strict kind of, you know, I do want to say Darwinian, but of like a kind of like evolution in its simplest turns.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:50:51] So, like, what benefit is there to long-term planning? You know, we all like to believe that we’re, you know, talking about sentience. We can, we make decisions that maybe go against our short-term best interests for the long term. But do we really? We’re capable of it, but do we, really? I mean, I would say that, “No, we, as a society where it’s definitely not.”

 

Kevin Burgio [01:51:16] You know, so that just kind of bears out my research paper, the term paper that I wrote. Basically like we’re incapable of doing it, so we’re not going to. And we’re only going to do something about it when it actually starts literally impacting people. That’s when they’re like, “Oh crap, like, you know, Florida’s half underwater now. Maybe we should do something about it.”

 

Kevin Burgio [01:51:35] Because we don’t see the value in preventing something that hasn’t happened yet, because there’s no guarantee that that thing is going to happen. So, why spend money on it now?

 

Kevin Burgio [01:51:47] So, anyway, I know that’s a long-winded way of looking at communication, but ultimately I think what it starts with is that I think our research should be written in a way that more audiences can understand. And I try to do this as an editor because I think that like an average adult should be able to read a research paper and get the general concept of what has happened, why it’s important, and what maybe should come from it.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:52:19] And I don’t think that’s the case for many research papers because they’re like completely just riddled with jargon and a lot of the, I mean, and it’s the system that we have because I think that when we write papers, we’re writing for a scientific audience and we want the reviewers to believe that what we do is important, that we’re smart, and that therefore that this is valid research.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:52:48] So the way that most research is written is in a very unengaging, arcane, jargon-filled kind of thing to prove to the reviewers that this research is good and that it should be published.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:53:04] Rather than worrying about, and this is something that I argue with people all the time, is like, I want my research papers, I want any person, any scientist, at least any scientist in any field, read it and say, “Oh, I get it.”

 

Kevin Burgio [01:53:19] Like maybe not understand the methods or the analysis, you know, like, you know, because all that stuff is, I mean, by its nature, difficult to understand for people who don’t do it for a living. But like the overall introduction, results, and discussion, I think any any scientist or high school educated person should be able to read a research paper and understand, more or less, what happened and why it’s important and what the results were.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:53:47] And I think that’s something that will require a paradigm shift, I think, in the way that academics go about publishing work. Um.

 

David Todd [01:54:01] Can you give me an example there? I know you’ve written for all sorts of things, I mean, Vice, NPR, the Atlantic, Smithsonian, New York Times. How do you take a subject that you’ve been thinking about and maybe published in a scientific journal, and you try to mold that, reshape it, massage it somehow, and then put it through the popular media mill so that it’s true to what you want to say, but it’s intelligible to people who would read it, who don’t have your expertise.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:54:39] Yeah, I mean, I think that the, I think the key is storytelling, and I think a lot of the things that I’ve written, you know, like the thing, the thing about the observation in upstate New York that I published in the Washington Post is a good example of that.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:54:53] It’s a story about people who saw a flock of birds and freaked out. And there’s this, all of this like historical kind of ramifications of that within this one small town. Because they saw this group of birds land on this house, and this was like in 1780 during the Revolutionary War, and they landed on the house. And these were people who were frankly, like right off the boat from Germany, they were all very unused to where they lived. They were all farmers and they saw these birds.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:55:32] And like, “Oh my God, that’s the sign of the Apocalypse, the end is near.” And then, you know, months later, the British troops came in and burnt everything down in that area. And they’re like, “Holy crap, here it is. This is the end times. Everything’s on fire. Everything is exploding around us.”

 

Kevin Burgio [01:55:53] Obviously, it wasn’t the end. In all these things and the importance of that area for the agriculture and the Revolutionary Army, it was like weaving a narrative about why this one observation was important. And therefore, and how that kind of played into what the actual distribution of this bird is. Because it’s such a unique observation, and it wasn’t something they saw every day, obviously, the bird didn’t live there all year, all the time. It was just a rare occasion.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:56:25] It’s just like a snowy owl that ends up in the Bahamas. It’s crazy, right? People will say, “Holy crap, there’s a snowy owl on the beach in the Bahamas.”

 

Kevin Burgio [01:56:36] So, that’s just a long-winded story in this historical kind of anecdote that talks about a very small part of my research, which was just basically, “Yeah, the birds weren’t up there. Everybody used to believe that, but they really weren’t.”

 

Kevin Burgio [01:56:55] I think that at the end of the day, we got to be able to tell more stories like that, but about more important things. People care about Carolina parakeets, and that’s why I got picked up so well. But we got to be able tell those types of stories about things that actually really, really matter.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:57:16] Where are the stories?

 

Kevin Burgio [01:57:18] We hear statistics and all this stuff about climate change. This is the hottest record, hottest summer in the last 100,000 years or whatever.

 

Kevin Burgio [01:57:29] Yeah, but what does that mean? We understand, most people understand what it’s like when it’s hot out and maybe it’s hot for a couple more days, but does that really mean? How does that affect your life? How will it affect your life? Where’s an example of how it has affected someone’s life?

 

Kevin Burgio [01:57:49] I just think that bringing it home and making them stories that people can empathize with, or at least, you know, understand and see where the correlation is with their own life. I think that’s where we need to do more work as communicators, is really find and write stories in an engrossing, interesting way to hook people in to understand that, “Yeah, maybe this person who lives in the deep South in this evangelical Christian stronghold can say like, well, if I keep doing what I’m doing, you know, what’s going to happen to me, my family, and everybody else? What is happening to other families just like mine already?”

 

Kevin Burgio [01:58:38] Because I think that we really have to make the point that these things have real implications for them and the people that they care about. Because like I said, people only seem to value things that they directly feel value from. Right? And I think we have to make the case that there is value and they have to see what the value is and feel it in order to value it. And I, I think that’s where we need to do a lot more work as communicators.

 

David Todd [01:59:11] Well, I guess it’s like your, your old college term paper about, you know, our tribalism and you know that we’re all sort of parochial and, you know, we huddle with those that we know and care about. Um, um, yeah.

 

David Todd [01:59:27] Um, well, you’ve taken us on a nice journey. Thank you so much. Um, I always want to make sure that, that we don’t close things off without making sure that you feel like you’ve had a chance to cover everything that is on your mind. Is there anything you’d like to add?

 

Kevin Burgio [01:59:47] Um, I mean, I think I’ve kind of gone on quite a bit about some of the stuff. But I mean I think at the end of the day, um, I don’t know, maybe I sound bitter and resentful. I don’t know. But I’m not. I don’t think I am. I think that, you know, I want things to be better for not only the world, all people, you know, myself, you know, endangered species, all those things.

 

Kevin Burgio [02:00:18] I think I’m just trying to, like, articulate how difficult it all is. And how the systems that are in place right now don’t really value the work that we do. And I think that’s really unfortunate.

 

Kevin Burgio [02:00:35] And I, and I think that trying to get people to value it more is the only way we’re going to move forward in a way that is actually productive, that we’re going to be able to do anything.

 

Kevin Burgio [02:00:48] I mean, coming down the pike in the next 50, 60 years in my daughter’s lifetime, there’s going to be some drastic changes to the world. And I think we’re past the point now that we can stop that from happening. I mean, we could presumably soften the blow a little bit. But things are going to change.

 

Kevin Burgio [02:01:10] And I think even a way a lot of conservation folks think about it is they’re still trying to grasp on to some version of the past and say, we need to restore this habitat to this pristine thing like it was before, you know like 100 years ago, or before Europeans came here or whatever.

 

Kevin Burgio [02:01:31] But I think the thing that I wish more people thought about is those times are gone. You can spend all the time you want restoring an ecosystem to whatever it was 200 years ago, but 50 years from now, it’s going to be something completely different or at least transitioning into something completely different.

 

Kevin Burgio [02:01:52] And we need to get on top of that. We need to better be able to model what’s going to happen in the future so we can anticipate it.

 

Kevin Burgio [02:02:02] Maybe protecting land now that’s important isn’t going to be important in 20 years, 30 years, 40 years from now.

 

Kevin Burgio [02:02:09] Where is going to be important? Like you care about birds? Or you care about say red knots. They eat a bunch of horseshoe crab eggs along the Northeast coast. Well, what happens when the water gets too warm for them and they start going up to Maine or Nova Scotia, if they’re even still around?

 

Kevin Burgio [02:02:31] What are we doing, how are we trying to anticipate these things, and how are we putting this into our long-term planning, because I don’t think a lot of people are.

 

Kevin Burgio [02:02:41] I mean, I just wrote a climate change synthesis for USGS a couple of years ago about how climate change is impacting and will impact Northeast species of greatest conservation need. I just wrote the Connecticut Wildlife Action Plan, which kind of sets the stage for the next 10 years of conservation in the state.

 

Kevin Burgio [02:03:02] But even there, we talk about climate change as a threat. We talk about adaptive strategies and the RAD [Resist-Accept-Direct] Framework and all these things. But they’re all conceptual at this point. And where are we really going with all of this?

 

Kevin Burgio [02:03:23] I mean, I think these are the important questions that people should be worrying about now.

 

Kevin Burgio [02:03:27] But again, it’s even for scientists. It hasn’t happened yet. I mean, it’s happening, right? And we’re starting to see things being affected by it, but we’re still kind of stuck in this paradigm of like we have to look to the past. And I don’t think we’re looking enough toward the future. I don’t know. That’s just where I’m at.

 

David Todd [02:03:52] You know, I guess at some point we all get a little nostalgic.

 

Kevin Burgio [02:03:57] Right.

 

David Todd [02:03:57] And the future can be scary. So, maybe a bad combination of the two.

 

Kevin Burgio [02:04:06] Yeah. I mean, because it’s a lot easier to say, well, 50 years ago, this was a coastal marsh. And if we put in some seawalls and we dig out or replace the ditching, the mosquito ditches, it will be like it was 50, 100 years ago. It’s easy, frankly. I mean the work is hard, but to conceptualize it is easy.

 

Kevin Burgio [02:04:28] But to conceptualize, where is that coastal marsh going to be 50 years from now? Is it even going to exist, because there’s all this development right behind it and it can’t migrate? That’s a little harder to conceptualize. Well, what do we do then?

 

Kevin Burgio [02:04:42] And I know by just my own experience with people, we can’t even think about that. It’s too big. We can’t think about it. We can only think about what we can control right now. So why even bother thinking about it? Fair enough. I mean, I get it.

 

Kevin Burgio [02:05:02] Like I said, the stuff we do is hard enough as it is. I mean, restoring something to 100 years ago that we can easily conceive and maybe even see pictures of what it used to look like, that’s hard enough. But to try to restore something for what it might be 50 years from now, yeah, it’s an intellectual exercise at this point.

 

Kevin Burgio [02:05:23] But I think it’s something that we need to start doing.

 

Kevin Burgio [02:05:27] But yeah, I got it. It’s hard. It’s an added complexity on something that’s already incredibly complex.

 

Kevin Burgio [02:05:37] So, you know, I get it. I just think that we need to, we need at least start having those conversations in earnest. And I think we need start looking forward a little bit more to see how we can go about salvaging what’s left 50 to 100 years from now.

 

David Todd [02:05:55] Yeah, it’s sobering, but you have a daughter, and I have two, and it’s worth making a good effort on their behalf.

 

David Todd [02:06:12] I really appreciate your help here, Kevin. It’s been a pleasure. A tough, tough subject, but a pleasure nevertheless. So, thank you so much.

 

Kevin Burgio [02:06:23] You’re welcome.

 

David Todd [02:06:24] I will turn off the recording, and if we have any discussions after that, we can explore that if you’d like.

 

Kevin Burgio [02:06:33] Okay.

 

David Todd [02:06:33] Is that good?

 

Kevin Burgio [02:06:33] Yes.

 

David Todd [02:06:33] Good.