For the Birds

sign on the door reads the last Archive. Step outside to a house in Silver Spring, Maryland, in the year nineteen fifty eight, Rachel Carson, a nature writer, had just started work on a new book. She hadn't decided what to call it yet, but she knew what she wanted to say. People all over the country bird lovers noticed something in nineteen fifty eight. When spring came, the birds didn't come. The robins didn't come. The tufted titmis didn't come,

the songbirds, the shore birds. There were just very few birds. Carson threw herself into a world of research, even though she was busy, exhausted. She was taking care of both her adopted son, a six year old boy named Roger, and her eighty nine year old mother, who was dying. Carson read and she researched all summer. That fall, the postman brought a package to her door, a gift for Roger. It was a vinyl record, American Bird Songs, Volume one.

Here are the songs and calls of sixty familiar birds as recorded in the woods, fields and gardens of North America the Laboratory of Ornithology at Carnell University. Some of the birds are widely distributed, others are restricted to special habitat. Roger listened to this record over and over. Carson sat down to write a thank you note to the sender.

One of our actors is going to read it. But let me just say first that I've listened to recordings of the actual Rachel Carson, who has sort of an odd voice, and this really is what she sounds like, so much so that it gives me the chills. The record of bird Song that came Friday gave Roger the greatest delight, First the thrill of receiving a package by mail,

then the pleasure in the record itself. He has a very sweet feeling for all living things and loves to go out with me and look and listen to all that goes on. I know he will have great pleasure in recognizing the song from this record, First the mocking bird that still pours his song down our chimney, then the cardinals that begin to whistle in January, and all the rest. There was a special and unheralded thrill for

me in the record. During the song of the wood peewee, I heard in the background the unmistakable voice of the veery, not once, but several times. Of all, the bird song that has the quality of purest magic for me, considered America's foremost songbird is the hermit thrush, now singing from a balsam spire in the Adirondack Mountains. How do you even record a hermit thrush atop a balsam spire in the Adirondack Mountains? And what happened to the birds in

nineteen fifty eight? Welcome to the last Archive, the show about how we know what we know and why it seems lately as if we don't know anything anymore. A while ago, when I was researching an essay about Rachel Carson for The New Yorker, I got completely lost in these recordings of bird songs. Carson was writing a book while Roger played these thirty threes, over and over again. It was called Silent Spring, and it changed the world. But I can't shake the feeling that if you're writing

sound Spring now, nothing would change. Carson is to me a kind of canary in a coal mine, a warning. People were able to listen to her then and to act on what she said in a way that people don't listen to warnings and act on them these days until it seems it's too late. This season, we've been trying to solve a Who've done it? Who killed Truth? And this might sound nuts, but I decided to do what I thought maybe Carson would do. She would ask

the birds next, the veries descending spirals. Rachel Carson was born in western Pennsylvania in nineteen oh seven on a sixty five acre farm along the Allegheny River. Her mother took her for long walks, teaching her the names and songs of all the birds. This is almost always how it works, parent to child, the passing on of a body of knowledge. All her life, Carson was fascinated by birds.

Wherever Carson went, she'd listen, and then there were the sounds of other smaller birds, the rattling call of the kingfisher that perched between forays after fish on the posts of the dock, the call of the phoebe that nested under the eaves of the cabin, the red starts that foraged in the birches on the hill behind the cabin, and forever, it seemed to me asked each other the way to wiscast it, for I could easily twist their

syllables into the witch's wiscassette witch's wiscassette. The oven bird sometimes called teacher bird from its song. People have always listened to birds, and they've been trying to write down their songs for thousands of years. A lot of birds, like the cuckoo or the chickadee, are named after the songs they sing. The first person to try to render birdsong in musical notation did that in the year sixteen fifty.

Eighteenth century scholars then tried to understand birdsong not as music but as language, and people started trying to record the sound of birds in eighteen eighty nine, almost as soon as the phonograph was invented. As a little girl, Chursen kept a list of birds, writing them down in a notebook when she spotted them. Counting birds making bird lists had just become a hobby in the United States.

Bird enthusiasts hoped this hobby would replace bird hunting because people had begun to notice that certain species of birds were disappearing, especially one, the passenger pigeon a dove. In the seventeenth century, over North America, flocks of passenger pigeons rushing across the sky could block out the sun for hours and hours and hours. The flocks were huge, some estimated more than two hundred miles long. You could knock passenger pigeons out of the sky with a stick by

the dozens. People ate pigeon pot pie, broiled pigeons, roast pigeons, stuffed pigeon, you get the idea. They gorged on pigeons. By the middle of the nineteenth century, shooting passenger pigeons had become a sport. In eighteen sixty nine, one hunter made a bet that he could kill five hundred in a single day. Took him only nine hours. Hunters would ride wagons out to pigeon nesting sites and slaughter them by the thousands, then ship the carcass as to cities

by train on ice cars. You could make a lot of money shooting passenger pigeons, or you could just do it for practice. Dead birds became a fashion. Like fur coats. Women wore bird feathers on their hats, and sometimes whole birds, terns, herons, gulls, egrets. In eighteen eighty six, an ornithologist in New York counted the birds on women's hats. He spotted one hundred and

seventy four birds from forty species in just two days. Finally, by eighteen ninety, people began to notice the passenger pigeons had disappeared. Spring came and the flocks didn't come back. Some people thought they'd migrated to Argentina or something. Those are the bird, declined denialists, but most people weren't denialists. Newspaper writers began to lament this sad passing their children would never know a passenger pigeon. Toronto Globe and Mail,

June thirtieth, nineteen hundred. The present generation knows little or nothing of wild pigeons except by hearsay, and is apt to scoff at the stories of old timers when they tell of the enormous flocks of these beautiful birds that numbered millions and fairly darkened the face of the sun in their flight, or actually broke down large lines of trees when they sit on it. Some people tried to do something. They founded the first conservation movements, the Audubon Society,

the American Ornithologists Union. I believe you have an announcement to make. They held gatherings like this one. On December ninth, nineteen o nine in New York, someone proposed a reward of one hundred dollars for a freshly killed passenger pigeon. The idea was to preserve it for posterity or for science, or both, but people still had misgivings about killing birds, even for sciences. You have something to say, Indeed, sir, I would not kill a specimen for one thousand dollars,

even to prove that I had seen one. And I wish that everyone else feels as I do. All offers for skins or dead birds ought to be withdrawn because at the present crisis, these might result in killing the last pair. Yes, I wish to withdraw my offer of one thousand dollars for a freshly killed passenger pigeon. Well, then why not let your offer stem for the location of a live specimen. I would gladly give two hundred

dollars for that. I am authorized to offer the following award three hundred dollars for first information of a nesting pair of wild passenger pigeons undisturbed. Once they finally got organized, bird lovers would go on to have a lot of influence. But for the passenger pigeon, it came to eight Boston Globe,

December eighteenth, nineteen ten. One solitary passenger pigeon, ending her life at the Zoological Garden in Cincinnati, is today all that remains of an American species that early in the last century swarmed over the continent in flocks numbering billions. Her name was Martha. When Rachel Carson was seven years old, Martha, the last passenger pigeon, died The next year, eight year old Rachel wrote her very first story. It's about a pair of friends looking for a house. She kept on

writing and writing about birds. Countless discoveries made the day memorable. The bob White's nest tightly packed with eggs, the oriole's aerial cradle, the framework of sticks which the cuckoo calls a nest, and the lichen covered home of the humming bird Carson went to college and then in nineteen thirty two to graduate school, enrolling in a PhD program at Johns Hopkins studying zoology, but after a few years she had to drop out to take a job to feed

her family. She never married, but during the depression she supported her parents and her sister and brother and their kids too. She started working for what became the US Fish and Wildlife Service, mainly writing reports and producing a radio program. She kept on thinking about birds, though, and so do a lot of other people. During the Second World War, the BBC tried to keep up its own long standing tradition of broadcasting bird song over the radio

to help people keep calm and carry on. But in this recording you can hear the sound of Royal Air Force bombers flying above the birds. After the war, Rachel Carson wrote a beautiful, stirring study of the sea. The Sea Around Us, appeared in The New Yorker as a profile of the Sea, the New Yorker's first ever profile of something other than a person who won a National Book Award, who was on the New York Times bestseller

list for a record breaking eighty six weeks. She bought a little summer house in Maine, where she wrote another bestseller, The Edge of the Sea. In nineteen fifty five. She was still taking care of all her family, her mother and niece, and her niece's little boy, Roger. That year, Carson took Roger for a walk in the woods. He was three. Roger went along to listen for veeries, his first bird walk, I guess, and I'd like to have

had a movie. He was told we'd have to be quiet, so he tiptoed along the path with elaborate caution, talking in a loud whisper. He seemed to find the whole experience very exciting. Roger's still around. My producer Ben, and I'd drove out to his house to meet him and his wife, Wendy and their old yellow lab. I came to talk about birds and about that album A Bird Song had come in the mail in nineteen fifty eight. And would you any more microphones? Yeah? I see that.

I shouldn't have even bothered with the recording. Roger's in the recording business. That's why his house is full of microphones. But as for birds, he never got the bug the way Rachel Carson did. She tried very hard, but you know, the truth is I was a little boy, and you

know I appreciated it, and I appreciate the birds. But but you know, I was never the house in Maine had they used to have these stairs that would go down and she could go down there and lie there for three hours listening and looking at the birds, and you know, I'd be lucky to make five minutes. Roger was kind of embarrassed that he didn't turn out to be a bird expert. Carson said that he was as lively as seventeen crickets. He just couldn't sit still long enough,

quietly enough to really watch birds. I get that I don't have the bird bug either. I have more of the dog bug. Hi, baby, get a word in here. There were a lot of birds at the bird feeder outside Roger's window. Neither of us had any idea what a single one of them was. Instead, we played with his dog. Something else we have in common. We've both been in love at different times with this album, The mocking Bird is a favorite, singing and ever changing medley,

often repeating each phrase three to five times. The spring of nineteen fifty eight, after Roger turned six, that was the Silent Spring when birdwatchers noticed that there just weren't a lot of birds around. It turned out that the birds had been poisoned by DDT, a pesticide the towns had been spraying all over the country. Members of an organization called the Committee Against Mass Poisoning filed a lawsuit in New York to try to stop the spraying. They

asked Carson to write about it. They also center that album Birdsong for Roger. Carson wanted to cover the trial, but taking care of Roger and her mother, she really wasn't in much of a position to. She thought, though, that another New Yorker writer maybe ought to cover the trial. It has occurred to me that eb White might be interested for various reasons, and it is the sort of thing he could be devastating about. If he chose, I thought I might write him. Eb White was one of

the best loved writers in the country. Dear mister White, it would delight me beyond measure if you should be moved to take up your own pen against this nonsense, though that is far too mild a word. There is an enormous body effect waiting to support anyone who will speak out to the public, and I shall be happy to supply the references. Rachel Carson. White said no, that Carson should write the article. He later told her that he himself didn't know a chlorinated hydrocarbon from a squash bug,

and so Carson did write the article. It took her four years and agreed to the size of a book. It's the book she'd always be known for. It reads to me like a eulogy for the last passenger pigeon Martha, as if all the birds were the last of their species, as if all the living things might disappear. There was a strange stillness the birds, for example, where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen

anywhere were moribund. They trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices. There was now no sound. Only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh. For a long time, Carson called the book men against

the earth. Then she came up with a new title, Silent Spring, was published in The New Yorker in the summer of nineteen sixty two, and as a book a few months later. Afternoon, I have several announcements to make. The President John F. Kennedy was asked about it at a press conference. There appears to be growing concern among scienas such a possibility of dangerous long range side effects

from the widespread use of DDT and other pesticides. Have you considered asking the Department of Culture or the Public Health Service to take a closer look at this? Yes, and I know that they already are, I think particularly of course, since Miss Carson's book, But they are examining the matter. A few books have so wholly changed the world.

Miss Carson's book led to the passage of the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Wilderness Act, the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and it helped establish the Environmental Protection Agency. At least for a while too, the spring of DDT slowed down. Today, It's not just the birds. It's not just DDT. It really is man against the Earth. We've poisoned the entire planet with carbon emissions. We've changed the very climate, clean water,

clean air. When it comes to carbon, there is no silence. There's a flood of fossil fuel industry pr great, gushing gobs of it, like Xon touting its clean gas over one million miles to pool that xons advanced clean engine formula will keep entire fuel systems running clean and intake vowels. When the birds went silent, and Rachel Carson noticed and

wrote about it, that changed everything. Now we notice everything, the species extinctions, the rising temperatures, the melting ice, the frightening weather, the floods and fires, the refugees, the spread of diseases, the pandemics. We notice, but we don't do nearly enough. Why I still think the birds have an answer. The Morse code of the yellow bellied sapsucker is less regular than the drum of other woodbeckers, and it's call note as harsh. I mean, like a collect baseball cards.

You have dinosaurs, you count birds. You when you started counting boods three you're kidding. That's Ken Rosenberg and applied conservationist at the Cornell Lab forn Mythology in Ithaca, New York. He's lead author of a huge study published in the journal Science it demonstrated that close to three billion birds have disappeared from the United States and Canada since nineteen seventy. My producer Ben and I went to see him at Cornell and we went for a walk to listen for

birds in a sanctuary called sap Sucker Woods. What do we sing over there? Cardinal? I felt haunted there by Rachel Carson. I don't know that she'd ever been to Sapsucker Woods, but it's the place she would have loved. While she was writing Sound Spring, she'd been an unbearable pain from surgery and radiation. She could barely walk. She'd been treated for tumors on her breasts and cancer had spread.

She'd go on TV wearing a wig. She testified before Congress, hiding from everyone that she'd come in on a wheelchair. She died in nineteen sixty four, only fifty six years old. She had her ashes spread in the sea, her ideas spread everywhere, in the flight of every bird. Rachel Carson's. One of Rachel Carson's close friends who was Chandler Robbins, who worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and

they would go bird watching together. In response to Rachel's work, Chandler Robbins created the Breeding Bird Survey, the North American Breeding Survey, and it was just this vision he had that Wow, we could count birds everywhere, and it is the primary source of all our bird data. That's what our whole paper was really based on, was fifty years of Breeding Bird Survey data. It's as if Carson is one of Rosenberg's co authors. I love that and birds

are a body of evidence. After the disappearance of the passenger pigeon, the Audubon Society had urged people not to hunt birds, but to go out and count them, and they did. Their lists had just kept piling up count after count after count data. Every year. At Christmas, there's this thing called the Christmas Bird Count. All over the country. People get up in the morning, go meet up in assigned spot with other birders, and fan out to count birds.

It's like the US Census, except not every ten years every year, and not done by a government agency, but just by regular people. Bird counting is probably the richest

kind of citizen science ever known. We had a data set from nineteen seventy to twenty seventeen, forty eight year data set, and that was the primary data set we also we also used the Christmas Bird Count, which dates back even farther, so we were pretty blown away when we ran those numbers and found this net loss of three billion birds across five hundred and twenty nine species.

So that's the big story, is that not only are a lot of species declining in their population, but we are seeing this tremendous total overall loss of abundance of birds, which is what's going to have bigger effects on the ecosystems. The abundant red eyed bureos in the tree tops can become monotonous and the regularity of their short, robin like phrases. I started asking Rosenberg about how they made those recordings decades ago, and he said he really didn't know anything

about them. But then, just at that moment, a guy just happened to walk past on this little wooden bridge we were on, and Rosenberg called him over. Actually, Leo probably narrow spit because he has tourist of the lab. Leo Sack, a public program's assistant and librarian as a lab I'm not I'm not a historic expert on this. Yes, I'm on the visitor center team. I do some tourist

of the building. So my understanding is that in nineteen twenty nine, Fox Movie Tone approached Arthur Allen and said, we have a new technology that we're trying out putting sound into movies instead of having silent films, and we want to show off this new technology using birdsong, and can you help us get some recordings of birdsong. Arthur A. Allen was the guy who started the lab here. Also he is the voice on that old Cornell Birdsong album.

This is him ros livers and shorter phrases from Canada to Florida. In nineteen fifteen, the year after Martha the Passenger pigeon died, Professor Allen taped up a sign on his office door. It said Laboratory of Warnithology. The door was just a door to his office, but he planted his flag. I like to think of that lab is a little like the last archive. Imagine there's a place in our world where the birds go. So when Fox Movie Tone came to Arthur Allen about recording birds, of

course he said yes. And the story is I've heard it is that they started out chasing the birds around with their big, heavy equipment, and songbirds being songbirds, flew away. But Fortunately, doctor Allen was very interested in the behaviors of birds, and so could figure out things like where was the bird likely to perch on its own and sing?

And so they set up their equipment, pointed at a likely spot, walked away from it, and sure enough, Uh, some of the birds came and sang into their microphones. Who's excellent? I can't believe you're just that was the most fortuitous. I think you swooped down and dropped out of the sky may be rarer than catching a songbird. The recording device that album American Bird Songs that a friend of Carson's had mailed to Roger in nineteen fifty eight,

Much of it was recorded in these very woods. Here are the songs and calls of sixty familiar birds as recorded in the woods, fields and gardens of North America the Laboratory of Ornithology at Cornell University. Unless otherwise stated, they were recorded in central New York State. There are three billion fewer birds in the US and Canada now than there were then, and we wouldn't even know if it weren't for all the bird counting that people do.

Ken Rosenberg study doesn't make an argument about what's causing this decline, but a lot of other research points to climate change, and as Rosenberg study says, all other threats to birds are exacerbated by climate change within one human lifetime, within my lifetime, we've lost more than a quarter of our birds. Silent spring, silent century, through the night, the incessant cause of the purple whale can be heard from New Brunswick to northern Georgia. Once I started looking for

people obsessed with recorded birds, I found them everywhere. John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Lab Befornathology, was eight when he first heard an LP of North American bird songs, because that was a bird geek and I wanted to understand what the bird songs were that I was listening to, and so I memorized all the bird songs of Minnesota from that record, and that was the first time I'd ever heard of this place. I love that Arthur Allen created the lab, and his voice on that record of

bird song taught young John Fitzpatrick to love birds. Everyone calls him fits and now fitz is the man behind eBird, an online crowdsourced bird database. The lab does all kinds of different things. Fitz has a whole room in the lab basement with drawers filled with stuffed birds. They even had a passenger pigeon. But of all the things they do at the lab, the place where Fits really lit up was when he showed us the collection of bird song. So this is the the archive, this is like this

is like Mecca. This is like day in the largest physical repository of natural sounds in the world. Here hundreds of thousands of recordings in this room. You can lock the door behind you and leave it to her. Yeah, it's fun. Every bird you can imagine across decades and decades. I guess if you love a thing, you want to hold onto every detail about it. Put it in a lab, keep it in a drawer, recorded on wax, lock it in an archive. But these bird songs aren't just sitting here.

Fits is on a mission, a mission to change Hollywood's bird illiteracy. So most moviemakers don't know that a lot of us can actually tell what that bird is, and that that's in the wrong continent. You know, you hear loons in Africa, and you hear morning warblers in South American rainforests, and it's crazy. The good filmmakers Lucas, Terry Malick,

El Spielberg. These guys when they need a track, they actually they want to get a tract from the authorities who know what birds are there, and they can get the best recordings possible. They come here, Yeah, and they come here. So let's see Harry Potter movies. They use sounds from here, the owls, the griffin say hello tou. In fact, this is a true story. That griffin which makes this sort of weird screeching sound that is flying.

That screeching sound is a limpkin. It's an American snail eating bird that looks like a heron, and it's got a very wild sound, And they used the limpkin sound. The particular recording they used was recorded by Arthur Allen. Most fascinating of all the sounds that come from the larger Southern swamplands are the weird cries of the lympkins. Perhaps they have given rise to some of the superstitions

that haunt our fast disappearing marshes. After explaining to us about hippogriffs, Fitz took us to see a machine that the labit invented, some AI gizmo that's supposed to be able to name birds by listening to bird songs, and one day it's supposed to be able to count birds by listening to those songs. It's not citizen science, it's computer science. But Fitz is way better than the machine. The gold correct watching fits try to beat the AI machine. I found as if wondering about other ways that we

can know about change over time, aside from birds. I was getting a little tired of listening to birds, to be honest, and then okay, stick with me. I started thinking about another kind of bird song, tweets. You can count tweets human tweets on Twitter, sort of like the way you can count bird calls and someone has friend. Moore is an assistant professor in the UC Davis Department of Environmental Science and Policy, and she's the lead author of a study of tweets. She and her team collected

more than two billion Twitter posts about the weather. The idea for this payback came from the observation that everyone talks about the weather, the kind of almost a kind of universal phenomenon that wherever you go you can chat yeah, yeah exactly. American Tweets, Volume one. Here are the tweets and posts of several high volume Twitter accounts has recorded on smartphones and laptops across North America. It's so hot dog something about a rainy day, so cozy, it's pretty warmth.

I'm so mad about the snow outside. Oh MG, I swear when it comes to driving in the rain, people in southern California are idiots on the road. The weather is nuts. Okay, so I'd rather listen to bird song. But more study, it's genius. What I thought was cool about the study was, you know, how do you how do you measure the phenomenon of you know, the remarkability

of temperature? And with these new large social media data their it can allow us to get at these questions than to measure the phenomenon in a really kind of comprehensive way. More designed to study to measure the remarkability of climate based on geolocated tweets about the weather. Her study is actually weirdly a lot like Ken Rosenberg's bird study, kind of mixed up with Fitz's lab study of bird song. Think about Twitter as human bird song, and then the

Twitter feed is a kind of citizen science. We are the birds, but we're collecting our own data. Worrying about our own demise long before coronavirus, because even then there was plenty to worry about. You know, I think that one theory of change that maybe some people have, which is really that eventually climate change will just become so bad it will become obvious that we have to do something about It will kind of the urgency of it

will become immediately apparent. It will get everyone on board and will kind of collectively come to the sailor that's the time by which it's too late to do anything. Remark Ability changes rapidly with repeated exposure to unusual temperatures, Franmore and her team wrote in their report. In other words, we get used to new weather and something between two and eight years. You don't compare this year's weather to the weather of your childhood. You compare this year's weather

to last year's weather. It turns out we get used to a new climate really fast. Even if it's killing us. Really is an epistemological problem, it's not quite an evidentiary problem. We have endless evidence. Fossil fuel companies have been suppressing that evidence for decades, but I mean, man, the jig is up still. It's not easy to pay attention to that evidence. For the reasons more study illustrates who killed truth Exxon Shell, Yes, God damn it. But also the

slowness of time it's so hard to notice. That makes it even more impressive that Rachel Carson did over increasingly large areas of the United States. Spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent, where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song. It can be hard to notice change that takes place on so long a timescale, a human lifetime or even longer, like climate change DDT. That stuff was sprayed one day and the next day the

world seemed quieter. You could notice that, you could follow a lawsuit to stop the spraying, you could write a book. Also, the DDT industry, the DDT lobby was tiny. The fossil fuel industries are gigantic, and they control a massive part of the world's economy. Then, too, climate change is slower. Still, you can see it, and people have been writing books about it for a very long time. Rachel Carson first wrote about it in nineteen fifty, twelve years before she

published Silent Spring. It is now established beyond question that a definite change in the Arctic climate set in about nineteen hundred, that it became astonishingly marked about nineteen thirty, and that it is now spreading into subarctic and temperate regions. The frigid top of the world is very clearly warming up. After writing about DDT in Silent Spring, Carson started working on a new book about the warming of the seas.

But of course by then she was dying. The December after Silent Spring came out, she fainted from pain in a department store while shopping for a Christmas present for Roger. She's buying him a record player. Roger would lose her not long afterward. But what if she'd finished that book, the book she'd wanted to write about climate change decades and decades and decades ago. We live in an age of risings. In our own lifetime. We are witnessing a

startling alteration of climate. Carson never wrote that book. I still think a lot though, about what it might have happened if she had. She'd lived long enough. She wrote Sound Spring at a time when books were a big deal. She could go on CBS at a time on there only three television networks, and she could testify before Congress at a time when Congress wasn't polarized, at time when

laws actually got written and passed. That's why I wish so dearly that she'd lived to write the book she planned to write about the warming of the seas, before the political chaos, before the no holds barred defense of the fossil fuel industry, before internet driven conspiracy theories, before social media mob rule, before the virus silent killer of our spring. We went back out to sap Sucker Woods to listen to the birds, then back to our hotel, turned in for the night. It had one more place

to go in the morning. The last place Ben and I went during our visit to Cornell was the archive entering the Crotch Library. Crotch Library, Crotch Library. There's another story about the Silence of Birds, written by someone who'd been an undergraduate at Cornell when it first founded its Laboratory of Oneithology, eb White. His papers are at Cornell.

An archivist Asian Neely had pulled a few folders for US Morning Yes in nineteen fifty eight, when Rachel Carson had asked eb White to write the book that became Silent Spring. She had thought of White because he was such a charming writer, and because he wrote a lot about nature Stuart Little in nineteen forty five, Charlotte's Web in nineteen fifty two. I don't think Carson really wanted White to write about DDT. She was really just slyly

getting his help and pitching the story to the New Yorker. Anyway, Carson and White had stayed close, and after Carson died, White wrote one last children's book, The Trumpet of the Swan, Analogy for the Earth. On a lonely pond on a day in spring, some baby swans were hatched. One of the young swans had a problem. He had come into the world without a voice. He couldn't utter a sound. I have written the story of this little swan, and

I will read it to you. During the whole of our visit to Ithaca, I'd been overwhelmed by this scale, the enormity of evidence for species extinction and for climate change. All that bird data, billions and billions of observations, people wandering in the woods and fields and long beaches counting birds. Then there's the study of billions of tweets. But sitting in that arc five with Ebe White's papers, I remembered how badly people also need stories fables. The fifth signet

was different. He opened his mouth but didn't say a thing. He made an effort to say beep, but no sound came. I think he came into the world lacking a voice. A young male Swan will be greatly handicapped in finding a mate if he is unable to say co ho co ho. Nearly everyone we talked to you for this episode they'd first gotten fascinated with birds in the natural world has little kids. That's one reason Ben and I were in the eb White archive to read letters to

him that had been written by little kids. This is a pack of letters from the combinations in the third grade classroom. Dear mister White, I am a pupil from Saint Leo's Primary School in Altona, North My name is Diana and I'm eleven years of eight. I have read both of your books, Trumpet of the one at Charles Webb and I was reading the books. They really got to me because they are so interesting. Lots of other people have read your books and they feel the same

way about them. The books really makes sense not like other books you're expect. Dear Diane, I'm glad you think the books makes sense. The books make sense, stories makes sense. If Carson were writing today, she'd get death threats on Twitter. He be White, he got love letters from children. Dear mister E. B. White. Our teacher, Missus mcelnahey, read Charles Webb to our third grade class earlier this year. We enjoyed it very much. This past months, she read The

Trumpet the Swan. So many interesting things resulted from your book that we thought you might like to hear about them. We decided to write a class poem about the Trumpet of the Swan. We discussed the order of events in the story and put down our ideas on two lines at a time. The poem we wrote is enclosed with this letter, and here's the phone. Louie a Downey Signet was born a trumpeter swan without a horn. I'm sorry I didn't want to laugh at their boom. Louis a

Downey Signet was born a trumpeter swan without a horn. Sam, a boy who liked the young Swan, would often sit by the clear, quiet pond. Louie could not even say cohoe. So the Cobs stole a trumpet for Louis to blow. Louis played taps, had a camp for boys to earn the money to pay for the noise. Louie married Serena, and new signets were born, and Louis played on with his shiny horn. By the third grade class, Hilliard Elementary School, Room twenty Dear mister, why blah blah blahlave your books?

Do you like swans? I do. My grandparents live on a saltwater pond, and sometimes when we're visiting, swan swam up to the shore looking for food. A fine feathered friend, Steven. Dear Stephen, I liked your letter, Thanks for writing. I never see swans here at home, only geese, but I think I would like swans. They are admirable birds. Reading those letters it was like listening to the best bird song. Lyrical and clear, noble and proud call and response. They

gave us faith, and they gave us hope. Maybe people can be admirable birds too. From the Last Archive Coho. The Last Archive is produced by Sophie Crane, mccabbin and Ben Natt of Faffrey. Our editor is Julia Barton and our executive producer is Mio Lobell, Jason Gambrell and Martine Gonzalez are our engineers. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original music by Matthis Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Symphinette. Many of our sound effects are from Harry Jeanette Junior

and the Star Janette Foundation. Our full proof players are Barlow Adams and Daniel Berger Jones, Jesse Henson, John Kuntz, Becca A. Lewis and Maurice Emmanuel Parent. The Last Argive is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Special thanks to Simon Leek, to Ryan McKittrick in the American Repertory Theater, to Scott Edwards, to Aisha Neely at Cornell, the McCaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Worn Athology, and everyone

at the Cornell Lab of Worn Athology. At Pushkin. Thanks to Heather Fane, Maya Caney, Carly mcgliory, Emily Rustick, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, and Jacob Weisberg. Our research assistants are Michelle Gau, Olivia Oldham, Oliver Ruskin Kutz, Emily Spector, and Henrietta Riley, who he'd like to specially thank for all of her help with Bird's song. I'm Jollipoor,