World War Tree: The Agony and the Ecstasy of Competitive Bird-Watching

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.

I am Pablo Torre and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

The North American podcaster.

A modern species of extreme abundance.

One defined as much by its curiosity as by its tweets.

Right after this ad.

If you're looking to add something special to your next celebration, try Remy Martin 1738 Accord Royale.

This smooth, flavorful cognac is crafted from the finest grapes and aged to perfection, giving you rich notes of oak and caramel with every sip.

Whether you're celebrating a big win or simply enjoying some cocktails with family and friends, Remy Martin 1738 is the perfect spirit to elevate any occasion.

So go ahead, treat yourself to a little luxury, and try Remy Martin 1738 Accord Royale.

Learn more at remymartin.com.

Remy Martin Cognac, Veeen Champain, a 14 alcoholic volume 40 by Reny Control.

USA Incorporated, New York, York, 1738, Centaur Design.

Please drink responsibly.

So, this is appearance number four for you, Mickey.

Fourth time.

Yeah.

It's no exaggeration to say that you are perhaps our most honored and weirdest correspondent.

I'm going to make some business cards.

That's flattering.

Thank you.

I mean, you've allegedly broken the law for us, sawing down a goalpost.

Had to go away after that for a little bit.

You revived your former life as a goth tennis player.

Also, you literally shoveled shit for us, investigating Nikola Jokic's horse racing obsession.

So what have you brought us today?

So, Pablo, we are living in a golden era of side quests.

Whether it's learning to get fit or hiking up a mountain, learning to play a new instrument, this is a real moment where maybe because work life in 2025 leaves a little bit to be desired, or it just gives us a great excuse to get off of our phones and tablets, all of these pastimes are really booming.

So just to preempt what I think you're about to do here, you're staging an intervention for me.

Well, I'm worried about you, Pablo.

I mean, we've even reached the point where subjects of yours are tweeting that maybe you need a hobby.

You've also, I think, astutely understood that the best way to get me to do something is to Trojan horse it in the form of an episode of this show.

But I need a hobby too.

So I've brought a solution actually for both of us.

It includes plants, which you love.

I do.

It includes tweeting, and not the tweeting you're kind of thinking, but this kind of tweeting.

Oh, God.

Pablo, that song that you just heard, that siren song, is the sound of your very own new Nemesis bird.

Okay, so to just understand the concept of the nemesis bird, which is stunningly not a thing that PTFO correspondent Mickey Duge just made up for us, we do need to go back about six months or so, because Mickey is a very busy and Emmy-nominated documentarian and artist and animator whose original illustrations you can see as this episode unfolds over on our YouTube channel.

But in a rare bit of free time earlier this year, Mickey found himself at a party.

A party that can best be described as elderly.

Elderly.

Okay.

And as the subject of hobbies came up, I was doing my usual, uh, I don't have a hobby and I could probably use a hobby, yada, yada.

And as I was doing that, an older gentleman stepped up through the crowd and he was carrying a bottle of wine and he came over to me, topped off my wine glass, and cryptically asked me if I had ever had a Nemesis bird.

And it was like such a spooky moment because he's staring at me.

At which point Mickey realized that he wasn't at any old old person party.

He was being watched.

He was being watched by an increasingly tipsy group of largely bald and very serious bird watchers.

The kind of obsessive competitors, in fact, who would argue about records and statistics and asterisks and honor.

All of which turns birdwatching into something like a sport.

And so now I'm visualizing, you know, the binoculars, the bucket hat, the bird-watching sort of regalia.

All that gear, that glorious gear.

And collectively, they all kind of flocked together

and started to tell me that having a nemesis bird is actually the most epic side quest you could ever have.

Because a nemesis bird, it turns out, is a flying Moby dick.

It is the creature that keeps eluding you.

And sure, if you only cared about statistics, you could technically just lie and say that you saw your nemesis bird whenever you wanted.

Because bird watching, not unlike pickup basketball, does rest upon a certain code of honor in self-reporting fouls,

as it were.

But the oddest thrill of the chase itself is kind of the whole point of this hobby in the first place.

You may know where this nemesis bird nests, when it migrates, and yet, despite repeated quests to lay eyes on its feathers,

it remains a ghost,

which is a torture felt by birders of all ages, all across the world,

as we'll see.

But sometimes you can still hear it without seeing it, which sounds like it's even more torturous than if you can't see or hear it at all.

So in that case, this bird is not merely ghosting you, but kind of haunting you.

Yes, that's the best way to put it.

And just to be clear about what you're haunting me with already, that sound is the sound that I...

I'm not going to reveal too much more about your nemesis at this point because I really want you to come to appreciate the real agony and ecstasy and even almost spiritual religiosity of this practice practice of birding.

I've previously spent my life considering bird watching probably to be the lamest of all hobbies.

Yeah, I feel like a lot of our viewers and listeners may be thinking that very same thing to themselves right now.

Totally.

And six months ago, I was right with them before it was kind of my side quest outside of, you know, my old person party.

And some of these people have traveled the globe to see thousands of birds each.

Some have vanished into thin air amidst having a war with other mysterious birders, or else they've spanned decades and continents bushwhacking through rainforests, climbing up active volcanoes, just to see their one single nemesis.

So I should say that I think I actually, at this point in my life, appreciate bird watching in theory more than you used to.

I have gone to Central Park, for instance, and like stared up at a tree among other people, looking at Flacco, the now deceased escaped Central Park zoo owl.

I've seen red-tailed hawks in Washington Square Park attack, you know, squirrels and shit.

I have been a rubbernecker, if not a watcher.

I just didn't realize that today, apparently, I would get to mix the metaphors here, a personal white whale.

You will come to appreciate things like this.

So, so this sound,

Which, the more I hear it, feels like a crowd at a baseball game, sort of like building an applause to root on a pitcher.

So, that sound, Pablo, is actually the mighty tail swish of the roughed grouse.

Okay, I see you're doing, okay, we're doing the David Attenborough thing now.

And that, Pablo, is actually a close relative of the longtime nemesis of just one of the many birders that I met for you.

My name is Sharon Steitler, and I'm known online as Bird Chick.

And Sharon described to me the satisfaction of finding your nemesis as being this kind of ecstatic experience.

So when you do finally see a bird that you've been looking for, it's a dopamine rush.

It is a high.

I mean, I get this sensation in my chest and it is, it's up there with like

having a 16 year old scotch or you know a really amazing orgasm i mean it's just actually i kind of describe my perfect day as getting the trifecta of birding bike riding and banging if i can have that

that is a perfect day shout out to sharon shout out to bird chick this by the way is the this is the big beautiful bill i was hoping for birding bike riding and banging it's the much better bpp for all the obvious reasons so sharon's search for her nemesis bird, the spruce grouse, coincided with a period of time in her life where she was also going through a divorce.

So right before the pandemic, my marriage ended and I went a little wild.

And some people were talking to me about showing me Spruce Grouse.

And

the adult son of a friend of mine was like, Sharon, I'd really like to help you find it.

And thinking about the other person, I just said to myself, I was like, I wonder if I just started like offering like, I don't know, know, blowjobs for a spruce grouse, if that would be a good dating strategy.

As I'm just thinking out loud, I'm single now.

I don't know what to do.

You know, what I'm finding out today is that somehow the bird watching episode is also the most explicit one we may have done to date.

So Sharon actually gets in so deep that she starts dating a guy who actually has the same nemesis bird as her.

A tale as old as time.

It's like, okay, the world's falling apart, but we're going to get a spruce grouse.

While biking alone in Alaska,

I see this dark blob in the road moving and swishing its tail, and I just knew.

And I gasped, and I stopped, and I tried to untangle myself.

She tries to untangle from her bike.

Her bike falls over.

I'm trying to set up my spotting scope that I had in my bike paneer,

and I'm on the ground.

She manages to take what she calls a craft-tastic video.

Oh my god, there's a second one coming in.

Holy shit.

Holy shit.

Oh my God.

What's funny about that video is that the Blair Witch style narration belies the absolute focus and clarity that we get on this video, which we're showing on YouTube, by the way, of the bird.

You can very clearly, I mean, Mickey, and it is...

It's a big, beautiful bird.

It's presenting, it's swishing its tail feathers.

It has like a red sort of like crown deal at the top.

It's really puffed up and strutting its stuff.

So, Sharon describes this moment almost like seeing a celebrity, like seeing George Clooney.

Somebody might get super excited seeing George Clooney walk down the street, but be cool, be cool, don't freak out.

Because if you freak out, the bird's going to freak out, the bird's going to go away.

You want to stay here and you want to watch it.

You don't want the bird to think you're a weirdo.

She describes it as a top five life moment.

So, just to complete the picture here, here's a photo of Sharon right after seeing the Spruce Grouse.

So what you see as she's wearing her bike helmet and her sunglasses is her celebrating, pumping her fist into the sky, framed by evergreens, as if she just scored the game winner in the World Cup.

Just look at the ecstasy, Pablo.

It is, dare I say, an orgasmic level of satisfaction.

And given that, I mean, don't you wish that was you?

So, one big thing that Sir David Attenborough will not tell you, as much as I love the BBC documentary Planet Earth, is that the world of birding has been shaken by a lot more than merely the tremors of the human orgasm.

It has been overwhelmed by technology and electrified by a civil war for its soul.

But before we continue this parade of competitors whose eccentricities will truly rival those of the birds themselves, you should know that in the United States, the bird started going from something to be shot and worn to something to be watched and counted not that long after the actual Civil War,

around the late 1800s.

A much more humane brand of birding emerged.

An ornithologist named Florence Bailey wrote a series of books and field guides aimed more towards an amateur audience.

And the most famous of these books was a book called Birds Through an Opera Glass.

And an opera glass, for the record, is like a pair of kids' binoculars with a stick.

Yeah, and they're, you know, things that kind of the upper class use when they go to performances.

These are golden.

But moving from the scope of a rifle to opera glasses brought a totally different enthusiast into the world of birding.

And in 1901, thanks to the work of an enthusiast and ornithologist named Edmund Sellis over in England, the term bird watching was hatched.

He, like other ornithologists, would also kill birds to study them.

But then, Dr.

Sellis had this epiphany.

On June 23, 1899, at precisely 3.15 in the afternoon, he began to watch a pair of Eurasian night jars.

The night jar, as Dr.

Sellis wrote in issue 699 of The Zoologist, quote, harmonizes to absolute perfection with the sandy ground, dry sticks, and pieces of fir tree bark amongst which it so often lays its eggs.

I once belonged to this great poor army of killers, but now that I've watched birds closely, the killing of them seems to me as something monstrous and horrible.

So the last century of birding has actually been really, really interesting.

What started as just a really scientific study or just this hobby of rich people has increasingly become more and more of an everyman's activity.

I mean, it is even popular, it turns out, among your balding friends at the old person party.

Absolutely.

Contrary to popular belief, it's not just popular among the hairless, as I discovered when I met the man that they call Birding Jesus.

Is it okay if occasionally I call you Jesus?

If you would like to, yes, I have no qualms with that whatsoever.

This is not an exaggeration if you are not watching on YouTube.

This man looks like Jesus if he loved birds and also had a perm.

So Birding Jesus, aka Charles Clarkson, is the director of avian research for the Audubon Society of Rhode Island and someone who also runs like a very successful bird touring company.

Charles told me that the barrier to entry is so low nowadays that birding, as a hobby even, contributes $300 billion in revenue to the United States.

$300 billion?

Yeah.

And that over a million people are employed in the American birding industry.

Yeah, I am inordinately happy to sit and watch one of the most common species for hours just do its thing so I can better appreciate its behavior, its evolutionary history.

And so one of the biggest things for me that brings me great joy is when I go to the tropics, these incredibly speciose countries where you've got thousands of species present.

To have a client of mine who's on one of my tours see these really charismatic, beautiful birds that I've seen thousands of, but to see one right in front of them and then to see the look on their face and to hear the, oh my God, that comes out of their mouth when they see this bird is just such a rewarding and amazing experience to me that that just you know it's a kind of a cup overfloweth moment for me my

quest is to make sure that i can prior to my death captivate as many other people as possible with the beauty of nature and the mystery of humanity so I spoke to a few romantics like this who commented on like the always on quality of birding.

So when you're commuting to work, you could be birding.

If you're smoking a cigarette on your lunch break back behind the restaurant, you could be birding.

One of my spiritual new friends actually called it a, quote, lifetime scavenger hunt.

But there are others.

There's a subset of birders who get way more hardcore and competitive about it, keeping elaborate lists on birding apps and trying to stay atop these leaderboards of like, who's got the most birds seen in their life?

So these are the volume shooters.

Totally.

Yeah, total volume shooters.

And these people are known as big listers because all of these people will log their life lists, usually on websites or apps.

The biggest app is an app out of Cornell called eBird, which is sort of like the Wikipedia Meets JSTOR for birding.

It's moderated by volunteers, and also the data is kept for scientific purposes.

So, you know, you you log in, you log your geolocated checklist, and you can be sure that it's safeguarded along with like half a billion other sightings that this digital community has pulled together.

But you should know that birding Jesus has a problem with eBird.

I think it has helped to lower that barrier.

But eBird is also largely responsible for the gamification of birding.

You know, this is an app that creates leaderboards where people can compare themselves and and their bird lists to the lists that other people have submitted, and that does tend to kind of expose that dark underbelly of competition where people are acting in their own self-interest and they have this singular mission, which is to best the other competitors.

This is beyond David Attenborough now.

This is getting, I mean, this is getting a little real according to Birding Jesus.

You have no idea.

If you're looking to add something special to your next celebration, try Remy Martin 1738 Accord Royale.

This smooth, flavorful cognac is crafted from the finest grapes and aged to perfection, giving you rich notes of oak and caramel with every sip.

Whether you're celebrating a big win or simply enjoying some cocktails with family and friends, Remy Martin 1738 is the perfect spirit to elevate any occasion.

So go ahead, treat yourself to a little luxury, and try Remy Martin 1738 Accord Royale.

Learn more at remymartin.com.

Remy Martin Cognac, Veen Champain, 14 alcoholic by volume, 40 by RenyControl, USA, Incorporated, New York, York, 1738, Centaur Design.

Please drink responsibly.

So, bird watching, very possibly an actual sport.

And as I realize now that this is also clearly a story about the humans involved, that I need to know who the f my nemesis bird is.

Who is the official nemesis bird if Pablo Torre finds out?

Well, I haven't told you because

I haven't introduced you yet to the absolute goat of birding.

The former senior inspector for the U.S.

State Department is this guy named Peter Kasner.

Does it work better with the reading glasses or not?

I would say without, just because it has some shine.

Okay.

My name is Peter Kasner.

So the greatest birdwatcher alive is an actual spy.

Not a spy, but Inspector Kaisner did tell me that he's not a spy, but he's an inspector.

That after 36 years working in the Foreign Service, living in places from Afghanistan to India.

I was in a fairly high stress business as a diplomat, and I found that whether I was dealing with a plane crash or visiting an American in jail or talking to a family of a deceased American, getting out in nature was just a wonderful way to disconnect, to refresh, to re-energize my spirit

and just enjoy.

So, just as a matter of scouting here, what makes Inspector Kastner the GOAT?

So, Inspector Kaisner is the world's preeminent big lister.

I am kind of crazy about numbers.

I have always had a real connection with numbers and I don't know why.

If I'm tuning a radio and the proper volume is at number 13, I'll change it to 15 or 10 or 12

because

I can't have it stop on a prime number.

It's just not right.

It's got to be an even number.

It's got to be divisible by five.

10.

I mean, 10 would be perfect.

So, I mean, it's just an affliction that I have.

But to me, 10,000 is like the ultimate.

And it's interesting because

it's resonated a lot in the birding community.

I think a lot of people see that as not the holy grail, but certainly

an almost unattainable

goal.

10,000?

Like, we should just do the math here for a second because how old, Mickey, is Inspector Kaisner?

Inspector Kaysner is 72 years old.

Okay, so let me just do some math here, right?

So 72, 365.

All right.

So we're looking at 26,298 days.

Oh, and also he said that he started burning at four years old.

Sorry.

So take that out.

Excuse me.

Yeah, 365.

That was four minus that.

Okay.

Taking out 1461.

Inspector Kaisner

has spent 24,837 bird-watching days on Earth, which means that 10,000.

I mean,

he's saying that he intends to see a new bird species every other day for the span of his entire life,

which seems, needless to say, impossible.

It does, but you got to realize that this guy is in the Guinness Book of World Records.

He was the first person to see an example of every single bird family in the wild.

And he's also like the only recreational birder who's ever discovered an actual new species of bird.

He discovered this bird called the Cundina Marca ant pitta in Colombia.

What is the all-time scoring list?

What does that ranking actually look like?

So you should know that a life list that is over 8,000 species is considered like insane.

There's a list with only only 32 people on it that have ever gotten that number.

And only 10 people all-time have ever had lists over 9,000.

And so the all-time record is what then?

So it was thought before Inspector Kaisner came along that the all-time long list record belonged to this British-Canadian guy named Philip Rostron.

He's got a list that has 9,763 on it.

And Inspector Kaisner was climbing the list through eBird, which again is the Wikipedia of bird watching.

MeepJStore.

With the community of scientists who were monitoring the progress.

But the inspector also used a separate website called Igoterra, which is kind of more of like an IMDb.

Which is a less academic fact-checking.

There's more species available.

So Inspector Kaisner, he made a pretty big deal out of it in the birding community.

I had it all planned out.

I was going to do it.

My 10,000th bird was going to be a wonderful thing called a tufted puffin, which he would get on U.S.

soil.

And Oregon standing on U.S.

soil.

I mean, this is going to be the best.

After going to 195 countries and territories.

And then all of a sudden...

Then came along Dr.

Jason Bourne.

I mean,

I mean, Dr.

Jason Mann.

Oh.

Jason Mann.

This Jason Mann shows up and he's almost behind me.

Who the f is Dr.

Jason Mann?

So Dr.

Mann, as far as I can tell, is an American healthcare investor who's living abroad in Hong Kong.

And he'd been logging his bird sightings on this other

less popular birding website called surfbirds.com.

So out of nowhere, Dr.

Mann's list pops up on Igoterra, which is a legit site and where Inspector Kasner had been climbing gradually the leaderboard past the 9,000 mark.

When Dr.

Mann shows up, suddenly he's right there and he's got over 9,000 as well.

So what you're telling me is that this is the real life Dragon Ball Z meme in which a guy has a power meter and he's saying it's over 9,000.

It's over 9,000!

What?

9,000?

That is literally what's happening now.

Yeah, totally.

And

the race was up.

I became aware that Jason Mann had moved his list to Igotera

and that he was only 50 birds behind me.

I said, holy moly, this guy has caught up 300 birds in three months.

That's a little unusual.

So since I had put my plans out there, I snuck off to Taiwan and I really absolutely snuck off.

I didn't tell anybody I was going except for one guy.

In fact,

and I really, I'm not sure I should say this in public, but I kept birding in eBird as if I was in my backyard while I was in Taiwan.

I have a

a streak of like 7,000, 8,000 days in a row that I've done eBird checklists.

And people actually follow me and they say, oh yeah, well, well, I see your e-birding in Florida, or I see your e-birding in Malaysia, whatever.

So I kept e-birding in my backyard.

And I didn't put the birds in in Taiwan until I left Taiwan.

And then I erased all the erroneous data and replaced it with the Taiwan data because I didn't want anybody to know I was there.

Try not to read between the lines of Inspector Kaisner.

He's alleging that something

nefarious, something maybe a little dishonest may be afoot.

I mean, the race to 10,000 at this point goes full cloak and dagger, with each man crisscrossing the globe in this high-stakes pursuit to reach the finish line first.

Right.

Now I have Maguire and Sosa.

Now I have the two of them like barnstorming around the world, competing, keeping up with each other.

In this world, it was that big.

So Dr.

Mann is in Colombia, where there are tons of species of birds.

So Dr.

Mann takes the lead when he's there in Colombia.

Inspector Keisner sees this.

He decides to go from Taiwan to the Philippines.

Well, hello, Inspector Keisner.

And then on February 9th, 2024.

I just posted a photograph of myself in the back of my camera showing the orange-tufted spider hunter with a little sign saying 10,000.

And

that was it.

So this is where where birding big listing becomes actual sports.

He's doing the Will Chamberlain thing.

Totally.

He has his big

round number.

And he looks so happy in the photo, too.

So the inspector posts these photos everywhere.

He puts them on I Goterra.

He posts on eBird.

He posts on Facebook.

This is top moment for him.

And it seems...

like Inspector Kastner has won this epic race.

But then

it actually comes out that Dr.

Mann had actually done his own post

just 12 hours before.

12 hours?

Claiming that actually he was the first to 10,000.

Oh my God.

So Dr.

Mann's production values here seem to be even greater than Inspector Kaysner because he has

graphically edited like digital medallion he's given himself in gold, where it says 10k and then has lifetime birds underneath.

Is that fake?

Did he put fake confetti, like golden confetti?

He's like sweaty in a jungle, but he's like superimposed confetti.

And it says new world record, Jason Mann, and has a little illustrated bird on the side.

This is his trophy for the world.

And the reaction

is what?

So Inspector Kasner says that with these things happening at the same time, after

a lifetime of nobody ever coming close to 10,000 and two people doing it and claiming it on the same day is just nuts.

And

the birding world exploded.

It really did.

It's a little suspicious.

Dr.

Mann,

is he legit?

Like,

what do you think?

What do you know?

So Dr.

Mann did not respond to many texts and emails that we sent him over the last few months.

And he keeps like a very low profile online.

He even took down a bunch of his LinkedIn profile after we initially reached out to him.

So I'm now just like, I'm doing some just cursory research into Dr.

Mann.

And there's this thread on

birdforum.net.

It's a comment thread.

And the quote, I think, says what many...

viewers and listeners might be thinking.

Quote, either this guy is the luckiest birder alive, having rediscovered several lost species, or his list is not to be trusted, end quote.

Yeah, so a lot of the species that Dr.

Mann had on his Igotera list did raise eyebrows.

Inspector Kaisner said that it would be headline news, for example, to see or hear a bird as rare as the new Caledonian night jar.

You'll remember

from the great epiphany of 1899 in issue 699 of the zoologist, the song of the night jar.

But this is no ordinary night jar, Pablo.

The new Caledonian night jar has not been seen on earth since 1939.

Which is all to say, I suppose, that if you had in fact found such a night jar,

You would not bury it on your list.

You'd be shouting this from the rooftops.

Or treetops, for sure.

I'm looking at

just the other pages available to me on birdforum.net.

And here's the quote from one of the pages.

Jason Mann reports several dozen extremely fishy species that besides him, no one has claimed to have seen for decades.

Some occur only in war regions, on islands that can only be visited by scientists, on remote mountains that can only be accessed via helicopter.

These include the following near-mythical species.

The bare-legged swiftlet,

the buff-breasted saberwing, the buff-breasted buttonquail, the scaled flower-piercer, the Sulawesi woodcock, the papuan whipbird, the taliabu bush warbler, the kanguan tit babbler, the black throat, of course.

This now is like an NC-17 rated bird-watching episode.

Oh, and we haven't even gotten gotten to a very important birding term.

What term have we somehow not gotten to yet?

That's jizz, Pablo.

So I should disclose that you got me.

Yeah.

I'm hooked.

I think that's very clear to everybody now.

I am ready to start collecting some nice big round numbers on one of these many apps available to me.

So we all know that you get your ecstasy from competition.

But let's recall that before we got distracted by the dirty birdie names here, that our friend Charles.

Birding Jesus.

Right, Birding Jesus, mentioned that big listers actually represent the dark underbelly of birding and kind of like the gamification of what should be a spiritual experience.

So I got Charles to

talk about this race to 10,000.

And Jesus got angry, Pablo.

I can't fathom the idea of spending large sums of time and money to go to some faraway location only to

zoom around the country in a very short period of time, jumping in and out of cars just to see one bird, check it off a list, get back in the car and drive to another location.

There's nothing else that for me personally is as impressive as the lords of the air flying all over our planet.

And so they've always been a source of my motivation.

And in many ways, they are a pretty consistent source of my happiness, viewing them as a source of competition, you know, even on a personal level to

try to set a goal of seeing X number of species.

And to me, that's kind of the antithesis of why I love birds.

The lords of the air being the birds and not the people.

So consider the nemesis bird, Pablo.

It's not about finding it or not, even though it seems to be.

It's really about the search, investigating, interrogating, noticing things, being out of cell phone service, to not be immersed in cyberspace, but actually be immersed in reality.

And after doing that, you can witness these like small, majestic miracles.

So, I mean, you're probably tweeting right now.

I have multiple tabs open for the record.

But to hear Jesus tell it,

for a bird watcher to actually successfully find their personal nemesis bird, you almost have to put yourself in like a sensory deprivation chamber

for your soul.

Okay, I'm closing my other tabs.

So Birding Jesus' longtime nemesis bird was the Rufus vented ground cuckoo, which is known as the ghost of the forest for being really one of the most elusive birds on Earth.

They spend their time chasing ant swarms through the jungles of Panama and Colombia.

And there are all sorts of birds and other organisms that use them as a food source.

So after 30 trips down to the jungle over 10 years, as Charles was walking by himself through the jungle, he heard the call of an oscillated antbird.

He refers to this call as the holy grail of ant bird calls, because those birds only really hang around the most massive ant swarms.

And so, you know, my heart rate went up.

And the swarm seemed to be a few hundred meters off the trail.

So I plunged headlong, bushwhacking into the rainforest as I typically do.

As I transitioned from this very high light environment, I had to let my eyes adjust to this low light environment.

I started seeing more and more birds.

I would see wood creepers.

I would see flycatchers.

There were toucans on the ground, mot mots in the trees, ant birds, and they were all kind of profiting from this army ant swarm, which was absolutely massive.

And it just sounded like it was pouring rain because of all of the ants kind of scouring through the leaf litter.

And as I was kind of surveying the scene, I saw this blur of this bird that just disappeared over the hilltop.

And based on its jiz, which is a birding term that refers to general impression of shape and size, everything about this bird screamed Rufus Minute Ground Puckup.

So my heart absolutely stopped.

And yes, in case you were wondering,

Jesus wept.

Yes, well, yes,

I did have tears in my eyes.

It wasn't a nemesis bird of mine because it was a bird I wanted to check off a list.

I was just absolutely captivated, enamored, fascinated by this group of birds that have evolved this incredibly unique lifestyle.

This one individual would then choose to spend an hour and a half in close proximity to a human.

It was just, I felt a very special experience.

So after a while, I called my wife and I whispered to her as I was kind of sobbing, you know, I found my bird.

I'm staring at a Rupa's Beddog Grand Cuckoo right now.

It's just a few hundred feet away from me.

To which she responded, that is so wonderful.

I'm so happy for you.

I'm going into Home Depot.

I'll call you later.

So the question now, Pablo, is,

are you a believer?

I could not be

more subscribed to the religiosity that you have brought me here.

All right, so I asked Birding Jesus himself to help us choose the official Pablo Torre finds out nemesis bird.

And he had looked at some charts and lists on your behalf.

He considered a couple of wood warblers for you, like the oven bird.

Charles also liked a bird called the American Red Start.

It has big orange spots.

But we thought maybe that was a little too trumpy for Morning Joe Pablo.

But then Birding Jesus settled on your nemesis, which is

the Northern Perula.

The northern perula.

Beautiful bird, pretty small bird.

A beautiful yellow belly.

That's technically called its bib, Pablo?

It's bib.

All right, noted.

They tend to live in the Caribbean, but they fly up to eastern North America to nest at this time of year, which is migration season.

Its song?

Can we play that one more time?

So Charles told me that the song of the northern perula is actually so high-pitched that people that start to lose their hearing, they lose the ability to detect your nemesis bird's song.

Which feels like a bit of a metaphor that I am unable to currently translate fully.

It's a young man's bird, Pablo.

Right.

A thinking man's bird.

And so

what do I do?

What do we do?

So Charles told me that of all places, the birding mecca is really Central Park.

We're going to go to Central Park now.

You want to take me to Central Park?

We're going.

I mean,

let me just ask you this: what other kind of reporting could deliver a transcendent, orgasmic moment of joy?

And, Pablo,

Jesus has risen.

Please meet birding Jesus.

Hello.

There he is.

How are you?

What the f is happening?

So, if you're not watching on our YouTube channel right now, what is happening is that we are being called to gather our gear by birding Jesus.

My wife is Catholic.

She hates that you guys are calling me this.

It's something more Catholic than Harrison.

And so we followed him out of our studio and toward the elevator here at Meadowlark Media.

It doesn't occur to me that Meadowlark is named after a bird.

I mean it is one of the most imperiled birds in all of North America.

Really?

Yep.

75% of the entire population has disappeared since 1956.

Oh, that's how it is.

And what's the...

It's a grassland.

And it turned out that I had a lot of questions for our guide, whose government name, once again, is Charles Clarkson, about New York City's whole birding ecosystem.

What's your sense of like a red-tailed hawk eating a rat?

As we began descending into the subway, I couldn't help but feel this burning desire,

a deep, almost primordial urge to turn this episode into a nature documentary.

And yes,

to hire David Attenborough.

The North American podcaster.

A modern species of extreme abundance.

One defined as much by its curiosity as by its tweets.

An exotic subspecies, however,

known as the Filipino American Podcaster, or FAP for short, has become increasingly difficult to find outside of the studio and out in the wild.

But all of that changes

as we land

on planet Pablo.

This afternoon, the podcaster has camouflaged himself, swapping out the trademark blue cardigan of the species for the cheap blue vest of the common birder.

Our rare sighting begins during spring migration outside the American Museum of Natural History.

You see that?

So we have the pigeons

with a

hobby eagle behind it.

Before long, the podcaster ventures into Central Park.

Also known as the Madison Square Garden of Bird Watching.

A veritable mecca.

Even if one of its most colorful residents is a Baltimore Oriole.

I guess it makes sense for a show that is definitely definitely a sports show to see the mascot of an actual sports team.

The obsessive Filipino American podcaster travels in a flock, most often with an extraordinarily endangered breed,

the freelance reporter.

When you said that the Perila might be watching us, I thought about Predator.

Oh, yeah.

You know, hiding in.

in the middle.

Slathered in mud.

Yeah.

That's what we got to do.

And we are doing that, technically.

And on this day, they are guided by a true wonder of nature.

Indeed, a mythological creature

who simply goes by the name of Birding Jesus.

So American Robins are singing.

Yeah, we've got some vocal activity.

American Robins are

just point to my ear and suddenly Birding Jesus is like, that's an American robin.

The podcaster is jubilant.

This is a great friend to have.

Definitely.

Yeah, everybody needs a birding friend, I think.

Suddenly, the freelance reporter sniffs out a lead.

So you were saying that kind of the migration period is wider.

Most of the time, males arrive on territory prior to females so that they can compete with one another for access to a territory for a lot of people.

But the obsessive fap,

having become perhaps unaccustomed to the great outdoors,

provide the pending females with all the resources they need to build a nest, seems on this day to have become particularly distracted.

And then assess the quality of the male based on the territory he was able to approach.

You were show me what you got.

Exactly.

So the...

Pending females is also a good band name, by the way.

The podcaster, hungrier than ever for content and thirsty as they come, seeks his prey.

The name of my nemesis bird is

the Northern Paralla.

The Northern Paralla, that's correct.

The Northern Paralla.

So driven is he by the algorithm.

Last year, there was one documented right here in The Ramble.

So we are still within the realm of possibilities of finding a Northern Paralla.

But the podcaster will stop at nothing.

We will find them.

Who will?

Wherever they may be hiding.

Even.

The caveat here is they, you know, they weigh as little as five grams, which is.

And especially

at the incontrovertibility

and pick out the movements of birds that are moving around in a canopy that's being pelted with rain of the elements.

Well, nobody said this quest was going to be easy.

It's right, and it shouldn't be.

This is a nemesis bird.

Nothing can stop the podcaster.

But here's the thing about a nemesis bird.

And his very own brand.

We have not seen the nemesis bird yet.

Of climax.

But the nemesis bird also hasn't seen us.

Canada goose.

Canada goose.

Yeah, Canada goose.

Canada goose.

Wait, the jacket or the bird?

There's a northern cardinal making a chip note behind us over here.

You're hearing far more than you're seeing.

So boning up on the vocalizations of birds is an absolute essential aspect of data collection or bird watching in general.

I've been stunned by the amount of boning that goes on in the bird watching community in general.

I'm sure, yeah, it's a Randy sport.

It is a romantic

pastime.

Yeah, and even like the rain,

the wetness.

The podcaster is distracted.

The clouds sort of shrouding, hiding, but also revealing.

It's very beautiful.

Which is precisely the point.

As if it's pulling up a stocking on the skyscrapers of New York.

Of bird watching.

I'm beginning to get it.

Yeah, you're kind of beginning to get it.

Instead of podcasting.

I've greatly enjoyed this.

Even though we have come up very empty and very wet,

the Northern Parallel has evaded us.

But I don't want to give up yet.

Good, and you shouldn't.

It has been, as the the Filipino-American podcaster himself might say, an exclusive skeleton key for a time machine into the creminology of what you might call the last American monoculture,

with nothing less at stake than the very nature of nature itself.

What I've found out is that even though I've gained a nemesis, I've also gained a friend.

Thank you for birding, Jesus.

You're very welcome.

I'm so happy that I could facilitate this very wet day in the park.

Before we go, though, I have a very New York City way of us continuing our quest.

I've put together a series of flights.

Have you seen this bird with a black and white photo of the northern parallel?

So I think we should hang it up.

Oh, and you have the tear away tads at the bottom, 51385 Pablo.

That is actually our hotline.

Put that up

like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

51385 Pablo, the Northern Kingbird, need not apply.

We're coming for you.

Emphasis on

coming.

They'll say that.

Is that too much?

Is that a little much?

No comment.

It's your show.

But first,

Pearl Jam.

Sorry, is this...

Have I...

have I got the wrong program?

Slightly confused.

And that, for the record, was not the real David Attenborough.

It was actually some guy named Guy.

And you can find Guy over over on cameo.com slash a voiceoverguy UK.

But

this has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Metal Arc media production named after one of the most imperiled birds in all of North America.

And we will hopefully talk to you next time.