Lake Doctor | A Lilly Center for Lakes and Streams Podcast

Feathered Friends: A Bird's Role in Aquatic Ecosystems

• Lilly Center for Lakes & Streams • Season 1 • Episode 24

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Nathaniel Wise vividly remembers the moment birds captured his imagination. It wasn't spotting a rare species or an encounter with a majestic raptor—it was a plush mourning dove toy that played authentic bird calls when squeezed. This seemingly simple experience sparked a lifelong passion for connecting bird songs with the creatures that make them, eventually leading him to study how birds and lake ecosystems intertwine.

From his early volunteer work with the Lilly Center demonstrating how shoreline vegetation reduces Canada goose populations (by over 50%!) to his research on secretive marsh birds like rails (the origin of the phrase "skinny as a rail"), Nathaniel brings both scientific insight and contagious enthusiasm to exploring the world of birds around lakes. His explanations of how birds cycle nutrients between aquatic and terrestrial environments reveal the delicate balance that keeps our freshwater systems healthy.

The conversation takes listeners deep into wetland habitats where birds like Marsh Wrens and Sora Rails create complex songs despite rarely being seen. We explore how waterbirds respond when predators like bald eagles appear (clumping together for safety), why diverse bird populations matter for lake health, and the significance of "ecotones"—those rich transition zones where land meets water. Nathaniel also shares practical advice for anyone curious about birds: where to find them in Kosciusko County, how to start birding without getting overwhelmed by identification challenges, and ways to make your property more bird-friendly while simultaneously protecting water quality.

Whether you're a veteran birder, lakefront property owner, or simply someone who's noticed birds at your local waterway, this episode offers a fascinating glimpse into how the feathered world connects with our freshwater resources. Ready to start noticing more than just "ducks" on your next lake visit? Listen now and discover the hidden world of birds that shapes our lakes in ways you've never imagined.


Learn more about the Lilly Center's work at https://lakes.grace.edu/.

Have a question we could answer on the podcast? Send an email to lakes@grace.edu or submit a comment below.

Help us improve the podcast by filling out this short survey: https://forms.gle/MzGSXHcnkEQC8T74A.

Learn more about the Lilly Center's work at https://lakes.grace.edu/.

Have a question we could answer on the podcast? Send an email to lakes@grace.edu or submit a comment below.

Help us improve the podcast by filling out this short survey: https://forms.gle/MzGSXHcnkEQC8T74A.


Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to the Lake Doctor podcast. I'm Suzy Light and my co-host, dr Nate Bosch, is a professional lake nerd.

Speaker 2:

That's true. I received my doctorate from the University of Michigan in limnology, which is the study of freshwater ecosystems. In today's episode, we're excited to welcome Nathaniel Wise. He is a birder who has grown up here in Kosciuszko County and we're going to talk about how birds influence lake ecosystems and also are influenced by lake ecosystems.

Speaker 1:

We might even learn about what skinny as a rail means. We're so excited about today's episode. The doctor is in, so so you know I start every episode of this saying I'm excited. But today I'm really excited because we're going to be talking about the joy of birding with our guest, nathaniel Wise. Nathaniel, welcome to the Lake Doctor podcast. Tell us about yourself.

Speaker 3:

Nathaniel, welcome to the Lake Doctor podcast. Tell us about yourself. Well, like you said, my name is Nathaniel Wise. I grew up here in Warsaw and have went to Grace College, worked at the Lilly Center, so there's a cool connection there already. I've been really interested in birds for almost my whole life. My little running joke is that as soon as I gave up wanting to be a fireman at age five or whatever that is I kind of transitioned into birds and have stuck with that throughout most of my life. Love learning more about birds, love watching birds, love talking to people about birds and interested in birds and their ecosystems as a career and have been kind of finding my way through that.

Speaker 1:

You've had quite a history with the Lilly Center too. Tell us about your journey at the Lilly Center.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so the very first thing I ever did at the Lilly Center was in high school.

Speaker 3:

I had approached Dr Bosch.

Speaker 3:

I was like, hey, like kind of want to do environment stuff, like what does that look like?

Speaker 3:

I don't know what to do. And he said, well, you're in luck because the watershed foundation is wanting to do a lakeshore restoration at Winona Lake Park and specifically they were looking at trying to keep Canada geese from coming up out of the lake into the lawn area and then of course that's a kind of a public nuisance, having the birds there that can be territorial and also leaving droppings on the lawn where you're trying to have people laying around and playing. But the Lilly Center partnered with the Watershed Foundation to do a small study just to try to quantify, before and after that restoration, whether there was an actual reduction in the geese that were using that lawn area. And so I was able to come on just as a volunteer in high school and help out with gathering some of that research. And then over the next few years I became a student at Grace and then was actually able to help compile that data, analyze it, put together a report for the Watershed Foundation at the end of it all.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, really cool project Already as a high schooler getting involved some research, but also research that has a local application, some research, but also research that has a local application. We all kind of know theoretically some of those things that Nathaniel was testing. As far as lakefront vegetation, the sort of nervousness that that creates in a Canada goose to not want to be in that vegetation because there might be a predator lurking around in there. But actually quantifying that and showing a response of less geese after vegetation is planted was a really cool project, yeah.

Speaker 1:

So less geese, less goose droppings on the splash pad, which was creating a health hazard and, as a result, what does it look like now?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, well, that restoration the vegetation there is still in place. I know they've had to do a little bit of maintenance. You know sometimes people are walking through it. But at the end of our study we saw over a 50 percent reduction in the goose droppings that we were finding in that lawn area in the grass. And just from my own anecdotal experience of being in the area and seeing that park, I very rarely see geese up on that lawn area in the grass. And just from my own anecdotal experience of being in the area and seeing that park, I very rarely see geese up on that lawn area now and they used to be there pretty much all the time.

Speaker 1:

So the folks that are listening or watching can take away from your project, specifically that to help reduce the geese population along their shore. They can do. Yeah, they can have a filter strip of native population along their shore, they can do.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, they can have a filter strip of native vegetation along the shoreline. So it's so much fun with a lot of these environmental practices that we talk about. They can have more than just an environmental impact, right, and so there's a win-win there oftentimes impact right, and so there's a win-win there oftentimes. And for someone's lakefront shoreline. We've talked a lot about having those native plants as a buffer so they can intercept sediments or nutrients as they're running off the person's property towards the lake. But there's also a benefit there of having less waterfowl, having less of those Canada geese up on there Because, again, as I was just saying with the predators and being nervous and stuff, they don't like to come through that vegetation. And we're not talking about vegetation that needs to be six feet tall and impeding someone's view of the beautiful lake. We're talking about even low stature, two to three foot tall plants not impeding the view, but impeding the view of a shorter waterfall that's wanting to walk up onto the land.

Speaker 1:

So I've heard birders often and I've experienced this myself. What was your spark, bird? What got you started?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so I love telling this story because it's very unusual. A lot of times, like you said, birders will have a specific bird that they saw and they didn't know what it was and maybe looked it up and then that got them excited about birding or had always seen birds, but then you see something that's really cool and you're like whoa, like so many birds exist that I didn't realize. For me it was actually a stuffed animal bird. That was my spark bird, because I'd walked into the local Ace Hardware here in Warsaw, which sadly no longer exists, but they had a bird bath display Early summer probably, you know, trying to get people to purchase these decorative bird baths and just to kind of grab your eye and make the display look cool. They had a bunch of just plush birds set in the different bird baths and one of them was a morning dove and if you squeeze the plush bird it would play the song of the morning dove.

Speaker 3:

And that just blew my mind because, you know, I knew that birds had songs, but it had never connected with me that those songs went with specific birds and so if I knew what bird had what song, then if I heard a song I could say, oh, that bird is out there. And I remember just spending days wandering around the neighborhood like listening for bird songs, trying to track them down and be like, okay, I hear this, where is it up in the tree? And then be like, oh, there's that. And because I knew a few common feeder birds already cardinals and goldfinches and that sort of thing and was able to put all that together, and then from then on I was just hopeless, very, I was able to put all that together and then from then on I was just hopeless, very, very obsessed with birds, and bird songs in particular is something that I've always really enjoyed, and birding by ear, doing those identifications of the songs.

Speaker 1:

My spark bird was a red-winged blackbird, but similar experience. It was the sound that attracted, so my father would make the bird sound and then the birds would respond to him, and that was what started to intrigue me and sparked my interest in birds.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and Red Wing Blackbird has a very distinct sort of call with it.

Speaker 3:

That's pretty cool Actually, we had been talking a little bit before we even started recording about the app Merlin, which is something that I thought would be cool to highlight for the audience. Bird songs can be difficult to get into, compared to visual identification sometimes, and the Merlin app from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology you can just hold it up and record and, as long as you can hear it pretty clearly and it's a little bit close does a fairly decent job of identifying what might be out there and that can be really helpful, especially getting going or even for myself. Sometimes I'm like I feel like I know what this is, but just that little extra confirmation can be cool. I thought also it might be neat to play a couple bird songs, especially of some birds that you might find around lakes or streams. We can do dueling.

Speaker 1:

Merlin apps, because I have that on my phone too. Yeah, we can try.

Speaker 3:

Sometimes it's a little bit tricky when it's coming from a phone speaker. But yeah, I just thought it would be neat to kind of expose some people to some bird sounds, especially for some birds that maybe are a little bit more secretive and they might not see as much.

Speaker 1:

Play some songs.

Speaker 3:

Cool, yeah, so the first one I pulled up here is the Marsh Wren, really small, chunky little guy, brown lives deep in reeds, cattails, that kind of a thing, not one that you're likely going to see very much unless you're specifically looking for it, and even then you might not be able to track it down. But it has a really loud song and fairly common around our lakes. We have a lot of wetlands in our county and in this region of the Midwest, and so here I'll just give it a play and then so what you can kind of hear is like a couple sharp introductory notes and then this chatter or trill with like really complex, like harsh um sound and um. They can be a little bit variable, but typically follow that same sort of pattern of those quick harsh introductory notes and then kind of a rough trill or chatter afterwards.

Speaker 2:

Do they have any sort of a melodic song Like I think of, like a house wren right? Does the marsh wren also have that more melodic song or is it more just like what you played?

Speaker 3:

Well, that is its actual song. Really so that's about as melodious as it would get. Okay. Interesting, there's individual variations. Sometimes they sound a little bit sweeter, sometimes they sound really rough and gargley. I almost hear kind of like a marbles squeaking timbre to it. But yeah, that's a really fun one, especially early mornings. You can walk out into a marsh and you'll often hear those guys calling from different places and maybe, if you're lucky, you'll also see a little tiny brown blur. Just go, shoop, shoop, shoop.

Speaker 1:

And you know you mentioned house wrens. There are so many varieties of wrens Carolina wren, house wren what others do.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I mean around here Carolina and house are the most common. We have marsh dren. Sedge drens are a little bit more uncommon. They also like wet spots but more kind of like grassy overgrown but still wet areas.

Speaker 2:

Well, speaking of your work at the Lilly Center and also some of these wetland sort of environments. Also some of these wetland sort of environments. I'm remembering you as a student at the Lilly Center and working on a project looking for rails right around, and that was news to me. I'm not a bird expert, obviously, and I love it when students like yourself bring new knowledge and new intriguing ideas to me. And I remember you talking about wetlands and rails as a almost like an indicator species of quality of wetlands, and so tell us a little bit about I know the results of the project were a little inconclusive but certain.

Speaker 2:

But sometimes that's the way science works.

Speaker 3:

So tell us a little bit about that project and how you got interested in that particular idea yeah, so rails belong to kind of a category of birds that are called secretive marsh birds, which is pretty self-explanatory.

Speaker 3:

It's birds that live in marshes and are really secretive. A lot of them are nocturnal or just otherwise very reclusive, and marshes are a little bit of a difficult habitat to get into and survey very effectively. So they are kind of poorly studied and their life history isn't as robustly understood as maybe some other more common species that occur in drier areas. When I came up with the idea for the project to try to go out and look for these guys, indiana had just passed some legislation that reduced protections for isolated wetlands specifically, kind of on the idea that they're low quality, they're just off on their own, they're not really doing much, which I think we and many people who would listen to this podcast you've talked about wetlands before and how important they are would know that even an isolated wetland still to a lake and also like a smaller wetland that's maybe just out in someone's field or along the edge of a road might actually they both would equally have or at least more than you would expect these, these rails, the, the research. It was pretty inconclusive, like you you said, but it was still a really cool chance for me to come up with a research project, figure out how to implement that, do it and then just learn from going through that data and, even though I wasn't able to really conclusively show one way or the other, that was a really cool experience that I got to have and was really grateful to you for kind of guiding me through that and I thought I have the app up already so I can also play a rail sound. Yeah, so this will be.

Speaker 3:

Have you ever seen a rail?

Speaker 1:

before yeah.

Speaker 3:

I mean, I've only seen a few, for as many as I've heard, and they they're very laterally compressed is the fancy way to say it, so they're just really skinny. You might have heard this saying skinny as a rail, that's what that is. It refers to the bird, not to, you know, like a railroad rail or something like that.

Speaker 3:

Because they're kind of, their whole idea is to not be detected by a predator right. So as they're weaving through these reeds or cattails, being really narrow lets them move without even really rustling the vegetation much, and so they just stay in dense cover and are really difficult to detect except by their, their sounds. So the sora is a particular kind of rail. They're really really chunky, gray and brown, have a little yellow kind of chicken-like beak, but they have a really loud whinnying call. So I'll play that.

Speaker 3:

So that's for such a secretive bird that you might go your whole life and never see. It's a really obvious sound. I think probably a lot of people have heard that. And you know it's dusk and you're outside and you hear this weird noise out in the marsh and you're like whoa, that's a little spooky, but it's just a saur out there, you know, communicating with others of its kind, and that's, I think, really cool, like having that auditory component to some of these secretive birds, letting us connect with the species that we might not otherwise be as able to obviously encounter just by seeing them.

Speaker 1:

So it seems that sometimes humans have an impact on bird habitat and birds have an impact on our lakes, and, just like we talked about goose droppings having an effect on a place that people would want to recreate, how does that tie in with the work that's happening at the Lilly Center?

Speaker 2:

Well, I can recall another project that we worked on together when Nathaniel was a student at Grace is we were looking at nutrients in our lakes, right? We've talked a lot about that on this podcast about, specifically, phosphorus and how phosphorus is part of a fertilizer and it fertilizes weeds and algae in our lakes, and we have too much phosphorus in all of our lakes here in Kosciuszko County, northern Indiana. It's a problem around the whole Midwestern United States. So what are those sources of phosphorus? Let's quantify those sources, and so oftentimes people will look out at a lake maybe it's partially frozen in the wintertime and they see a congregation of Canada geese, or maybe it's coots, and they say, oh, wow, look at all of those birds Like those are certainly ruining the lake as far as droppings and increasing phosphorus levels, and it's going to make weeds and algae grow the next year.

Speaker 2:

So we thought, as any scientist would right, rather than just kind of wondering about this, let's start to quantify this. And so we have stream sensors looking at stream inflows, which looks at phosphorus. We've done some budgeting work, looking at people's yards around lakes with fertilizer application, but a missing component was looking at the waterfowl. And so, nathaniel, it was wintertime, right that we were doing it and kind of doing a bird count and so maybe talk a little bit about that project.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So the budgets that the Lace Center staff had put together used just some interpolation of some larger regional data sets, so kind of saying this is a data set that we have that says in a larger area there's about this many birds. Then trying to reduce that down to you know, on a given lake we can kind of estimate how many birds there would be. So the idea was for me to go out and say, ok, here's how many we think we're going to see, here's how many are actually out there, and found out that there was a pretty significant discrepancy, that we saw a lot more diversity of types of waterfowl and we saw higher populations of waterfowl on the lakes compared to what had been expected. But then the interesting finding of that research was, when you actually ran the numbers compared to other sources of anthropogenic or human-caused nutrient pollution that was entering the lakes, the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus that was coming from the waterfowl, even though it was more than was expected, was still just a tiny, tiny sliver. I think important to highlight that waterfowl are part of the lake ecosystem, right. So they're nutrient cycling. They're consuming vegetation and then putting that nutrient or putting the nutrients from that vegetation back into the water. They're part of the food web there. You have plants that are growing, you have plankton that are taking sunlight in producing energy, then you have crustaceans, small fish, that are eating those plants and that plankton, and then maybe birds are coming in and eating the plants. Or you also have species of waterfowl, like diving ducks, that will dive down and catch fish or catch little crustaceans. Then you even have, like apex predator, like ospreys are coming down and getting like larger fish right. So this is all this complex, interconnected network that, when it's balanced and functioning properly, helps the lake be healthy and continue these life processes. So it's really when kind of us humans come in and meddle and have just vastly greater nutrient loads that we start to see some of those issues.

Speaker 3:

An interesting thing about birds, also in terms of that nutrient cycling, is they fly famously most of them, and so having that ability to fly enables some connectivity between the lake or the stream and the water that's in there and then the land or maybe even some more far-flung isolated wetlands or water bodies.

Speaker 3:

So, for example, you might have a stream that runs through a forest and you have some aquatic insect larvae in the stream that then are going to eventually emerge as adults and fly and might be caught by, say, a great crested flycatcher that's out in this floodplain forest. And so now you have this energy that's gone from, you know, within the stream. Maybe there's algae growing on the rocks taking in that sunlight, photosynthesizing. Now you have this insect larva that's consuming that algae off the rock and then emerging as an adult and now this bird out on the land side has eaten that bird, maybe poops it out, and now it's on the ground. So it's like just these large scale cycles of nutrients and energy that birds play a really key part, both directly water birds like ducks and geese that are in the lakes, but then even birds that just live around streams, and there's this, this interconnection between the lakes and streams and then the birds and all part of that ecosystem, and some of those apex predator birds as well, like an osprey or bald eagle.

Speaker 2:

they might carry the fish then far away.

Speaker 1:

Right exactly.

Speaker 2:

To their nesting area, and now you've got nutrient inputs over there too, that originally came from the lake itself.

Speaker 3:

There's been some emerging research about the role of birds in recolonizing areas of wetlands that are being restored with new native plants. So you have birds that are eating wetland species in one area, flying to another area that maybe is more degraded, but then moving those plant species into a new area. And that's just another really cool example. You know, even aside from moving energy and moving nutrients, even potentially directly moving species that are helping restore some of these areas that have been damaged.

Speaker 1:

So let's talk a bit about bird behavior, because many of our listeners or viewers have seen on Winona Lake the bald eagle and the waterfowl that are on the lake. Tell us about that behavior. When there is an apex predator, how do birds react?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, well, it depends on the bird, right? There's many different strategies, as we see all around nature different strategies to deal with things, but birds don't really like when there's a really big predatory bird flying around. Maybe, maybe not actually super at risk, but it makes them nervous, right. So one thing that you'll often see is just all the birds rising up together in a huge group. So they're all moving around, wheeling, and in a big group like that it makes it difficult for a predator to track down one individual, which, like I said, a bald eagle is not super commonly going to take a duck, but they do. Coots, yeah, coots for sure, but yeah. So it's like, even though you're a water bird and you're out on the lake, you're safe from all the land predators, but then sometimes you still have to keep an eye out for those avian predators too.

Speaker 1:

So what I've observed is there is a coop population on the northeast side of Winona Lake. And usually they're pretty spread out. They're pretty spread out, but the minute the bald eagle comes around, they clump together in the water as a defense mechanism that you know the eagle's going to maybe get one or two of them, but it's harder when they're all clumped together.

Speaker 3:

Yeah for sure, especially when you know a lot of our waterfowl have relatively cryptic patterning, these patterns of black and white or like mottled browns. So you squish them all together and it becomes very visually confusing to pick out one specific bird in that group.

Speaker 2:

We worked on a project with the United States EPA a few years back where the EPA was noticing some declines in bald eagle populations in the southeastern United States, and so they connected with us hearing about some of the algae toxin research that we were doing up here at Grace College at the Lilly Center and the the hypothesis was that we may also be seeing declines in bald eagles because of the coots, and so the coots were were eating and you'd have to help us more with the diet here. But they were eating, from what I understand, some of the aquatic macrophytes that would have paraffin, which would have an algae that was connected to those plants through you would have those algae producing toxin and those coots would then ingest the toxin.

Speaker 2:

Some coots that would get more toxin would be more lethargic, and so maybe when the others are all clumping together you'd have a few outliers that are slow, and so those would be the ones the eagles then would obviously take, and so the idea was maybe we're accumulating these toxins up into the eagle population. Now, the good news is is that we didn't find any evidence for that in all the sampling that we did to support that research project, but is another connecting point between the lakes and some of the things that we're doing.

Speaker 3:

And that blue-green algae is such a huge component of what the Lilly Center does. Having the waterfowl presence there is such an important regulation on the lake ecosystem and consuming smaller fish that might be eating zooplankton that then are competing with phytoplankton. It's like having a component of the ecosystem missing, just predisposes it to becoming imbalanced, and that's where we see some of those harmful algae blooms, where they're way out of balance, and birds play an important role in keeping all of that correct, as it should be and healthy.

Speaker 1:

So is the diversity of birds important to that ecosystem.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, absolutely so. Ducks and waterfowl we kind of can break down into two categories dabbling ducks and diving ducks. So dabbling ducks are kind of your common mallards would be the famous example of a dabbling duck and they kind of just pat around at the surface or maybe they upend. So sometimes you'll see just a duck butt sticking up out of the water and they're just reaching down to get algae or aquatic vegetation, aquatic macrophytes, like you said, and are primarily more of those herbivores. But then you have diving ducks which are more predatory and are going to go completely underwater, chase down fish, go down to the bottom, grab little crustaceans that would be like a cormorant uh, yeah, so a cormorant would go down for fish also.

Speaker 3:

Um, uh, like, scup is something that we see a lot of on our lakes. Coots even aren't, are not ducks, they're more closely related to rails, like we were talking about earlier, but also have that diving behavior. And, um, yeah, so it's like you. You have waterfowl birds that are eating vegetation, you have some that are eating fish, you have some other birds that might be eating those birds and fish also. And having all of these levels of trophic interaction, different levels of producing energy, and then animals consuming each other, one after the next, when you have that, biodiversity there prevents any one group from overwhelming and creating issues for the rest of the ecosystem and then even for humans also being a part of these ecosystems.

Speaker 1:

And what about things like songbirds or other types of birds, those also important to lakes?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, absolutely, and I think maybe even more so the inverse of that. So, lakes and streams and having healthy lake and stream ecosystems being important to some of these things that we would typically consider more of a land bird, a concept that I find really cool is ecotones. So an ecotone is just where one ecosystem merges with another ecosystem. So, for example, you have a lake transitioning to dry land. Typically you're going to find a marsh there or a riparian zone of just shrubby vegetation that likes water but doesn't grow in the water. And these ecotones are hubs of biodiversity because you have this overlap of species from one ecosystem and species from another ecosystem and then species that also specifically like that transition ecosystem.

Speaker 3:

So when you have wetlands, when you have riparian brush along a lake edge, when you have floodplain forests along our streams, these are areas where you have really high avian diversity you have good food sources for these songbirds. So, for example, in wetlands we talked about in wetlands, we talked about the marsh wren or the sora rail in floodplain forests. Actually, for the lily center, I helped lead a float down the tippecanoe river. There's a lot of floodplain forests along that river and we got to see some prothonotary warblers, which are a declining species because that habitat of these floodplain forests is declining and they're kind of specialist to those ecosystems.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so where can our listeners or viewers go in Kosciuszko County to observe birds?

Speaker 3:

Well, anywhere. I think that is the coolest thing about birds, right, they're literally everywhere.

Speaker 1:

And can anyone do it? Yes, everyone.

Speaker 3:

I think everyone should do it. Start near you, your own backyard. I mean, I personally don't like the idea of a trash bird. We have things like house sparrows, european starlings, rock doves or pigeons that are not native to this area but are living close to human habitation and they're, you know, making use of the environment that they find themselves in. Granted, they have detrimental effects to our native species. However, I still find some enjoyment in just recognizing that. You know humans and nature. We kind of can be view ourselves as opposites or in conflict, but really, no matter what we do, we can't really separate ourselves from nature and the ecosystem, and that's kind of evidenced by the way that these birds are still a part of our lives, even in a Walmart parking lot, say.

Speaker 2:

So even in someone's own yard, as you were just talking about, and they want to start doing some birding, is it helpful to have things like a bird feeder or a bird bath, or are those things too unnatural and actually cause more harm than good for diversity of birds or the ecosystem that birds are part of?

Speaker 3:

Well, a bird bath in particular can be excellent the ecosystem that birds are part of Well, a bird bath in particular, can be excellent. Water resources are so important for all birds and especially if you live somewhere that doesn't have like a lake right there or a stream right there, or even if you do, having that bird bath can be a great way for birds to get access to water to drink and then also to bathe in as the birdbath. A bird feeder, too, can be great, especially for our own enjoyment. A really important note about birdbaths is that they do need to be cleaned regularly. They can become, you know, you're bringing in a lot of birds to a small area and we do have different avian diseases that can spread much more easily when you have multiple birds that are, you know, eating, rubbing their bills in this bird seed and coming into close contact with each other in a way that they wouldn't naturally but inherently.

Speaker 3:

A bird feeder can be a great way to, especially in a neighborhood where maybe there's not a lot of natural food sources for birds, you're able to still have them in your yard and enjoy them. But I will point out that even if you have a bird feeder an even better thing you can do is plant these native plants that are providing habitat for the birds, providing food sources, whether that's directly from seeds from the plant or also native plants. Harbor, or I should say, host a lot of native insects that birds eat. So you might have birds that would never come and eat seeds from a feeder, but planting these native plants can bring them in to eat the insects off of those plants.

Speaker 1:

So this week we had a bird on our front porch trying to eat the artificial berries on a wreath I have on my front door Like bird. Bird brain. There are other places that people can go in our community, especially along boardwalks, and there are a couple of really good spots Pisgah, marsh, yeah, where's your favorite place to go?

Speaker 3:

Well, I'm a sucker for a good boardwalk. I love wetlands, I love marshes. But the the Byer Farm Trail boardwalk, out by the hospital here in Warsaw my partner, sydney, lives really close there and so we love to go for walks along that boardwalk and just enjoy the scenery, enjoy the birds, enjoy each other, each other. So that's like my number one recommendation for people who are local to the area Pisgah Marsh also, like you said, a little bit further out in the county, but also a really great place to see cool birds.

Speaker 1:

Have you been down to the Nature Preserve off of Highway 14, south of town, south of Warsaw?

Speaker 3:

I cannot remember the name of it wildwood yes, wildwood, good place to look at birds for sure any other nature preserves in our area that you'd recommend yeah, so um heritage trail and in winona lake um has a paved greenway and also some like bike slash walking paths. Um, something neat that we have there is the cerulean warbler, which is a threatened or vulnerable species, and it's a pretty neat thing to be able to encounter in our area. It's a little bit of a trickier one in terms of its song or to identify, but definitely one to. If you're interested in birds and know what that is, or if you get into birding and develop some of those skills, definitely try to track that down there and that's a blue color right.

Speaker 3:

When we have a cerulean blue it comes from that bird. Yeah, which, frustratingly, when it's a little tiny bird up in the top of a tree on an overcast day and it's kind of like a powder blue, it just turns gray. But yeah, it's really cool to have a species that is. You know, we're kind of lucky to have it still in our area. It's declining in a lot of other places.

Speaker 1:

What do you see as the major threat to bird population?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, well, a few things immediately come to mind. One really big, overarching one would be climate change. So with changes in the climate, we're seeing birds having to adapt maybe faster than they're really able to and seeing population declines accordingly. So, aside from like really big, big scale topic, just habitat loss in general at large and small scale. So we talked about lakeshore restorations and how that can kind of bring in habitat for species and that's a really local and personal example of that where if you just have a lawn up to a seawall, there's not a lot there for most birds to use. You might have a few robins in your lawn. You'll probably have geese in your lawn a lot there for most birds to use. You might have a few robins in your lawn. You'll probably have geese in your lawn. But if you have some kind of even a glacial rock restoration, but especially native vegetation, you're just introducing so much more habitat and so many more resources that birds can use. And the more habitat that is available to them, the more robust their populations can be and the more resistant to some of these bigger threats like climate change.

Speaker 3:

Also, something that people don't always realize is how damaging outdoor cats can be and windows. So having your cats be inside or at least have some kind of a bell caller can go a really long way towards protecting our local songbird populations. And with big picture windows like some of the lake houses have, they're great for looking out and seeing the view. But birds on the outside it can reflect the sky. They don't really understand how glass works and can fly into it, and we lose a lot of birds every year, especially during migration to window strikes. So having some kind of window treatment, they make different films that can reflect UV light that the birds can see but not us, or dot grid patterns. Some things that don't work super well are just like a couple like hawk silhouette decals have been shown to not be super effective compared to something that's a little bit more consistent across the whole window.

Speaker 1:

What is your birding philosophy?

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

So something that I really try to think about in my birding is not getting too fixated on counting species or identifying everything super specifically, and giving myself the freedom to just enjoy the birds for what they are and appreciating that I get to, you know, interact with them and observe them.

Speaker 3:

So, from an ethical standpoint, trying to be considerate about not disturbing them too much by approaching too closely, even to just move through an area relatively quietly, trying to not frighten them off as much as I can, and thinking in terms of you know, I'm trying to appreciate these birds and I want to.

Speaker 3:

You know, I want them to stay around, I want to contribute to them being able to exist in healthy ecosystems. So things like I mentioned earlier with cats or windows and being cognizant of that, or we haven't been talking, but on the podcast you've talked a lot about different things people can do for water quality in lakes and streams, and then we've discussed in this episode how that water quality is connected to birds and how they're all part of this larger ecosystem. So being thoughtful about, you know, enjoying the birds and appreciating them and then also taking steps to ensure that they're able to live in a world that is beneficial to them and healthy for them. And then just on a personal level, like I said, I think I had a period where I lost some of the passion and the joy of the birds themselves. In my pursuit of new species, or at least volume of species, I'd go out and I'd see 30 species when I knew I could have seen 50 and been like, oh, that was a bad day.

Speaker 3:

I'm like I saw so many cool birds and trying to get back to that place of almost childlike I guess you could say Delight in the birds Right exactly, and I think you know, for people who are maybe interested in getting into birding, not getting too frustrated with oh, I don't know what that one was, just letting themselves be like. Oh, I don't know what that one was, um, just letting themselves be like. Oh, um, I really like birds, I'm having a good time watching them and you know as much as you can identify it. Maybe all you got to was well, that's a duck, it's like.

Speaker 3:

Well, you know something about that bird then and maybe you can narrow it down a little bit further, even, um, you know, that's a really good starting point. You can already cut out most of your whole field guide and just look at the ducks. But even if you never get further than that, I still find that a really worthwhile endeavor and it connects you to nature and you're building your observation skills even when you're not having a check on your list of all the birds you've seen in your life, or trying to get to a big number on just that one outing.

Speaker 1:

That's a good reminder, because first thing I asked, nathaniel, was how many birds are on your list, and and I'm so competitive like, my list isn't even close to what your list is, but I need to take more delight and not worry about how many. So, nathaniel, are there resources or organizations that can help people who are interested in birding?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so locally we have the Tippecanoe Audubon Society and they're actually celebrating their 50-year anniversary this year and are planning some cool extra events beyond what they normally do.

Speaker 3:

So annually they do a Christmastime bird count and then a May bird count and that can be a really cool way to get involved with some other local birders, go out with people who maybe know a little bit more than you and go to some new places that you might not have known otherwise.

Speaker 3:

Everyone has their little secret spots and little patches to look at and we go out and just try to get kind of a snapshot, in coordination with other Audubon societies around the nation and around the world, just to get an idea of over many, many years, population patterns and we can see things declining or increasing over those big time scales, which is really cool, contributing to some actually scientifically significant work. They also do monthly outings to different nature preserves and other areas. So we were talking a little bit about different cool areas you could go to go birding. I know for me I tend to be a little bit, you know, I find the ones that are my favorites and then stick with that, and it can be a good way to say, oh, audubon Society is doing something here. It's like I'll go there and out of your comfort zone?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, A good way to get to somewhere you might not have been before and to enjoy that community of other birders. And then for the 50 year anniversary, they're doing, I believe, quarterly guest lectures around the area, so I know there's one about native plants, there's going to be one about backyard birds for people who are especially interested in, you know, just the birds in their own backyard, and I'm sure they have other stuff planned later in the year as well.

Speaker 1:

Great data collection for birds, and it's something the Lilly Center does. That's fascinating. So, nathaniel, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your joy of birds and pointing us in directions and helping us understand. Biodiversity is really an important thing, and we need to take care of birds.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, you're welcome, thank you.

Speaker 2:

Hey, I'm Dr Nate Bosch with the Lilly Center for Lakes and Streams, and today we're gonna answer the question when it rains, where does all that water go? So we've got a little bit of a model right in front of me here that we're going to use to picture what this might look like. So we've got rainfall coming down and as it hits the ground, there's a few different ways it can go. It can run off the surface of the ground we call that surface runoff, as the name might suggest and it can carry things with it. When it does that, pretty easily because it's right there at the surface of the soil or the pavement or whatever. It's getting intercepted by. Some of the water can actually infiltrate into the soil itself and start to percolate down to lower soil levels, eventually getting down into even the groundwater. We call that our aquifers in northern Indiana here. And so wherever the rainfall is going to go, it's eventually going to move towards a water body. It could be a stream, it could be a lake, it could even be, like what's behind me here, a wetland. We just have to have a low depression where the water is moving towards. This reminds me of the concept of a watershed. So the watershed is that boundary where all the water within that boundary all funnels and drains down to a specific point usually a wetland, a lake or a stream and so the water. You could think of it almost as a bowl or an upside-down umbrella where all that water is collecting to a single spot. And we've got a great model of that right here in front of us, and so let's talk a little bit about that. I got to tell you this is taking me back to when I was in college. My very first internship in environmental science was taking an enviroscape model like this around to different communities and libraries and stuff for an entire summer. So it's kind of fun 20, 25 years later coming back to using this same sort of a model.

Speaker 2:

So I've got some soil here and I'm going to put it on areas of the land that we might expect there to be soil. So we have a little agricultural field here that's depicted on our model. We have some bare soil areas here on some hills. Maybe there's some erosion going on on these hills. We got a construction site over here, maybe a new home is being built, and so we've got some exposed dirt in these sort of areas. We also notice right here along this stream bank. Here we've got some exposed channel, and so we can have erosion all along that channel as well. We can also have wind erosion, and right now it's a little windy, and so some of the soil is just blowing around with, and so we can have erosion all along that channel as well. We can also have wind erosion, and right now it's a little windy, and so some of the soil is just blowing around with the wind, and so that's actually a real thing in the environment as well.

Speaker 2:

So we've got these areas of exposed soil and then, like happens, we get rainfall, and so as rain starts to come across the surface of the land, you can see that we've got water then running down, and it's moving right down to this lake here. So water that's going over our agricultural area, over these hills, over the stream channels construction site. It's washing all of that water down to this collecting point. So all of this space is within the watershed. This rainfall is moving everything down. Now this model is made out of plastic, and so it's not going to allow infiltration or the water to get down into the soil, but in some instances our land can be a little bit like plastic. I think of pavement, like in a parking lot or along a roadway. Even some people's turf grass lawns around their homes can be pretty resistant to infiltration of water getting down, and so this might be a little more realistic than we might think, with water all getting funneled down.

Speaker 2:

And so if we're looking at this receiving body of water, this lake here in our model or in real life behind me, this wetland, all of those things that get washed off the land with the water, are going to end up in that receiving body, and so that's why it's important for everybody. Everybody lives in a watershed. Everybody's going to have a piece of property that they have some influence over, and as water rushes over that or through that property, it's going to wash things with it. It could wash sediments with it, like we've depicted here with the soil that I put out here on our EnviroScape. It can also move things like nutrients, nitrogen and phosphorus, maybe toxic pollutants like oils or greases or those sorts of things, pesticides. Those things are going to end up in the receiving body of water and it's going to start to degrade the quality of that receiving body of water And's going to start to degrade the quality of that receiving body of water, and so what we want to do is we want to keep the soils, keep the nutrients, we want to keep those things on the land rather than allow them to come through the watershed drainage into our receiving bodies of water. All right, so we've talked about where rain goes when it falls on the land and we've talked about watersheds.

Speaker 2:

What are some things that you can do on your own property to help protect that water and keep it cleaner as it's moving into those lakes and streams down slope? One thing that you can do is you can look at your bag of fertilizer and make sure it doesn't have any phosphorus in it, and so we want to use phosphorus-free fertilizer. The middle number of the three numbers needs to be zero. That's phosphorus-free, and we have plenty of phosphorus in our soils around the Midwestern United States. Typically, we don't need extra phosphorus to grow our gardens or to grow our turf grass lawns. If you're curious about that, you can ask us and we can help you with how to do soil testing and you can know exactly what your soil needs. But typically we don't need phosphorus to be added.

Speaker 2:

The second thing that you can consider on your own property would be to keep yard waste out of our lakes and streams. If you live along a lake or a stream, it's pretty obvious you don't want to blow or put bags of that stuff into the lake or stream. If you live in a neighborhood away from a lake or stream, you're not off the hook, because in those neighborhoods oftentimes driveways and and the roads themselves will have storm drains in them. And those storm drains, if leaves and grass clippings get in those, they're going to go directly to one of our lakes and streams. No treatment, no filtering, just going to go right there.

Speaker 2:

When those, when that yard waste starts to decompose, once it gets to a lake or a stream, it's going to give off nitrogen phosphorus. Hey, that's just like that fertilizer bag, right? So nitrogen phosphorus, those things are going to be given off by that yard waste. And what do those nutrients do? Those nutrients start to grow excess weeds, excess algae, even blue-green algae, a type of algae that can produce toxins in our lakes which can be harmful to people and their pets. So we want to be really careful that that stuff doesn't get into our local waterways.

Speaker 2:

The third thing that you can do is having native plants on your property. Those native plants will help intercept and filter those nutrients and the sediments, the soil, like we showed here, as they start to move towards those water bodies. Maybe they're going to move towards the water body by coming into a storm drain, or maybe they're going to move towards the water body directly along a lake shore or along a stream bank. Either way, those native plants are going to help buffer and help protect those water bodies. So, again to recap, we can use phosphorus-free fertilizer, we can prevent yard waste from getting into our lakes and streams and we can also produce or we can plant native plants on our properties and that's going to help that rain that falls not to carry things into our lakes and streams that we don't want to be there.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Lake Doctor podcast. Please like, subscribe and share, and make sure to join us next time. It's bound to be fun.

Speaker 2:

Listening to this podcast is just the first step to making your lake cleaner and healthier. Visit lakesgraceedu for more information about our applied research and discover some tangible ways you can make a difference on your lake.

Speaker 1:

If you have a comment or a question that we can discuss in future episodes, leave a comment or send an email to lakes at graceedu. We'll see you next time. The doctor is in.