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Wenfei Tong on Seeing Ourselves in Birds
There’s plenty of behavior in the bird world we can relate to.
© Carla Kishinami
For biologist and writer Wenfei Tong, the line between people and animals has always felt fuzzy — or maybe feathery, in the case of birds. Wenfei loves to highlight commonalities we share with birds, like how young adult Acorn Woodpeckers sometimes stay with their parents if there aren't good territories available for them to move into right away. She thinks that seeing ourselves in birds could be a boon for conservation.
BirdNote®
Wenfei Tong on Seeing Ourselves in Birds
Written by Mark Bramhill
Tenijah Hamilton: This is BirdNote.
[Acorn Woodpecker calls]
For biologist and writer Wenfei Tong, the line between people and animals has always felt fuzzy — or maybe feathery, in the case of birds.
Wenfei Tong: If I know a bit about the birds, it's almost like seeing a friend or something and then thinking, oh, I wonder what they're off to do right now today.
Tenijah Hamilton: Wenfei loves to highlight commonalities we share with birds, like how young adult Acorn Woodpeckers sometimes stay with their parents if there aren't good territories available for them to move into right away. It reminds her of a human living with their parents for a bit after college.
[Acorn Woodpecker calls]
Wenfei thinks that seeing ourselves in birds could be a boon for conservation.
Wenfei Tong: To motivate people to want to care about the natural world, I think it's just important to find ways that you get the natural world to really resonate with people at a deep level. Birds are such a good group for doing that because they have so many entertaining behaviors that we can really relate to. They're also just very captivating and beautiful and charismatic. Through identifying with them, we learn to care about them. And then through caring about them, people will want to protect the birds and the places they live.
Tenijah Hamilton: You can learn all kinds of cool bird behaviors from Wenfei on our podcast, Bring Birds Back. Find it in your favorite podcast app, or on our website, BirdNote.org. I'm Tenijah Hamilton.
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Senior Producer: John Kessler
Content Director: Allison Wilson
Producer: Mark Bramhill
Managing Producer: Conor Gearin
Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Acorn Woodpecker ML 56900 recorded by Geoffrey A. Keller.
BirdNote’s theme was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
© 2022 BirdNote November 2022
Narrator: Tenijah Hamilton
ID# PodBBB-19-2022-11-09 PodBBB-19
Mark Bramhill
Writer
Tenijah Hamilton
NarratorSights & Sounds
