Spark Bird: Olivia Wang and the Sky Dancers

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Spark Bird: Olivia Wang and the Sky Dancers

Written by Mark Bramhill

Mark Bramhill: This is BirdNote.

     [MUSIC: On Top of It by Blue Dot Sessions]

When Olivia Wang was in college, she knew she wanted to work with animals, though she wasn't sure exactly what that would look like. But speaking with a biology instructor after class, she got some direction:

Olivia Wang: She studied Northern Harriers. And she was like, yeah, if you ever want to, like, come out into the field with me feel free to reach out. And that sort of turned into me becoming a field assistant for her.

We were studying their breeding and they're like very sneaky raptors. They like to stay sort of low to the ground while they're hunting. So we would spend like hours sitting out in the marsh and just getting like tiny glimpses of them as they rose over the vegetation or whatever.

Mark Bramhill: But Wang remembers the first time she saw a male harrier doing a courtship display, known as sky dancing.

Olivia Wang: It's just all these like aerial acrobatics and like loops and dives. And it was just like breathtaking to watch, and it still is every time I see it. 

     [Northern Harrier flight call, ML248049481]

Olivia Wang: And it just brings me so much joy every time I see these birds just doing, doing their thing, right. This is just survival to them. They're not trying to make me smile and, like, instill awe in me, but... it does.

Mark Bramhill: Wang is now a grad student at the University of Hawaii Manoa, doing research on the Hawaiian Short-eared Owl - research that isn't so different from her experience with the harriers.

     [Northern Harrier flight call, ML248049481]

Mark Bramhill: For BirdNote, I’m Mark Bramhill.

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Senior Producer: John Kessler
Production Manager: Allison Wilson
Producer: Mark Bramhill
Associate Producer: Ellen Blackstone
Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Northern Harrier flight call, ML248049481 recorded by Nicole Richardson.

Music is On Top of It by Blue Dot Sessions.

© 2021 BirdNote   March 2021 Narrator: Mark Bramhill

ID#  sparkbird-06-2021-03-02       sparkbird-06