LULU MILLER: This is Radiolab. I'm Lulu Miller. Over the last few months, as we've been watching public lands come under peril, massive cuts to the National Parks Service, proposals to sell off millions of acres of public land being debated, I keep thinking about this one moment in a piece I reported about 15 years ago. In a kitchen in rural Michigan, I encountered one of the best defenses of conservation I've ever heard, and it came from such an unexpected person that it was almost like a jump scare. Anyway, I'm saying too much, so I'm gonna turn it over now to OG host of this here program, Jad Abumrad for a story we called "Weighing Good Intentions."

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Okay, so set up this story. This story happens where?

LULU: It's in a little town in northern Michigan called Mio.

LULU: Seven AM. Just drove through the Delaware water gap.

LULU: That's me on my way out there from New York.

LULU: The sun is rising, and ...

LULU: It's about an 800-mile drive.

LULU: ... and it's just gorgeous out here!

JAD: Ooh, listen to you.

LULU: Lush and ...

JAD: All into the outdoors.

LULU: Nauseating.

JAD: Yeah, a little.

LULU: I know. But I'm just one of those people.

LULU: I open my windows, and ...

LULU: When I get out into nature.

LULU: Sweet air.

LULU: I feel my place in the world. Anyway ...

LULU: Just crossed into Mio.

JAD: So you get there.

LULU: Yep.

JAD: What was the reason you were going again?

LULU: To see a bird. A very—not just rare, not just the kind of bird birders get obsessed about, but this is a bird—this is what they call a life bird.

JAD: A life bird?

LULU: Birders wait their life to see it.

JAD: Really?

LULU: Yeah. Only found right here.

JAD: And what's the bird called?

LULU: The Kirtland's warbler.

LULU: So now have you seen a Kirtland's before?

WOMAN: No, I've never seen one. This is my first trip up here.

JAD: And this right here. Where are you right now?

LULU: We're just outside of town on the edge of the forest about to go in. And I'm standing with about 15 people who've come from everywhere.

LULU: Where are you folks coming from?

LULU: To see this bird.

WOMAN: Toledo.

MAN: I'm from South Carolina.

WOMAN: Yeah.

MAN: We're from Oregon.

WOMAN: South Dakota.

WOMAN: Dayton, Ohio area.

WOMAN: Wyoming.

PARK RANGER: We'll walk out to a spot, try to stay single file.

LULU: The park ranger leads us down a path into a little clearing, and pretty immediately ...

MAN: In the background there.

WOMAN: Way back there?

MAN: Mm-hmm.

LULU: ... a guy from Ohio spots a Kirtland's.

WOMAN: Oh, there he is! Yeah!

LULU: A tiny yellow bird ...

MAN: Back there.

MAN: Right there.

LULU: ... up high in a jack pine tree.

WOMAN: Oh, yeah! Oh, great! It's singing like crazy.

LULU: A lady from Dayton starts clapping.

LULU: Can you describe what you're seeing?

JIM COLEMAN: I see a lovely bird with a gray back.

LULU: This is a guy from Oregon, Jim Coleman.

RITA COLEMAN: A blue-gray back.

LULU: And his wife Rita.

RITA COLEMAN: Smaller than a robin.

JIM COLEMAN: Beautiful yellow throat and breast.

RITA COLEMAN: Brilliant yellow. And so in the sunlight, it's just an absolutely radiant bird.

LULU: Is this worth the trip from Oregon?

JIM COLEMAN: Oh, you bet. I don't know, it just makes me thankful that I'm here. And it makes me grateful that my wife is here. I know this is something she's wanted to see for a long time.

LULU: Jim actually starts to tear up.

JIM COLEMAN: This is a very special bird.

RITA COLEMAN: Hold my hand.

LULU: And that's what this story is really about: how special is this bird?

JAD: Meaning?

LULU: Well, how much is a species worth?

JAD: Um, and ...

LULU: Well, here's the backstory.

JAD: Okay.

LULU: In the early '70s, the warbler almost went extinct.

CHRIS MENSING: Want to go in?

LULU: Okay.

LULU: The reason why, it was thought ...

LULU: That's just the sound of them.

LULU: ... was because of a little creature called the cowbird.

CHRIS MENSING: It's a parasite, you know, on some ...

JAD: And who is this guy?

LULU: This is Chris Mensing.

CHRIS MENSING: Fish and wildlife biologist with the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

LULU: And we're standing in this cage full of cowbirds.

CHRIS MENSING: It looks like we've got six males and one female. Let me grab a couple.

LULU: He just reached out and grabbed two of them. You're good at that!

CHRIS MENSING: And the males ...

LULU: Can I touch that?

CHRIS MENSING: Yeah, go ahead.

JAD: What do they look like?

LULU: It's like, imagine a tiny little gnarly crow.

LULU: They've got really sharp little beaks.

LULU: But with this curled beak.

CHRIS MENSING: It has a very drab body, very dull.

LULU: So here's what the cowbird does to the warbler: while the warbler is out of its nest ...

JAD: Like getting a worm or something?

LULU: Yeah. The cowbird lays one of its own eggs in the nest. To make room for it so the warbler doesn't know anything is up, it pushes out one of the warbler's eggs.

JAD: Oh!

LULU: Out of the nest?

CHRIS MENSING: Mm-hmm. And the timing is such that the cowbird egg will hatch first, and will double its size in 24 hours.

LULU: Wow!

CHRIS MENSING: So by the time that the host birds hatch, that cowbird may be up to four times the size. And when they start begging for food from the parents, the loudest, most aggressive chick is gonna get fed, the cowbird chick.

JAD: So the warbler mom ends up shoveling food into this cowbird chick?

CHRIS MENSING: Yep.

LULU: And oftentimes it gets so much food that another warbler chick will die.

JAD: Really?

LULU: Yeah.

JAD: Wow!

LULU: So when the cowbirds first showed up in this area ...

CHRIS MENSING: In the late 1800s, early 1900s.

LULU: ... the warbler population just started plummeting.

CHRIS MENSING: This huge drop.

LULU: By 1971 ...

CHRIS MENSING: There were only 200 males.

LULU: On Earth.

JAD: Whoa.

LULU: So what do you do?

JAD: Are you asking me?

LULU: Mm-hmm.

JAD: I guess you gotta kill the cowbirds.

LULU: Exactly.

CHRIS MENSING: This is one of 64 traps. It's a new one that we just built this year.

LULU: Which is why we're out in this cage. It's actually a cowbird trap.

LULU: Run cowbird, run!

CHRIS MENSING: Yeah, she's biting me. Just like anyone that's got someone larger grabbing you. they don't appreciate it too much.

LULU: And you want to know how they kill them?

JAD: I kind of do, yeah.

CHRIS MENSING: Thoracic compression is the term we use. We basically squeeze the bird, suffocating it, preventing it from breathing.

LULU: Just with your hands? There's no ...?

CHRIS MENSING: Yep. Yep.

LULU: Wow. Yeah, do you have to do that?

CHRIS MENSING: Yeah.

LULU: Like, all the time?

CHRIS MENSING: Yeah.

JAD: Did you see this?

LULU: No.

JAD: [laughs]

LULU: [laughs] But 1972, Fish and Wildlife Service sets up a bunch of traps. A few years and about 12,000 dead cowbirds later ...

CHRIS MENSING: It works.

LULU: Kinda. The population stopped dying off, but then it didn't start bouncing back.

RITA HALBEISEN: What's going on?

JAD: Yeah.

RITA HALBEISEN: Why aren't we seeing bigger numbers now that we're catching the cowbirds?

LULU: That's Rita Halbeisen. She worked with the Forest Service back in the '80s.

RITA HALBEISEN: And we thought, well, we finally concluded it must be just there is not enough habitat.

JAD: Like, they don't have enough trees? Is that what ...?

LULU: Well, no, there are plenty of trees. But the thing about warblers is they like a specific kind of tree. They like them very young.

JAD: [laughs]

LULU: That was weird! [laughs] I could feel it as I was saying it. "They like 'em young."

JAD: No, but they like young trees is what you're saying.

LULU: Yep.

JAD: And there aren't young trees in this place?

LULU: No. It's really weird. When they started looking around this forest, they noticed all the trees were really, really old.

JAD: Why? Why wouldn't there be young trees?

LULU: Well, us.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, public service announcement: Only you can prevent forest fires.]

LULU: Hey, hey, Smokey Bear! See, when humans began to settle in this area of Michigan in about the 1880s, they brought with them that certain human disdain for fire.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, public service announcement: Only you can prevent forest fires.]

LULU: But fire is exactly what's needed up there to make new trees ...

CHRIS MENSING: Yeah, this ecosystem is a fire ecosystem.

LULU: ... says Chris.

CHRIS MENSING: It burns.

LULU: Because when these trees burn, they release their seeds and make room for new trees to grow.

CHRIS MENSING: It is a fire ecosystem. It is made to burn.

LULU: So I ask you again, what do you do?

JAD: Do you start fires? Would that be the solution?

LULU: That would be the solution. So the forestry started doing ...

RITA HALBEISEN: What we call a prescribed burn.

LULU: Basically, says Rita, they burn down a little patch of forest.

RITA HALBEISEN: A few acres.

LULU: To regenerate it. And one windy spring day in 1980 at a place called Mack Lake, the Forestry Service started a fire that they probably shouldn't have.

DICK LORD: Okay, my name is Dick Lord. And I, at that time of the Mack Lake fire, I was part of the ignition crew for the prescribed burn.

LULU: What is an ignition crew?

DICK LORD: They light the fire. [laughs]

LULU: So at 10:00 in the morning, Dick and his crew go out into the woods.

DICK LORD: Went out with a plan.

LULU: Start setting up perimeters, and they begin lighting a few stands of shrub.

BOB BERNER: I was driving home.

LULU: That's Bob Berner. Best name ever for a firefighter.

BOB BERNER: I could see the Forest Service starting to do a burn. And I thought this is not a good time. It was windy, they didn't have the manpower. And I said, "We'll probably be getting called out here shortly."

DICK LORD: Basically, we did not realize that the weather was gonna change as rapidly as it did.

RITA HALBEISEN: The wind came up suddenly—something nobody could predict. And it took the fire across the road into a stand of mature jack pine and took off.

DICK LORD: There were flames probably 100 to 150 feet in the air.

BOB BERNER: The sound is like a roaring train.

LULU: The forest guys jump into their bulldozers trying to plow trenches alongside the fire.

DICK LORD: To pinch it off.

BOB BERNER: And I mean, you could feel the heat.

DICK LORD: It was way out of our control.

BOB BERNER: Hitting the tops of the trees, rolling.

DICK LORD: I knew at the rate it was traveling that it was going to be a major catastrophe.

LULU: Within six hours it had burned over 20,000 acres. It's one of the fastest moving fires ever documented.

BOB: Yeah, it went through here. Far as you can see, was all black.

LULU: These are two guys ...

BOB: I'm Bob.

MIKE: I'm Mike.

LULU: ... who own houses in the area that got burnt.

BOB: I remember the guy down there in the corner, garage was all burned up, black, charred.

LULU: Their houses were okay, but 41 houses were destroyed.

MIKE: All the way up to the lake.

LULU: Just completely.

MIKE: Yeah.

BOB: Nothing green. Nothing.

MIKE: Like something out of a moonscape.

BOB: As far as you could see, everything gone.

RITA HALBEISEN: And the worst part about it for all of us ...

LULU: That's Rita Halbeisen again.

RITA HALBEISEN: ... was that it killed one of the Forest Service employees, a very young wildlife technician who was very well loved by his coworkers.

LULU: A guy named Jim Swiderski.

DICK LORD: You know, Jim was a good friend as well as an employee.

LULU: Dick Lord, again, Jim's boss. He told me that Jim had been a postman for a few years, but just loved birds so much that he took a huge pay cut to come and help protect the warbler.

DICK LORD: Basically what happened was the fire overran him.

RITA HALBEISEN: Oh, the press was having a heyday, just tearing into the Forest Service for what had happened.

DICK LORD: The townspeople were very angry at the Forest Service.

RITA HALBEISEN: How could you do this?

LULU: Rita says they were told not to wear their Forest Service uniforms in town.

RITA HALBEISEN: Gosh, it was so terrible.

LULU: And the forest itself?

RITA HALBEISEN: You know, there was nothing there.

LULU: Completely silent. But a year later, a little bit of green started to poke up. And the next year a little bit more. And ...

RITA HALBEISEN: Eight to ten years after that Mack Lake burn, it just seemed like everywhere you turned around, you'd stop for a listen, and there were five or six birds. A tremendous number of warblers. That was the answer to the mystery.

LULU: The fire.

CHRIS MENSING: You know, if you look at a population graph ...

LULU: That's Chris Mensing again.

CHRIS MENSING: ... after that Mack Lake burn, the population went like that.

LULU: He points his hand straight up.

CHRIS MENSING: So it's pretty dramatic.

LULU: And today, the numbers are up to almost 4,000 birds.

WOMAN: Ah, there he is! Yeah!

LULU: And growing.

WOMAN: He's singing like crazy.

LULU: Now that the birds are back, but a man is gone, when you walk around this town, a question lingers in the air ...

ED FAWCETT: Is the life of a fireman worth the life of a bird?

LULU: That question right after the break.

LULU: Lulu. Radiolab. Just before the break, a well-intentioned fire had turned deadly, and it left a town wondering ...

ED FAWCETT: Is the life of a fireman worth the life of a bird?

RITA COLEMAN: Oh, take a look. Take a look!

ED FAWCETT: Is it?

JIM COLEMAN: That's incredible.

WOMAN: Got him. I got him.

ED FAWCETT: No, in my opinion it isn't.

LULU: This is Ed Fawcett.

ED FAWCETT: I wouldn't trade your life for a bird.

LULU: I'm sitting with him and his wife, Mary Jane.

MARY JANE FAWCETT: Amen.

LULU: Amen.

LULU: In a diner. And no matter where you go in this town ...

MAN: Ah, what's the government doing?

LULU: ... people don't tend to be huge fans of the warbler.

MAN: It's just a small bird.

WOMAN: And I've been up here since '68. I've never seen one.

LULU: Did you ever see one?

MAN: No.

WOMAN: Never have I seen one.

MAN: I've never seen one.

MAN: No.

LULU: And back to Ed.

ED FAWCETT: I just gotta say to you, what would you think about it if your father or brother were killed in a useless fire for a bird? It'd be pretty hard to accept, wouldn't it?

LULU: But if you zoom out, one human life versus the end of a species.

ED FAWCETT: You know how many warblers there are in the United States? I think there's something like 37 species of warblers.

LULU: The real number is actually closer to 60.

JAD: Whoa!

ED FAWCETT: That's kind of ridiculous.

LULU: And that's not all ...

CHRIS MENSING: They ask you when are you done? And we really say, "Never."

LULU: Chris explained to me that they have to keep killing the cowbirds, and they have to keep doing burns—smaller burns, but every single year.

CHRIS MENSING: If we let things be, the bird would be extinct.

LULU: Wow.

CHRIS MENSING: That's the hard thing about this job is knowing that we're never done.

LULU: How many people are working? How much ...

CHRIS MENSING: You're probably looking at hundreds of people. In dollars, you know, we could be looking at, you know, well over a million dollars a year spent.

LULU: And all this began to really sink in on one of my last mornings out there.

LULU: All right, it is five in the morning.

LULU: It was the annual Kirtland's warbler census.

MAN: Good morning.

LULU: Where birders from all over the world show up to help count how many warblers there are out there.

JAD: Is it like "There's a warbler?" Step step step step. "There's a warbler!"

LULU: Yeah, that's actually exactly how it works. I was paired up with this guy, Dave Mendes.

DAVE MENDES: We're gonna kind of walk through the middle of these transects. We're gonna come up ...

LULU: He's kind of a dude dude. He's an older guy, got a beard.

DAVE MENDES: I work for an electrical contractor.

LULU: Told me he's got a man room.

DAVE MENDES: My man room. You know, most guys got sports, but I've got Kirtland's warbler pictures up on the wall.

JAD: Nice.

LULU: So I went into it thinking, like, this will be really cool. We'll march along, we'll count them. I looked at the map. It was a mile, maybe, of a walk. We'll be done in 20 minutes. Well okay, maybe not. We're walking through the forest, an hour, tops.

DAVE MENDES: [laughs] And?

LULU: Hey, Dave!

LULU: We set off. Dense, brambly forest. Still dark.

LULU: Is that one?

DAVE MENDES: That was a hermit thrush.

LULU: Okay.

LULU: And let me just play you a quick little time lapse.

DAVE MENDES: Twenty to seven right now. The sun's just coming up, and it's getting a little muggy out here. That was a Kirtland's.

LULU: Oh, yeah?

DAVE MENDES: Yeah. We can't count him, though. He's not in our section.

DAVE MENDES: 7:07. I heard one way back that way.

LULU: Yeah?

DAVE MENDES: Yeah. There he is again. But I'm not gonna mark him in because I don't know exactly where he's at.

DAVE MENDES: 7:33. There he goes.

LULU: Yeah?

DAVE MENDES: Yep, right there.

LULU: Did you count him now?

DAVE MENDES: No, no, no.

LULU: Not yet?

DAVE MENDES: No. We want to be a lot more accurate than just to say we know there's one up there. We want to triangulate them.

DAVE MENDES: 9:56, and all's well in the warbler woods.

LULU: A couple of ants are biting me, yeah.

DAVE MENDES: They hurt, don't they?

LULU: They do a little bit, yeah. Get out of there!

DAVE MENDES: 10:45 am. I know that there's a bird out there.

DAVE MENDES: I can still hear that bird way back there.

LULU: So we end up staying out there for seven and a half hours.

LULU: We just marked one, right?

DAVE MENDES: Yep. I've only marked one.

LULU: And I don't mean to sound like I'm making fun of Dave. I mean, he's doing his job well, but at some point, in between the fire ants and taking four hours to confirm this one bird ...

DAVE MENDES: He's gonna be right off over here.

LULU: ... I just started thinking about all the effort it takes.

DAVE MENDES: Two rows of trees over from us and I can't see him.

LULU: I just suddenly thought ...

LULU: [bleep]! It's this fussy, fragile little bird and it hasn't evolved. Who cares?

DAVE MENDES: Yeah.

LULU: I mean, this is not worth it.

LULU: And so I started asking people who protect the bird ...

LULU: Why do it with so much money, and it's all for a bird. And I could see it maybe if it was for some—but it's just one warbler of 18 million different kinds of warblers. Like, why do it?

CHRIS MENSING: Well, we do it because we should. You know, we're stewards of the land.

LULU: That's Chris Mensing again, cowbird killer.

CHRIS MENSING: It's for future generations.

LULU: And ...

DICK LORD: Well ...

LULU: ... Here's the firestarter, Dick Lord.

DICK LORD: You know, the Kirtland's warbler was listed under the Endangered Species Act, and we had a charge under the law to do what we could to recover its existence. And that's the only thing that I can say that, you know, we had to do what the law required us to do.

LULU: So we should do it. And the law tells us we have to do it. Unconvincing. And that question ...

ED FAWCETT: Is the life of a fireman worth the life of a bird?

LULU: ... and that guy Ed at the diner, it just stuck in my mind. And I realized I couldn't leave this town until I talked to the people who lost the most.

LULU: Can I just get you to introduce yourselves?

ROBERT SWIDERSKI: Whole name?

LULU: Yeah, sure.

ROBERT SWIDERSKI: Robert Swiderski, age 54.

KATHLEEN SWIDERSKI: Kathleen Swiderski.

FLORENCE SWIDERSKI: Florence Swiderski.

ROBERT SWIDERSKI: The mother.

FLORENCE SWIDERSKI: I'm the mother of James Swiderski.

JAD: Of the guy who died?

LULU: Yeah.

JAD: Okay.

CALVIN DEBREE: Want iced tea or water or anything?

LULU: We're all sitting around the kitchen table.

CALVIN DEBREE: There's a lot of hot dogs and beer over there.

LULU: Jim's brother-in-law is there too.

CALVIN DEBREE: So I'm Calvin. Calvin DeBree.

LULU: And I asked them to tell me about Jim.

ROBERT SWIDERSKI: Quite a guy. Soft spoken.

CALVIN DEBREE: Smart.

ROBERT SWIDERSKI: He was quite a character.

KATHLEEN SWIDERSKI: Yep.

LULU: They told me at first they were furious.

KATHLEEN SWIDERSKI: They should have never, ever sent him in there.

LULU: Angry at the forest service, angry about this bird.

ROBERT SWIDERSKI: Very angry.

LULU: Now, three decades later ...

ROBERT SWIDERSKI: I say you keep that little bird going.

CALVIN DEBREE: Exactly.

JAD: Really?

LULU: Then Jim's younger brother Robert said that the thing he wanted the most is for the Kirtland's warbler to become the ...

ROBERT SWIDERSKI: State bird. That would be the ultimate.

JAD: Huh!

ROBERT SWIDERSKI: That would be the biggest accomplishment ever, would be that being a state bird.

LULU: Wow. I guess in some ways, I'm surprised. I didn't mean to come here with expectations, but in some ways I thought if it was my family, that I would hate that bird, that I would just hate that bird.

KATHLEEN SWIDERSKI: No, it's not the bird. I mean, that bird didn't do anything to any of us. You know, if we can keep it going, I mean, that's what he set out to do. Let's keep it going.

LULU: They think about Jim's death like the death of a soldier.

CALVIN DEBREE: Where would you be sitting right now if we wouldn't have lost all those soldiers in World War I, World War II?

LULU: That he died protecting us.

CALVIN DEBREE: You know?

ROBERT SWIDERSKI: It's only one species. Well then it's gonna be another species and another species and another species. Next thing you know, you walk out in the morning and it'll be quiet. Thank God for Teddy Roosevelt and the boys that made our national parks. Imagine if we didn't have those? It costs money. It's painful, blah, blah, blah. You gotta have the guts to do that. And Jim was really that kind of guy.

JAD: Well, that is convincing.

LULU: Yeah. But ...

LULU: I mean, do you agree, Florence?

LULU: And I asked the mom.

FLORENCE SWIDERSKI: What can I say? The birds are coming back, but the life is gone. So why bring it up again? It's done. You can't bring it back, so you have to live with it. But there's always a hole in your heart, something that none of us will ever forget forever. And don't ask me any more questions, please.

LULU: And then if ever there was a sign to just turn off the darn mic ...

CALVIN DEBREE: There she goes again.

FLORENCE SWIDERSKI: Oh!

LULU: ... the power goes out.

FLORENCE SWIDERSKI: Give me a break!

ROBERT SWIDERSKI: We'll go home and get the generator.

CALVIN DEBREE: I think we're done. Pretty dark.

LULU: Okay, Lulu from 2025 here again. Since I reported this story in 2010 a couple things have changed for that little bird. The biggest thing is that in 2019, the US Fish and Wildlife Service officially removed the Kirtland's warbler from the endangered species list. That meant the bird had surpassed recovery goals. Since then, the population has begun to decline again, but the Michigan Department of Natural Resources say they feel confident they have the tools and resources to stabilize the population.

LULU: And one more thing: a few years back, I called up Robert Swiderski just to check in and ask how everyone was doing. And he said that his mom, Florence—I remember this. He said, "She ain't cookin', but she's still kickin'." [laughs] At that point she was 92. Since then, she has passed away. And a note on her obituary online suggested that in her memory in lieu of flowers, you might plant a tree.

[LISTENER: Hi. I'm Victor from Springfield, Missouri, and here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad, and edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Anisa Vietze, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, Molly Webster and Jessica Yung. With help from Rebecca Rand. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Anna Pujol-Mazini and Natalie Middleton.]

[LISTENER: Hi, Jerry and I'm calling from Kapsowar, Kenya. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

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