Bird-Watching Will Blow Your Mind (PTFO Vault)

Parties. Orgasms. Adventure. Transcendence. Is there a sexier "sport" on planet Earth than birding? Correspondent Mickey Duzyj introduces Pablo to a nemesis, to the GOAT, to Jesus... and to David Attenborough (sorta). (This episode originally aired July 8, 2025.) • Subscribe to PTFO on YouTube for breaking news, greatest hits and live premieres with Pablo https://www.youtube.com/@PabloTorreFindsOut/ • Subscribe to Pablo's Substack for exclusive access, documents and invites https://pablo.show/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is.

• 0:08Speaker 01

  The North American podcaster. A modern species of extreme abundance. One defined as much by its curiosity as by its tweets.

• 0:25Pablo Torre?

  Right after this ad.

• 0:30Speaker 02

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• 1:02Pablo Torre?

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• 1:46Pablo Torre?

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• 2:09Pablo Torre?

  So this is appearance number four for you, Mickey?

• 2:12Speaker 03

  Fourth time, yeah.

• 2:13Pablo Torre?

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

• 2:20Speaker 03

  I'm gonna make some business cards. That's flattering. Thank you.

• 2:23Pablo Torre?

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

• 2:29Speaker 03

  Had to go away after that for a little bit.

• 2:31Pablo Torre?

  You revived your former life as a goth tennis player. Also, you literally shoveled [BLEEP] for us, investigating Nikola Jokic's horse racing obsession. So what have you brought us today?

• 2:44Speaker 03

  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.

• 3:11Pablo Torre?

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

• 3:16Speaker 03

  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.

• 3:25Pablo Torre?

  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.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  But I need a hobby, too. So I've brought a solution, actually for both of us. It includes plants, which you love.

• 3:43Pablo Torre?

  I do.

• 3:44Speaker 03

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

• 3:52Pablo Torre?

  Oh, God.

• 3:53Speaker 03

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

• 4:09Pablo Torre?

  Okay, so to just understand the concept of the nemesis bird, which is stunningly not a thing that PTFO correspondent Mickey Dujie 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...

• 4:45Speaker 03

  Elderly. Elderly.

• 4:47Pablo Torre?

  Okay.

• 4:48Speaker 03

  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.

• 5:23Pablo Torre?

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

• 6:01Speaker 03

  All that gear, the glorious gear. And collectively, they all kind of flocked together.

• 6:08Pablo Torre?

  As it were.

• 6:09Speaker 03

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

• 6:18Pablo Torre?

  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,

• 7:01Pablo Torre?

  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.

• 7:17Speaker 03

  But sometimes you could 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.

• 7:26Pablo Torre?

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

• 7:30Speaker 03

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

• 7:36Pablo Torre?

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

• 7:41Speaker 03

  I'm not gonna 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 of birding. I've previously spent my life considering bird watching probably to be the lamest of all hobbies.

• 8:05Pablo Torre?

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

• 8:09Speaker 03

  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.

• 8:42Pablo Torre?

  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 Flaco, the now-deceased, escaped Central Park Zoo owl. I've seen red-tailed hawks in Washington Square Park attack, you know, squirrels and [BLEEP]. 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.

• 9:16Speaker 03

  You will come to appreciate things like this. So this sound.

• 9:28Pablo Torre?

  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.

• 9:38Speaker 03

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

• 9:48Pablo Torre?

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

• 9:52Speaker 03

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

• 10:01Speaker 04

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

• 10:06Speaker 03

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

• 10:15Speaker 04

  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.

• 10:42Pablo Torre?

  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.

• 10:51Speaker 03

  It's the much better BBB, 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?

• 11:03Speaker 04

  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, blowjobs for a spruce grouse? If that would be a good dating strategy. I was just thinking out loud. I'm single now. I don't know what to do.

• 11:35Pablo Torre?

  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 today.

• 11:44Speaker 03

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

• 11:53Pablo Torre?

  A tale as old as time.

• 11:55Speaker 04

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

• 11:58Speaker 03

  While biking alone in Alaska.

• 12:03Speaker 04

  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.

• 12:12Speaker 03

  She tries to untangle from her bike. Her bike falls over.

• 12:16Speaker 04

  I'm trying to set up my spotting scope that I had in my bike panier, and I'm on the ground, and I just-

• 12:21Speaker 03

  She manages to take what she calls a-

• 12:24Speaker 04

  A craptastic video. Oh my god, there's a second one coming in. Holy [BLEEP]. Holy [BLEEP]. Oh my god.

• 12:34Speaker 04

  Be cool, Sharon, be cool.

• 12:38Pablo Torre?

  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 cle- I mean, Mickey, and it is, it's a big, beautiful bird.

• 12:52Speaker 03

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

• 12:54Pablo Torre?

  It has like a red, sort of like, crown deal on top.

• 12:58Speaker 03

  It's really puffed up and, and strutting its stuff. So Sharon describes this moment almost like seeing a celebrity, like seeing George Clooney.

• 13:07Speaker 04

  Somebody might get super excited seeing George Clooney walk down the street. Be cool, be cool, don't freak out, because if you freak out, the bird's gonna freak out, and the bird's gonna go away. You wanna stay here, and you wanna watch it. You don't want the bird to think you're a weirdo.

• 13:19Speaker 03

  She describes it as a top-five life moment.

• 13:25Speaker 03

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

• 13:35Pablo Torre?

  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.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  Just look at the ecstasy, Pablo.

• 13:49Pablo Torre?

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

• 13:53Speaker 03

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

• 14:21Pablo Torre?

  So one big thing that Sir David Edinburgh 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

• 15:02Pablo Torre?

  to something to be watched and counted not that long after the actual civil war, around the late 1800s.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  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.

• 15:30Pablo Torre?

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

• 15:35Speaker 03

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

• 15:40Pablo Torre?

  These are golden.

• 15:42Speaker 03

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

• 15:51Pablo Torre?

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

• 16:04Speaker 03

  He, like other ornithologists, would also kill birds to study them. But then, Dr. Selles had this epiphany. On June 23rd, 1899, at precisely 3:15 in the afternoon, he began to watch a pair of Eurasian night jars.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  The night jar, as Dr. Selles 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."

• 16:51Speaker 03

  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.

• 17:05Pablo Torre?

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

• 17:11Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And 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.

• 17:25Speaker 03

  Is it okay if occasionally I call you Jesus as well?

• 17:29Speaker 05

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

• 17:33Pablo Torre?

  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.

• 17:44Speaker 03

  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.

• 18:09Pablo Torre?

  $300 billion?

• 18:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that over a million people are employed in the American birding industry.

• 18:17Speaker 05

  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 specious 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 overflow of moment for me.

• 19:02Speaker 05

  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.

• 19:15Speaker 03

  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, 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?

• 19:56Pablo Torre?

  So these are the volume shooters?

• 19:58Speaker 03

  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 J-Store for birding. It's moderated by volunteers and also the data's 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, has pulled together. But you should know that Birding Jesus has a problem with eBird.

• 20:43Speaker 05

  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 their bird lists to the lists that other people have submitted. And it does tend to kind of expose that, 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.

• 21:10Pablo Torre?

  This is beyond David Annborough now. This is getting, I mean, this is [BLEEP] getting a little real, according to Birding Jesus.

• 21:17Speaker 03

  You have no idea.

• 21:27Pablo Torre?

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• 22:00Speaker 02

  At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet. Like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone, and including dental, vision, and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is, every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save, too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage, HMO, and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 22:38Pablo Torre?

  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 [BLEEP] my nemesis bird is. Who is the official nemesis bird a Pablo Torre finds out?

• 22:56Speaker 03

  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 US State Department is this guy named Peter Kastner.

• 23:14Speaker 06

  Does it work better with the reading glasses or not?

• 23:16Speaker 03

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

• 23:19Speaker 06

  Okay. My name is Peter Kastner.

• 23:21Pablo Torre?

  So the greatest bird watcher alive is an actual spy?

• 23:26Speaker 03

  Not a spy, but Inspector Kastner did tell me that-

• 23:30Pablo Torre?

  He's not a spy, but he's an inspector.

• 23:32Speaker 03

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

• 23:38Speaker 06

  I was in a fairly high-stress business as a diplomat, and I found that, 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, and, and just enjoy.

• 24:05Pablo Torre?

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

• 24:11Speaker 03

  So Inspector Kastner is the world's preeminent big lister.

• 24:15Speaker 06

  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, the proper volume is at number 13, I'll change it to 15, or 10, or 12, because I, I can't have it stop on a, on a prime number. It's just, it's just, it's just not right. It's, it's gotta be an even number. It's gotta be divisible by 5. 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, and it's interesting because it's, it's, it's resonated a lot in the birding community. I think a lot of

• 25:00Speaker 06

  people see that as not the holy grail, but certainly a, a, an almost unattainable goal.

• 25:14Pablo Torre?

  10,000? Like, we should just do the math here for a second, because how old, Mickey, is Inspector Kastner?

• 25:22Speaker 03

  Inspector Kastner is 72 years old.

• 25:24Pablo Torre?

  Okay, so let me just do some math here, right? So 72, 365. All right. So we're looking at 26,298 days.

• 25:32Speaker 03

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

• 25:37Pablo Torre?

  It's all right, so-

• 25:39Speaker 03

  So take that out.

• 25:40Pablo Torre?

  Excuse me, 365 times four minus that, okay? Taking out 14, 61. Inspector Kastner has spent 24,837 bird watching days on Earth, which means that 10,000, I mean, he's saying that he tends to see a new bird species every other day for the span of his entire life, which seems, needless to say, impossible.

• 26:09Speaker 03

  It does, but you gotta 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 Kundinamarca antpitta in Colombia.

• 26:39Pablo Torre?

  What is the all-time scoring list? What does that ranking actually look like?

• 26:43Speaker 03

  So you should know that a life list that is over 8,000 species is considered like insane. There's a list with only 32 people on it that have ever gotten that number. And only 10 people all time have ever had lists over 9,000.

• 27:01Pablo Torre?

  And so the all-time record is what then?

• 27:03Speaker 03

  So it was thought before Inspector Kastner 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 Kastner was, was climbing the list through eBird, which again is the Wikipedia of bird watching-

• 27:25Pablo Torre?

  Meet J-Store.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  -with the community of scientists who are monitoring, you know, the progress. But the inspector also used a separate website called Igo Terra, which is kind of more of like IMDb-

• 27:39Pablo Torre?

  Which is less academic fact-checking.

• 27:41Speaker 03

  There's more species available. So Inspector Kastner, he made a pretty big deal out of it in the birding community.

• 27:47Speaker 06

  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.

• 27:55Speaker 03

  Which he would get on US soil-

• 27:57Speaker 06

  And Oregon, standing on US soil. I mean, this is gonna be the best.

• 28:02Speaker 03

  After going to 195 countries and territories-

• 28:05Speaker 06

  And then all of a sudden-

• 28:07Speaker 03

  Then came along Dr. Jason Bourne. I mean, I mean, Dr. Jason Mann. Jason Mann.

• 28:18Speaker 06

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

• 28:21Pablo Torre?

  Who the [BLEEP] is Dr. Jason Mann?

• 28:24Speaker 03

  So Dr. Mann, as far as I can tell, is an American healthcare investor who's, 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 Igo Terra, which is like a legit site, and where Inspector Kastner 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.

• 29:03Pablo Torre?

  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!

• 29:16Speaker 03

  What night thousand?

• 29:18Pablo Torre?

  That is literally what's happening now.

• 29:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally.

• 29:24Speaker 03

  And like, the race was on.

• 29:27Speaker 06

  I became aware that Jason Mann had moved his list to Igo Terra.

• 29:34Speaker 06

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

• 30:19Speaker 06

  And people actually follow me and they say, oh yeah, well I see, see your eBirding in, in Florida, or I see your eBirding in Malaysia, whatever. So I kept eBirding 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.

• 30:45Pablo Torre?

  Trying to just read between the lines of Inspector Kastner. He's alleging that something nefarious, something maybe a little dishonest, maybe afoot.

• 30:56Speaker 03

  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.

• 31:07Pablo Torre?

  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.

• 31:15Speaker 03

  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 Kastner sees this. He decides to go from Taiwan to the Philippines.

• 31:30Pablo Torre?

  Well, hello, Inspector Kastner.

• 31:34Speaker 03

  And then on February 9th, 2024.

• 31:37Speaker 06

  I just posted a photograph of myself and the back of my camera showing the, the orange tufted spider hunter with a little sign saying 10,000. And that was it.

• 31:50Pablo Torre?

  So this is where birding, big listing becomes actual sports. He's doing the Wilt Chamberlain thing.

• 31:58Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 31:59Pablo Torre?

  He has his big round number.

• 32:02Speaker 03

  And he looks so happy in the photo too. So the inspector posts these photos everywhere. He puts them on Igo Terra. 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.

• 32:21Speaker 03

  But then it actually comes out that Dr. Mann had actually done his own post just 12 hours before.

• 32:31Pablo Torre?

  12 hours?

• 32:33Speaker 03

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

• 32:38Pablo Torre?

  My God. So Dr. Mann's production values here seem to be even greater than Inspector Kastner because he has, 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.

• 33:12Speaker 03

  This is his trophy for the world.

• 33:14Pablo Torre?

  And the reaction is what?

• 33:17Speaker 03

  So Inspector Kastner says that with these things happening at the same time.

• 33:21Speaker 06

  After, you know, 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, the, the birding world exploded. It really did.

• 33:36Pablo Torre?

  It's a little suspicious. Dr. Mann, is, is he, is he legit? Like what, what do you, what do you think? What do you know?

• 33:44Speaker 03

  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.

• 34:00Pablo Torre?

  So I'm now just like, I'm doing some, some just cursory research into Dr. Mann. And there's this thread on, on birdforum.net. It's, 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.

• 34:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. So a lot of the species that Dr. Mann had on his Igo Terra list did raise eyebrows. Inspector Kastner said that it would be headline news, for example, to see or hear a bird as rare as the new Caledonian nightjar. You'll remember.

• 34:49Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 34:49Speaker 03

  From the great epiphany of 1899 in issue 699 of The Zoologist, the song of the nightjar.

• 35:00Speaker 03

  But this is no ordinary nightjar, Pablo. The new Caledonian nightjar has not been seen on earth since 1939.

• 35:09Pablo Torre?

  Which is all to say, I suppose, that if you had in fact found such a nightjar, you would not bury it on your list. You'd be shouting this from the rooftops.

• 35:20Speaker 03

  Or treetops, for sure.

• 35:22Pablo Torre?

  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.

• 35:58Speaker 03

  The buff-breasted buttonquail.

• 36:00Pablo Torre?

  The scaled flowerpiercer.

• 36:03Speaker 03

  The Sula waysee woodcock.

• 36:05Pablo Torre?

  The papuan whipbird.

• 36:08Speaker 03

  The talibu bushwarbler.

• 36:10Pablo Torre?

  The Kangian titbabbler.

• 36:13Speaker 03

  The blackthroat, of course.

• 36:15Pablo Torre?

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

• 36:20Speaker 03

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

• 36:25Pablo Torre?

  What term have we somehow not gotten to yet?

• 36:29Speaker 03

  That's jizz, Pablo.

• 36:40Pablo Torre?

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• 37:24Pablo Torre?

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• 39:08Pablo Torre?

  So I should disclose that you got me.

• 39:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:11Pablo Torre?

  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.

• 39:21Speaker 03

  So we all know that you get your ecstasy from competition. But let's recall that before we got distracted by the dirty birding names here, that our friend Charles-

• 39:32Pablo Torre?

  Birding Jesus.

• 39:33Speaker 03

  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.

• 39:54Speaker 05

  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. Using them as a source of competition, even on a personal level, to try to set a goal of seeing X number of species. And to me, that's the antithesis of why I love birds.

• 40:39Pablo Torre?

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

• 40:43Speaker 03

  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 cellphone service, to not be immersed in cyberspace, but actually be immersed in reality. And after doing that, you can witness these small, majestic miracles. So I mean, you're probably tweeting right now?

• 41:15Pablo Torre?

  I have multiple tabs open, for the record.

• 41:19Speaker 03

  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.

• 41:35Pablo Torre?

  Okay, I'm closing, closing my other tabs.

• 41:40Speaker 03

  So Birding Jesus's longtime nemesis bird was the Rufus Ventid 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 ant bird.

• 42:23Speaker 03

  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.

• 42:33Speaker 05

  And so 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 had seen wood creepers. I would see flycatchers. There were toucans on the ground, mott mott's 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 scouring through the leaf litter. And as I was kind of surveying the scene,

• 43:13Speaker 05

  I saw this blur of this bird that just disappeared over the hilltop. And based on its jizz, which is a birding term that refers to general impression of shape and size, everything about this bird screamed Rufus Ventid ground cuckoo. So my heart absolutely stopped.

• 43:32Speaker 03

  And yes, in case you were wondering, Jesus wept.

• 43:36Speaker 05

  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 Rufus Ventid ground cuckoo right now. It's just a few hundred feet away from me.

• 44:17Speaker 05

  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."

• 44:26Speaker 03

  So the question now, Pablo, is, are you a believer?

• 44:31Pablo Torre?

  I could not be, yeah, more subscribed to the religiosity that you have brought me here.

• 44:38Speaker 03

  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 redstart. It has big orange spots. But we thought maybe that was a little too Trumpy for Morning Joe Pablo.

• 45:07Speaker 03

  But then Birding Jesus settled on your nemesis, which is the northern perula.

• 45:14Pablo Torre?

  The northern perula.

• 45:17Speaker 03

  Beautiful bird, pretty small bird.

• 45:19Pablo Torre?

  A beautiful yellow belly.

• 45:21Speaker 03

  That's technically called its bib, Pablo.

• 45:24Pablo Torre?

  Its bib, all right, noted.

• 45:26Speaker 03

  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.

• 45:34Pablo Torre?

  Its song, can we play that one more time?

• 45:39Speaker 03

  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.

• 45:51Pablo Torre?

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

• 45:55Speaker 03

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

• 45:57Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 45:57Speaker 03

  A thinking man's bird.

• 45:59Pablo Torre?

  And so what do I do? What do we do?

• 46:03Speaker 03

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

• 46:09Pablo Torre?

  We're going to go to Central Park now. You want to take me to Central Park?

• 46:12Speaker 03

  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.

• 46:36Speaker 05

  Hello.

• 46:37Speaker 03

  There he is.

• 46:38Speaker 05

  How are you?

• 46:41Pablo Torre?

  Um, what the [bleep] is happening?

• 47:04Pablo Torre?

  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.

• 47:13Speaker 05

  Your wife is Catholic. She hates that you ever told me this.

• 47:17Pablo Torre?

  There's nothing more Catholic than Harrison. And so we followed him out of our studio and toward the elevator here at Metal Arc Media. It doesn't occur to me that Metal Arc is named after a bird.

• 47:29Speaker 05

  It is one of the most imperiled birds in all of North America.

• 47:32Pablo Torre?

  Really?

• 47:33Speaker 05

  Yep, 75% of the entire population has disappeared since 1956.

• 47:36Pablo Torre?

  Oh, that's ominous. And what's the...

• 47:39Speaker 05

  It's a grassland.

• 47:40Pablo Torre?

  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.

• 48:13Pablo Torre?

  And yes, to hire David Attenborough.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Ah, 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.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 49:31Speaker 01

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

• 49:40Pablo Torre?

  You see that? So we have the pigeons with a hawk on top of an eagle behind it. So [bleep].

• 49:50Speaker 01

  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.

• 50:11Pablo Torre?

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

• 50:21Speaker 01

  The obsessive Filipino-American podcaster travels in a flock, most often with an extraordinarily endangered breed, the freelance reporter.

• 50:37Speaker 03

  When you said that the parilla might be watching us, I thought about predator.

• 50:43Pablo Torre?

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:43Speaker 03

  You know, hiding in the...

• 50:44Pablo Torre?

  Lathered in mud.

• 50:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:46Pablo Torre?

  That's what we gotta do. We are doing that, technically.

• 50:50Speaker 01

  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.

• 51:06Speaker 05

  So, American robins are singing. Yeah, we've got some vocal activity. The American robins are singing.

• 51:10Pablo Torre?

  I just love them. I just point to my ear and suddenly Birding Jesus is like, "That's an American robin."

• 51:16Speaker 01

  The podcaster is jubilant.

• 51:18Pablo Torre?

  This is a great friend to have.

• 51:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, everybody needs a birding friend, I think.

• 51:23Speaker 01

  Suddenly, the freelance reporter sniffs out a lead.

• 51:27Speaker 03

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

• 51:32Speaker 05

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

• 51:39Speaker 01

  But the obsessive fap, having become perhaps unaccustomed to the great outdoors...

• 51:46Speaker 05

  Provide the pending females with all the resources they need to build a nest.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  Seems on this day to have become particularly distracted.

• 51:55Speaker 05

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

• 51:59Speaker 03

  Show me what you got.

• 52:00Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 52:00Pablo Torre?

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

• 52:03Speaker 01

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

• 52:11Pablo Torre?

  The name of my nemesis bird is...

• 52:15Speaker 03

  The northern parilla.

• 52:15Speaker 05

  The northern parilla, that's correct.

• 52:17Pablo Torre?

  The northern parilla.

• 52:18Speaker 01

  So driven is he by the algorithm...

• 52:22Speaker 05

  Last year, there was one documented right here in the ramble. So we are still within the realm of possibilities of finding a northern parilla.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  That the podcaster will stop at nothing.

• 52:33Pablo Torre?

  We will find them.

• 52:35Speaker 05

  We will.

• 52:35Pablo Torre?

  Wherever they may be hiding.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  Even...

• 52:38Speaker 05

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

• 52:42Speaker 01

  And especially at the incontrovertibility...

• 52:46Speaker 05

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

• 52:52Speaker 01

  Of the elements.

• 52:55Speaker 03

  Nobody said this question was gonna be easy.

• 52:57Speaker 05

  That's right, and it shouldn't be. This is a nemesis bird.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  Nothing can stop the podcaster.

• 53:02Pablo Torre?

  But here's the thing about a nemesis bird.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  And his very own brand...

• 53:05Pablo Torre?

  We have not seen the nemesis bird yet.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  Of climax.

• 53:09Pablo Torre?

  But the nemesis bird also hasn't seen us.

• 53:17Speaker 05

  Canada goose.

• 53:17Pablo Torre?

  Canada goose.

• 53:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, Canada goose.

• 53:20Pablo Torre?

  Canada goose.

• 53:20Speaker 03

  Wait, the jacket or the bird?

• 53:23Speaker 05

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

• 53:29Speaker 05

  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.

• 53:39Pablo Torre?

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

• 53:45Speaker 05

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

• 53:52Pablo Torre?

  It is a romantic...

• 53:55Speaker 05

  Pastime?

• 53:55Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, and even like the rain, the wet, the wetness.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  The podcaster is distracted.

• 54:03Pablo Torre?

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

• 54:07Speaker 03

  It's very beautiful.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  Which is precisely the point.

• 54:11Pablo Torre?

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

• 54:16Speaker 01

  Of bird watching...

• 54:17Pablo Torre?

  Beginning to get it.

• 54:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:19Pablo Torre?

  Kind of beginning to get it.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  Instead of podcasting.

• 54:27Pablo Torre?

  I've greatly enjoyed this, even though we have come up very empty and very wet. The northern parilla has evaded us, but I don't want to give up yet.

• 54:41Speaker 03

  Good, and you shouldn't.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  It has been, as the Filipino-American podcaster himself might say, an exclusive skeleton key for a time machine into the Kremlinology of what you might call the last American monoculture, with nothing less at stake than the very nature of nature itself.

• 55:08Pablo Torre?

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

• 55:16Speaker 05

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

• 55:21Speaker 03

  Before we go, though, I have a very New York City way of us continuing our quest. I've put together a series of flyers.

• 55:32Pablo Torre?

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

• 55:37Speaker 03

  So I think we should hang it up.

• 55:39Pablo Torre?

  Oh, and you have the tearaway tads at the bottom, 51385 Pablo, that is actually our hotline.

• 55:45Speaker 03

  Put that up like that?

• 55:47Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. 51385 Pablo, the northern kingbird, need not apply.

• 55:56Pablo Torre?

  We're coming for you.

• 55:59Pablo Torre?

  Emphasis on coming.

• 56:05Pablo Torre?

  Is that too much?

• 56:08Pablo Torre?

  Is that a little much?

• 56:09Speaker 05

  No comments, kids. It's your show.

• 56:15Speaker 01

  But first, Pearl Jam. Sorry, is this... Have I got the wrong program? Slightly confused.

• 56:34Pablo Torre?

  And that, for the record, was not the real David Attenborough. It was actually some guy named Guy, and you can find Guy over on cameo.com/voiceoverguyuk. But this has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Metalark Media production named after one of the most imperiled birds in all of North America. And we will hopefully talk to you next time.