Laura Erickson's For the Birds

On September 17, The Stokes Guide to Finches was released. I know both the authors, but in different contexts. Lillian Stokes is author or co-author of 36 different Stokes Guides now, so I’ve run into her at festivals and when we were on a bird conservation panel.

I’d heard about Matt Young even before he started the Finch Research Network (FiRN) and kept the Finch Forecast alive after Ron Pittaway retired in 2020, but the first time I directly contacted him was with regard to Evening Grosbeaks.

I got to talk to them both a couple of weeks ago, and edited some of our conversation into four radio programs for what I’m calling “For the Finches Week.”

First, I asked Lillian Stokes how she and Matt Young got together to produce this book.

LILLIAN: Well, it’s a good story, and I like to say that the finches actually recruited me. So from my side, Back in August of 2020, I lived in Hancock, New Hampshire, and a flock of Red Crossbills came every morning to the Harris Center for Conservation, and the former director, a good friend of mine, notified me and said, “Lillian, get over here. There are crossbills.”

So the next morning I flew down as fast as I could with my camera, with my cell phone to record them, and I couldn’t believe it. There were crossbills all around me, and they were landing in the dirt parking lot right next to my car to get grit, because birds eat grit to help them digest their seeds, and they were reliable every morning. So I was amazed. I recorded them, I tried to photograph them, I kept hearing their calls in my sleep. I get more and more and more involved with them, they kind of hooked me. So I say, I like to get recruited by them, I became one of the flock.

So what do you do when red crossbills are in front of you and calling? People need to understand that red crossbills, think of them as living in tribes in different areas of the country. Each tribe speaks its own secret, unique language, and they just talk to one another. So what you do is you record their calls, their flight calls, and then it’s hard for the average birder to discern one from another. So what you do then is you send it to the crossbill expert, i.e. my co-author Matt Young.

So we connected over that, and we hit it off right away, and we suddenly realized, oh my god, there’s no really good book on these finches, you know, including crossbills. There should be a book.

So I have a little background in producing books. And Matt, being the crossbill expert, that was a good match to produce this book. Matt himself, actually, his backstory on getting involved with crossbills goes way back into his early days. Matt, you want to fill her it on?

MATT: Yeah.So. I finished my degree at Oneonta in 1995 and that was in meteorology, hydrogeology, but I knew I wasn’t going to go into that professionally even though I’d finished the degree and that May I bought a pair of binoculars, I bought a car, I went to a Grateful Dead concert and then I got in the car the day after the Grateful Dead concert and drove across country to Yellowstone. I had a job in Yellowstone as a host at the restaurant there.

First day I landed there, I grabbed my binoculars, went to Lower Falls and a flock of crossbills flew in above me and started feeding and that’s where it all started in 1995. I was originally really a more full-finch across all of the finches as you remember probably Laura, good Evening Grosbeaks and siskins and redpolls and whatnot, but you know the biology is so interesting with crossbills because of the flight call dynamic and the fact that everybody started recording them as we encourage people and you know it’s the largest by far, it still has the largest number of recordings in Macaulay Library by far. It’s like I think it’s like 10-12,000 ahead of the next closest species which is Carolina Wren. So that’s how it all started.

LILLIAN: I think what’s great about all that and certainly some of those 10,000 and probably more that Matt has listened to, Matt I feel has really gifted hearing. He is able to hear incredible nuances in all these call types so when I sent my recordings to him he told me well you have type 1, 2, 3 and at that time 10 which has now become 12, I was absolutely floored. I thought oh my god I have crossbills coming from way across the country.

I was asking all the right questions. I kept asking Matt well where are they coming from? Where are they going? Do they breed or not? Are they going to stay and breed? How do people understand how to differentiate the call types? So I was hooked and again this led to us deciding to do a book and making what we refer to as the All Finch book for anyone who has ever been interested in finches. So it’s All Things Finch and it differentiates it from a usual field guide in that it has so, so much more. As you know Laura you have the book so it’s got stories and quick takes and incredible foraging charts and the history and the biology, the eruptions, so much more than what you find in a usual field guide although it has all the information on the subspecies, the males, females and matures, all of that as well.

Laura: Next time Lillian Stokes and Matt Young will discuss another cool finch that many of us see in our backyards, and the species that serves as the central photo on the cover of The Stokes Guide to Finches—the American Goldfinch.