A "For the Birds" Retrospective in Three Parts

How I (of all people!) ended up doing a radio program forty years ago.

(Listen to the radio versions for Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.)

Part 1: Searching for my niche in the Duluth birding community

On May 12, 2026, “For the Birds” will be 40 years old. When I first walked into the college radio station at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, with my trusty Peterson bird records and three scripts in early May 1986, I didn’t know if anyone there would be remotely interested in a program about birds, and I had no clue what I was doing—I was simply frustrated that I’d not yet found a niche in the Duluth birding community the way I’d so easily fit in in East Lansing, while I was a rank beginner, and in Madison, where I became much more skilled.

I’d never ever been on the radio before, and my only experience doing anything for public consumption had happened several years before, while we were living in Madison. The afternoon paper, the Capital Times, published an article about warblers filled with factual errors, and the very next week, Peter Fox, the city editor at the morning paper, the Wisconsin State Journal, just happened to call me at the school where I was teaching to tell me that the paper was starting a brand new “Leisuretime” section, and he wanted to list the beginner birding walks I was leading for Madison Audubon on his events calendar. I said sure but hoped that if he published any articles about warblers in the new section, they’d be more accurate than the one in the Cap Times. He said, “Well, why don’t you write one for us?”

That felt like a put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is challenge so I agreed, but WHOA! it was daunting. My only college degree was in elementary education, and I’d never written anything for publication before. I confided to my birding buddy and closest friend, Ken Wood, how embarrassing and scary this was, but he seemed certain that I’d do just fine. He told me to think of newspaper readers as smart sixth graders who’d never had a chance to learn anything about birds. My job was simply to make the subject accessible and interesting for them, never assuming they knew basic stuff while never talking down to them.

Peter Fox wanted photos to accompany the article, so he sent a photographer on one of my birding walks at the arboretum. These walks were on weekdays and I had to be at school by 8:30, so the group met at at 6, an ungodly hour for the photographer. He’d been mostly planning to take people shots and I don’t think he brought a telephoto lens, but this being May in a Madison hotspot, warblers abounded, and he got some nice photos. He didn’t want his gorgeous Blackburnian Warbler photo “wasted” on an inside page, so he lobbied for and got that one on the front page.

The article was very well received (I later found the paper won an award for it!), so Peter asked me to write more, and I did. When we moved to Duluth in 1981, I sent some clippings to the Duluth News-Tribune, but the managing editor there, Larry Fortner, told me the paper already had the “finest outdoor writer in North America.” Russ and I both enjoyed Sam Cook’s articles, but he wrote mostly about hunting and fishing, not about birding and nongame birds. I wrote back that the Wisconsin State Journal also had an outdoor writer who covered those kinds of activities, but Larry was just not interested. Journalists and media professionals back then, and probably still today, have little training in nature studies, and few understand how hungry people are for reliable information about backyard and local wildlife.

I knew it was pure luck that I got the newspaper assignments in Madison, so I wasn’t too disappointed to have lost that creative outlet. But what was frustrating at a soul-deep level was how I simply could not fit into Duluth’s birding community of the 1980s. Things have changed dramatically as the “old guard” retired and, especially, after Frank Nicoletti moved here, but that was in the future. I got involved in Duluth Audubon from the very start—within a year, I was elected president and was editing the monthly newsletter. But those jobs don’t require any birding skills. The local birding community was specifically focused on Hawk Ridge, and the people serving as raptor counter, bander, and naturalist back in the eighties formed a closed, insular circle. It was so different from Lansing and Madison!

In all three cities I’d lived in, we had some genuinely great, very experienced birders, mostly but not all men. I never minded deferring to them, and just about all of them took me seriously. In Madison, I did Big Days every May with the top birders, who considered me among their numbers. In Duluth, even when the big guns were actively searching for a fourth for a Big Day team (four is the ideal number), they refused to let me join—one team leader bluntly explained that women did not belong on Big Day teams. I started my own team, which we called the Reeves after a lovely European shorebird that occasionally turns up in America—it’s the only bird with a different species name for males and females. (The males are called Ruffs.). But two of my team regulars were from the Twin Cities, not Duluth, and only one was as acquisitive as I was, so we focused more on quality than quantity.

My Madison Audubon birding walks for beginners had been very well attended and popular. Here the Duluth Audubon board of directors would not allow me to lead any field trips using the Duluth Audubon name because one of those top local birders was already doing a very popular and worthwhile spring and fall bird class for Community Education, leading trips to the best hotspots in the area. I signed up for it several times—it was great! But in Madison, we had lots of people leading different kinds of field trips, figuring the more opportunities we provided, the more people we’d be including. People in Duluth had to pay to sign up for Community Ed classes while mine would be free and more informal—a good way for people who weren’t sure about birding to try it out without any commitment.

I was plenty busy and happy at home—my three children were born between 1981 and 1985—and Duluth Audubon kept me busy, too, but I’d never felt so excluded from the most active birding community before. I was also missing teaching—I needed, deep in my bones, to be sharing stuff about birds. I had no clue how I was ever going to find my niche here. I was ready for a big change.

Part 2: Radio?!

When we first moved to Duluth, I listened to KUMD and National Public Radio a lot, but I never could have imagined me writing and producing a radio program. One of my favorite things on NPR was when John Ciardi talked about the etymology of words and expressions on “Morning Edition.” He didn’t sound anything like a radio person—the kind of news reader who maintains the same detached, professional tone whether reporting on a devastating tragedy or delivering a funny fluff piece. Ciardi was deeply knowledgeable and passionate about etymology, and it came across in his segments.

In early 1986, I wrote to him asking about a poem I couldn’t get out of my mind—I only remembered the last lines, and was pretty sure he hadn’t written it, but for some reason I associated it with him and badly wanted to find the entire poem. He responded with a lovely letter explaining that Love Poem, by John Frederick Nims, was one of the ones he’d included in his book, How Does a Poem Mean? That was why I associated the poem with him—we’d read that book in high school English. I was thrilled to hear from him.

Then on March 31, the day after Easter, on “Morning Edition,” I heard the horrifying news that John Ciardi had died of a heart attack on Easter Sunday.

This was cataclysmic. Suddenly there was a huge vacuum on the airwaves—someone had to quick get on the radio talking about something they were deeply knowledgeable and passionate about. On the strength of that, I sat down and wrote three scripts—about Duluth’s spring weather, orioles, and grackles. I decided to call the segments “For the Birds,” in part to beat anyone to the punch who wanted to dismiss my work, and in part because being for the birds suggests advocacy. My close friend Karen Keenan knew Bob De Armond at KUMD, so she asked Bob to set up an appointment for me to meet Stephanie Hemphill, the station’s news director.

Stephanie liked what I’d written, led me into the studio to record those three scripts on the spot, and showed me how to mix in the bird sounds at the beginning and end. I’d figured those three scripts were just a sample, but she saw no reason to change anything. Since I’d written three, she decided to start airing “For the Birds” every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And that was that.

Other than Stephanie teaching me how to do my own recording and production work at the KUMD studio, I got virtually no feedback. I was painfully self-conscious. It’s funny to listen to those first programs now—I talked much too fast and my voice was higher-pitched from nervousness.

I muddled through week after week, focusing on Duluth’s spectacular spring and fall migrations, backyard bird feeding, interesting birds, and any other topics that seemed interesting and timely. I did the program as an unpaid volunteer, but money was never my measure of the value of anything worthwhile. I didn’t know how to promote the program, but somehow Minnesota’s KAXE and Wisconsin’s WOJB and WXPR heard about it and started airing the program the next year. That meant a little more work for me--I had to dub the copies and get them in the mail—but KUMD covered the cost of the tapes and postage.

At some point someone told Dale Connelly of Minnesota Public Radio’s “The Morning Show” about “For the Birds” and I sent him a few recordings and transcripts. He was interested, but an MPR producer said no way—I sounded too much like a teacher (which of course I was—”For the Birds” was nothing if not authentic) and she said nobody wanted to hear about birds once a week anyway. I’ve never been all that ambitious and just about always took no for an answer pretty easily. Anyway, I was happy just the way things were.

And that is how “For the Birds” got its start four decades ago.

Part 3: Getting silly.

Six months after I started producing “For the Birds”, as my almost-three-year-old daughter Katie’s December 10 birthday approached, I wanted to do a special program just for her. We watched Sesame Street together every day, and she was especially fond of Big Bird, so I decided to do a program about him. The humor was pretty over the top but it was a lot of fun to write and put together, and several listeners called the station to say how much they enjoyed it.

If my goal was to promote the love, understanding, and protection of birds, I knew that injecting humor was a good way to achieve that. A few months later, I did my very first April Fool’s Day 1987 program, about how the “Cornell Lavatory of Orthinology” had cracked the code of all bird language. Two of my favorite KUMD volunteers, Tim Winker and Dan Procter, voiced a crow from Chicago and one from Duluth, and I introduced my fictitious underwriter—Jim Baker from Baker’s Blue Jay Barn. My friend John Keenan (Karen’t husband) provided the voice of Jim Baker. Many people thought I’d gotten my inspiration from “A Prairie Home Companion,” but Saturday afternoons and evenings were for our children, so I’d never listened to it. Any inspiration I got to make a fake commercial would have come from “Saturday Night Live”.

For April Fool’s Day 1988, I did a parody of Duluth’s famous John Beargrease Sled Dog Race—my version was the John Chickenfat Sled Bird Race, in which the teams were made up of homing pigeons pulling their sleds through the sky from Grand Marais to Hawk Ridge—that year, my fictitious Jim Baker was fielding a team of Blue Jays. This program marked the radio debut of my son Joe, who was six at the time, and of my neighbor Mary Tonkin, who portrayed Jaimie Honker, “top sled-bird racer in North American, straight from the Alaskan Ichickenrod.” (In real life, Mary Tonkin was my kids’ emergency auxiliary backup grandma.) That was also when I created Earth Angel Bird Emporium, “Helping you to attract upscale, trendy birds to your home.”) Earth Angel was voiced by Karen Keenan—the friend who got me that appointment at KUMD in the first place.

April Fool’s Day fell on a weekend for the next two years and I was getting stir crazy for an opportunity to get silly again. Fortunately, there were two full moons in December 1990, and I got the idea to name any month with a blue moon “National Blue Jay Awareness Month.” I did a few silly programs that month, including one in which I compared Blue Jay intelligence with that of a little kid, using my five-year-old son Tommy as the kid. Cell phones were a new technology, so Jim Baker had an ad for Baker’s Blue Jay cellular phones (Here ‘s the link to that program).

My mother-in-law always listened to the local radio station that was in the “Music of Your Life” network playing old standards, so I of course had to do a parody of that for April Fool’s Day in 1991: “The Music of Your Blue Jays.” This time, I brought my whole family into the act in an ad for American Blue Jay Insurance, and introduced my own personal vocal “group,” the California Ravens, singing the parody song “Dancing Cheek to Beak” and a madrigal for Baker’s Blue Jay Blend. (It was fun singing harmony with my own voice in the studio, late at night so no one would hear!) It became something of a tradition: whenever April Fool’s Day fell on a day Duluth’s 103.3 FM station was airing “For the Birds,” I’ve tried to produce some sort of silly program.

I was lucky in my choice of best friends when we moved here—Karen and John Keenan lived just a couple of houses away from us when our firstborn Joey and their daughter Britta were babies. It’s been enormous fun to write scripts knowing exactly how they would read their parts. John has done such an amazing job with my Jim Baker character that a surprising number of listeners over the years told me they thought Baker’s Blue Jay Barn, and Jim Baker, were real. I used Karen and John in my 1992 parody of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Erich Segal’s Love Story, my own “A Farewell to Love Stories.”

After I saw the 1995 movie The Bridges of Madison County, I read the book, which was so over the top that I simply had to parody it. The main male character actually says, “I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went out to sea,” which gave me the idea to make the character a Peregrine Falcon; John Keenan did his voice and Karen played poor Francesca Pigeon, consumed by her love. (The Pigeons of Madison County.)

The funnest one I ever wrote was a parody of the movie Where the Boys Are. Karen and I played two birdwatching college girls heading up to Grand Marais over spring vacation to be “Where the Boids Are,” with Russ and John playing two hitchhikers we pick up en route. We had to keep doing retakes because we were laughing so hard as we recorded the lines, like Karen’s “I love that spotting scope of yours. It’s sooooo long.”

For April Fool’s Day in 1992, I did a program about the Winter Bird Olympics, ending with a news headline about Lorena Bobwhite. In 2006, after I saw the video ostensibly showing an Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Arkansas, I had to produce an April Fools Day program about the rediscovery of a small population of Dodoes in the Duluth Harbor.

My daughter Katherine is a wonderful pianist, so I enlisted her help to provide accompaniment for the California Ravens singing such tunes as “Bohemian Rhapsojay” and “Turn Around.” I needed more of a sixties band sound to do a parody of “Last Kiss” (“Where Oh Where Can My Blue Jays Be?”) so I actually paid three UMD students, Darin Bergsven, Nate Perbix, and John Sommerfeld, out of my own pocket to come to the studio for that one.

For April Fool’s Day 2005, I reported on a major breakthrough in our understanding of bird intelligence, with an ad for Baker’s Blue Jay window feeders with Jayagra suction cups.

Duluth’s Mayor Don Ness did a cameo when I did my Chickadee Ghost Pirates Terrorizing Duluth story on April 1, 2010.

You could easily tell which TV shows I was watching in 2014, when I parodied Breaking Bad, and in 2015, when I wrote the true story of Don Draper and How Mad Men will end (if it sticks to the truth).

The pandemic inspired my April Fool’s 2020 program about how Blue Jays are helping humans with social distancing.

Jim Baker got into high tech, developing Bluolingo: The first Blue Jay translation app for April 1, 2022

He announced a new podcast featuring not human guests but Blue Jays for April Fool’s Day 2023, and announced a new product for travelers, CLOACA, for April Fool’s Day 2024.

Last year I provided updates from Earth Angel and Jim Baker, for April Fool’s Day 2025

On April 15, 1987, I did a program about the birds of baseball.

In December 1999, my son Joe and his best friends Ian Smith and Ramiro Figueroa, high school seniors at the time, voiced this silly program: How Earth Angel Bird Identification Binoculars saved Christmas.

December 2000 had a blue moon, meaning it was National Blue Jay Awareness Month. I ran an ad for Jim Baker’s Blue Jay Instant Vocalization Decoder Ring. (That one ended with the California Ravens singing “Bohemian Rhapsojay.” Jim Baker also announced a bunch of other products, such as Oil of Ojay, Jaybelline Eye Cosmetics, Jim Baker’s Blue Jay Board Games, and Baker’s Blue Jay Video Games. He also made a new, improved Baker’s Blue Jay Blend: Not just for Blue Jays anymore.

The crazy election in 2000 inspired this California Ravens song: “Blue Jays Are Here to Stay.”

For one month, I think in 1999, I launched an hour-long program, “Wake Robin.” Each program featured an interview with someone interesting, including John Fitzpatrick, Director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology; Greg Budney, curator of the Lab’s Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds; and Pulitzer-Prize winning humor writer Dave Barry (I am not making that up!). We played some music, had silly pre-recorded ads, and lots of fun stuff about birds.

KUMD let me air it live at 6 am on Saturdays for the month, but I couldn’t get anyone at the station interested in helping with production. Tim Winker, “the VOICE of the North Woods” and one of KUMD’s most creative volunteers, helped me each week, running the board, making sure everything went okay, and adding a voice to make the program more interesting, but without sponsors, I couldn’t pay him or anyone else (much less myself), and it took about 60 hours each week for me to get the pre-recorded segments written and produced. So the program only lasted for that brief “trial period.” The following was one of the segments on that program. Tim Winker introduced the piece, Karen Keenan played Earth Angel, Russ Erickson played Lars, and Stephanie Hemphill played Juliet Montague in these Testimonials about Earth Angel Bird Identification Binoculars.