Talking to Lillian Stokes and Matthew Young

The authors of The Stokes Guide to Finches chatted with Laura about ... well, finches and their new book!

This post is the transcripts of four radio program/podcasts produced from my interview with Lillian Stokes and Matthew Young.

1. How Lillian and Matt connected to write their book. (Spoiler alert: it has to do with Red Crossbills.)

   

   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 at a Midwest Birding Symposium.
   

   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.

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2. Lillian and Matt talk about the American Goldfinch

   

   The American Goldfinch is the state bird of New Jersey on the East Coast, Washington on the West Coast, and Iowa in the middle. (Many old bird books call it the state bird of my own state, but Minnesota didn’t have an official state bird until 1961 when the state legislature named the Common Loon.) The kind of popularity that makes a bird a state bird of three states, along with the goldfinch’s eye-popping beauty and its coast-to-coast range, must have made it an easy choice as the central photo on the cover of The Stokes Guide to Finches. The American Goldfinch entry in the book is 12 pages long, including lots of interesting information such as how the female bill color is a status signal among females yet doesn’t seem related to which females males select as mates. The goldfinch also is highlighted in the 14-page section about feeding and attracting birds, with tips to improve your enjoyment of backyard birds while ensuring the safety and well-being of those birds. This charismatic bird popped up in the conversation I had about the book with the authors, Lillian Stokes and Matt Young.
   

   LILLIAN: People say, you know, why should I buy this book? You know, okay, I’ve got a field guide. Yeah, there are a couple of finches. I know what they are. And when we talk about how it’s something for everyone, you know, it’s for people who are in their backyard and just feed birds, because we have a wonderful section on bird feeding, how to do it, how to keep these finches safe at your feeder, not getting a disease, what’s the right kind of seed, feeders, we have photos of all this, we have the best information. And you realize something like what, some incredible number, 90 million Americans feed and watch wildlife in their backyard. It’s really quite phenomenal. So it’s for those people.
   

   And even though they think they know their backyard finches, the book has so much cool stuff about them. For example, American Goldfinches, my neighbor thinks they disappear in winter because she’s just a very casual backyard feeder. In fact, American Goldfinches are the only finches that changes their clothes twice. They molt completely, this is a complete molt, in the winter, in the fall, and all those beautiful American Goldfinches we’re all watching right now are going to change into their winter coats, which are sort of duller and brown. And in fact, those feathers have more insulative value in winter, which is a very interesting fact.
   

   Another cool fact about American Goldfinches are that females, when they breed, sometimes breed with more than one male. They have a nest, they mate, and they have young, and then partway through that nest, they may in fact go and have another nest with another male. That’s called polyandry, which is quite rare in birds. But when you consider that in American Goldfinches, in many of these finches, there are more males than females. It makes a lot of sense, there are all these extra males and they get to breed,and so does the female get to breed twice. So, cool stuff.
   

   MATT: But that’s rare, though.
   

   LILLIAN: It’s very rare, 4.9% of the time. So, it’s rare. But again, this was one study color-banded. You wonder, well, is it going on more than that? Is it going on in other finches? Some people think it might as well. So, there’s so much more to learn about these finches. I think in the book, we’ve taken all the science we could come up with and stuffed it into the book, made it interesting, and it makes you realize, wow, they’re really cool birds and there’s so much more to learn.

   
   LAURA: The Stokes Guide to Finches provides 330 pages of this kind of information about the 43 finches we see in the United States and Canada.

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3. Lillian and Matt talk about Evening Grosbeaks

   

   Matthew Young is the founder and president of the Finch Research Network, which has done very important work on one of my favorite birds of all as well as one of the most fascinating eruptive species, the Evening Grosbeak. When I moved to Duluth in 1981, the Evening Grosbeak was one of the most abundant birds in my yard, almost year-round, from late July through early June, leaving only during their actual nesting season. Now I can go a year without seeing even one in my yard, yet in 2021, a large flock spent late winter through much of the spring in my yard. I talked to him and Lillian Stokes about this wonderful bird and its distressing decline.
   

   MATT: You know, when we covered, just to kind of add a little bit here, you know, we talked about the eruptions, we talked about feeding, you know, what makes these birds so incredible in so many ways is, you know, there’s kind of the garden variety backyard finch that a lot of us have, and then there’s these mystery finches that come from the far north, and obviously we’ve been working on Evening Grosbeak Road to Recovery Project the last few years where we’re banding birds and tagging birds and trying to get a handle on what has led to the declines there, and that’ll be an ongoing project, and we cover that in a research conservation section of the book.
   

   But yeah, 92% decline over the last 50 plus years. It’s, you know, like you said, a bird that is, you know, it’s very super charismatic and iconic in so many ways. And back, you know, we all kind of have that story of talking to people that used to see them abundantly, like you said, Laura. And, you know, now they used to be called, you know, the nicknames are grocery beaks, because people would, you know, they really drive, they seemingly probably really drive seed sales when we have these eruptions.
   

   Now, there’s been a budworm outbreak. There’s certainly tied into in the working group. You know, I’m a co-leader on the International Road to Recovery Working Group for evening grosbeak with David Yenny, Western Pennsylvania Conservancy. And, you know, we’re trying to figure out what’s going on and we kind of have some focal, like topics that were covering our committees in the group. You know, is it diet? Is it a budworm thing? Is it habitat change? Is it, you know, some kind of, you know, collision thing? I mean, they’re, they’re actually USGS people that we’ve worked with on this project. They’re they’re actually number one in the number of collisions at windows.
   

   LAURA: Yeah, Daniel Klem was publishing that back in the 80s that the Evening Grosbeak is one of the top species colliding with windows. And there have been some major kills on roads where they were drawn down to salt.
   

   MATT: They’re number one in the USGS database. Yeah. So it’s kind of interesting. Finches in general, because of their flocking nature, leaves them a bit more susceptible. So the placement of windows or feeders to your house and windows and using bird friendly, you know, on your windows is super important. I always say, you know, wellness for finches is wellness for you kind of thing. So yeah.
   

   LILLIAN: Take care of those finishes. We have information in the bird feeding chapter about how to protect your windows from birds hitting your windows, which is a biggie if you feed birds, you know, you want to be responsible.

   
   And you know, I remember to huge numbers of grosbeaks and going through major amounts of sunflower in the in the 80s and things like that. Even before that, it was, they kind of reached the East, the whole Eastern Seaboard by the mid 60s. So this was a Western expansion. And, you know, we don’t fully understand the whole thing, but it may have had to do with quote the baited highway of box elder seeds that were planted that gave them food sources as they moved across.
   

   But certainly the budworm outbreaks, which is another biggie has heavily contributed to both their proliferation and then to some extent is it leading to their, their decline. So hopefully the road to recovery Evening Grosbeak projects that are satellite tagging them and finding out all kinds of amazing stuff.

   You know, we have information about that in the book, but there’s certainly they’re big and they’re charismatic and we’ll see what’s happened in this this winter. Will we see more of them or not everybody, you know, stay tuned. Get about get out your piggybacks to to or take up collections for bird seed if if they’re coming, we will find that out when the winter finch forecast comes out.
   

   LAURA: The winter finch forecast will come out on September 29. That was Lillian Stokes and Matt Young, authors of The Stokes Guide to Finches.

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4. Lillian and Matt talk about why they included the Hawaiian honeycreepers in The Stokes Guide to Finches of the United States and Canada.

   

   What we used to call the “AOU Checklist”—the list of “countable” American birds as defined by the American Birding Association using the American Ornithologists’ Union’s checklist, used to include only the birds of North America north of the Mexican border. Now the scientific organization has become the American Ornithological Society, and their current checklist covers all the species in North and Middle America from the North Pole to the border of Panama and Colombia, including adjacent islands, and also the Hawaiian Islands. Virtually all field guides and other books about American birds follow the old tradition and don’t include any Hawaiian birds. I asked Lillian Stokes and Matt Young why they made the unusual decision to include the Hawaiian honeycreepers in their brand new Stokes Guide to Finches of the United States and Canada.

   LILLIAN: On the cover of the finch book, you know, there are photos of seven finches and we include the Palila and there’s a little button that says includes the honeycreepers of Hawaii. Matt, you want to talk about why we did it?
   

   LAURA: And how they got there in the first place?
   

   LILLIAN: Very, very important, you know, they, they kind of landed five to seven million years ago and an ancestor of today’s common rose finches just flew out across the ocean, flew and flew and flew, landed in Hawaii and then radiated that.
   

   MATT: Yeah, so as, as Lillian just said, approximately five million years ago, the thought is, you know, rose finches landed there, radiated out to these 55 plus species.
   
   Unfortunately, and the reason why we really wanted to cover them, because there’s a conservation crisis going on in Hawaii, there’s only 16 species left of them in the wild. We just lost, lost ʻAkekeʻe in the wild. There are some in captivity. So there’s only 16 species now left. Well, big issue going on is Avian Malaria is the big issue that’s unfortunately this non native mosquito, one of bites, one of the honeycreepers, they just don’t have the defenses.
   

   LAURA: And how does climate change figure into that? Because that is exacerbating it.
   

   MATT: Well, yeah, so, you know, as the earth is warming these, did they’re not really cold tolerant the mosquitoes, but as the earth is warming, they’re going upslope, where a lot of these honeycreepers can be found. And as it moves upslope, it now is starting to bite some of these higher elevation species and they’re also in steep decline. So it’s, yeah, we really just wanted to bring to light this group that needs attention.
   

   We, you know, met with the American Bird Conservancy and they’re kind of heading this initiative, the Birds Not Mosquitoes Initiative, multi-agency organizational effort to try to save the honeycreepers there. So they’re, you know, they’re, they’re basically taking a male and, you know, they’re using this Wolbachia bacteria to create this kind of incompatibility in the Wolbachia between the males and the females. So when the females, you know, lay the eggs, those won’t be fertile eggs and that way the populations hopefully will decline over time and we’ll be able to save the last species of the honeycreepers.
   

   LILLIAN: It’s an ongoing effort. It’s basically mosquito birth control. So, you know, how to get rid of the mosquitoes and how to stop them and then save the, save a lot of the birds and of course save habitat too. And of course, you know, it’s climate change. So the more all of us can do to support organizations that are fighting climate change, the better it is.
   

   MATT: Yeah, that means like, like Lillian said, it’s going to be an ongoing effort. This is going to take a while. This isn’t going to go away. And that’s why, you know, we’re Finch Research Networks also doing presentations to raise awareness around this group as well. So anything we can do to kind of bring more attention and hopefully raise awareness and some funding for the project, you know, we’re all behind.