B-Roll Birding

How to bird when you're stuck inside

Welcome to Owl My Children, a monthly newsletter where I recount my exciting bird moments from the past month and talk about Hollywood bird fraud.

Wow, is anyone else already tired of the summer? A heat wave hit Pittsburgh last week, with most days in the 90s and a “real feel” of 110 (whatever that actually means). Having spent a few years in NC, I felt like this wouldn’t be that bad, but then I realized that most of the buildings in Pittsburgh are super old and don’t have very functional air conditioning, if any. This includes my apartment building. I’m quite sweaty.

One of the weirdest things I learned during the past week is that the city of Pittsburgh only employs one plumber who knows how to turn on the water fountains at the city parks (this is true!), so none of the water fountains were on during the heat wave. An emergency bill was passed to pay some plumbers overtime. I still don’t know if they actually got the water fountains turned on.

So, have I gone birding much this month? No, I have not. Michael and I have tried to go out in the evenings after 8 PM, but it’s still so humid that I feel like I’m breathing molasses. I have noticed on these short strolls that the birds don’t seem quite as affected by the heat. Just last night we saw two robin fledglings in the park, yelling for someone to come feed them. The neighborhood house finches seem to have doubled in number, the mourning doves continue to visit my feeder, and the red-shouldered hawk that lives nearby can be heard shrieking at all hours of the day. I think most of the birds hide out during peak afternoon sunny hours, but otherwise, they seem to be going on with their normal activities.

[It’s hard to take pictures of a red-shouldered hawk, because they’re usually flying around screaming. Here’s one perched on a snag. - Photo by Michael]

I, meanwhile, have been watching a lot of TV. And one of my favorite things to do while watching TV is to look (and listen) for birds on TV shows. That counts as birding, right??

Birds on reality TV

There are certain reality TV shows that provide the dual pleasure of 1) watching real people interact and say stupid things and try to win money and 2) seeing amazing b-roll footage of things in the environment, such as sunsets and weird insects and, yes, birds.

B-roll footage is the stuff that gets added into a primary scene, usually to add color and dimension, set the tone, give additional context, foreshadow what’s coming, mark a transition between scenes, etc. An example would be when two Survivor contestants discuss stabbing someone in the back, and then the camera cuts away to show a snake eating another snake.

The best reality TV show for birdwatching—at least from what I’ve seen—is Survivor, along with other wilderness survival shows like Race to Survive: New Zealand (where, spoiler, contestants wanted to eat a weka! They weren’t allowed, because wekas are protected. But that didn’t stop contestants from fantasizing about eating “that walking sandwich.”). The Amazing Race has good b-roll, but doesn’t feature many birds. So far I haven’t seen any birds on Below Deck, either, even though it’s filmed in tropical locations. It’s like the producers don’t think their audience would be interested.

On Survivor, the director of b-roll is a guy named Scott Duncan, who just happens to be the brother of NBA star Tim Duncan. He’s been with the show for all 46 seasons, and his b-roll is so good that I feel like he should win an Audubon Photography Award, or an Emmy, or something. (Fun fact, Survivor has been nominated for 63 Emmys.) It helps that Survivor has a massive budget and super fancy equipment and like a million camera operators (I can’t find the exact number, but this article says the show uses 20-30 boats in order to transport the crew. 20-30 boats!!)

For the last 14 seasons, Survivor has been filmed in Fiji. This has made it easier for me to identify the birds I see in the b-roll while watching the show, because they’re often the same birds over and over again. In the last few seasons, the most common birds I’ve seen are the Pacific reef heron and the red-footed booby.

How do you identify a bird on TV in a country you’ve never visited? My best advice is to try to match it to a bird you ARE familiar with. For example, when I saw the Pacific reef herons, I knew they looked like herons/egrets, but I didn’t know the species. So I just googled “common herons Fiji” and scrolled through the image results until I found the one I’d seen on TV. Luckily, there aren’t that many options in Fiji, so it was easy to narrow down.

If you want to give it a try, watch this clip from Survivor 44, filmed in Fiji. There’s an exciting b-roll bird in the first 30 seconds. Scroll to the bottom of the newsletter to check your answer!*

Remember that the key to reality TV birding is to know where the show is being filmed. Location narrows down the field of possibilities and makes TV birding a lot more fun.

Fictional shows that get it wrong

Birding while watching fictional TV shows gets a lot weirder. That’s because if a fictional show needs a bird, the producers go hire a trained bird. They don’t go out into the wild and film birds.

This results in some deeply irritating situations where a TV bird COULD NOT POSSIBLY EXIST in the world of the characters. In some cases, I have stopped watching a series because I simply cannot get over a blatant bird error.

Case Study: Bones

Bones is a show where almost every character has a PhD and is an expert in their field. One character (Hodgins) even has three PhDs: in bugs, plants, and minerals. I say this because you’d think that such highly educated people might be able to do a little bird research if a case required it, but no. In season 9, episode 5, our two main characters investigate a body that was found on the side of a cliff outside of DC. The remains have mostly been eaten by a “hawk,” a term the characters use interchangeably with “buzzard” (which is a separate linguistic problem with this episode, by the way. In the US, people most often use “buzzard” when talking about vultures; in Europe, Asia, and Africa, people use “buzzard” when talking about hawks. So why does Hodgins, an American and a nature expert, use “buzzard” when talking about a hawk??). Anyway, they take the hawk back to the lab to see if it has ingested any human remains. The whole time, Hodgins acts like this is a typical hawk you’d find in DC, no big deal.

I had never seen such a hawk in my entire life. (I would insert a screen grab from the episode here, but apparently Hulu and Fox are strict copyright enforcers. If you have Hulu, you can watch the episode here; the hawk appears toward the beginning.)

I tried googling the hawk’s features: “Brown hawk, white belly.” But Google only gave me North American hawks, so I tried adding in a general location: Europe, then Africa, then Asia. There were too many options and I clearly wasn’t being specific enough. I finally gave up and searched for “Bones tv show hawk” and found this thread, which revealed that the hawk in the episode is an augur buzzard, native to Africa.

During this process of irritably googling hawks and swearing I’d never watch Bones again (even though I had already made it through eight seasons), I learned that there’s a reason there are so many bird mistakes on TV. In the US, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act has made it illegal to own a native bird for commercial gain, which includes using native birds in TV shows. This explains so much! I’m glad that native birds are being protected and aren’t allowed to be toted around like little dolls—but isn’t it weird that TV can circumvent the law by getting a non-native bird instead? How does that help anything? I kind of think that if a show can’t use the right bird, they shouldn’t use a bird in the plot at all.

I’m sure all the entomologists out there have been complaining about Bones since episode 1. Hodgins always ends up finding some rare insect on the murder victim that completely unlocks the case, and now I’m starting to doubt that the writers really cared about the details. They just expected the audience not to know if something wasn’t right.

Well, I know! And I’m resentful!

[This bird would have been a much more suitable candidate for that Bones episode. This is a juvenile red-tailed hawk—you can tell because it has light-colored eyes. Adults have dark brown eyes. - Photo by Michael]

A quick digression

Bones isn’t the only show to get confused about hawks. Jeopardy! has mistaken falcons for hawks twice in the last 6 months, once in December and once in April. My friend Megan pointed out the April mistake in her Instagram stories—the clue was: “The Cooper’s type of this bird of prey is soon to be the TBD type as American birds will no longer have people in their common names.” While the correct answer was a hawk, the accompanying photo for the clue was a PEREGRINE FALCON, not a hawk at all! (The photo they used is in this article.) If a knowledgable contestant had made a quick guess after seeing the photo, they would have gotten it wrong. But it didn’t matter in the end, because the contestant incorrectly answered, “What is finch?”

The suspicion online is that Jeopardy! writers use stock photos that are sometimes mislabeled, and they don’t do the due diligence to check that the label is correct.

Inaccurate bird sounds

One thing that shows could do, but often don’t, is get the sound right. Using bird sounds doesn’t have to involve exploiting or possessing a native bird; it involves recording some audio clips or using pre-recorded ones. Surely someone on the staff of a big-budget movie could try to verify that the audio clips aren’t RIDICULOUSLY INACCURATE before sticking them into a scene where they don’t belong?

You might already know the most common example of using the wrong bird sound in TV and movies. Often when a show depicts a bald eagle, they’ll use the sound of a red-tailed hawk instead, because a red-tailed hawk call is actually scary. An eagle call is more high-pitched and bubbly. Here’s a great video of a red-tailed hawk call vs. a bald eagle call, if you want to hear the comparison.

[Here are two bald eagles flying together and burbling. - Photo by me]

Another rampant bird sound mistake involves the common loon call. This call is ubiquitously used in shows to make a scene seem “spooky,” even when there are no birds around. Vox made a fun video about this phenomenon. (The only thing I take issue with in this video is when they say, “You’d never find a loon in a desert.” Um, excuse me, please see The Saga of the Yellow-Billed Loon. Thanks.)

There are lots of other examples. I personally love how everyone got really mad when The Revenant came out and there was a yellow-billed cuckoo making noise during the bear attack scene (wrong place, wrong season). Stuff like this happens because the background noise in movies is rarely recorded on location; sound editors license the noise from companies with “sound libraries.” For example, they might request a recording of “forest sounds with birds” and get something really specific to a particular region without realizing it. (There’s a ReplyAll episode about how white noise in meditation/sleep apps often gets made using sound libraries. In the episode, a former sound recordist talks about people who complain about inaccurate bird sounds in movies, calling them “nit-pickers” and “nerds.”)

The National Audubon Society compiled a list of other irritating movies here.

[This adult red-tailed hawk is wondering if you’ve noticed a theme to the photos in this newsletter. - Photo by Michael]

If you want to practice birding by ear, I recommend watching golf tournaments on TV. The announcers and the audience get really quiet whenever a golfer is about to hit the ball, and you can clearly hear all the birds nearby. One of my friends’ dads likes to submit eBird lists of the golf tournaments he watches on TV. I don’t know if such a thing is even allowed on eBird, but leave it to a dad to figure that one out.

One thing to be wary of: there’s a history of TV networks pumping in fake bird sounds during golf tournaments. For the 2000 PGA Championship, CBS used pre-recorded sounds and were caught because of a singing white-throated sparrow. (Click the second song here for the traditional “old Sam Peabody-Peabody” song of a white-throated sparrow.) The championship took place in Kentucky in June, when all the white-throated sparrows should be breeding farther north.

There are also some reporters out there determined to prove that the Masters Tournament commits bird fraud. Read more about their efforts here.

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Call for mockingbird content

This is completely unrelated to TV birds, but do you live in a place where you frequently see mockingbirds? (AKA the American South? Here’s a sightings map to give you an idea of where mockingbirds are most common—I birded in Madison for four years and never saw one there!) Do you have an audio or video recording of a mockingbird making lots of cool sounds? Respond to this email and let me know if you’d like your content to be included in a future mockingbird-related newsletter!

[Here’s a sassy merlin, just because. A merlin is a species of falcon. And yes, the secret theme of this newsletter is birds of prey! - Photo by me]

Signing off from a sweaty room,

Holly

*Did you watch the Survivor clip? At 0:24, there’s a brief appearance of a Fiji goshawk!