I’ve done a lot of things to find birds. For starters, I’ve gotten up really early in the morning. Way before sunrise, at times of the day which up until then had seemed theoretical. I’ve gone to some strange places, too. To a research camp in the middle of the Cameroonian jungle. To a marsh near JFK airport where we found a whole abandoned wharf in the reeds, complete with a jet-ski. To a Maya ruin on the Yucatan peninsula. To Staten Island. But I’ve got nothing on this episode’s guest,...

On the first episode of Once Upon a Checklist we heard about the intimate experience of spending time with a single bird. In our case - in Don Roberson’s case - it was one of the last Guam Flycatchers alive on earth. It was a sad story. This time we’re going full speed in the other direction. Toward joy, and glee, and huge numbers of birds. Really immense numbers of birds. Really very colossally spectacular numbers of birds. — Special thanks to Kathy Mihm Dunning and Van Remsen. My son pilot...

On August 29th 1978, Don Roberson drove in a rental car up to a scrubby limestone forest on the North end of Guam. Using a hand-made guidebook he’d drawn himself with coloured pencils, Don managed to find and identify two of Guam’s rare endemic birds: The Guam Rail and the Guam Flycatcher. He didn’t know it at the time, but both of those birds would go extinct in the next five years. In this episode, I talk to Don about that day in Guam, to find out what it was like to catch a last glimpse of...