{"id":20527,"date":"2023-07-18T14:56:53","date_gmt":"2023-07-18T14:56:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/160-news\/?p=20527"},"modified":"2026-01-18T19:06:35","modified_gmt":"2026-01-18T19:06:35","slug":"doing-right-by-birds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/2023\/07\/doing-right-by-birds\/","title":{"rendered":"Doing Right by Birds"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Julie Hessler ’85 \/ Photo by Erich Saide<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even though biologist Benjamin Freeman \u201906 has studied birds for years, they still enchant him. \u201cJust yesterday, I was watching these murmurations of dunlin\u201420,000 living creatures moving across the sky as one in this shimmering, kaleidoscopic way,\u201d he says. A murmuration is a strikingly poetic word for a large group of birds moving in unison\u2014in this case, the shorebirds that winter near his home in Vancouver, British Columbia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One bird, he says, had a fishing line with a float attached to its leg that trailed behind as it moved. \u201cYou realize these are individuals that are navigating an earth that is dominated by a single species\u2014which is us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Freeman studies how birds\u2014specifically those in the tropical mountains of South America\u2014are responding to climate change. His work is powered by larger questions about how biological systems adapt to the pressures humans put on the earth. Last summer, his research made the cover of Science<\/em> magazine. Birds, he argues, have a whole lot to tell humans about climate change and the planet. \u201cA world in which we\u2019ve done right by birds is a world in which humans can flourish,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Freeman was a nature-oriented child who often asked his mom to read him a field guide to lizards for a bedtime story. But birds around his Seattle home captured his attention the most. \u201cI think it\u2019s because birds use the same senses that humans do to make sense of our world,\u201d he says. \u201cWe understand the way they experience the world a little bit better than the way, say, insects experience the world. And birds are dynamic. There is always something new to see.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Freeman enrolled at Macalester, classes with and mentorship from biology professors Mark Davis and Jerald Dosch bolstered his interest. Freeman was inspired by Dosch\u2019s ornithology course, and he took every class offered by Davis. During a summer research project in Alaska with lab instructor Mike Anderson, Freeman studied bacteria in the roots of alder trees, learning about fieldwork in the long, light-filled days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Freeman was a junior, he took a semester off to work on a project in Bolivia led by a University of Florida researcher. He researched birds that migrate within South America, an experience he calls transformational. \u201cSouth America is the bird continent,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s home to more species than any other place. Within a couple hundred meters of where I was, there were more species of birds than live in the entirety of Minnesota. I learned how to do field biology, and that was very exciting to me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After graduating from Macalester with a biology degree, Freeman worked as a birding guide in Colombia. He later earned a PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell University, and he just completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of British Columbia. The tropical Andes, which include Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela, remain his central research focus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Freeman wants to know how birds are changing where they live as human-caused climate change transforms the landscape. As we\u2019re making things warmer, he asks, how do species respond? Freeman found that in the tropics, as it gets warmer, species that live on mountains are moving higher and higher up the mountain slope. \u201cIt\u2019s like they are riding an escalator up the slope over time, over generations,\u201d he says. \u201cThe species that live at the top of the mountain have nowhere higher to move to. For them, it\u2019s an escalator to extinction.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Freeman\u2019s study of mountaintop birds in Peru showed that birds common in 1985, when Freeman was one year old, had disappeared in his lifetime. In other words, his research shows that climate change is not a problem for future generations\u2014it is already affecting tropical species.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A second important area of Freeman\u2019s research appeared on the cover of the July 22, 2022, issue of Science<\/em> magazine. For centuries, Freeman says, people have known that birds on tropical mountains tend to live in narrow slices of the mountainside. The question is, why?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Freeman and his co-authors offer an answer. They found that competition and not climate change explains why tropical montane birds live in those narrow slices. Freeman thinks it means that climate change indirectly matters to the birds\u2014for example, by altering food sources or transmitting avian diseases\u2014not because warmer temperatures directly cause physiological stress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Freeman says his future research will investigate how warming temperatures change species interactions and change where species live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To do so, Freeman will rely in part on the community. He is wildly enthusiastic about eBird, an online database of bird observations. His team used more than 4.4 million eBird citizen science records from global observers for the research published in Science<\/em>. Anyone who is interested can participate in eBird and add their own data, or simply use it for identifying birds in their neighborhoods. Freeman says eBird has provided valuable insights into bird habitat, migration, and responses to urbanization and land-use changes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This summer, Freeman will move to Atlanta to take a faculty position at Georgia Tech. And while he may no longer have opportunities to watch murmurations of dunlin, he will be observing and listening closely to the birds in his new region. He urges everyone to do the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe should pay attention to the natural world,\u201d he says. \u201cI think that starts with having some connection to it. I\u2019ll advocate that birds are an excellent vehicle for that connection because they are so unarguably cool, but if birds don\u2019t float your boat, find something else.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Julie Hessler \u201985 is the managing editor of <\/em>Macalester Today.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Benjamin Freeman \u201906 studies how birds are adapting to climate change\u2014and how species have disappeared within his own lifetime.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1077,"featured_media":20569,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","mediatype-articles"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"fields":{"article_type":[8],"flickr_photoset_id":"","youtube_id":"","square_thumbnail":false,"press_photos":false,"story_title":"","story_caption":"","rotations":false,"maps":false,"marker_title":"","marker_text":"","geographic_location":false,"feature_embed":"","custom_link_url":"","news_icon_name":"","image_options":false,"main_feature_story":"","custom_image":false,"custom_feature_title":"","custom_feature_caption":"","custom_markup":"","custom_markup_link":"","custom_markup_title":"","custom_markup_caption":"","byline":"","post_thumbnail_style":"default","press_downloads":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1077"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20527"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20527\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30079,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20527\/revisions\/30079"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}