Berly McCoy
speaker
102 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Berly McCoy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Support for NPR and the following message come from Jarl and Pamela Moan, thanking the people who make public radio great every day and also those who listen.
Support for NPR and the following message come from Jarl and Pamela Moan, thanking the people who make public radio great every day and also those who listen.
Tariffs, recessions, how Colombian drug cartels gave us blueberries all year long. That's the kind of thing the Planet Money podcast explains. I'm Sarah Gonzalez, and on Planet Money, we help you understand the economy and how things all around you came to be the way they are. Para que sepas. So you know. Listen to the Planet Money podcast from NPR.
Okay, Burleigh McCoy, shortwave producer, why is Jack the dog searching for whale poop?
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
So in about two minutes, we'll get started. Okay.
It was a tromp through Patuxent River State Park in Maryland, hosted by a group of naturalists, people trained in gathering observations and educating people about the environment. Now, naturalists lead hikes all over the world, but not all of them like this crew hand out homemade banana bread. That was pretty cool. And UV lights provided by our leader.
Okay, so Serenella is a mushroom expert? Yeah, along with other fungi. She's been leading nature walks since 2013, and tonight I really wanted to see the forest through her eyes. to know what flaps and flutters and fluoresces when the sun goes down in winter.
So I should really try to listen very closely to everything.
And that's what I want to do with you today, Burleigh. I want to just get real quiet and listen to the sounds of a winter's night when everything is dead or dormant. Or is it? Okay.
No idea, because it was so dark. And we don't have half of these critters' night vision.
But I know that the park, because I looked at a map, sits along the Patuxent River, which flows into Maryland's Chesapeake Bay. We were bundled in our winter coats, and the first stop along our night hike was a patch of lichen growing along a tree just off the parking lot.
Yeah, lichen is that stuff that grows on trees. It kind of looks like seaweed, but it's actually a hybrid colony of fungi and algae in a symbiotic relationship. To show us, Serenella dramatically shines her flashlight up the tree trunk.
Serenella then flips on her UV light and the patch of green lichen totally changes. And it suddenly glowed. Neon yellow. The lichen, one particular part of it was fluorescing. So absorbing the ultraviolet light from the flashlight and emitting visible light.
Yeah, it was like the Las Vegas strip. Natalie Howe, an ecologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, steps forward and shoves her face into the tree bark.
She sounds so excited. So we take a UV light and get up close to that tree to look. And pretty soon, Serenella shouts. Oh, Natalie.
Yeah, okay. So the yellow lichen is called red. Pyxene subscenaria, and the orange lichen is Pyxene syridiata, and both have chemicals in their tissues which allow them to fluoresce. Okay, but like why? Natalie explained to me that lichen fluoresce as a protective response against ultraviolet light damage from the sun.
Yep. So the group starts to branch out at this point away from the lichen depot, drifting into pockets of the forest, swinging their UV lights and headlamps up trees. Everyone's kind of getting into it now. And they're breaking up books to try to identify what they see. And suddenly it just feels weird to step on anything. Because, like, everything is alive. Yeah, except where there's trash. Oh.
Well, there was this gigantic piece of fabric that one of the naturalists had hung up and lit with mercury vapor lamps. So those are lamps that emit this very broad spectrum of light and attracted all these different kinds of moths just like clinging to the fabric.
Yeah, this moth, along with all moths, use the moon and stars to navigate, so lamps are a good way to draw them out of the shadows. Then, Matt Felperin, a roving naturalist with Nova Parks, the regional park system of Northern Virginia, makes an announcement that he will be, quote, doing owl calls intermittently. Okay.
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