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
So what's the best way to call a barred owl?
Matt learned how to do this while prowling for owls during the Great American Campout. What is that? It's this nationwide campaign that happens every June to get people outdoors in a safe way. And this was a really common theme among the naturalists. They're all involved with some kind of community work. Anna Kahanui is the co-founder of the DC-based nonprofit Capital Nature.
I found her crouched over a log inches from the dirt taking a picture with her iPhone.
There's fungi that are jellied?
It looks like slime. So you got Matt making owl calls in the background, Anna face in the dirt showing me her iNaturalist.
Well, you have 5,107 observations. I do make a lot of observations. Wow.
Yeah. I have, I don't know, a few dozen, but I have realized that learning to identify and name and even just notice the life forms around me is one of the best ways to deepen your relationship to land and to nature. Anna says you can also look up a bird count or some other bio blitz in your area. That's what they call like these nature searches.
One of the biggest ones is the City Nature Challenge. Oh, what's that? It's basically a four-day sprint around Earth Day. Cities who enroll are tasked with identifying as many of a certain type of species as possible.
So did that owl ever show up? Never showed. Gave us the cold shoulder. But at this point in the hike, owl cameo didn't really matter. I mean, over the course of the night, just watching these grown adults act more and more like kids was so amazing. Like sticking their fingers in dirt. Rolling over wet logs, jumping and shrieking when a tiny crustacean like an isopod appears. I love it.
Oh no, it's like a little shrimp. Or a tiny fungi shaped like a fan with an incredible secret.
Twenty-seven?
go so much higher than you think is possible for how many sexes an organism can have I mean 27 was the highest you know like what hundreds 20,000 this fungi has 20,000 different sexes amazing it's very successful very abundant and found almost everywhere take a look and then there were life forms that were moving quite actively like we got salamander yeah
So I got low, you know, army crawling and peering through everyone's legs, hovering beneath this like chaotic cloud of science facts. Yeah, it's like orange and black and slithering. It looks kind of like a snake.
Yeah.
One of the most interesting things I picked up was the fact that redback salamanders will bury themselves, sometimes a foot deep in winter, to basically be surrounded by decaying roots to stay warm and wet because the salamanders need the moisture to absorb oxygen through their skin. Yeah, and there's so many adaptations for winter when you really start to look for them.
Sometimes that looks like a change of location. Sometimes that looks like energy conservations.
Yeah, this was towards the end of the hike. I hear Serenella calling my name in the dark. All people look the same. We don't overlook the stick. The stick with the mushroom.
That's right. That's right. This is the one Serenella spent the whole hike searching for. It is a honey mushroom. Our final observation of the night. So in the summertime, honey mushrooms produce a green light known as foxfire. They glow in the dark all on their own. No flashlight required. And we call this phenomenon bioluminescence.
Yeah, I had no idea that mushrooms bioluminesce either. Scientists don't entirely know why. But as Serenella explained to me and my husband Duncan, it might be the fungi's way of attracting nocturnal creatures. You know, the glow is basically...
Like, you need a knee inside that people walking by say, oh, yummy. Hungry animals, so birds, rodents, and insects, eat the mushrooms and poop it out later, which may help with spore dispersal. But that's not what I saw, Burleigh. No? No. It was winter, and apparently the honey mushrooms will shut down all bioluminescent business. They will not glow at night in wintertime. Bummer.
Showing 81–100 of 102 · page 5 of 6
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