Chris Mensing
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Fish and wildlife biologist with the U.S.
It looks like we've got six males and one female.
And the timing is such that the cowbird egg will hatch first.
and will double its size in 24 hours.
So by the time that the host birds hatch, that cowbird may be up to four times the size.
And when they start begging for food from their parents, the loudest, the most aggressive chick is going to get fed.
The warbler population just started plummeting.
It's a new one that we just built this year.
Just like anyone, if you had someone larger grabbing you, they don't appreciate it too much.
Thoracic compression is the term we use.
We basically squeeze the bird, suffocating it, preventing it from breathing.
Yeah, this ecosystem is a fire ecosystem.
You know, if you look at a population graph... That's Chris Mensing again.
After that Mack Lake burn, the population went like that.
If we let things be, the bird would be extinct.
That's the hard thing about this job, is knowing that we're never done.
You're probably looking at hundreds of people.
Dollars, we could be looking at well over a million dollars a year spent.
We're going to kind of walk through the middle of these transects.
The sun's just coming up, and it's getting a little muggy out here.
But I'm not going to mark him in because I don't know exactly where he's at.
We want to be a lot more accurate than just to say we know there's one up there.
956 and all's well in the warbler woods.
I know that there's a bird out there.
I can still hear that bird way back there.
You know, we're stewards of the land.
That's Chris Mensing again, cowbird killer.
Now, three decades later... I say you keep that little bird going.
Thank God for Teddy Roosevelt and the boys that made our national parks.
Imagine what if we didn't have those?
It costs money, it's painful, blah, blah, blah.
You gotta have the guts to do that.
And Jim was really that kind of guy.