"Pedaling the Whooper Highway: Mike Forsberg & Andy Caven"

[00:00:03] Just a couple days ago, we ran into a woman that was a retired postmistress in this tiny little town called Gann Valley in South Dakota, population 60 or something like that. And she remembered when she was in her little country school back in 1955, when she was nine or ten years old, they had 14 whooping cranes land outside their school at the wetland that was nearby.

[00:00:33] In 1955, there were maybe 30 or low 30 number of whooping cranes left in the world. So they had half of the world's population of whooping cranes land outside it. She never forgot that. In fact, she told me three times that she saw these birds in her life. And how did that happen? Andy was at the courthouse visiting with a couple folks and I was just pedaling my bikes, wasting some time waiting for Andy to come back.

[00:00:58] And she comes tooling down in her fancy blue pickup truck and asks what we're doing. And ten minutes later, we have this amazing woman telling us this amazing story and very proud of it. Greetings and welcome back to the show. And now for something completely different.

[00:01:26] What if you suddenly felt the urge to jump on a bicycle and ride 2500 miles across North America following the migration route of the endangered whooping crane? I'm Tom Czajko and this is the Camera Cafe Show. Today folks, I'm joined by conservation photographer Mike Forsberg and conservation biologist Andy Cavan, who at the time of this recording are somewhere in the middle of doing exactly that.

[00:01:51] Mike is one of North America's leading conservation photographers and has spent years documenting the whooping cranes and the landscapes they depend on. Andy, meanwhile, is the director of the Central Flyway Programs for the International Crane Foundation, where his work focuses on protecting the habitat that supports cranes and countless other species across the Great Plains.

[00:02:12] Now, I should probably tell you that my original plan was to sit down with Mike and talk about his remarkable photography career, his work on the Great Plains and his long relationship with whooping cranes. But while preparing for that conversation, I discovered that Mike and Andy were about to embark on this extraordinary bicycle expedition. The more I learned about it, the more I felt this journey deserved a conversation of its own.

[00:02:37] Together, they are cycling from the Texas Gulf Coast all the way to Canada, following the migration route of the whooping crane. Along the way, they are exploring not only the birds themselves, but also landscapes, nature, communities and people connected by one of North America's Great Migratory Flyways. So, think of this episode as a special mid-journey stop. A chance to catch up with Mike and Andy while the adventure is still unfolding.

[00:03:02] And don't worry, after summer, Mike will be back on the show and we'll dive much deeper into his photography career, his conservation storytelling work and of course, some more stories of how their remarkable trip ended. For now, this is a story about migration, conservation, friendship, the occasional headwind of course, and the art of spending 2,500 miles together without throwing your riding partner into a ditch. Grab a coffee, settle in and enjoy my conversation with Mike Forsberg and Andy Kaven.

[00:03:31] Greetings and welcome back on the show, everyone. You know that sometimes somebody sends me an email and he says, you should check out this photographer. This was Jim Richardson from National Geographic. I was on the phone with him and he says, you have to check out this photographer. And then I checked him out and what was happening, he was going to do an amazing thing.

[00:03:52] So if you feel proud about your long bike journey this week, just lower the bar a bit because I'm going to talk to two guys who are doing a 2,500 mile bicycle tour from Texas all the way up to Canada to following the Whoopert Cranes. It's my pleasure to have you on the show. It's great to be here. Thank you. Absolutely. Looking forward to talking to you.

[00:04:18] So Mike, you are a conservation photographer, a filmmaker, storyteller, and you spent actually years documenting the Whoopert Cranes. We will be only touching a little bit about your photography on this podcast and I'm looking forward to catching up with you after summer and we will go deeper onto your photographic career, your magnificent book and the Platte River Basin Time Lapse project. Yeah.

[00:04:43] Andy, you're the director of the Central Flyway Programs with International Crane Foundation. So you have, I guess, spent most of your lives with cranes too? Yeah. Yeah. Mike and I met through cranes. Yeah. Yeah. I've, uh, I've, my role is really long-term research with plants and birds has been my career and that led me to cranes and understanding what they need and where it is in how to conserve it.

[00:05:10] And that's been my life track and where I encountered Mike on the Platte River. I lived in Nebraska for most of a decade and that's where I met Mike and we've stayed friends since and continue to work on projects together. Yeah. So this is a very big project. Whose crazy idea was this in the first place? I'll point at you and you point at me. I don't know.

[00:05:35] I will probably figure that out where the idea will become myth and the myth will become legend and who knows who will decide whose idea it was, but it, regardless, it took shape about three months ago. So this hasn't been anything that's been years in the planning or anything like that. It's something that we decided very, very quickly that we wanted to do and then rallied the troops.

[00:06:05] And here we are. Yeah. The logistic planning really started in March and I changed positions. I actually went from being vice president of North America programs for the International Crane Foundation, which was a leadership post down to a program post, which I created. I think that was a big part of the project. I wanted to help start this new program. We didn't have a lot of time to plan it. I think the idea gurgled up like a spring, like spring water as we were working on different project ideas.

[00:06:35] I think we first talked about the idea maybe at the end of 2025, but we really didn't start the logistics planning until a few months out. And we've been working on ways to tell the story of the whooping crane migration corridor, which is in this, the central flyway, which is within the great plains and like Russian nesting dolls. And the whooping crane migration corridor cuts right through the heart of this important prairie province.

[00:07:04] It's very transformed and it's really under threat right now. And as Mike describes it, it's often like a melting glacier. You don't see it go away like this. You lose it bit by bit. And we wanted to make sure people were aware because it's affecting the whooping crane and it's affecting a lot of other birds and wildlife as well. And people. Yeah, and people. So you guys, I think now are halfway through South Dakota. How are you feeling mentally and physically? All in shape?

[00:07:35] We're taking a rest day today. The bonafide rest day minus emails and some pop-ins from folks that we know and such. But yeah, I think we're both holding up pretty good. We each have our issues physically. We certainly have our issues mentally. But those are with us all the time probably.

[00:07:57] But yeah, after the first day when we started, at least for me, I was like, man, you're really doing this. And then the second day was, holy crap, we're really doing this. After about day five or six, you started to get into a rhythm. And your body started to accept what you were about to do in your mind. You had to get your mind right. And then you just go day by day.

[00:08:27] Or sometimes mile by mile. And I think we've, Andy and I have done some hard things together. So we know each other pretty well. And we give each other space when we need it. We give each other support when we need it. But I think this would be a really difficult thing to do alone. But my buddy here, it's very doable. Yeah, it is hard.

[00:08:50] And for me, when I was younger, when I was in high school age, I was a track athlete and I was a pretty decent one. And I ran the mile was one of my best races. And I feel like we're in the third lap of the mile, which was always the hardest one. My splits, I'd always suffer that. I'd go my first two laps, I was on pace. And my last lap, I always finished strong. But that third lap was holding it together. And I think we're about right there in the trip. I think physically, we've got a few lingering issues.

[00:09:21] We're doing pretty good. But the hard part for me mentally has always been that third lap. And I think, like Mike said, we give each other a lot of grace. And that's the important part. Everybody has a hard day or a couple of hard days and you just keep trudging forward. We don't always get the number of miles we want. Some days we get a few more. But every day, we learn something and we meet interesting people and see interesting landscapes.

[00:09:52] And try to tell that the story of the landscape. I feel like that's what we're doing. It's not our story. We both want to tell the story of the landscape. Yeah. These birds, these tall white birds, these angel white birds. Yeah. And their story. That nearly went extinct. Everybody had written off in fact in the 1940s, except for a handful of people when there were less than 20 left in the entire world.

[00:10:14] They have come back to roughly 550 in this self-sustaining migratory remnant flock. Mm-hmm . And cranes, like anything that migrates, but especially birds, they connect habitats that they need up and down their flyways. They also connect people and culture and so forth. Andy and I both grew up in the Great Plains. This is where we're from.

[00:10:41] And, and beating the drum about the Great Plains, a place that is our habitat home. Yeah. For me over 30 years and Andy being much, not a lot younger, but. And nomadic. But nomadic, yeah. Like, we've been telling that, that story through these birds.

[00:11:01] And so in a lot of ways, this is a, the cranes are the muse in a sense, and it is very much about them, but it also is about something that's much bigger than us that goes across space and time, you know? So. Yeah. It's a very interesting, interesting information flow. Cause coming out from us to the community is the story of the whooping cranes. They've already moved through. People ask us, why are you going after they move through?

[00:11:24] As Mike often says, they live on the edge of winter and we'd probably have frostbite if we tried to ride this during the crane migration. People have gotten snowed in and they occasionally do get snowed in and held up. But we're telling the, we're talking about the story of whooping cranes and the importance of this migratory pathway. And some of the things we've seen like them stopping at, in dry lands where there's no wetlands and coming into big groups where there's no options to roost with a lot of other water birds where there's disease risks.

[00:11:53] So we're telling the story of these birds and their recovery and now habitat loss threatens that we're listening to community members to learn about their experiences with the land and the birds. So the output is us talking about whooping cranes, but the input is us really learning about getting an updated snapshot of the great plains where they come through and communities and ecologies. And so both science and story and photography play into that.

[00:12:23] Yeah. For someone who never saw a whooping crane, what's, what makes it so special for you guys? What's the first thing you notice when you see them? They are the tallest bird in North America. They're five feet tall and they are angel white. In fact, for me, there's a lot of white birds in the world, right?

[00:12:45] But it seems like these birds have a kind of light that emanates from inside of them going out like a lamp. And they have a wingspan of eight feet, which is like that of an NBA basketball player. So these are giant birds and they're very rare. And if you think you might've seen a whooping crane, you haven't seen one. You know when you see what.

[00:13:15] I used to see them from airplanes doing aerial surveys and they literally pop. There's no other bird that's so white. Occasionally there's some human structure that's white, like a bright white bucket. You might look twice, but they are so white. They're the only, they pop out more than any other bird from a white color standpoint. Yeah. You guys talked, touched a bit before on the extinction issue.

[00:13:37] I remember when I was talking years ago with a photographer from Japan and he was telling me the same kind of story that there were only a few left. And then after the war, people gave them land where they could be and they start feeding them and they grow also back to some numbers. You have an idea how they managed to survive again here? Yeah, I'll start and I'll let Andy finish because I'll come at it from one way and you from another, I think.

[00:14:05] At its lowest point, these birds were roughly 15 or 16 whooping cranes left in the 1940s. And we were just coming out of World War II. Mm-hmm . At that time, there was a gentleman named Robert Porter Allen, an ornithologist of the 20th century in the United States that was hired by the Audubon, National Audubon Society, to try to figure out where these last handful of whooping cranes that were showing up on the Texas Gulf Coast

[00:14:35] and one location at the newly formed Aransas National Wildlife Refuge were coming from. They didn't know, they knew they showed up there in the winter, a handful of these birds, but they didn't know their pathway. They didn't know where they nested or anything like that. And so they hired Robert Porter Allen, who was stuck with it for nearly a decade to try to uncover the story of these birds.

[00:15:00] And one of the things that he did, besides being an ornithologist and a great scientist studying them very specifically down there on the Texas Gulf Coast, was also to move up the Great Plains in a way that we really are emulating and talk to people through the geography and ask them if they've ever gone to small towns, small communities, rural areas, and ask people if they have ever seen these birds.

[00:15:27] And if you had, tell me about them. If you do someday, please fill out this little report card here that I've got you. So he talked in churches and community centers and schools and cafes and basically anybody that would listen and walk that all the way up to Canada. Eventually, they, through that effort and others around him, they were able to reconstruct where these birds were coming from, going to eventually found their nesting grounds in far northern Canada.

[00:15:57] The last stronghold clear up in Wood Buffalo National Park in the Northwest Territories. But it was very incremental work. You can't care about something that you don't know. And you have to speak its name first, right? For it to be something, somebody. And then when it becomes personal to whoever that person is, then all of a sudden you have this capacity to care.

[00:16:20] And so I like to say that despite us and because of us over these last 80 years or so, these birds have been allowed to come back. But there's been a lot of trigger points in that 80 year period through policies and new scientific knowledge and research that has helped as well. Yeah. The interesting, it's a, somebody actually did a dissertation or master's thesis.

[00:16:42] I forget on comparing the recovery in Japan of the red crown crane and the whooping crane in the U S and they're a little bit different in the red crown cranes in Japan. And they're non-migratory and those feeding stations help boost that population. Yeah. And it's something we never did in the U S and actually that population is growing a little faster for that reason. There's also the risk of disease and everything else.

[00:17:08] These birds had to figure it out on their own to recover from a foraging and diet standpoint. But there's a lot of landmarks start in, obviously in North America, we had the dirty thirties, the dust bowl and great depression leading up to world war two. And that's when a lot of birds hit their lowest points. In fact, there's reports, a natural history reports from the dust bowl, a big dust storms and birds litter falling out of the sky dead.

[00:17:34] So these dust storms would blow through and birds would just fall out of the sky dead. So I think it's no coincidence whooping cranes were at their lowest point after that. Because a lot of poor folks too were subsisting on wild game at that same time. And so the 1940s marks the beginning late thirties of the recovery efforts. The refuge system really ramps up late thirties. Their wintering grounds are partially protected.

[00:18:01] 1937 with the Ransis National Wildlife Refuge and the refuge system built from there up through their migration path. So those refuges were a big part of the story. The federal refuges in particular, like Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge in Oklahoma or Cuvira National Wildlife Refuge in Kansas or the protection of the Platte River through multiple agencies later and organizations. But the habitat protection was part.

[00:18:31] And then the cessation of hunting them and penalizing for it, right? We had the Migratory Bird Treaty Act 1918, I think that was. And the Endangered Species Act much later, 1973 was the final act. But many other things throughout that time period that related to land conservation and farming practices and everything else. And so the habitat conservation came into place. People quit shooting them and they have recovered by their own merits.

[00:19:01] There's been reintroduction efforts to start separate populations, but they have not grown nearly as quickly as this remnant population. There's currently about not even 140 at this point in the wild in the two reintroduced populations. So this remnant population, even though people thought it was going to go extinct, this is what has succeeded by their own resilience, which is an interesting story. Yeah.

[00:19:29] And I think it's important for people to understand that in the Great Plains of North America, it's a big temperate grassland traditionally. It's like the Mongolian steppe or the African veld or the Pampas of Argentina or the Kazakh steppe.

[00:19:48] These are also though our bread baskets, our energy pumps, and they are the most highly altered ecosystems arguably on earth. And so here in the Great Plains, if you were to take its roughly million square mile geography, which is what it is, there's about 23 million people that live in the Great Plains. That's not very many. You consider 23 million people live in the Los Angeles basin alone.

[00:20:17] Right. It doesn't mean that this place is not highly developed. It's one of the most altered, human altered landscapes on earth, like most of these grasslands are. And so if you have that as your backstory and your stage, and you understand that most every state and province that we're moving through is in private ownership, not public ownership, like a lot of the public lands out to the West.

[00:20:41] That creates a different kind of a set of challenges in the conservation space because you're not dealing with governments as much as you're dealing with people. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's cut us off. We'll go on too long here, but then we want to answer the question, but the, we can ride for days in telling this story and updating it. We can ride for days without seeing a high quality remnant wetland or prairie.

[00:21:09] We've ridden 30 miles in a row without seeing any wetland or prairie. We enter South Dakota recently. And for days we're mostly riding through bromus and ermus, smooth brome fields where there is grass, which is actually European grass that's come over here. We've sent you our golden rod and that's here too. But bro, it's enormous is very invasive here.

[00:21:35] And we took till about the middle of South Dakota till we hit a really high quality remnant prairie. And then it was lights out. The birds was incredible. And we rode through a few of those and we've already ridden out of them. So these last vestiges, mostly on private lands, mostly on ranches are really important. We hope to tell that story.

[00:21:56] I don't think the fate of an ecosystem has ever been so tied to the fate of an economy in ranching the way it is now because ranchers are also having a hard time and they're the ones keeping the grass in the grass. Hmm.

[00:22:13] Because I think it's the most, well, most fascinating part for me because normally when you hear the word conservation guys, people think about saving a species, but you guys are also a lot about protecting entire flyaways and habitats, not only the whooping crane. So I think I, I think it's a fascinating thing you are doing there. We, thank you. Yeah. Thanks.

[00:22:38] We, in our country and in Canada, we've basically laid out a grid of straight lines on a map to delineate political boundaries and borders. Great idea by Thomas Jefferson, but it doesn't work great in the natural world. And, and so, so we try to not completely ignore these straight lines because they are political boundaries that we have to work in within a policies framework and so forth.

[00:23:07] But there's other ways to delineate landscapes and through these rivers in the sky that are our flyways and the watersheds that here in the great plains mostly run from mountains to plains. As Andy often describes rungs on a migratory ladder. Those are the most compelling physical attributes of all. And they are, and you can build community around that too.

[00:23:37] So I may live in Nebraska and somebody else may live in North Dakota. We may be separated by hundreds of miles, maybe even a thousand miles, but we're in the same flyway. And that's really the power of cranes in a lot of ways. In Nebraska, we have the largest gathering of cranes anywhere in the world in March where you have over a million birds come to the Platte River for four to six weeks. And most of them are sandhill cranes, but we also get most of the whooping cranes too.

[00:24:04] And you have a second migration that happens then, and that's not the migration of birds, but it's a migration of people coming from all over to come and see these birds too together. And those people come from everywhere. And they're bound together then by that shared experience that they have. And it doesn't matter where they're from. Cranes have a very, they mark time for us in our lives when we see them, when we hear them call.

[00:24:34] They bring us together in community. They help us define flyways and watersheds in a really beautiful way that seems to strike at something that's very deep within the hearts of all of us. And maybe that's because they're such an ancient species, 15 crane species in the world on five continents. And they're long-lived. They can live 30, 40-plus years in the wild. They only have two kids a year.

[00:25:04] They don't reach sexual maturity until they're five. They stay together if things are working out for the pair for very long lengths of time. And they are symbols and cultures and religion and so many layers. And there's just something very special about them. So they, again, provide us a good term going. Yeah. One weird thing about cranes, if you look at extinction risk for species in general, for vertebrates in general,

[00:25:33] the sandhill cranes and cranes in general are not outliers in a way in that their survival without changing has been above average for a vertebrate in recent epochs. And cranes as a lineage can trace their ancestry right to the original radiation and diversification of birds post-dinosaurs. But you can trace the Gruiformis roots back to 64 million years ago.

[00:26:02] And you can trace modern forms of the African crown crane to 25 million years ago. And the Gruus Antigone cranes to 12 million years ago in similar forms. The sandhill crane is relatively unchanged in that 12 million years. So they're really ancient, which is pretty neat. And they've out-survived most other things. And they may out-survive us. But we're making it a little bit hard on them.

[00:26:31] And then, of course, Mike, the most fascinating thing is that you guys are on bicycle, but with roadmaps and GPS, and they don't have nothing of this. How do they do it? How do they do it? Yeah. So the thing about cranes is that they, when their chicks are born, they learn most everything from their mom and dad. And they're with them that entire first year of their life.

[00:27:00] So whereas some birds are hardwired for migration their first year, these birds are not. This is a generational transfer of knowledge from mom and dad and others in their flock to that next generation. That's really fascinating because you wonder what those conversations are as they're teaching their young one to fly.

[00:27:24] So when these birds leave Wood Buffalo National Park way to the north in the boreal forest when they're about roughly four months old, they're making this epic migration with mom and dad. And they're learning the landscape. They're learning what to eat, what to drink, what to be afraid of, how to be a crane, basically. And they stay together for that first year of life. And then that's it.

[00:27:50] Then they split from mom and dad after that first year. And for the next three to four years, they're finding others that are in a similar predicament, like teenagers, if you will, that are trying to figure out how to live their lives without really much responsibility until they become sexually mature and can pair up and then raise kids of their own.

[00:28:16] So if you consider a 40-year-old bird that is making this migration for since adulthood, you're thinking about a bird that has maybe traveled 200-plus thousand miles across the same geography. And then you consider that if she has raised 10 or 12 generations of chicks within that time frame,

[00:28:40] just imagine all of that knowledge that she has imparted to all of those that then are turning around as they become adults and are imparting that knowledge to others. I think Andy and I think about both of those things in our head quite a bit as we're doing our own migration north. Yeah. Because now how the numbers, how many there are left now? Yeah.

[00:29:06] Technically, in the world, we're in the 830 to 840 range, including captivity. So it's about 560 individuals, give or take 10 to 15 in the remnant population we're going with, traveling the path of, in the reintroduced eastern migratory population, which goes from Wisconsin to the southeastern United States. They're at like 60, 65 right now, but they just had a good crop of chicks, so they could be doing a little better soon.

[00:29:36] In Louisiana, non-migratory population, which has only been going about 15 years now, they are at about 75 individuals. And then there's the remainders in captivity, just about 700 in change in the wild, and then 130 or so in captivity. And the captive birds are used to continue to maintain the genetics.

[00:30:04] So they really think about pairing those birds and maintaining the genetics as a default or safety population that we hope never is necessary. But the thing is that you have, if they only have two chicks a year, and usually only one survives to fledge, then they don't have a lot of room to fail as these populations slowly continue to climb.

[00:30:34] Ducks, geese, they reach sexual maturity much younger than cranes, and they have lots of them, right? Big clutches. You may see a clutch. Ducks or geese. Yeah, 10, 12 eggs, yeah. And they may have to, they may reclutch a couple different times if they fail the first time. Cranes just typically don't do that. Yeah, same with grouse. Anything, cranes are the archetypal, case-selected species in ecology, right? The R&K strategies.

[00:31:01] Cranes are a lot like elephants or chimpanzees, whales, great apes in general. Very case-selected. The demographic success of the species is incumbent upon high adult survival. If the adults don't survive at 92 to 96% a year, the population won't do well. You need to have 95% adult survival. When we make it hard on adults to survive because they don't have enough habitat

[00:31:30] or there's a lot of threats to them, that's when, that's why illegal hunting was so hard on them. Each time you remove an adult from the population, you lose a lot of cultural information. In fact, they used to breed in many more areas. But as the birds that got hunted out of those areas were gone and the habitats transformed, the existing birds just haven't gone back and bred there. Those were cultural lineages passed on about migration routes in foraging areas and breeding areas that are gone now.

[00:32:00] And maybe some will reestablish at some point, but it'll be slow. But they still currently breed and winter in the same spots. We see those teenagers explore some areas. And maybe in the next couple of decades, we'll see some expansion of the breeding range. But it remains to be seen. Got to have habitat. Got to have habitat first. Yeah. And that's still going down. Guys, let's go a moment to both of you. Halfway the journey now.

[00:32:28] What's a typical day like for you both when you're on the road? He's looking at me, so he wants me to start. You do more than a... I don't know about that. Yeah. We wake up. We try to get to bed not too late. Wake up and it's a little bit of physical maintenance. Mike and I both wake up early, but it doesn't mean we're on the road early.

[00:32:54] There's some physical maintenance and gear maintenance and packing in the morning. Get some breakfast in. We're moving all the time, so often it's an exercise in packing. Unpacking and packing the SegWagon. And wherever we ended up, oftentimes we're staying at a... Somebody's putting us up like a kind rancher like Jim and Carol Falstic recently in South Dakota or we're at a hotel or maybe on occasion we can camp.

[00:33:22] But we get packed up. The SegWagon, which is driven by our friend and colleague Ethan, he will drive us to where we left off the last day. And we hop on the bikes. But we don't go that far usually for our first bout because we stop at the first wetland or prairie that's in good condition. We do a biological survey of plants and birds. We take those notes. And then we get back on the bikes and kind of start making miles for the day.

[00:33:51] And about every 10 miles, they'll check in on us and say, hey, how you doing? We'll get maybe water and some snacks and plow through the day. But if we see something cool, we stop a lot. We see a rancher who's out on his land and the land looks good. We're going to pull up and talk to him. Or if we need a bathroom and we drive into a gas station, we'll probably talk to somebody. Every day is a relatively unplanned adventure.

[00:34:17] The course was set with a bunch of important areas for whooping cranes, about 44 areas. And then we kind of filled in the gaps. But there's times where the route doesn't work and we get stuck because there's a gravel road underwater or a private road we can't pass or something of that nature. And then we have to get back to the maps and replan our route. So I don't know. Is that an overview? Andy's doing the science along the way and I'm doing the photography.

[00:34:47] And helping with the science. Very helpful. I see stuff. But yeah, I'm just using... This was a really big reach for me to just use a phone. And I figured that I would use the camera that I had in my hand. And I think it would be nearly impossible to do anything with if I had a bag of cameras with me. And I just wouldn't be able to do it.

[00:35:16] And I just wanted to focus on one thing and I wanted to focus on one tool that I knew everybody used. Because like this trip of ours, Andy's a great athlete and I'm well enough. But we're two regular guys that have done this trip. We haven't been training for years for this. We're not super athletes. And I wanted to maintain that same sort of idea. Look, you can do this too. And maybe you're not going to go the whole way.

[00:35:45] But you can go part of the way. And I'm going to document this with a tool that I know that just most everybody on the face of the planet these days is walking around with. Which is a phone. And I feel naked a lot of times. And there's times that I wish it's like, man, I wish I had my telephoto lens right now or this or that. But Andy's in the same boat as a scientist. He's without all of his books and keys and all that sort of stuff. And so we are experiencing this.

[00:36:15] It's stretching us both, I think, a lot. Professionally, creatively. But I'll tell you that over halfway in, it's been one of the most freeing experiences as a photographer that I've ever had in my life. And that doesn't mean that I want to run around with the phone the rest of my career.

[00:36:34] But once you learn how to see and what this thing can do and how you can use it, then I've really dialed that in to the few things that I do then on a daily basis. So when Andy is doing his plant surveys, and I'm no good at plants. I know a flower from a grass and a grass from a tree. That's about it.

[00:37:00] But I'll be looking around and I'll be looking for the pollinators that are on the flowers, the small life insects. Because with this phone, I can shoot really close. And I can shoot macro stuff in a way that I can't with my other phone. And anytime we meet somebody, I'm using this phone to take their portrait. I'm trying to take the same kind of a portrait every time. So it's like assemblages, right? And so I've maybe made 60 different portraits from this phone.

[00:37:29] And documenting the diversity of bird life, 1,500 miles up the Great Plains so far. And then just our clouds. Because out here, the clouds are our mountains. And they're always changing. And so those cloudscapes are always different. And they look different depending on where you are in the geography. So you can do that with this, right?

[00:37:55] And that's the way I've tried to work or have been challenged and have figured out some solutions. Now I have no idea what it's going to look like at the end. But it'll be fun to go back and look at the body at work and see what's there. You know, so. Reacting to Mike there, I'm a big, in conservation, it's interesting. I've been in the conservation community in Nebraska.

[00:38:18] And in any big event, you can tell the quality and meaning of somebody's work by the venues in which their work comes up. And if there's a retirement or an award or something in the conservation community in Nebraska, the first person they often go to is Mike to say, hey, we would really love one of your photos to honor this great person's career or something of that nature.

[00:38:48] And he's, I love his work. I've loved it for a long time. And I've seen some of the photos he shot with his phone. And I got one that I think is one of my favorite photos I've ever seen of his. And it's really abstract and I'm in love with it. So anyways, I think he's doing some super cool stuff with his phone. I love that one photo. I do. The whole part of the script is to be relatable. And I think the thing is, a bike is relatable, right? Yeah, it's really hard what we're doing. We've done hard stuff before.

[00:39:18] But most publicly, it was actually staying in a blind together and not moving for days and change. This is all movement, as Mike has been pointing out. Neither of us can slow down enough to take in everything we want. If I stopped for every bird I saw on the side of the road, we would be in Kansas. And it's all about making choices about where to come down. Everything's a choice. If you stop, it has to be worth it.

[00:39:48] You have to keep moving. But everything about this is relatable, both existentially to the cranes and how they have to make decisions. Can they come down? Can they not come down? And to the people, because people can do what we're doing. There's nothing, like Mike said, we're not super athletes and we're not, yeah, we're just two dudes. So this is all doable. I'm using new tools as well. I prefer my taxonomic keys, but I've been using my phone a lot more too.

[00:40:18] I've been using some of these new AI tools. If I don't know what a plant is or I have a guess, see what the AI says. Now, the AI is terrible at grasses and sedges, but luckily that's one of my specialties. But it's pretty good at flowers. If I see a flower I don't know, I can shoot it on there. I think that's a linum. I think that's a flax, but I don't know which one. I can use that, the AI. It'll give me a guess of, oh, it's 50% linum this, 30% linum this. And then I can look pictures on the internet and confirm.

[00:40:48] So we both had to bear down and work in new ways. But Mike, I think Mike's been one more pure about it. I stole a key in Nebraska that I've been, I'm going to use for multiple states. He's been more pure about it. And I think the quality of what he's done is really interesting. Because I had this scene in my head with both of you on the bicycle. Mike seeing something. He says, Andy, let's stop. I have to take a picture of this.

[00:41:16] And Andy seeing some new grass. And he says, Mike, both of you were rolling the eyes in the end. He says, oh, come on. Let's go. Let's get going. But it's not like this. You're actually very consistent about things. No, I think that happens too. I think every day what you describe this, it's always a conversation. And it's based on oftentimes how tired you are and where you're at in the day. And how many more times do we have to stop and take a picture of a flower?

[00:41:46] How many more times do we have to stop and look at the birds we've seen before? But yeah, but I think those decisions each day when we're traveling, we're making all kinds of decisions just like the birds are. So imagine a bird on migration, a whooping crane on migration. And every day they wake up and they decide if they're going to fly that day based on the weather and everything else and how they're feeling. And then if they decide to go, they don't know how far they're going to go necessarily that day.

[00:42:16] But they are going to have to make decisions along the way. How high do we fly? What are the roads in the sky going to be like? We're going to have a lot of turbulent weather. We're going to have smooth sailing. What's that going to be? And what pathway is that going to lead us on? And where are we going to come down to drink? Where are we going to come down to eat? Where are we going to come down to sleep? Who's going to feel good that day and who doesn't? Like when we take off in the mornings, usually within the first 10 miles, we look at each other and say, okay, what hurts today?

[00:42:43] Because almost every day, there's some consistency each day, but there's also things that you don't expect. And I imagine those conversations among birds, among a family of cranes or a duet of cranes is very similar. You know, you may start together and you may end together, but maybe along the way, you may separate. You may do things differently or you may decide to not go as far as you want to one of them

[00:43:13] because the other one just can't go any further. So that's been a fascinating thing about being on a bike and running the brilliant things that I think Andy has always talked about is we want to feel the weight of migration. And obviously, we're not birds. Obviously, we have a safety net, but we are doing this all under our own power. And that's been a really eye-opening experience.

[00:43:42] And you can really feel the distance between these beautiful places, you know, these remnant places. Like I get, because I'm a biologist and he's a photographer, we get excited when we get to a gorgeous grassland. And sometimes it's a long pedo between them or a gorgeous wetland. And the other thing we wrestle with, oh, we have to stop again by giving each other a lot of flexibility. We ride 40 to 60% of the day pretty close together. And then another, the other half of the day, we might separate a bit.

[00:44:12] And it's no big deal because sometimes you have to ride to your body. And people ride different when we have different bikes and different bodies and different approaches at times. But if Mike's getting a shot of a bird on the road, he doesn't always expect me to wait. And if I stay, the other day I was staying, I'm like, I got to watch this lark bunting sing a little bit more. They took off. It's no big deal. He knows I'll work to catch up. And we give each other a lot of flexibility. And that way we don't necessarily hold each other back because there's times one of us is going to want to stop and the others not.

[00:44:42] But there's a lot of times where we want to stop together. The other day, I heard a couple of calls and some grassland birds were going down. They're pretty big. And I was like, oh shit, I missed him. And Mike was behind me and he's done a lot of work with burrowing owls. He's burrowing owls. I was like, oh heck, that's, that was, those were burrowing owls. We got to get on those. And we found them pretty quick. Mike has great eyes and he's, there they are. So we got to look at these burrowing owls. We both enjoyed that. A lot of times it's what we're doing together.

[00:45:11] Sometimes it's, I might be like, I'm going to stop and look at this grass for a while and Mike might pedal. Or he might be taking a photo of that and he lets me keep pedaling because your body can get in a rhythm and you have, you have to be conscious of how often you break it. If you stop too much, I feel better riding 10 or 20. 12. If I ride four every four miles and get off, I'm going to slow down because the next half mile, getting my legs back into a rhythm is always sore. But you kind of, it's really a cost to come down.

[00:45:41] It's kind of like flying. You're going to, you're going to pay something for every stop, but sometimes you have to stop. And so it's a really interesting story that way. And your guys pass also through a lot of small towns and communities. How did people respond when you talked to them? They've been great. And I don't think I expected them not to be. They're just curious. When you go through a small community and here's two dudes coming by on bikes with,

[00:46:11] that obviously aren't from there. There's, there's an awareness. We have, I don't know how many connections we've had with people, but it's been a lot. And it is always met with curiosity. First, they may not know what a whooping crane is. Some people do. Some don't. They're always curious about the bikes. They're always curious about the journey. And then they start asking questions.

[00:46:39] And maybe more than anything else, though, what's been important is that Andy and I, in our own work in our lives, we've learned that working here in the Great Plains of North America, one of the most critical things that one can do is to listen. Not to tell people what they ought to think or how they ought to run their land or anything else, but just listen to them and hear their story.

[00:47:03] So oftentimes we're asking the questions, not telling them all about what we're doing, but then that provides a doorway conversation. And we've talked to kids that have been as young as nine years old and people as old as 90 years old. And, and they've all got a story to tell. And a lot of them, if you spend enough time with them, they've got a story that they're very proud of about their land, about their heritage,

[00:47:31] about their, about their family, and sometimes about these birds. Just a couple of days ago, we ran into a woman that was a retired postmistress in this tiny little town called Gann Valley in South Dakota, population 60 or something like that. And she remembered when she was in her little country school back in 1955, when she was nine or 10 years old,

[00:48:01] they had 14 whooping cranes land outside their school at the wetland that was nearby. In 1955, there were maybe 30 or low 30 number of whooping cranes left in the world. So they had half of the world's population whooping cranes land outside it. She never forgot that. In fact, she told me that three times that she saw these birds in her life. And how did that happen?

[00:48:27] Andy was at the courthouse visiting with a couple of folks and I was just pedaling my bikes, wasting some time waiting for Andy to come back. And she comes tooling down in her fancy blue pickup truck and asks what we're doing. And 10 minutes later, we have this amazing woman telling us this amazing story and very proud of it. And that, for me, more than anything else, that's what we're doing here.

[00:48:55] We've talked to schools and we've had some formal things at different nature centers and such, but it's that those regular touch points are most important of all. Yeah, it's fascinating. Mike, I had to double, I had to check the old Google because I was like, I thought the town was even smaller. And Gann Valley, the official census was 10 people. Oh, 10. 10. Wow. 10. And I think we actually met, we actually met six people. Six of the 10. We met six people.

[00:49:25] Six of the 10 people in Gann Valley. And the thing about Gann Valley was fascinating because it was the smallest county seat in South Dakota for Buffalo County and the smallest county seat in the whole United States, the smallest population for a county seat. And that town used to be bigger, of course, but a lot of these towns have had hard times and aren't what they were in terms of population anymore. But there's all these interesting towns we've passed through, right?

[00:49:51] Whether it's Turin, Kansas, Red Cloud, Nebraska, Gann Valley, South Dakota, that we had these really interesting experiences meeting people and hearing their stories and telling them about cranes. And they were excited, really excited to have us. I think just getting attention to their town, they're like, wow, somebody cares about my little town. That's neat. And that's that first step. Conservation is always appreciation, right? You got to be able to care.

[00:50:20] And oftentimes it starts with pride. And if people want to join you guys for a few miles, they can do this? Yeah. Yeah, they have to go through our gatekeeper, Mariah Lundgren. Mariah is Mike's right-hand person. She's actually in the hallway right now. She is serving us the contact for the trip, mostly because Mike and I are biking. We can't answer things. And we're barely keeping up with our normal life duties as is.

[00:50:48] I think Mariah is probably barely keeping up with her normal life duties as is too, but she's doing her best to shepherd us and make sure that we organize it a little bit. We tend to do bigger rides from certain places. So some folks have come out with us. We've had a lot of people join for a day or two. But what we try to do to get bigger groups out is have some kind of coordinated rides out of particular areas where more people want to join.

[00:51:15] And I think there will be one coming up, from what I understand, in North Dakota leaving Bismarck. We're going to have a number of people join. Is that correct, Mariah? She says yes. So thank goodness for Mariah Lundgren. Yes, and she's very good in answering emails also. Yes, we're both horrendous. Not worse than Mike. So Jim Richardson, he didn't join you on the bike?

[00:51:44] He did not join us on the bike, but the man is a superman. He came out for half a day. And it's fun to watch Jim because the guy's got endless energy and boundless enthusiasm. And he's a very young 70-something. I don't know how he does it, but he's running all over the place, getting different angles and shots, getting clear down. He's squatting.

[00:52:13] He's everywhere. He's like Flash. And Jim has been such a wonderful mentor and a wonderful friend. It was fantastic to be able to introduce him to Andy. And he's just another one of those treasures along the Whooper Highway. And Jim actually also gave me... I had a crash course in iPhone photography with Jim before I left on this trip.

[00:52:38] We took about an hour to help me understand some of the nuances of how the camera works. And it's been a big help. I will give him a phone call now when we finish talking. But guys, what's one luxury item that you are missing the most on the trip? I think we're both pretty basic. We both camped and roughed it. In fact, we even have a Segway again that carries paramount of gear is more.

[00:53:06] We almost didn't for part of the trip. And we had all the saddlebags and stuff to go unassisted. And a water pump to pump out of streams would have been a lot slower and a lot less comfortable. But having the Segway again is pretty much answered... I miss my best friend, my dog, Bruno. Bruno is an old dog. He turned 16 in May, which is very old for a big dog. And he's a black-mouthed cur. And he's my best buddy. And aside from him, I'm doing okay.

[00:53:36] But I miss Bruno. Yeah, I think that's a good answer. The luxuries of home, you know, and being able to wake up when you want to wake up. Watch your birds in the backyard and be with the people that you love. And the animals around you, all of that stuff. But yeah, Andy and I are pretty basic people. So we're comfortable being uncomfortable to a point. But yeah, I don't know. I don't know. We've still got a long ways to go.

[00:54:05] So if you ask that question again later, we may be able to... After some, I will do. Yeah. Guys, what's one thing in the other half still left to come? What's one thing you definitely are looking forward to? So I am just looking forward to more of what we're just getting into now.

[00:54:30] So we have this vast prairie pothole country in the northern plains that is these rolling hills, pockmarked with glacial erratics of rocks that were left in the last glaciation that created these shallow depressions where water sits. And there's so much bird life in these places. And I have spent a lot of time over my career working in the prairie potholes.

[00:54:58] But getting to them in a vehicle, in a truck, and then sitting for one great length of time, maybe working out of blinds or using remote cameras to show something different that people haven't seen before. I'm really looking forward to moving through this landscape. Because on a bike, what you don't get in a car or you don't get in a plane is all of your senses are on. So you're not just seeing a landscape slower.

[00:55:28] You're smelling it. You are hearing it. And if you eat enough bugs, you know, you're tasting it too, right? It's just a really visceral kind of experience that I didn't expect. And so moving into the prairie pothole country that we're getting into now, and the further we go north, I think the more experiences we'll have, perhaps like yesterday, is something that I'm really looking forward to. And then, of course, I'm looking forward to the end. Yeah.

[00:55:57] Yeah, surviving it. One of the goals is to finish, right? I'm looking forward to it. I'm keeping track. Like they said, and Mike's doing this with me, is keeping track of the birds as we go. And we haven't seen a couple of these pothole birds yet that I'm excited about. I really like little birds. I love sparrows and shorebirds. And two little sparrows I'm excited to see are the Lacants and the Nelson sparrows. Both are little Amadromus sparrows. It's the genus, Amadromus. And they have orange on them.

[00:56:25] The Lacants has this little purple flecking on the neck. They're these beautiful little sparrows. And I'm excited to see them. I mean, they both like the transition zone. A lot of the birds that have suffered in our modern landscape are the birds that like transition zones. Because what we've done is we've impounded and drained wetlands. You get a wetland, and then it goes straight into cropland. We don't have a lot of these transition zones where it goes open water, marsh, wet meadow, wet grassland.

[00:56:54] And a lot of the coolest birds like that transition zone. And both those birds I just mentioned do. So I'm hoping we see some good populations of them to the north. We're just getting into the country where you can see them breeding. And I'm looking forward to both of those species, hopefully. I was hoping you guys were going to tell me that people coming out of their houses with homemade baked pies for you guys to take away or something like this.

[00:57:21] There's a place next door that has a very homemade place. And they apparently have pies. Mike just got a slice. He got me a cookie. I do, yeah. I have a doctor cream pie, and we have homemade oatmeal raisin cookies from the cafe next door on the house. So that's happening. I think we're actually gaining weight. Mostly muscle in our butt.

[00:57:47] Mike, Andy, thanks so much for having this little conversation with me. It's been great hearing a bit the adventure, the story about the 2,500 miles going. It sounds to me like a reasonable thing now to do. I wish you all the best for the second half of the journey. And may the winds be at your speed. How many flat tires you guys had? A couple. Mostly my bike.

[00:58:14] And mine fell off the rack as we were going down the highway. We had to fix his brakes, my tires. We're holding it together, though. Duct tape. Okay. Okay. Then you guys have safe travels. And Mike, I will talk to you after summer. We will want to hear a lot of more stories. And we will talk about your photography, the whooping cranes, your book, and everything else. Gentlemen, thanks again. It's been a pleasure talking to you tonight here on the show. It's been our pleasure.

[00:58:44] It's been our pleasure to be on the Camera Cafe show. Take care. Peace. I see you guys around on Instagram. Have a great day still there. Bye. You too. Thank you. Bye. Have a good evening. Bye. And that wraps up today's episode with Mike and Andy, folks. Before this conversation, I was mostly thinking about whooping cranes and a 2,500-mile bicycle ride. But what struck me afterwards was how the cranes became a doorway into a much larger conversation

[00:59:13] about landscapes, communities, conservation, and the connection that tied them all together. And of course, that's exactly why Mike and Andy set off on this journey in the first place. I would like to thank both Mike and Andy for taking the time to join me on the show, especially while they're still in the middle of this incredible adventure. It was a real pleasure to travel a few miles on the Hooper Highway with them from the comfort of my own recording studio. And for those of you who would like to hear more about Mike, don't worry.

[00:59:43] After the summer, we'll be welcoming him back to the show for a much deeper dive into his remarkable photography career, conservation storytelling, and many years spent documenting the great plains and beyond. To both of you guys, I wish you safe roads, fair weather, strong legs, and hopefully not too many headwinds for the miles still ahead. And if there happens to be a good slice of pie waiting somewhere along the route, I hope you find that too. For everyone listening, if you would like to learn more about the Hooper Highway project,

[01:00:11] the whooping cranes, or the work of Mike and Andy, you can find everything back in our show notes. And of course, folks, if you enjoyed this episode, have a look at our website. Don't forget to subscribe, leave us a review, and follow us on any podcast platform or on YouTube. Until next time, keep shooting and keep on moving your own photography forwards. I'll see you next week here for another wonderful conversation about photography and life. Adios!