In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers share tales about birds that had a big impact in their lives.

Part 1: Paula Croxson uses her neuroscience background to get rid of the pigeon family that has taken up residence on her window sill.

Dr. Paula Croxson is a neuroscientist, award-winning science communicator and storyteller with expertise in academic research, nonprofit work and science communication. She is President at Stellate Communications. Paula has an M.A. from the University of Cambridge and a M.Sc. and a Ph.D. from the University of Oxford. She was an Assistant Professor of Neuroscience and Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai for 5 years before shifting her career focus to science communication and public engagement with science, first at Columbia University and then at the Dana Foundation. She is passionate about communicating science in meaningful and effective ways, and fostering diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility in science. She is also a musician, playing flute in alternative rock bands Wax Majestic and Marlowe Grey, and a long-distance open water swimmer. The swimming is apparently for “fun”. You can learn more about her at paulacroxson.com.

Part 2: As a new urban park ranger, Tim Lopez gets a call to capture a swan on the loose.

Tim Lopez is a storyteller and educator born and raised in Los Angeles. His stories have been featured on the Moth Radio Hour, KCRW in Los Angeles, and CBS Radio nationwide. He is currently an Interpretive Park Ranger at Channel Islands National Park, where he brings the stories of the natural environment and the history of California to life. He is also a Jeopardy! champion and is legally obligated to mention that fact as often as possible.

Episode Transcript

Part 1

A few years ago, after years of school and work experience, five years of grad school, Master's and PhD, three years of a postdoc, and relocating from England to New York City, two more years of a postdoc, and interviews and job talks and efforts and publications, I got my dream job. I got my job as a researcher, as an assistant professor at a medical school. I got my own lab and I got to manage people and I got to set the direction of my research. It was really exciting.

Paula Croxson shares her story at Caveat in New York, NY in July 2024. Photo by Zhen Qin.

So naturally, after I got this amazing job, I would wake up in the morning. My alarm would go off, I would sit bolt upright in bed, sweating, shaking, heart racing, absolutely terrified that I was going to fail. In fact, my imposter phenomenon was so strong that I genuinely believed that any day now, somebody was going to walk into my office and say, “What are you doing here? We must have made a mistake. You don't belong here.” So sure was I that I was going to fail.

But I couldn't let them know that because I'd signed a contract. And this was my dream job. I spent my whole life training for this moment.

And so I got up anyway and I went to work every day. I put in the effort to try and make this work.

It did come with quite a few perks. One of those perks is that I could finally afford my own apartment. I know! That was a joy. So I moved into this apartment and I got furniture. It was really exciting.

Early on in my days in my new apartment, I was woken not by my alarm but by a sound that sounded a little bit like a chicken being dragged backwards through a wire fence. I wasn’t sure what it was, but it was coming from the window. So I went over to the window to investigate.

I saw that there were two pigeons on my windowsill having very loud and vigorous sex. So naturally I said, “Oh, sorry.” Because you really shouldn't interrupt when that's happening.

But after I had stopped apologizing, I was like, “This is not okay. These pigeons are waking me up at 6:00 AM. I need my sleep. I have an important job to do.”

And this kept happening day after day. I was no longer being woken by my alarm. I was being woken by the pigeons having, quite frankly, a much better time than I was. It was starting to interfere with my life. So I decided they had to go.

Unfortunately, the pigeons saw this coming and they planned ahead. They had already built a nest and there were two eggs in the nest. I am many things, but a baby pigeon killer, I am not. So I had to wait for the eggs to hatch and the babies to fly the nest and then I could have my peace and quiet back.

So I waited and I waited. One morning, finally, I woke up and it was quiet. I thought, “Oh, this is the moment. The babies have flown the nest.”

I grabbed my rubber gloves and my bucket of water and I went over to the windowsill. I saw that, inside the nest, there were two teeny tiny pigeon skeletons. The pigeons, they were bad parents. They had not raised their babies well. I was not the pigeon killer here.

I felt really bad about this situation, but I didn't really want to let them try again so I was like, “Okay, validate it. I can ask them to move out now.”

So, I clean off the windowsill. I carefully dispose of the little pigeon skeletons. I said a little few words. Then I was like, “Okay,” I commenced my plan. I started with the spikes.

The pigeons loved the spikes. They fashioned the spikes into a kind of rudimentary Game of Thrones style nest of swords. They perched there looking incredibly proud of themselves.

Then I moved to the shiny tape that's supposed to make rustling noises and dazzle them. They loved the shiny tape. They lined the nest of swords with the shiny tape and they reclined there.

So then I got the shiny discs. They're supposed to clang and bash against things. And I don't actually have evidence of this, but I believe that they used the shiny discs like mirrors to admire themselves while they were having really loud sex in my windowsill.

Day after day, I was getting woken up at 6:00 AM, and I was working really long hours in the lab. I was trying to do experiments. I was trying to write grants and get funding. I was working all of the time. And when I got home, all I wanted to do was sleep, but I couldn't sleep.

I knew I hit rock bottom when I found myself Googling whether it's legal to own a hawk in New York City and train it to kill. It is not. Don't do it.

As I was doing this, I remembered that I'm a behavioral neuroscientist. Behavioral neuroscience is the study of how the brain and structure function and chemical composition of the brain leads to behavior. Everybody knows a little bit about behavioral neuroscience because pretty much everybody has heard of Pavlov and his dogs. Conditioning is the most basic thing that we learn when we learn about behavioral neuroscience. When Pavlov rang a bell before his dogs received food, they learned to salivate to the sound of the bell because they made an association between the sound and the reward.

But there's another kind of conditioning called instrumental conditioning, and that is when an animal can make an association between an action and a consequence. One of the first people to study that was a guy named B.F. Skinner. He taught pigeons to peck keys to get rewards. I had known this for a long time, I had just forgotten about it.

I knew that if B.F. Skinner could teach pigeons to peck keys to get rewards, that I could teach pigeons to leave my windowsill to escape a punishment. So I entered what I like to call my Angry Lady Shouting phase.

You see, the key with this kind of instrumental conditioning is that there has to be a really close amount of time between the action and the consequence in order for the animals to learn. And so whenever I saw those pigeons, and I wasn’t home very much, right? Whenever I saw those pigeons landing on the windowsill, I had to run over to the window and bang on it to get them to fly away. I had to do this really, really predictably and all of the time so that they knew there was never a good time to land on the windowsill.

This is not a good time to start dating a new person. It turns out that leaping out of bed stark naked, running over to the window and banging on it with both hands is a bit scary. Although, if somebody accepts you when you're doing that, that could be true love.

I kept at it anyway. I had to. It didn't matter. I had to keep trying because I had to see if this worked.

One morning, one beautiful, glorious morning, I woke up to the sound of my alarm. Heart racing, clamped hands, sweaty palms, shaking, still stressed out of my life, but I wasn't woken up by the pigeons. And this happened the next day and the next day and the next day. You see, what we know about the brain actually is backed by science and it works. And my behavioral neuroscience had discouraged the pigeons from living on my windowsill anymore. I was truly alone in my apartment for the first time.

I now had no excuses because there was nothing else that would be responsible for my failure, if I did fail, other than me. And so I had to get up and go to work and see if I could make it work.

Thank you so much.

Part 2

I was born and raised here in Los Angeles, but a few years ago, I was living in New York pursuing a career in part‑time bartending when my girlfriend got a job in Tucson, Arizona. So we moved out there and she went right to work and I continued to flounder, trying on various odd jobs until finally landing a role as a groundskeeper with Tucson Parks and Recreation at Hi Corbett Field, which is a collegiate and recreational series of baseball fields.

In that job, I was part of a crew that would come in every day and repair the baseball fields. That entailed re‑claying the mound and home plate, smoothing over the infield and repainting the lines, mowing the grass, and raking up Infinity Sunflower Seeds. It was basically putting everything back into optimal condition so that it could be destroyed that very evening and then doing the whole thing the next morning.

Tim Lopez shares his story at the Crawford Family Forum in Los Angeles, CA in August 2024. Photo courtesy of LAist.

There was a certain Zen appeal to this work that really connected with me, something about restoring order to this chaos that really struck a chord with me. I really enjoyed it. I did that for a few months and then we eventually moved back to New York, where I immediately resumed clutching at straws.

I went back to work more or less right away for the restaurant that I'd been working for. I started teaching some after‑school programs in the Bronx, where I would show up and turn the chair around and get real with the kids for like an hour.

I started dabbling in the non‑profit sector before, ultimately, finding it to be especially nonprofitable for me personally.

Then the pandemic happened. Everything I was doing pretty much evaporated and we were all stuck in our apartment for months. When things started opening up again, I knew that I wanted to work outside. I thought back to my experiences in Tucson, and I really just wanted to get to work outside.

So I started to look for opportunities with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. I saw that they were hiring for something called an Urban Park Ranger. Now, most people don't think of New York as a particularly natural environment, but I'm here to tell you that it is. It is one of the finest natural harbors in the world. There's over 30,000 acres of parkland, rivers, estuaries, old growth forest, bird habitat, natural historical sites and beaches. The role of the urban park ranger is to connect everyday New Yorkers with the natural environment and world through education, recreation, wildlife management and conservation.

I figured that with my background in history and extremely casual educational settings, this could be a good fit for me. So I applied, and after an alarmingly short vetting and interview process, I was hired.

But before I could be deployed into the field, I was informed that I needed to attend the New York City Parks Academy. Now, despite its lofty title, the Parks Academy is essentially a series of semi‑abandoned bungalows beneath the RFK bridge on Randalls Island, which is historically a meeting point for the cast‑offs and misfits of New York City, myself and my fellow recruits included.

And there we were on the very first day of academy in our uniforms, lined up in what they call muster, with our boots shined and our logbooks at the ready to be inspected and/or yelled at. Now, the person doing the yelling was one of these sergeants that was assigned to the academy training. His name was Sergeant Contreras. He was a short, wiry man with an obvious Napoleon complex who was in charge of the physical element of the training, which included self‑defense and things of that nature.

Then there was Sergeant Lee, who was a kinder and generally more normal human being, who was to be in charge of the academic portion of the training, which would include park rules and regulations, constitutional law, and use of force training.

So if this is starting to sound super law enforcement to you, that's because it is. Unbeknownst to me, an urban park ranger is considered a peace officer in the state of New York, which means there's a certain state‑mandated amount of training that goes into this work that we were all forced to endure. So, despite my interest, experience, background, and personality, all being more on the education side, we had to learn all of this enforcement stuff as part of our trainings before being deployed.

At first, the training started out very formally. There was a lot of rigid classroom instruction on things like park rules and regulations, what you can and can't do in a park, how to write a ticket, self‑defense and things of that nature. But as the days dragged into weeks, dragged into months, the overall atmosphere started to take on more of like a last‑week‑of‑school kind of energy.

For example, the week where all we did all day long was watch episodes of Law and Order, which I assume had something to do with the constitutional law portion of the training. Or the week that we watched a documentary from the 1980s about a very, very corrupt branch of the New York City Police Department, after which the instruction given was basically just don't be like that.

As it started to go on, we were all just kind of getting a little bit impatient and wanted to just get out and start working. But before that could happen, there was one more hurdle to clear, and that was pertaining to the wildlife management portion of the job. That was where we learned to deal with something called animal conditions.

Now, an animal condition is a situation in which an animal, whether that be wildlife or a domestic animal, finds its way into a New York City park where it's having interactions with people that cause it to either be dangerous to the animal or to the park patron. And then it is the responsibility of the urban park ranger to go in and to apprehend the animal and relocate it to another area of the park.

The most common of these conditions, an animal condition, is a raccoon condition. Raccoons are extremely wild, wily, clever, very cagey animals that are very reluctant to be apprehended and/or captured when they are healthy. When they're not healthy, they kind of tend to stumble around, kind of drunk. They're a lot easier to catch. And a point of fact, they are rabies vector species and they carry canine distemper, so there's definitely a need to do this.

The problem is there's no way to train for this, at least not practically speaking. To their credit, the Parks Academy did their best to prepare us for this by at least familiarizing ourselves with the equipment, which were bite gloves, snare pulls, and animal carriers, and practicing on stuffed animals.

So with this training, we were deployed into the field. I was assigned to the borough of Queens.

Fast forward to a couple of years later. I was no longer a fresh‑faced, idealistic recruit coming out of the academy. I was a grizzled veteran of the thin green line of New York City Parks. I'd seen a lot of stuff out there. And one day in the summer, it was hot. I was on patrol, and a call went out over the radio. It was an animal condition. The nature of the condition was a swan on the loose.

Now, again, I’ve dealt with dozens of conditions at this time. I brought in a bunch of guinea pigs, a couple of hedgehogs, a couple of possums, one alligator, was unfortunately DOA, and a number of raccoons. But swans, birds in general, are kind of a whole different situation. I don't know what you know about the New York City birding community but they can be a little intense, a little involved.

And swans in particular tend to captivate the public imagination in ways that most animals do not, even birds. People find them graceful and beautiful. They mate for life, which is something that people really respect in a wild animal. And, you know, as soon as a swan appears in a New York City Park, it immediately becomes a celebrity.

Now, rangers hate swans for a variety of reasons. The first of which is they are considered an invasive species, which means they are not from the area, which in and of itself is not a problem. But when they arrive in an area, they tend to outcompete the local resources. They push out the other waterfowl, they build these huge ostentatious nests, and they generally make a spectacle of themselves. They are bullies and they are gentrifiers.

This particular swan was one of these. It had been spotted frolicking in various high‑traffic areas of the park. And people were feeding it, which is bad for the animal as well as a violation of park rules and regulations. It also had several close encounters with off‑leash dogs, which is another hot‑button topic of park's enforcement, and was generally making a nuisance of itself. We were getting dozens of calls about it, tweets, and it was attracting a lot of attention and so the higher‑ups made a decision to send us in, to bring him in.

Riding shotgun with me that day was my partner, Sal. Sal and I went back aways. We come up in the academy together and we didn't always see eye to eye. He was a man of many contradictions. He was hot‑tempered, kind of quick to anger, no friend to swans. But he was also a militant vegan who seemed to subsist entirely on dandelion sandwiches.

In any event, we went out to the park. After interviewing a few witnesses, we were able to get an approximate location of the suspect and we headed down to make the collar.

Now, we get down there and it's this area of the park, it's kind of narrow and there are a series of vernal pools, these ponds that kind of form over the spring. They kind of reach their peak in the summer and then sort of freeze over in the wintertime. That's where this swan had been kind of lurking. It's kind of a reedy, marshy, muddy area.

We get down there and we see the telltale signs of swan activity. There's like a little pile of potato chips and like a little trail leading off into the brush. We see that it's there and we kind of head in.

We put on our equipment. We have to wear waders, because now we're getting into a muddy situation. We bring our equipment and we head out and we find the swan in the middle of this pond‑type area. We move in, Sal from one side, me from the other.

I must stress, once again at this point, we are highly trained professionals. That said, it's a totally different situation preparing for something, training for something, and experiencing it in real life in the field. I don't know how many people have been up close to a swan, but they are bigger than you think, they are scarier than you think, and they are meaner than you think.

This particular swan, as soon as he saw us coming in, he knew the score. He started kind of hissing and pumping his neck up and down and making his clicking sound. He kind of started beating his wings, this kind of like perturbed dinosaur, which, from an evolutionary perspective, it basically is.

I stay and I look over at Sal, he looks over at me and I'm wondering is he going to come quietly or are we going to have a problem?

As it turns out, this is all for show. It was a bluff. We were able to coax the swan into a carrier and get it out of there with very minimal fuss. And as we loaded it onto the back of the truck, we were eye to eye. I kind of looked into this cage and I saw this animal looking back at me with this kind of resigned look on his face. You know, I didn't see a bully. I didn't see a menace. I just saw another creature just trying to make it in New York City. Maybe went the wrong way, got off course and just needed a little nudge to get back in the right direction.

I couldn't help but think of my own life. Maybe I needed a little nudge to get myself back in the right direction.

A short time after that, my girlfriend got a job back here in California and so we move cross‑country again, but this time I knew what I wanted to do. I was lucky enough to apply and to get hired as a park ranger with the National Park Service here at Channel Islands National Park, where it is my privilege and my responsibility to interpret the natural world and tell its stories to Native Californians and Americans of all kinds, and hopefully to bring a little bit of order to the chaos in everyone's lives.

Thank you.