Laura Erickson’s For the Birds

On May 12, 2026, For the Birds will be 40 years old. When I first walked into the college radio station at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, with some bird sound records and three scripts in hand in early May 1986, I didn’t know if anyone there would be even remotely interested in a program about birds, and I had no clue what I was doing—I was simply frustrated that I’d not yet found a niche in the Duluth birding community the way I’d so easily fit in in East Lansing and Madison.

I’d never ever been on the radio before, and my only experience even moderately close to what I wanted to do here had happened several years before, while we were living in Madison. The afternoon paper, The Capital Times, published an article about warblers filled with factual errors, and the very next week, Peter Fox, the city editor at the morning paper, The Wisconsin State Journal, called me at the school where I was teaching. He said the paper was just starting a brand new “Leisure Time” section, and he wanted to list the beginner birding walks I was leading for Madison Audubon on the events calendar. I said sure but told him that if he published any articles about warblers in the new section, I hoped they’d be more accurate than the one in the Cap Times. He said, “Well, why don’t you write one for us?”

That felt like a put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is challenge so I agreed, but WHOA! it was daunting. My only college degree was in elementary education, and I’d never written anything for publication before. I confided to my birding buddy and closest friend, Ken Wood, how embarrassing and scary this was, but he seemed certain that I’d do just fine. He told me to think of newspaper readers as smart junior high kids who’d never had a chance to learn anything about birds. My job was simply to make the subject accessible and interesting for them, never assuming they knew basic stuff while never talking down to them.

Peter Fox wanted photos to accompany the article, so he sent a photographer on one of my birding walks at the arboretum. My walks were on weekdays, and I had to be at school by 8:30, so we started at 6, an ungodly hour for the photographer. He’d been mostly planning to take people shots and hadn’t brought a telephoto lens, but this being May in a Madison hotspot, warblers abounded, and he managed to get some nice shots. He didn’t want his gorgeous Blackburnian Warbler photo “wasted” on an inside page, so he lobbied for and got that photo on the front page.

The article was very well received, so Peter asked me to write more, and I did. When we moved to Duluth in 1981, I sent some clippings to the Duluth News-Tribune, but the editor there, Larry Fortner, told me the paper already had the “finest outdoor writer in North America.” Russ and I both enjoyed Sam Cook’s articles, but he wrote mostly about hunting and fishing, not about birding. I wrote back that the State Journal also had an outdoor writer who covered those kinds of activities, but Larry was just not interested. Journalists back then, and probably still today, have little training in nature studies, and few understand how hungry people are for reliable information about backyard and local wildlife. A decade later, Larry asked me to write a regular column for him for a new local magazine he was editing, The Senior Reporter. I of course said yes. At the time, I was also writing occasional articles, including one cover story, for Wisconsin Trails and Tales, Better Forests, and a few others.

But I did not fit into the Duluth birding community of the eighties the way I had in either Lansing or Madison. In all three cities, we had some genuinely great, very experienced birders, mostly but not all men, and I never minded deferring to them. But in Madison, I did Big Days every May with those top birders—they considered me among their numbers. Here, even when the big guns were actively searching for a fourth for a Big Day team (four is the ideal number), they refused to let me join—the team leader explained that women didn’t belong on Big Day teams. So I started my own team, which we called the Reeves after a lovely European shorebird that occasionally turns up in America—the only bird with a different species name for males and females. (The males are called Ruffs.).

My Madison Audubon birding walks for beginners were very well attended and popular. Here the Duluth Audubon board of directors would not allow me to lead any field trips using the Duluth Audubon name because one of the top local birders was doing a very popular and worthwhile spring and fall bird class for Community Education, leading trips to the best birding spots in the area. I signed up for it several times—it was great, and a very helpful introduction to all the local bird hotspots. I didn’t see that any bird walks I led would take anything from his—people had to pay to sign up for a Community Ed class while mine would be free and more informal—a good way for people who weren’t sure about birding to try it out without any commitment. I was plenty busy and happy at home—my three children were born between 1981 and 1985—but I’d never felt so excluded from the birding community before. Also, I missed teaching—I needed, deep in my bones, to be sharing good stuff about birds. I had no clue how I was ever going to fit in here or do something to satisfy that deep need to teach. I was ready for a big change.