Scott Weidensaul
Natural History Writer/ Bird Bander

Think you've seen it all? Travel on a wild ride with Scott Weidensaul for a day, and you'll see natural beauties, up close, like you've never seen before! Scott has a passion for studying and protecting all birds and has found that this passion can help protect them from harm while educating others at the same time. Scott is a bird bander. Which means that he temporarily catches birds in order to place a small metal numbered band around their leg so that they may be identified in the future. The whole routine takes only a few minutes out of the bird's day, and causes no imposition to it in the future. The practice of bird banding is done for many reasons, but the main focus is to get a glimpse into the health, habits, and lives of birds so that we can learn from them to see how their populations are coping with environmental changes and human impacts. Scott shows us up close how measurements and weights are recorded to create a record of each bird he bands so that if it is re-caught by himself, or a bander in the U.S. or another country, or if the bird is found dead, that the bander can know a history of where the bird was first banded and what may have happened to it. This journey has taken Scott around the globe, but Pennsylvania remains his first love for its rolling green mountains and the abundant bird species.