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The Bird Counters
On the last remnants of Missouri’s prairie, a six-person nonprofit is tracking the disappearance of North America’s fastest-vanishing birds — and looking for a way to save them.
Before dawn, while most of Missouri is still asleep, Matt Longabaugh is already walking a prairie. He wakes around 4 a.m., drives to whatever grassland his crew is surveying that morning, and tries to be in position half an hour before sunrise. Fifteen minutes before the sun clears the horizon, he starts to walk, slowly, down a straight 400-meter line through the tall grass. He watches. He listens. He plots every bird he sees or hears on an iPad, tags its location, notes its species, estimates its age. By the end of a morning, he may have logged as many as 250 birds. By the end of a season, walking hundreds of miles across dozens of sites, he and his crew will have logged close to 30,000. “We cover some serious ground,” Longabaugh says.
As science coordinator at the Missouri River Bird Observatory (MRBO) — a small, Arrow Rock-based nonprofit that has been counting the birds of Missouri’s grasslands for more than a decade — Longabaugh is something of a professional birder. He’s humble — bashful, even — when asked about his work. A “glorified, paid bird watcher,” is how he describes himself.
