Song Han Ngo is a 17-year-old junior at Interlake High School in Bellevue, Washington with a passion for birding and ornithology. Currently Song Han is working on a project with Douglas Robinson at Oregon State University studying the vocalizations of Evening Grosbeaks. He also researches bird migration behavior with Andrew Farnsworth at Cornell Lab of Ornithology, focusing on aeroecology (the study of the behavior and ecology of flying animals). He is also a youth board member at his local Eastside Audubon chapter, and loves participating in citizen science efforts such as the Puget Sound Seabird Survey and Seattle Bird Collision Monitoring Survey. Song Han was one of 10 student scholarship recipients from the United States at the 2024 WFO conference in San Diego, CA.

When did you get into birding? Do you have a favorite bird or birding location?

I had always been interested in nature and the wilderness as a child, but my passion for birds really took off when I saw a small, iridescent black and white duck swimming about at our local pond. I later found out that it was a Bufflehead, one of the many different diving ducks present in Washington. From there, I began to learn more about the various duck species, which eventually ballooned into a passion for ornithology. To this day, ducks are still some of my favorite birds and hold a special place in my heart.

My favorite birding location has to be Union Bay Natural Area next to the University of Washington campus. It is one of the best birding spots in the whole city, supporting many different habitats including forests, wetlands, and open water. Not only that, its small and compact area means that it’s a great place to bird together with other people. Many of the ID tips and tricks that I’ve learned have come from times when I was out together with experienced birders at the bay. I also really love the history behind the area. It was previously a landfill where trash was dumped, but thanks to decades of restoration by volunteers, it is now a healthy and vital habitat for local birds. It serves as a great reminder that given time and effort, we can reverse human-caused destruction of the environment.

Are you involved with any of your local bird groups?

I’m currently involved mainly with my two local Audubon chapters. I’m a youth board member on Eastside Audubon and part of the young birders group at Birds Connect Seattle (formerly Seattle Audubon). As a youth board member, my job is to reach out to younger birders across the region and increase their involvement with the organization. For example, I helped to create a youth group for the chapter’s annual Christmas Bird Count last year.

How have you been involved with WFO?

I first learned about WFO through my sister’s Spanish teacher, who is an avid birder. The organization’s mission of protecting and studying birds was something I really resonated with, and so I decided to apply as a student scholar to attend the 2024 conference in San Diego. The conference was truly an amazing experience and I especially enjoyed meeting so many other people who were also passionate about ornithology.

Some of the most memorable activities at the conference were the science sessions and the live taxidermy demonstration by Phil Unitt. The birding in San Diego was wonderful as well, with highlights such as seeing a Ridgway’s Rail close up and a Black Skimmer skimming along the surface of the water. Since then, I have kept in touch with many of the people I met at the conference, and I recently joined WFO’s Student Programs Committee to help plan student-related activities and events.

Why do you think students should attend the WFO conference?

I think that the conference is an incredibly worthwhile and rewarding experience for students. There are many, many locations all over the country with great birding, but what makes the WFO conference unique is its community, and its focus on science. From my trip to the 2024 San Diego conference, it was clear that everyone there was deeply passionate about studying and protecting birds in addition to just watching them. As students, it’s very rare that we get to delve into what it means to study birds, and what a career in ornithology actually looks like. In addition to that, being able to meet so many other young birders is a very exciting opportunity to make new friends from all over the region!

What research are you currently working on?

I’ve been helping Douglas Robinson at Oregon State University as a member of his Evening Grosbeak research team. These birds, which are in rapid decline throughout North America, have five different regional call types. Although many skilled birders can identify specific call types either by ear or through analyzing spectrograms, there hasn’t been a clear quantitative algorithm developed to distinguish between different call types, which is what the research we are working on aims to do. This is significant because developing an algorithm to accurately distinguish between different regional call types enables researchers to track and monitor the different populations of Evening Grosbeak across the country.

Outside of call analysis, I’ve also been very interested in bird migration. In recent years, BirdCast has enabled birders to forecast migration in any county across the United States, detailing the quantity and even species of birds flying overhead. Last year I reached out to Andrew Farnsworth, one of the creators of BirdCast, and am now collaborating on a project to determine whether temperature impacts bird migration altitude on a nationwide scale. It’s a really cool project, and one that I never realized could be approached in a quantitative way.

How do you plan on incorporating ornithology or research into your future career?

An aspect of birding that has always fascinated me is the ever-developing technology that’s enabled not just ordinary birders to have a better birding experience but also provided researchers with valuable data to work with. In particular, eBird has allowed us to quantify the downward trends in bird populations that many have been observing over the past decades, such as in the 3 Billion Birds Gone paper [Kenneth V. Rosenberg et al., Decline of the North American avifauna. Science 366,120-124 (2019). DOI:10.1126/science.aaw1313].

In the future I really want to bring together my passion for both computer science and ornithology to make a positive impact on the field of birding. With new advancements in technology appearing at an ever-increasing pace, I hope that these developments can bring new breakthroughs for ornithologists, similar to those that have already occurred with so many projects such as Merlin, Feederwatch and Birdcast.

 

March 2025 | Lauren Smith, Newsletter Editor