By the time Foster E.L. Beal died in 1916, the eminent ornithologist had poked through the stomachs of more than 37,000 birds, trying to decipher by their diets which were “good” and which were “bad.”  More than a century later, we’re still making economic arguments for why birds matter — and writer and researcher Scott Weidensaul is tired of it.

Join Weidensaul to learn why, more than ever, birds — which circle the globe in astounding migrations, which fill the world with color and song and vivid life — matter. Period.

Scott Weidensaul is the author of more than two dozen books on natural history, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist “Living on the Wind,” about bird migration, “Return to Wild America,” and “The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery and Endurance in Early America.” His newest book, “The Peterson Reference Guide to Owls of North America and the Caribbean,” has just been published. Weidensaul is a contributing editor for Audubon, a columnist for Bird Watcher’s Digest and writes for a variety of other publications; he lives in the mountains of eastern Pennsylvania, where he studies the migration of owls and hummingbirds.