 Welcome back to the third edition of our Portland Rising, a production of the Portland Phoenix and the Portland Media Center. And we thank them for their help on this. We have a great show today. Colin Ellis, our staff reporter, is going to be interviewing Michael from the ACLU. And our columnist, our monthly columnist, Nick Lund, will give a presentation on migration and some other interesting facts about birds. So to throw it to Colin right now, and Michael, go. Great. Thank you, Karen. As you said, we'll be talking to Michael from the ACLU, where he's policy counsel. Before that, Michael was a consumer rights advocate at Maine Equal Justice. And before that, he worked at the Portland Law Firm, Law Firm Verrill, a graduate of Boston College Law School. Michael is also a member of the city's upcoming charter commission. So Michael, thanks for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me, Colin. Yeah, yeah. I know I gave a quick little background there for you, but what made you want to, and how did you become the policy counsel for the Maine ACLU? I spent a lot of my spare time as a lawyer in private practice, working on social justice type things. And in the course of doing that, I met everyone who works at the ACLU of Maine. And the prospect of doing what I did for free part-time, and to some extent pro bono, green-lighted by my law firm, this prospect of doing that full-time struck me as very attractive. And when there was an opening I applied, and probably through some administrative error, I got hired. And how long have you been with them? About a year and a half. So I remember when you and I first spoke probably about six, seven, eight months ago, it was regarding the city's effort to put a ban on facial recognition technology. So why do you think that was something from a civil liberties perspective that was important for the city? Facial recognition is a very, very dangerous tool in the hands of law enforcement. That's because it poses grave threats to our civil liberties when it works. And it poses grave threats to our civil liberties when it does not work. Let me tell you a quick story about what happened to a Colorado man, a white man who was a banker, very middle-class to upper middle-class, had a family, kids house in the suburbs, I think in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado. One day a team of heavily armed police officers came to his house and arrested him because they determined, using facial recognition technology, that he had committed a bank robbery. He was arrested, imprisoned, and eventually cleared. But in this entire process, he lost his marriage and he lost custody over his children. And all that happened because of a case of mistaken identity and facial recognition was the culprit. Now, facial recognition technology mistakes everyone's identity frequently, but it's especially prone to mistaking the identities of black people, but especially black women and Asian people, especially Asian women. And so the story in Colorado is an illustration of what could happen throughout the country, including in Portland, if facial recognition started to be widely used. There's now a bill in the state legislature sponsored by Portland's representative, Grayson Luckner, to ban facial recognition statewide. If that passed, we would be the first state to do so. Great, and another thing I know you've spoken about, I think we've spoken about before, is also the police's use of body cameras in schools. So I know that with SROs, at least at some point, maybe temporarily being out of schools, is that a victory in banning that kind of technology? And in general, why is prohibiting that in schools important to begin with? Great, you've asked two questions. I'll take them one after the other. The first question is, why should police in schools be prohibited from wearing body cameras? And the second question is, why should police be prohibited from working in schools altogether? The first question has to do with what police do on the streets and what police do in schools. And what they do is what they swear and oath to do, which is uphold the laws that govern us. Now, a lot of the laws that govern us, if they were strictly enforced in every scenario where they could potentially be applied, would criminalize a lot of our behavior. For instance, in a school, if a kid is walking down the hallway and they're going through puberty, they're having a particularly bad day, they kick a trash can. That could be interpreted as criminal mischief, which is a crime under Maine's statutes. If a kid is tussling with another kid, either consensually or non-consensually. Maybe it's a friendly fight, maybe it's not a friendly fight. That could be interpreted as assault or assault and battery under Maine's statutes. All of these behaviors that students engage in and that we engage in day to day through the eyes of a police officer who has sworn to uphold the laws of Maine are potentially criminal. And what that means is the very presence of a police officer in school has a strong chance of criminalizing ordinary student behavior. Now, when you add a camera to the body of the police officer who's looking at this behavior, what that camera does is it multiplies the pairs of eyes that perceive student behavior. And it also stores footage of student behavior in a police server where many police officers a week later, two weeks later, a month later can find criminal behavior. And so the very presence of police in schools criminalizes student behavior, but the presence of police in schools with cameras on their bodies further criminalizes student behavior and strengthens what researchers and advocates have referred to as the school to prison pipeline or the school to supervision pipeline. What this means in short is ordinary student behavior, developmentally appropriate behavior gets treated as a criminal infraction. The behavior gets referred to a prosecutor, the prosecutor brings charges. And next thing you know, the student has a criminal record is entangled in the criminal legal system and it's possibly incarcerated. What that does is it starts the student, it starts the young person on a journey into second class status having a criminal record, having any source of sort of entanglement with the criminal legal system, dramatically magnifies your chances of being passed up for a job, rejected for an apartment, rejected from an institution of higher education and all kinds of other consequences. Great, great. And so those are two more specific questions and this is more general. Are there, what are a few things that you're working on with the Maine ACLU that are bubbling to the forefront or you'd like people to know about or you think are important that folks are knowing about in the coming months and year here? We are taking positions on dozens of bills in the legislature. And so if listeners and viewers are particularly interested in an issue, chances are that we have weighed in on lots of bills in the legislature that touch that issue. Our priorities right now are reforming Maine's system for responding to substance use disorders. You know, last year over 500 people died from opioid overdoses in the same period. Only a couple hundred people more died from COVID-19. And so we have a major health crisis in Maine and New England throughout the country that's driven by despair and that we've been using the criminal legal system to solve. We have a list of bills that we're working to push in the legislature that would do all kinds of things to the drug system and to the state's response to drug use that would move the state away from treating drug use as a crime and toward treating it as a health issue. And that includes decriminalizing drugs it includes the establishment of safe use sites throughout the state starting with Portland. My view personally is Maine has lots of safe use sites for drugs and those are bars and pubs where you can safely consume alcohol, which is a drug. Cafes as well where you can safely consume coffee, a drug that I was raised with and that was invented by the country I grew up in. We don't have a similar approach to drugs. Portugal has a program where it has established safe use sites and the results have been extremely hopeful and inspiring. And I think we would save lives to replicate it in Maine. Other legislative work that we've been doing focuses on criminalization of other health issues, behavioral disorders, mental health challenges, poverty and homelessness. Over half of the people in our jails right now have some form of substance use disorders. What that means is we are sending people to jail because we don't have a strong enough healthcare infrastructure to get people the treatment that they need. And so a lot of our advocacy in the legislature has to do with not just diverting resources from the criminal legal system to the healthcare system but creating new unhealthful resources in the healthcare system so that the criminal legal system can shrink to a fraction of a fraction of its current size. And I don't know how much time you have but I can continue down this road if you want. Those are good but I do wanna shift for the last little bit here because I know you personally, in addition to being a member of the Maine ACLU, you're a member of the city's upcoming charter commission. So you were one of almost 40 people who applied to be appointed to that. So I was just curious what interested you in wanting to be a member of this upcoming charter commission. Great, thank you. Once again, there must have been an administrative error in my being selected as one of the three charter commissioners. I'm thankful to the clerk who must have made a mistake but what drove me to apply is the events of last summer. The George Floyd and Breonna Taylor rebellion made me feel a greater sense of responsibility for the structure of my city, of the city of Portland, which I'd lived in for about five years but I'd never really felt like I belonged to until I met a group of people who had grown up here and the thing that brought me together with that group of people was the response, the mass response, the protests and the demonstrations against police violence and structural racism. And that made me feel like I had a place in Portland and belonged in Portland and with a greater sense of belonging I think comes a desire to take more responsibility for the community and institutions that one feels like they belong to. And fundamentally that's what pushed me to apply. I'm also just interested in the legal puzzle and the constitutional questions that arise from the process of rewriting a charter. I wanted to be a part of that process for purely selfish intellectual reasons in addition to the reasons I mentioned earlier. Great and we're just about almost out of time but I do have one last question for you. This actual upcoming race for the Charter Commission that folks who are gonna be elected, it was a very high turnout, kind of unusual for the city. So what do you make of that? What do you make of that high number of folks who took out papers and turned them back in? It's extremely exciting. I think Portland should be grateful that there's a great deal of interest and enthusiasm behind this effort. It's good for a democratic system to generate engagement and involvement. Governments are only as effective and as good as the level of pressure and the level of involvement that residents and citizens demonstrate. And I think that the events of the last year have increased the desire for political participation among the people who live in Portland. So I think it's a very hopeful and exciting development. And I think it has the potential to make Portland a more engaged democracy that it has the potential to raise the temperature of Portland's politics, which is a great thing. It has the potential to increase the amount of scrutiny that decisions made by Portland's government are met with. These are all great and excellent developments. I'm not a fan of sleepy democracies where only a core group of highly educated and well-connected insiders know what's going on. I think what's happening in Portland is that participation and involvement are being democratized, and that's a great thing. Well, great. Well, thank you, Michael. I appreciate you taking some time to chat with us on these very important issues. And now we're gonna throw it over to Nick Lund from the Maine Audubon. Great, thank you so much, Colin. Good morning, everyone. Nick Lund here, staffer at Maine Audubon, columnists for Into the Wild and Berger. And do you guys hear that? Do you hear that? The sound of billions of tiny wings working their way north, beating against the wind. That's right, it is spring finally. Thank goodness. And that means it is time for spring migration. This is what a good spring migration looks like, just absolute paradise spinning around in a field of flowers. You can't see the birds, but they're there, they're coming. And this is what it looks like, a good spring migration. This is not a photograph, I understand, but hundreds of different species of birds all working their way north, all in their sharp breeding colors, all looking great, all coming up, getting ready to breed, getting ready to have babies, getting ready to sing their little hearts out, getting ready to show off to birders like you and me. Let's do a quick numbers check here. So this is a map of the United States showing migrations, bird migration. So we'll look at the blue arrows here, the blue arrows are spring migration. And right now, starting now, already starting, not quite in the thick of it in Maine yet, but on its way, about three and a half billion birds are flying their way north from the Caribbean, from Central and South America, from Mexico, coming in, coming up north. About two and a half billion of those will continue on through the United States and head up to the wonderful boreal forest in Canada where they are gonna lay their eggs, have their babies and eat their fill. The orange arrows, just so we're talking about it, is fall migration. About four billion birds are gonna be coming south out of Canada in the fall. And about 4.7 billion are gonna be coming, picking up the United States and move in south to the Caribbean tropics, et cetera. Why, of course, is it a larger number in the fall than it is in the spring? Because they all had babies over the summer, and so there's more birds to fly south. So this is what we're talking about. We're talking about billions of birds with a bee here. I should say, too, if you probably double these numbers to get the birds that are non-migratory or birds that are resident throughout the United States, that gives you an estimate about the total number of birds in the United States, maybe seven billion or so. So huge numbers of birds. And what species are we talking about, right? Just some beauties. Let me just show you. This is some eye candy here. These birds are mostly what we're talking about today, mostly neotropical migrants. And some of the most famous are these warblers. Through Maine, we're gonna have about 25 or so species of warblers, these brightly colored songbirds, all with their own sharp little uniforms and their own songs. This here with the yellow cap, this is a chestnut-side warbler. You can see that little chestnut markings showing on its flanks right there, real stunner. This is a magnolia warbler. Beautiful, not in a magnolia here, but this is where they like to spend their winters. Beautiful yellow-chested, got black streaks down there. This one's singing, so it's a little ruffled up, but cool little black eye patch. One of the most beautiful birds in the country is the male scarlet tannager. This picture does not do it justice. If you were to actually look at this bird in real life, you'd have to put sunglasses on because it's so gleamingly bright scarlet with those jet black wings. Beautiful bird again. And then another warbler, a common yellow throat, it's called. This is a funky little guy, like to stay low. Again, this picture, not doing the correct justice. They like to stay low in watery reeds. Very common bird, this black bandit mask and the yellow throat there. These are just some of the millions and billions of birds that are winging their way north right now. Why, why, why are we doing this? Why do so many birds when it's springtime come all the way up? What is the point? The point is food, right? But it's not this food, right? These are the different types of seeds that we stock in our feeders right now and keep full for the chickadees and finches and things over the winter. This is food, this is bird food, but this is not the food that is causing billions of songbirds to come flying out from the tropics. What we are talking about is this insects, right? Insects, these birds are flying up because as we all know, in the thick of a main summer, we're covered in insects. This place is just flying and buzzing and crawling with insects. All of those insects are delicious food for somebody, including these little buggers here. We don't like to see them. I don't like it when they land on me. I don't like it when they're buzzing around my head, but mosquitoes are a delicious treat for some birds. But they really aren't the type of insect that most birds are coming for. The number one best type of food, if you're trying to raise a baby, right? If you're trying to grow a young clutch of birds, you want these bad boys, these bad boys, caterpillars. In the spring and summer, in Maine, there are, I don't even know, trillions of caterpillars that are crawling around. So these are the young of butterflies, the young of tons of moths that are inching their way along the undersides of every piece of bark and every leaf in the forest, right? And if you are a parent trying to raise a baby bird, there ain't nothing better than a caterpillar. Why? They're abundant, right? That's good. They're easy to catch, right? Caterpillars aren't running away from you. You can just kind of grab them off there. And they're full of protein, right? They are growing creatures themselves. And so they're packed full. They're like little protein-packed burritos that birds can just pluck off a leaf or whatever and feed to their babies. And so caterpillars are the number one favorite food for these growing birds. And it's the reason, as all of these caterpillars emerge in the springtime, it's the reason that all these billions of birds are risk, a huge migration to fly up. It's pretty dangerous. We'll talk about that in a minute. They're flying. These tiny birds that are the size of your fist, smaller than that, are flying for thousands of miles over dangerous territory just to get this delicious little burrito right here. Insects are it, right? Here are some screenshots from a Facebook group called What the Birds Eat, showing different migratory birds munching on insects. There's all kinds of weird stuff, crickets and dragonflies and weird things. I don't even know what they are, some sort of arthropod. About 99% of birds in the United States, terrestrial birds, maybe not sea birds, but birds on land either eat insects or feed insects to their young, including birds that don't eat insects any other time of the year. So for example, your cardinals, right? Your cardinals that are coming to your feeders are coming and eating seeds. But when it comes time for them to raise their babies, they don't feed them seeds, they feed them insects. So even those seed eating birds. So I want to pause here really quickly because insects are super important, right? So as we are coming up on the spring planting season, Maine Audubon and everyone who knows who wants to protect migratory birds, protect native species of birds, encourage you to plant native plants that are plants that have evolved to be at home in the main climate, because those plants have a great relationship with native insects. And we need lots of those caterpillars. These aren't pest insects, I'm sorry, I showed you the mosquito slide a minute ago. We're mostly talking about caterpillars that turn into moss that you never see, they don't bother you, but they're very important. So if you want to have a backyard that is full of birds, full of life, plant some native plants back there and that's how you get it done. Okay, cool. All right, let's go back to migration. We are learning a whole ton about how birds migrate and exactly what times they do it. This is a little video slide, animated slide from eBird, which is a big bird reporting database, showing bird migration. So this is an Eastern Phoebe, these birds are here now. They winter in the Southern United States and boom, April, May, these birds flood up here. Eastern Phoebe's are famous for being one of the earliest migrants in spring, they are here now in April. So if you could hear a little gray fly catcher, singing in your backyard, it may be one of these birds. Let's show another map. So this is a woodthrush, woodthrushes spend their winters further south. This bird's in the Yucatan in Central America. And here we go, starting in January, let's get this in play in here, February, March, April, and you can see that boom, in about mid-April, May, they flood across the country. An unusual pattern here, watch how they jump from the Yucatan straight across. You notice they're not going up around Eastern Mexico. They gather in the Yucatan, they jump right across the Gulf of Mexico. It's pretty incredible and pretty dangerous. This is not an animated slide, but I wanna show you here another, this is bird called a morning warbler, beautiful little warbler. And I want you to notice here, this is a little harder to see, you can see the purple down here in Panama and Columbia and Venezuela. That is the wintering area of the morning warbler. And here's their breeding area. See all the purple up in Canada and the United States. I wanna point this out because it's the difference between the Panama, these winter range and the Northern range is much tighter in the winter. A lot of conservationists think about, making sure we protect not just the wide swaths of Canadian and Eastern forests where these birds breed, but also the much smaller areas of Central and South America where lots of species are concentrated in the winter. So when we think about conservation, we think I have to think about the winter and the summer ranges of these birds. Just a couple of different things. I mentioned all the warbler species up above here are three different ones. They're closely related birds, but they've all evolved different ecological niches and that has resulted in some very different territories. On this here on the left is bluebird, black-throated blue warbler and absolute stunner. It is sort of an understory bird, high elevation. Sometimes its breeding range sort of runs the appellations and up into Maine. Black and white warbler, not very creatively named, but that's what it is. A beautiful bird, winter is in Florida and comes through a big swath of the East. And then the yellow-rumped warbler. This is a bird that actually has evolved and learned in recent years to be able to eat fruit through the winter and so it doesn't need to migrate quite as far. And we actually have a few individuals at winter in Maine throughout the winter. Migration is not just for these little songbirds. Of course, our loons migrate. Why do loons migrate? It's not really for food. It's because they're breeding areas freeze solid in the wintertime, right? They spend their winters on lakes and ponds. Those things ain't gonna fly in the winter so they gotta go to open water. So they really only fly as far as they need to which is mostly the ocean. Loons are actually much more commonly seen in the winter on the ocean than they are in the summertime on their lakes. Here is an American black duck. They have sort of another sort of inland coastal and then coastal in the winter and then inland when it's frozen migration pattern. This is the way a lot of ducks do. You can't dabble in a frozen lake. So they move up and down. Raptors migrate too. Of course, not all raptors, about 60%. I would say raptors are migratory. Some going very far, including this Swainsons hawk which you can see some of their individuals goes all the way down through Argentina. You'll notice that unlike the woodthrush a minute ago with Swainsons hawks don't like to migrate over water. A lot of raptors don't like to go over water. So this bird is going right through the tight Panama canal area and up into the United States. And believe you me, if you are in some of these narrow areas in Central America during migration, you can see millions and millions of raptors. It's very cool. It looks like this. So I wanna make sure I'm on my time here. Here is another bird. This is a kestrel, another small falcon. They also migrate but don't go quite as far a little bit like that. And then I have to say too, there are birds that don't migrate. Why do you not migrate? It's cause you don't need to, your food is fine. You can eat food in the winter. These birds are black-capped chickadee, the state bird of Maine are cedar waxwing here and are red crossbow. They've all learned to develop a diet of fruit, not exclusively but they can feed themselves through the winter when there aren't the insects around to eat. So that's why these birds don't migrate. It saves them a lot of time and trouble. All right, quickly. About migration, mostly happening at night. So right now every night, if the conditions are right about billions of birds are picking up and flying north, safer at night, you can avoid predators, generally calmer at night and birds use the stars, believe it or not, to migrate. How do we know that? There have been tests. Birds actually can tell north-south. Some people can put a, they did this test where they put an ink pad on the bottom of a cone and then the bird at nighttime so they can't see anything and where they're going. They could see in the morning which direction the ink pad feet were going. And when they put stars, they like beamed fake stars above the circle, the birds would follow the stars, whether it was north or south or different directions. So we know that they are using the stars for migration. And it's pretty crazy, it's pretty crazy. Some of them are flying just in a few days. This is some satellite tags from a black pole warbler down there. And you can see that in spring migration they generally go a little slower. They don't wanna get too far ahead of themselves if it's still cold up there. But you can see that in the fall, these orange lines, these birds in about two days, they're smaller than like your thumb are flying from Maine all the way to Colombia, Venezuela. Pretty insane. All right, as you are preparing for spring migration, how are you gonna get yourself ready? There are tools now, right? We are living in a data-driven world. I recommend everyone go to this site, Birdcast, from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. They use weather radar and timing patterns, all sorts of science to give forecasts about when really big migration nights might be coming. So check out Birdcast, you can see exactly when to expect lots of birds to fly in. And let me tell you, it's coming. These are the birds, look at all these. This is about 30 species of birds that may be in Maine. This is just a small swath. So people like me, birders and everyone out there should be ready for spring migration, should be excited and here it comes. Thank you. Well, thank you, Nick, and thank you, Michael, especially both of you for coming on our show today. A lot of interesting facts. And Michael, the insight on what you're doing with the ACLU I think is very important and interesting for those of us who are not connected to that kind of world to be more connected. Also, we wanna mention we've been looking in depth the key issues facing Portland and recently investigated the impact of closing, the closing of Milestone, the one and only Detox, one of the only Detox centers in the state. So that is a very important story. I hope you all read more about that. And also, if you didn't see this, you didn't see this anywhere else, we talked to the Portland counselor, Taichung, who criticized the local progressive leaders for their insensitivity to the Asian bias. So pick up our paper every week. We're out there everywhere. Give us an email, call us, tell us what you're thinking, what your reactions are, or just some news tips. We'd love to hear from you and thank you again to Michael and Nick and the Portland Media Center. We appreciate you and look for us next month. Thanks, everyone.