Hello and welcome to the bookmark.

I'm Kristine Brown, your host today.

My guest is Jennifer Bristol, author of Cemetery Burning an Unexpected Guide to Discovering Birds in Texas.

Jennifer, thank you so much for being here today.

Thanks for having me.

I should say welcome back because hopefully people remember you from your last appearance, which was her parking lot birding, another kind of unexpected guide.

Yes.

And this one may seem more unexpected for people.

So can you tell us where the idea for this book came from?

Sure.

So this is a follow up to parking lot birding.

And while I was doing the research for that book, I stumbled into a couple of cemeteries and started thinking, Gosh, these are really good birding locations.

They have great habitat, especially the older ones have beautiful and historic trees.

And so it piqued my interest and I thought, well, this would be a great follow up to parking lot birding, because I'm all about easy places for people to go and get outdoors and and discover birds.

And this is like parking lot ways.

This is an easy mostly accessible.

We probably all already know some cemeteries.

We've got some loved ones buried.

So that's an easy place to start to.

Or we've got them in our neighborhoods or in our cities.

So it.

I like how you've made birding accessible not only physically, but also just like mentally.

Like it's kind of hard to get started on a hobby like this, but you make it approachable.

Well, thank you.

Yeah, that was kind of my goal was just, you know, to really help people focus on the fact that birds are the wildlife that are around us all the time, all day, every day.

And where can you go and find them that you don't have to necessarily travel to a faraway place?

It's great if you can go to the Rio Grande Valley and, you know, explore all the amazing world birding centers, you know, down there or down to the coast.

But you don't have to.

You can go to your local park or you can go to your local cemetery, which were originally designed to be parks to begin with.

So sort of returning to a little bit of our heritage and our roots with how are these spaces looked at and viewed as that dual relationship between being a place to honor our departed, but also then a place for us to gather and and be together and utilize them as a as a park as well.

And the birds love them.

I think.

I think the the cover kind of says it all.

There's lots of places for the for the birds to perch on.

There's great habitat.

A lot of times they're surrounded maybe by parks or other habitat that's around them so they can kind of come and go in and out of that.

And and if the birding is not great, there's beautiful things like that as well.

And a lot of history.

I mean, you mentioned kind of the history of cemeteries, which I think is fascinating in and of itself.

And there's also other book recommendations in the book, if you are interested in that.

But then, yeah, our local history, our Texas history is all on display, literally in these cemeteries.

It's true.

And that was one thing that really intrigued me as well.

I love history.

I love Texas history.

I love all things Texas.

And, you know, so to get out there and really look at, you know, how do these present this little snapshot in time of what what was the culture?

How did that tone and that community sort of began?

And then where is that travel to over time?

And so many times those headstones tell that story in their most subtle ways or in a big maybe sort of even brazen way, you know, And so looking at all that, you know, doing the research on what a lot of the symbols mean, what do you know, what are each one of these things telling us?

And, you know, I had a lot of time during COVID, which is when I was working on this and really, you know, dove into that and looked at that aspect of the cemeteries as well as, you know, what is the habitat look like, what birds are coming there.

And I was really looking for that, that nexus of history and habitat when I was trying to pick the 91 locations that are in the book.

Yeah.

I was going to ask you, first of all, the travel you did because you did travel to actually not even just the 91, a lot more.

So can you talk about the travel you did and then how you selected the ones that ended up in the book?

Sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It was really interesting.

I mean, like, I said, I was doing the research during COVID and I don't know if you remember or not, but gas prices are like a dollar 25.

And, you know, we weren't doing anything.

And I thought, Well, I don't think I can catch COVID at the cemetery.

I wasn't sure, but I was felt pretty sure.

And so I would load up the van with everything I needed and go out.

And between 2020 and probably the 2022, I went to about 250 cemeteries and was again, like I said, looking for that sort of match up of of habitat and birds and then the history as well.

I would, you know, also wanted to make sure that they were public and open so that people could, you know, get there easily.

And I was also really focus on accessibility.

Are they easy to get around?

If somebody were using a wheeled mobility device, could they get around easily?

And I mentioned that at the end of every chapter, too.

You want to make sure that, you know, people know that, hey, this is a great place for people with limited mobility to get out to as well.

Some of the other, you know, pieces that I was looking at was, was there water nearby or in the cemetery?

Because that's something that's important to the birds.

Did it have good insect population?

There are cemeteries that spray, unfortunately.

And, you know, I get it.

That's what they prefer.

But it's not great for the birds.

If there's no insects, there's no birds.

And so, you know, really looking at that.

And then I also wanted to have a mix of, you know, smaller family, you know, a couple of family plots or country, you know, style, you know, cemetery as well as the big grandiose ones that are in the big cities.

So, you know, I wanted to have sort of, again, tell the story of Texas.

What do what are all these different layers look like and and invite people to get out and explore those.

You talk about.

And I think it's probably less so in the more open areas, but in the big cities, these places are kind of like oasis's there they've got you've got wildflowers, you've got old mature trees that haven't been cut down.

If if you're a long time of year, maybe you remember we did an episode on Antique Roses.

A lot of anti-growth species were discovered in cemeteries where they had been let able to grow for years without anybody noticing.

And I would imagine it's kind of the same for birds.

This is untouched, safe space for them where they can be left alone.

Yeah.

And live their lives.

You're exactly right.

And.

And the ones that do.

You mentioned the wildflowers.

And of course, it's the the beginning of wildflower season right now.

The ones that do let the flowers grow are just.

They're magical, you know?

No need to, you know, bring flowers out to somebody, you know, plot.

We have this carpet of bluebonnets and then it changes to the yellow flowers and the pink flowers.

And, you know, I really love those cemeteries that that allow those to come in Galveston, Rockport.

So on the ones along the coast are really intentional about that.

And then you mentioned the the ones that are the bigger ones that are in the bigger cities.

They are these, you know, unique little spaces.

What's really fascinating is that a lot of times they were built outside of the city and they seem far away, you know, when they first originally plotted them and now they're, you know, completely surrounded by the city.

I think about Glenwood Cemetery that's down in Houston, which was our very first park in the state of Texas.

It was designed for that dual purpose.

And, you know, it seemed really far away on this bluff above the bayou.

Now it has this, you know, grandiose view of downtown Houston.

But in there is, you know, this magical habitat that has been allowed to grow.

And, you know, it's quite a large space.

And so the birds love it.

So do the raccoons and foxes and other things that live there.

You know, they're they are habitat when we, you know, really look at it in that way.

And I you know, I did some rough calculations.

There's literally thousands and thousands of cemeteries across Texas.

And, you know, it's well over 100,000 acres worth of lands.

And so, you know, that's a that's a big chunk of property in the conservation, you know, mix of how do we look at that?

And especially within the bigger cities, you know, there also provides some ecosystem services to us that are reducing heat island of insects and runoff and, you know, doing carbon sequestration, you know, all of these things that we we think we need parklands for that are exclusively parklands.

But these have that double purpose.

And so that's one of the reason I love them.

You talk about the sheer amount of square footage.

That's also important because not a lot of land is public in Texas, but these are places where you mentioned, you know, maybe as you're on a road trip, if you want to stop and get out, stretch your legs, look for some birds.

Yeah, these are as long as you're doing it respectfully.

And we'll talk about that, I'm sure.

But these are places you can do that.

They're built for that.

They're built for walking around and.

And observing.

Yeah, yeah, exactly right.

And, and that's that's one thing too, that I, you know, like I said, I wanted to focus on the ones that were open to the public so that because some are closed.

Well you know disclaimer on that some are are closed and only open open to their congregations or whatever faith that they're related to.

But they are you know, you can go on any road trip, you know, and find a cemetery in the town that you're going to.

And like you said, get out, stretch your legs, walk around.

You know, if you have your binoculars with you, you know, see what birds are there in different seasons on the actually, on the drive over here, I saw, you know, the spring migration is very big flocks of sandhill cranes going, big flocks of, you know, the pelicans going.

And I thought, wow, we are really on the precipice of, you know, the spring migration right now.

And my my desire to get out and bird and go to the different cemeteries is like, I've got to get you got to get closer and stop.

I'm glad you brought that up because right now is the time if you're if you're listening or watching right now.

Well, it's very after it's over, go outside and look for some birds, because we're about we are right in that in that pathway.

One of the the major pathways of this is why Texas is such a great birding state, because we are the road back up north.

We are.

Yeah, exactly.

And you know, we we have front row seats twice a year to the largest migration, you know, one of the largest migrations in the world as the birds, you know, start making their way north this time of year.

It's a lot of them are here wintering especially along the coast.

So that's when you will start seeing all of the coastal birds leaving and heading north and and squawking and informing the V's and stuff that we can see the songbirds travel at night.

So we don't actually see them, except now you can see the big when the when the migration is really strong, big blooms of them coming up at night and you can actually see them on the radar, which is really, really cool to see those.

And, you know, you'll see these kind of big blue explosions happening, you know, right after sunset and stuff as they all get ready to peel off and head as far north as they can get that night.

And then they eat all day and then they leave the next night until they reach wherever they're going to nest and stay.

So it is really an exciting time of year.

The one of the birds I saw yesterday, too, was the first male ruby throated hummingbird, which a lot of times the smaller birds still the males come first as scouts and then as they arrive, then the females will start to follow after that.

So, you know, think about the the little male that I saw.

You know, he flew all the way across the Gulf of Mexico to get here.

I mean, that's amazing for this tiny little bird.

Yeah, it's.

And you I want to highlight to each section will have kind of the kinds of birds, of course, you'll list in there in the text, the kinds of birds you can see.

But each section does have its own bird highlighted that you might see and and it talks about, you know, how where they come, how far they go and some of these tiny little birds go as far as like Alaska.

And I have made that trip as a human and that's exhausting just in a plane.

I'm not doing anything yet.

I can only imagine how many bugs they have to eat to have the energy to fly that far.

It's really impressive if you stop and think about it.

It really is.

It really is.

Yeah.

All the way up to the Arctic Circle and then back again down to South America every year.

That's those are some some serious flier miles right there.

Yeah.

Well, I want to make sure we talk about you.

You have kind of a know before you go and best practices for if you're birding in a cemetery.

And I want to make sure we do highlight those because they're important.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So pretty A cemetery is different than if you're at a a nature center or a park.

You know, you have to be more mindful, obviously.

And, you know, I tell people, if there's an active burial going on, come back later or go way to the other side of the cemetery to be respectful.

That's its primary purpose.

And those people are grieving.

And so giving them their spaces is the right thing to do.

And even if there's just someone there, you know, caring for the person there, their loved ones plot and these, you know, are grieving.

I give them, you know, plenty of space as well.

Ironically, I will say every time I've been out and I have my binoculars and things and, you know, I'm usually sort of shuffling away to give that person some space.

Sometimes they'll ask me, you know, what are you doing?

And I'll say, I'm birding.

And they, we love seeing the birds, you know, And we hear them all the time.

We just don't know what we're seeing and stuff.

And we'll have a little conversation and stuff.

And, you know, I enjoy that.

I really I love it that they're aware and that that's part of why they go there, you know, to see So you know, it's talk about also in there you know being ethical with not walking across the graves, not leaning or sitting on the headstones.

You know that even though a lot of them are made of marble and they look plenty sturdy, sometimes they might not be.

So, you know, really making sure that, you know, mindful of that.

And then also people leave a lot of things on people's graves.

They bring great grave gifts and they'll leave them there.

And to us, you know, not knowing the meaning behind each thing that's left, we might see it as something that needs to be picked up and thrown away, but it has a meaning.

And so I tell people, leave it there unless it's, you know, a plastic flag blowing around or something, you know, obviously pick that up.

But if it's specifically at the grave, you know, it needs to stay there.

And it's probably brought there by somebody and left there for a purpose.

Another consideration you mentioned is that while some of these kind of have a purpose as parks, they're not like actual parks, so they may not have restrooms or water fountains or things like that that you wouldn't need to think about for a park.

So again, think ahead before you're traveling.

Absolutely.

You're absolutely right.

Yeah.

And I fell into that trap many times and I would get there.

I was so excited and I thought, gosh, no, actually I need to turn around to find a restroom first and then come back and do my birding.

So yeah, now some do, you know, some again, with that mindfulness of designing them as a place for people to gather, they will have restrooms, but not very many.

And you do highlight in the book.

I do.

If they do, yes.

Yes.

That is important information.

Always.

Always.

And I also want to make sure to mention that and commend you because this book does cover the full state.

You traveled every corner and it's you know, it's a big place.

So no matter where you're traveling in Texas, there's going to be a cemetery probably close by.

And I'm sure that was very intentional on your part.

It was, yes.

Yeah.

I feel like, again, this pause that we had during COVID really allowed me to get out and explore certain parts of the state that I wanted to go to and I hadn't been to.

And then and then I was very intentional with I've got to get I wanted to go as far to the panhandle as I could.

That's somewhere that I haven't explored a ton.

But the birding is really, really unique and different and excellent up there.

And so, you know, really wanted to make sure that included more of the Panhandle and this one than I did in parking operating.

I feel like that was sort of a a blank spot for me in parking lot birding.

But then I was also able to make it all the way out to El Paso, loved my experience in El Paso.

I was really excited about the cemetery that I went to there.

I learned so much in that visit and about the birds as well as, you know, the culture and what helped build the city.

So yeah, I did try to include everything and and like I said, and every size to, you know, from, you know, the small country landscape to, you know, the bigger ones and and some that I thought were, you know, were just total surprises.

I was surprised that even though it was a country cemetery, how big it was, you know, and that clearly the designers thought that that town was going to be much, much bigger at some point.

But, you know, it stayed a small town.

You talked a little bit of a history.

But I want to highlight, too, you know, we are a country of immigrants, but Texas specifically, we have a lot of different ethnic groups that came here across many years.

And you see that that flavor of, you know, say, the German settlers that bring this tradition or English settlers bring this, I mean, that the way that they craft their tombstones or the rituals they have and the symbology everything is kind of a reflection of that culture they brought, which again, is a reflection of our history.

You're exactly right.

Yeah.

And I love looking at the names, you know, And you can really see the names and the dates, you know, when those waves of immigrants were coming in.

And then what's interesting is a lot of times maybe the first person's headstone is fairly small, but then the next one is big and they want to make sure that, you know, they know like, we made it, you know, our family, you know, we had success, We're doing good.

And a lot of times on theirs is they'll say where they came from, you know, so they are so proud of that heritage where they came from.

And so it might say, you know, you know, Jennifer, Bristol, Bristol, you know, England or something on there, which is not exactly where I came from.

I came from Austin, Texas.

But, you know, so they'll have that on there specifically.

Or if we're if they came from another state, which is also, you know, something that they wanted to share on those kind of earlier headstones that kind of eventually fell out of favor.

And we don't see that very much anymore.

We see that maybe once in a while.

And then what's on the headstone itself, too, was very, very important.

If they were part of a benevolent society, you know, which was so important to each one of those cultures, you know, they want to make sure that they had that blaze on their or that symbol, you know, that showed that they were part of that and that that was part of their life.

And a lot of times that was also how they paid to have that burial was through this societies.

So the Masons, the international Oddfellows.

Order, the.

Order, they you know, it's like there's another element in, you know, so this would kind of help cover those cost Woodmen of the world is probably one of my favorites.

They're very unique.

You know, your headstone looks like a tree stump.

And, you know, they you can really spot them as you go to different cemeteries and they're they were only kind of a issue during a certain window of time, you know.

So after a certain date, really after the Spanish flu, they couldn't afford to issue those big ones anymore.

And so you only had the blaze on your headstone if you were part of that society.

That leads me to another point that I found really fascinating, because we especially when you were writing this book, we can kind of tunnel vision, our own experience, our own time as the worst time or all this is happening to us.

But and you were doing this during our recent pandemic.

But as you're walking the cemeteries, you see the results of Spanish flu, yellow fever outbreaks.

We're not the first people to live through something like this.

We won't be the last.

But yeah, we've made it.

We're still it's such an interesting touchstone.

And I don't mean to make a pun there, but to see that history on display and to know that we're still we're connected in that way.

It yes.

And I was actually in a cemetery outside of La Grange, Texas.

And, you know, it had been one of those weeks where, you know, we were really in the heart of COVID.

You didn't you just didn't know what was coming the next day.

It was very stressful.

And I'm standing there reading this historical marker, and it's quite gruesome.

I mean, and it's talking about the waves of of cholera.

And then it was followed by yellow fever, which are, you know, horrible diseases.

And and they didn't have a treatment for them.

And they were losing people, you know, left and right.

And they had they had a kind of a mass burial in the background or in the back part of the cemetery.

And I thought, well, gosh, you know, I just came through La Grange and it's such a lovely town.

And they made it, you know, we're going to be fine.

You know, it was sort of like one of those little epiphanies, that sort of moment of reassurance that I needed and that, yeah, we're going to be we're going to be okay.

You know, we're we don't know.

They didn't know what was around the next corner at that point, too, but they just kept going.

Yeah, we are as a nation, people.

We're going to keep pushing.

Yes.

I also want to highlight to back to the birding angle of it.

You mentioned some if you're if you're getting started in your new were there are apps you can use like eBird and Merlin to help you identify if you're not good at I'm not good at I love those apps to help me figure out what am I seeing.

Yes.

You know, the I will hand it to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

They have done an amazing job with creating eBird, which is where you can log your different sightings and what you're seeing.

And if you log something incorrectly, let's say I'm at the cemetery here in College Station.

I report that I saw blue footed booby.

They have people that are checking that and they're saying, no, no, I don't think you did.

And so, you know, you can.

So someone's double checking that on the back end there and then the sound off that they have.

my goodness.

You can hold it up, turn it on, hold it up and whatever birds it's hearing, it'll start telling you what they are.

And it's amazing what it can pick up.

The nuances.

You know, birds don't always make the same sounds.

So the calls that they do in the winter are very, very different than what they're starting to do right now.

They might just have a little chip sound and it'll say, that's a yellow warbler.

And it's like, that was barely even the sound, but it knows what it is.

And, you know, it's remarkable that they've been able to take that technology and really hone it for us, you know, and especially for somebody who's just getting started.

That is it's amazing because not only does it tell you what the bird is, it pops up an image of it.

So then you know, okay.

Well, there's a yellow one probably here.

and that's what it looks like.

Let me look.

And see where is it?

You know, instead of just sort of blindly trying to figure it out.

And that that's the cool I had.

I try that out this morning, actually.

A backyard.

I have some old oak trees and I could hear all the birds.

Couldn't see them.

Yeah.

And I pull that app up and there was like six different bird species in my trees and I had to get to work so I couldn't stay in there and stare.

But it's such a it's I would recommend everybody go try that out because that was so fun.

Yeah.

I'm going to be using that during this migration season.

Yeah, it is very cool.

Well, and I will say also the one thing I love about cemeteries that I really came to understand is they're very quiet spaces, too.

And so listening and training your ear to really think about the different protocols and pairing it with that app to, you know, really kind of verify that's what you're seeing.

We're hearing they're great spaces to do that in Fantastic.

I unfortunately, we are really running short on time.

I can talk about this for an hour with you, but in our final minute, what do you want people to take away from the book?

You know, part of the purpose I wrote it was just to get people outdoors, you know, get them looking at, you know, places that are nearby them and thinking about spaces that are maybe a little untraditional for them to get out and enjoy.

And of course, I'm always, always wanting people to find birds as fascinating as I do.

It's maybe impossible, but, you know, they are the wildlife that's around us all the time and they're beautiful.

And and here we go into the spring migration, and there they're going to be at their best dressed.

Well, I have to say, I think you've done this.

This book is so remarkable because it really does highlight things we take for granted both the birds and our natural spaces in cemeteries.

And I really hope it does get people out because I want to go out now and find some birds and maybe learn some history about my local, my, my area.

So thank you so much for coming here, but also just writing the book.

It's a fascinating project.

I think you appreciate that.

And unfortunately, that's all the time we have for today.

The book again was Cemetery Birding by Jennifer Bristol.

That's all we've got.

So we'll see you again soon.