Eliot Miller conducts research in Costa Rica with the American Bird Conservancy. As the BirdsPlus index manager with the American Bird Conservancy, Miller is working to create an index to value the biodiversity of birds in Central America, the Caribbean and South America. (Photo courtesy of Juan C. Oteyza)
Eliot Miller was in the middle of a six-hour drive to his parents’ home near Boston when he received an email from a Washington Post journalist. The email – out of the blue from one of the nation’s top publications – seemed suspicious, though.
“I asked my wife if she could read it to me,” he recalled. “I was like, ‘Google that guy, this sounds like some weird phishing thing. See if he’s a real journalist.’ She’s like, ‘He seems legit.’”
The journalist in question was Andrew Van Dam, the Post’s Department of Data columnist, and he was interested in Miller’s research on competitive interactions between North American feeder birds. The project, a joint effort between the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Project FeederWatch, logged nearly 100,000 interactions at bird feeders across the United States and Canada. Those interactions began to unlock a hidden pecking order among hundreds of species of birds.
Miller called his colleague from the car and told him to send the data to Van Dam. Within 48 hours, his article was live, and it began spreading like wildfire across the internet. The playful headline, “Which birds are the biggest jerks at the feeder? A massive data analysis reveals the answer,” helped it gain traction on social media.
“It was a pretty cool experience,” Miller said.
Miller, who earned his PhD in biology from the University of Missouri–St. Louis, has carved out a niche as a researcher who likes to tackle big questions by tapping into new data sources.
As a Schmidt Science Fellow at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, he leveraged citizen scientists in his study of competitive interactions and dominance hierarchies of North American birds. Currently, he’s looking at ways to utilize tools like the Merlin Bird ID app, which he describes as Shazam for birds, as the BirdsPlus index manager with the American Bird Conservancy.
“There’s a million people a day using Merlin,” he said. “There are tons of people using this and opportunities to collect data at a much, much bigger scale. I got really interested in what can we do with that to power our knowledge of what birds are where, how their populations are doing and how their trends are doing.”
As a young bird enthusiast, Miller couldn’t have anticipated so many other people would be interested in birdsongs, much less that ornithological research would go viral.
“I was real secretive about birding through junior high and most of high school,” he said. “It wasn’t really a cool thing to do.”
Miller traces his interest in the subject to his father and grandfather who were avid birdwatchers. He recalls writing a list of all the birds he saw in a day near his home in Amherst, Massachusetts, when he was about 8 years old. Trips to visit his grandfather in California were always a cause for celebration because he would get to spot different species endemic to the Western United States.
When he was 11 years old, his father took him and his grandfather on a trip to Belize to go birdwatching. Exploring the country’s tropical rainforests and vibrant biodiversity was a transformative experience for a budding biologist. Ultimately, the trip presaged his future career and the tropical terrain he would tread again as a researcher.
“I had this notebook – the lodge would give you a little checklist to check your birds off – and there was a notes section at the back.” he said. “In the notes section, I’d written Cornell Lab of Ornithology. It was spelled all wrong. I don’t know if somebody told me about it, but that was the first time it crossed my radar.”
Miller completed his undergraduate education in biology at Vassar College, where he began working in the field during summers. Miller realized he could hone his professional skills doing bird surveys while getting paid to spend time outdoors. As far as he was concerned, it was a win-win situation.
“It was just all about finding places I could get paid to go, somewhere really exotic,” he said. “I wasn’t filthy rich, but I would take less money if I got to go to Ecuador or something. So, it was a balance. It played out for a few more years after college. I’d go home and wait tables and landscape and work two jobs, and then go back to the tropics for six months.”
That work took him to destinations throughout the Americas, including Canada, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Mexico. It was exciting, but eventually, he decided to bolster his career prospects by pursuing a PhD.
Miller came to UMSL based on the strength of its tropical biology program and studied under renowned ecologists and ornithologists Bob Ricklefs and Bette Loiselle. During his time at the university, he was affiliated with the Whitney R. Harris World Ecology Center, and his doctoral research focused on the foraging ecology of honeyeaters in Australia.
After graduation, Miller’s field experience and work at UMSL helped land him a short-term National Science Foundation fellowship in Idaho. From there, he secured a postdoctoral fellowship with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
In Idaho, he had begun exploring how to collect data on a large scale by partnering with citizen scientists – hobbyist, nonprofessional researchers like birdwatchers. Historically, projects that utilize citizen scientists have been somewhat one-dimensional, limited to recording “what, where, when.”
“I was really curious, what else can we get citizen scientists doing?” Miller said. “I had this idea that people really like fights and have a weird interest in watching them. That always happens at bird feeders, so you can get a ton of data about who’s fighting with whom and who’s winning.”
At Cornell, Miller took that idea and ran with it. He partnered with Project FeederWatch, a long-running annual survey of North American birds from November to April, to have birdwatchers across the continent judge aggressive interactions between birds at feeders. The novelty of project even helped it obtain NSF funding.
The team working on the project ran thousands of recorded interactions through a Bradley–Terry model – a probability model used to determine the ranking of variables based on pairwise competitions – to synthesize them into a power ranking. In some cases, the results were expected, but in others, there was more nuance below the surface.
“The first, most obvious one, which is expected, is bigger birds tend to win,” Miller said. “It’s not rocket science. If the turkey fights, it’s gonna win, right? There was also some other stuff that you might call obvious in retrospect, but it wasn’t obvious out of the gate. Woodpeckers, for example, are really dominant for their body mass.
“Downy woodpeckers, they probably weigh about the same amount as a cardinal, but the downy woodpecker is way more dominant. It probably has to do with bill length and the fact that they hammer on trees for a living, basically. And cardinals just crush seeds. Usually, when they fight, the cardinal just goes away, loses, so to speak.”
At the American Bird Conservancy, Miller has turned his attention to birds in tropical regions of Central America, the Caribbean and South America. In his current role, he’s working to create an index to value the biodiversity of birds in working lands in those regions.
He plans to deploy autonomous recording units consisting of a small waterproof box with a battery, microphone and SD card in 16 countries within the next two years. Once they’re set up, they’ll make a one-minute recording every five minutes. With the help of artificial intelligence tools, similar to the Merlin Bird ID app, ABC will be able to parse that massive amount of data.
“You just send it through, and it comes back and tells you what birds are where,” Miller said. “You can start making these models and quantifying the biodiversity retained.”
ABC is also helping farmers transition from sun-grown to shade-grown coffee and to plant more native hardwood trees on rubber plantations. Presumably, that will increase biodiversity, and Miller is on a mission to help prove it.
“It’s hard to put a number on that, and that means it’s hard to attract, say, corporate investment into conservation,” he said. “It would be really cool, for example, for Walmart to be like, all our coffee is shade-grown, and we estimate that that protects 300 million birds a year.”
