Seven-Year-Old Khalib Townsend Finds a Mentor in Conservation Science

PHILADELPHIA — Seven-year-old Khalib Townsend hikes in the rain along the Audubon Discovery Center's nature trail. He's all suited up in a bright blue waterproof jacket, holding in his small hands a pair of binoculars that hang around his neck.

Because today, he's going on a bird walk.

"I just really got interested in birds because I thought they were really cool and I wanted to study all types of animals," Khalib says with a big smile with his front teeth missing.

Khalib says he loves nature. He wants to study biology and learn about different plants and animals. This precocious first grader really wants to be a conservation scientist, "because I care for the Earth," he says.

Kids get asked all the time: What do you want to be when you grow up? But research shows that most of them have no idea. Even when they find a passion for something, like Khalib, it's hard for them to know what that "dream job" would be like or how to make it happen. And many kids lose that spark over time, because they don't know anyone, an adult, who can show them the ropes.

All this made me wonder: What would it take for Khalib to hold onto his dream?

With the support of his mom Danielle Townsend, who I met while producing a different story, I introduced Khalib to someone who shares his idea of a dream job: Keith Russell, a conservation scientist at the Audubon Discovery Center in Philadelphia.

Russell says he's well aware of the hurdles for getting into the natural sciences.

"When you're growing up, there's a lot of pressure to fit in," he says. Russell says he was once in Khalib's shoes: a young bird lover in Philadelphia — who could've used a mentor.

"There are expectations that Black folks do this and Black folks don't do that, and that's been a real barrier for Black folks to get into birding," he says. "So it's really important to have support and be with people that understand your interest."

So I asked Keith Russell if he could be that person for Khalib. And one Monday morning this spring, he invited us on a bird walk along the Discovery Center's nature trail, a patch of green at the heart of the city.

Along the way, Khalib got to ask questions he'd prepared, with help from his mom, about what Russell does and the path he followed in his career. NPR tagged along.

How did you get so passionate and just fall in love with birds?

I got interested in birds when I was in the first grade, and it was so long ago that I can't remember how it happened. But I do remember being in the third grade and giving a report to my class about birds. My parents were very helpful in helping me learn more about birds once I got interested. My parents got me some binoculars, they got me a bird book and they found someone that lived in our neighborhood that knew about birds. That person took me out on bird walks and helped me learn more about birds.

I eventually decided to go to college and study biology, and then when I finished college, I got a job at a museum. I worked at a museum for a long time, and then when I finished working there, I got the job with Audubon, and I've been with Audubon ever since, doing conservation work.

What do you love most about your job?

Just being able to share my love of birds with other people and help with their interest in birds too. I think that's been the most rewarding thing.

And also what's fun about it is you get to help birds. I do a lot of work to try to protect birds from flying into glass windows, and that's very rewarding. The number of birds that die from flying into windows is probably over one billion every year here in the United States. It's one of the leading causes of bird decline right now. It's really sad.

Philadelphia lies on a migration pathway called the Atlantic Flyway, so we have maybe 40, 50 million birds each year that pass through the city. So we have a lot of birds that die in Philadelphia, and that's why we're working on this problem here.

Here at the Discovery Center, we have a lot of ropes in front of the windows, and we have dots on the windows, and those are to protect the birds from flying into the glass.

You know, I did put stickers up on my window for keeping the night birds and the day birds from flying into the windows.

That's very clever. Well thank you for doing that.

Even seagulls? Because I know seagulls are really smart.

Well, seagulls don't do it so often. But there are a lot of songbirds and other types of landbirds that migrate over the ocean. They're going from the United States down to South America, and those birds even fly into cruise ships. They see the lights on the ships, they go toward the ships, and they wind up flying into the window of cruise ships. That's a good question.

Why do birds matter?

Well, you like birds, don't you? And I like birds, and I think we all like birds because they're so beautiful, and they have interesting behaviors, and they make pretty songs, and they're easy for us to find, and we just like watching them. And we have lots and lots of birds here in Philadelphia, and it makes living in the city much nicer when we have birds around us to hear and to watch. So I think all of us that love birds want to protect them and keep them safe from various things that can harm them.

Do you know if birds evolved from flying dinosaurs?

Well, we know that birds and dinosaurs are very similar and that there are fossils that show animals that were in-between birds and dinosaurs. So because of that, we think that birds and dinosaurs are related and that there was probably an evolution from dinosaurs into birds.

Learn from the fossils. The fossils know, even though they're not alive anymore.

Hahaha. That's right.