Bruce Glick is a high school teacher who is balancing a full-time career and a post-retirement transition into a freelance lifestyle. We discuss his project about connecting families to local birds.
Bruce Glick is a high school teacher who is balancing a full-time career and a post-retirement transition into a freelance lifestyle. We discuss his project about connecting families to local birds.
Tania Marien:
Welcome to Talaterra, a podcast about freelance educators working in natural resource fields and environmental education. Today my guest is Bruce Glick, a high school teacher who is working on a very special project. I reached out to Bruce because I admire the work he's doing connecting families with local birds. Bruce's balancing a full-time job, pending retirement, and a transition into the freelance lifestyle. What is Bruce's long-term plan, what kind of life experiences led him to where he is today, and why is it that sometimes educators don't make the best businesspeople? Let's find out. What is your first memory of enjoying the outdoors?
Bruce Glick:
My dad introduced me to all that through walking in the woods, through paddling canoes and fishing, and he was a lifelong bird lover. I mean, that's how he got his start. He would wander around in the marshes and bays in south New Jersey and follow these birds around and just loved them, decided that's what he wanted to do with his life when he got back from being overseas. He was in World War II, wanted to work with birds. At the time, I don't think there was such a thing as just straight-up ornithology. So he found a university that had poultry science as a major, so he decided he would apply for that.
Bruce Glick:
The people there laughed at him, pretty much, because here's this kid that had never spent a day in his life on a farm. So he had to spend months on a chicken farm, pretty much, to prove that he could actually do it, and he just loved it. So he spent his professional life as a scientist in poultry science and did lots and lots of different research with chickens as the vehicle into cancer and immunobiology, and that's what he ended up. Actually, his title was immunobiologist, and he worked with chickens to do his work. But, I mean, he loved birds. He just loved them. He brought them into our yard ever since I was a little kid, and he fed birds. They were always there, and he would talk to us about it. In talking to us about it, he would make up stories, and he called birds by their Latin names. We just thought they were their names. Didn't know we were learning Latin. It's just what he did.
Bruce Glick:
It's stayed with me my entire life, and have always loved it. As I got older, I realized that out of my siblings, I was the one that never ran out of anything to talk with him about anything, because we had this common love of birds, what was here, what was going. I could call him and ask him questions about, "There's this thing out here. I don't know what it is, but it looks like this," and he could come up with an answer to it. It just stayed with me. That's what inspired me and has inspired me.
Tania Marien:
Have you been a birder all your life then?
Bruce Glick:
Yeah, pretty much. Didn't even know there was such a thing as a birder. It was, "I'm interested in birds. What's that bird there? What's that bird there? There are birds on the deck. What are they?" I would travel to places and always want to see what birds are around. It included wildlife. It included plants, too, because different plants will attract different birds, and just fell in love with it all. I mean, did a lot of landscaping through my college years. My brother-in-law was a professional landscaper in Atlanta. I grew up in Mississippi, and he invited me over to work with him, so I learned a lot about landscape plants. He had a love for native plants, so I got to learn all about these native plants and how to identify them from him, from my brother-in-law. That also translated back to my dad, because he was an avid gardener. So I would get to go in the garden and play with him, and we'd identify plants.
Bruce Glick:
I remember this one time, we were planning these giant evergreen trees. I think they were some kind of a holly, on Nellie R. Stevens holly. They were huge, in the middle of Atlanta. These things came on tractor trailer beds, two of them to a tractor trailer, and the owner of the company was worried because they were full of berries, and he knew that if we didn't get them in the ground just right and water them just right and feed them just right, all the energy was going to produce these berries. Well, lo and behold, as soon as we got them in the ground, these huge flocks of cedar waxwings showed up and stripped them of all their berries. It made those plants survive. I mean, this is downtown Atlanta at the Georgia Power Building. Right at the convergence of I-75 and I-85 and 285, we're planning these giant trees in the middle of this urban area, and these cedar waxwings show up, strip them of all their berries, and made them survive.
Tania Marien:
Did your professional life evolve as an extension of your interest in ornithology and nature?
Bruce Glick:
Yeah. I had studied at Mississippi State University to be a commercial artist, because I love nature. I was always sketching and things like that, and it was usually nature, and was told, "Well, if you want to make a living, you need to go into commercial art." Well, it turns out I don't have a skin that's quite thick enough to do that, because you go through these studio critiques that just rip you apart. My skin is just not thick enough for that. So I transferred to education, because I realized if I wanted to be an artist, I needed to teach, too.
Tania Marien:
You are about to retire, or have you retired already?
Bruce Glick:
I have not retired. I don't know when I will. I feel like I have this really good job with all these benefits and time off. I thought, "Okay, well, I'll figure something out during this time. I can still do what I do and will be able to explore different opportunities with my time off," as being in the education system. So that's what I thought I'd do. I've tried lots of different things, and nothing has ever really panned out.
Bruce Glick:
This idea showed up, and the opportunity to explore it with the marketing seminar showed up. I've got to back up a little bit, though, because before that, I'm a member of the Atlanta Audubon Society, and they reached out to educators that they had a program called Taking Wing and Flying Together. They were inviting educators from Georgia to come take this class about how to identify birds and bring birds into the curriculum. So I thought, "Hey, that's great. I'm going to do that." So I did that, and it was about a six-month journey. Most of these educators weren't bird people. They weren't birders. They weren't even feeding birds in their backyard, and it was a revelation to them. They really got jazzed about it.
Bruce Glick:
Then some of the things that the leader, Melanie, and other people brought to the classes were how to integrate these things into their curriculum just naturally, into a science class or an art class or an English class, and just bring these birds in. They really, really enjoyed it, and then immediately after that, the Audubon Society here in Atlanta came up with this idea of creating a master birder class, and it was a six or an eight-week class where they would bring in guest speakers, professional ornithologists, professional horticulturalists, park rangers, with the goal of us being able to identify 300 birds by sight and sound in our area.
Bruce Glick:
It was quite something to go through that class and learn about everything from controlled burns to prairie to woodland forest and what birds defined there. It was just such an experience, and it brought back something that my dad said. He said, "Don't worry about what you're going to do. Just do what you love, and the money will come." Well, that kind of came together here within the last year or two. Yeah, birds, birds and people, and even drilling down a little further, birds and families and how it might connect parents to kids and kids to grandparents and just open up a whole new area of conversation and wonder and discovery within it all. So it has kind of come full circle from when I was a kid to be able to try to share that experience with others.
Tania Marien:
I know you were looking for greater connections, but what else are you looking for?
Bruce Glick:
I don't think I've ever gotten over being a kid. I just loved being a kid. It was so much fun for me. I loved it. I think I loved it because my dad had taught me so much about birds and what they do and where they live and how they live. That gave me an appreciation of nature, and I'm wondering, with all the screens that we're in front of all the time and with all the information that I'm given as a teacher that kids spend too much time in front of screens and not face-to-face with other people or with nature, that this might be a really good way for them to put down the screen and experience a real-life conversation and a real-life experience with something that doesn't talk back, literally doesn't talk back, but really does.
Tania Marien:
When did you realize that nature was important to you? What was the moment, and do you think a moment like that can be recreated, considering today's technology, people's attention spans, and how they choose to spend their time?
Bruce Glick:
I think attention spans getting shorter is a misnomer. I don't think they are. I think people's attention spans will focus as long as they want them to, as long as it's something that's interesting to them. What I remember most vividly was being in a canoe with my dad and my brother, and we were being pushed across this lake by the wind. All of a sudden, it got really quiet, and we started hearing these sheep bleating. They were everywhere, but we couldn't see them. They were everywhere, but we couldn't see them, and we couldn't because it was a big, grassy hill. We should have been able to see them. Later on, we found that there were frogs. They were these narrow mouth tree toads that were right there, we couldn't see, sounding like sheep. It was just such amazement and hilarity, these things that are about as big as your little fingernail, and they were loud.
Bruce Glick:
Ever since that experience, I've had even more. I was just a kid then, but I still have these experiences of just, "Wow, look at that." Paying attention in the moment is something that can be very, very powerful, and I think these things can be recreated just by being present and by listening. When you learn about birds, you'll learn about their song. So you'll hear a song when you're outside, and you'll think about it involuntarily. So when you hear something that you're not sure what it is or it's mysterious to you or foreign to you, you've automatically got to know what it is. You've just got to find out. So by putting the idea out there that these birds have a language that you can recognize pretty clearly at first, there are some birds out there that will speak English to you.
Bruce Glick:
You have a bird called ... It may be akin to ours. We have a towhee, and you have one. I think it's called a spotted towhee. Well, the voice here actually says, "Drink your tea." It sounds exactly like that. It's amazing. You tell that to a kid, and then you play the song for them and they light up like you've never seen before. You've captured them all of a sudden. I mean, I can't show them a math problem or read a history text to them and they're going to light up, but I did that, and it just lit the whole room up. They thought that was great. So yeah, you can recreate it, and it's not very hard.
Tania Marien:
How has your project progressed over the past year, and what are you working on now? If you could, provide a little background information about your project.
Bruce Glick:
Hmm. Let's see. Well, I thought I would sell bird seed online. Found out that there are a lot of people that buy bird seed. I had no idea. The statistics are that there are 47 million households in the US that feed birds in their backyard. It made me think, because I know a lot of birders, but you don't know a lot of people that feed birds in their backyard. They're not considered birders, and they don't consider themselves birders. I mean, if you're going to travel to go find a specific bird, you're a birder. If you've got a pair of binoculars that costs a year's wage, you're a birder. Well, I'm not. Never have been, and most of the people I know aren't, either. But you'd be amazed. If you bring it up, "Oh, hey, I've got a dove nesting outside my classroom," three-quarters of the people you meet will say, "Hey, you know what? We've got a wren that nests in our garage every year." Then you start talking to them about it. They feed birds in their backyard, and they don't know much about them, other than they really love them.
Bruce Glick:
So I thought, "Well, I need to explore this and see if I can connect with these people that aren't birders, but feed birds and see if I can help them do it better, attract more birds, enjoy it more. Yeah, that's it." That's what I thought. I joined the marketing seminar Seth Goden put on and found out that my audience might be too big, that I might need to narrow it down. So I thought, "Well, how small can I make it?" and realized that I could probably make it for people with kids 5 to 15 years old and set up a way for them to talk to their kids about birds in a fun way and have them around the house. They don't have to go anywhere. They're right there. Those birds are right there, right outside your window, and you can attract them in pretty easily and learn who they are very easily. But you have to have somebody to help like my dad helped me.
Bruce Glick:
So I thought I'd do that. I could send out a package of bird seed that's specific for their season, depending on where they are, and include a card that has a picture of a bird they might see at their feeder or on their deck and a song that goes with that bird and a mnemonic to remember it by and go from there and see what happens.
Tania Marien:
How's your project coming along? Are you continuing along that course?
Bruce Glick:
I'm continuing along that course. I'm in the process of finding out how to package it together and how to get it to people in the best way possible. So that's where I am right now. I've found a supplier that will mix bird seed for me to my specifications. So I've got to find packaging, and I've got to do all that fun stuff that is what a lot of people would do at the beginning, but I was lucky enough to join the marketing seminar and find out, "No, don't do that yet. Find out who wants it first." I just got such a great response from people through the marketing seminar and from people I talk with that they're like, "Yeah, sign me up whenever you get it. Sign me up." So that's where I am right now.
Tania Marien:
Wonderful. That's exciting, Bruce.
Bruce Glick:
It is. It is.
Tania Marien:
Very exciting. So what has been the hard part for you?
Bruce Glick:
That part.
Tania Marien:
That part.
Bruce Glick:
That part. I had all these ideas about how to put the bird seed together, and I can't quite make it happen, so I've got to come up with a different way to do it. I want to make it as convenient as possible for people that might not have a bird feeder. I'm lucky enough to live in a house with a little deck. I can just put bird feed on the deck, and the birds will come, but I have bird feeders all over the place just because they're fun. So I'm in the process of trying to find a small feeder that might go on a window, maybe, so to bring the birds straight up to them, just to get people started, and packaging that's resealable and without having to be plastic. I want to stay away from as much unsustainable packaging as possible.
Tania Marien:
Yeah. Well, that's understandable, because everything has a reason. You don't want to do anything that steps on your message.
Bruce Glick:
Yeah.
Tania Marien:
Yeah, you think of all of the fine details. Yeah.
Bruce Glick:
Everything. I mean, there's a guy, Paul Stamets. He owns this company called Fungi Perfecti. If you look him up on TED Talks or on the Internet, he is quite the guy, and he grows mushrooms. He's come up with a sustainable packaging that's made from mushrooms, where when you're done with the packaging, you put it in the garden, and it'll grow mushrooms. I think that would be cool to send that out. I'm interested in partnering with people, everything from pop-up cards to mushroom packaging to zero waste type of thing as much as possible and hope to create a way for people to learn about native plants and why they're important and why it's not okay to plant privet or English ivy, but it is okay to plant whatever's native. It just kind of wraps around itself, which I find quite fun.
Tania Marien:
How much time do you spend on your bird project? You still work full-time.
Bruce Glick:
Yeah, I work full-time. Yeah.
Tania Marien:
So how much time do you get to spend on your project?
Bruce Glick:
I think about it all the time.
Tania Marien:
Yeah.
Bruce Glick:
I'm always finding new things, too, just by accident, during the course of the day. My students teach me a lot about what I'm doing, because we work with birds during the course of a day. I'm lucky enough to work in a place where I teach a lot of different classes. So I'll get to teach an art class, and I do ceramics. So we'll get to make bird feeders and put them out all over campus. Holiday seasons, we'll make watercolor cards, and they usually revolve around birds and plants and bees and how everything kind of connects. So they teach me a lot, what they know, what they don't know, what they want to know, what they think is cool. So I can get stuck real easy in I don't know enough, because I keep learning so much every time I turn around. So it's an hour here, five minutes there. On the weekends, I can commit time to trying to track things down. I think I have to decide. I think that's the hard thing, is just decide to start somewhere and then let it change on its own.
Tania Marien:
If you could start somewhere without anything bad happening, if it was all lined up and perfect, where would you start? What would your first step be?
Bruce Glick:
Oh, I would contact people I know and say, "Hey, this thing is ready." One thing that I have started is learning about podcasting, and I'm trying to write out some kind of loose script about birding and about birding with families and putting that out there and let people know how to do it, the best way to do it, and bringing them bird songs and helping them to learn those, too, in a way that if an adult was listening to it, they could teach their child. If they wanted to listen to it with their child, that would be appropriate, too. I've got a lot of learning CDs about bird songs, and they're pretty dry. I mean, you've really got to want to do it to listen to these things. So what I would do would be something very quick, very fun, something easily enjoyable and actionable.
Bruce Glick:
So that's my first plan, is to do that, just put this out there into the world and let people know that you can bird from your kitchen window. They're there. They will come, and they'll enrich your lives with their color and their song. They'll enrich your children's lives, and they might even bring you closer together. So that's what the podcast would pretty much be about.
Tania Marien:
Do you reach out beyond your students?
Bruce Glick:
I do. I've done it in lots of different ways. I haven't done it like this. As a member of the Audubon Society chapter, they reach out to us and ask us to volunteer in different places. So whenever that happens, I go out and volunteer and show people everything I know about birds there in just that space, nothing about me in a business, but just about me. I did a lot of work with some urban gardens. In Atlanta, we have quite a few, and they would do summer school or summer camp for kids. I would go out and teach the kids there about the birds that come into the garden and ask them about ones that they've seen and have them describe them to me. Then I've got an app. It's called Merlin, and it has bird songs on it. So I can say, "Did it sound like this? Did it look like this?" They would think, "Wow, how'd you know that?", just by me describing them to you.
Bruce Glick:
I also keep bees. So I'll take a few bees with me, too, and let them see the bees. So, I mean, there's lots of opportunities. There's the nature centers around here will always want folks to come out, and all I have to do is say, "Hey, I'm Bruce Glick. I know a lot about birds and bees, and be glad to come out and help you anytime you want." They're more than happy to have me. Of course, it's all for free, but later on, I think it's just a matter of building to the point to where I can say, "By the way, I've got this thing. Maybe you'd like to try it."
Tania Marien:
So when you present your project as a self-sustaining entity, where do you think your first venue will be? Where do you think you'd start?
Bruce Glick:
I think I would go through the Audubon Society, because we're so connected there. But we have a lot of art fairs, craft fairs. I think I could very easily do that and show what bird feeders that I have and sell the bird feeders, but introduce them to this project there, also, and then through the podcast, at some point, have it point to a website where people can go and download information and see other newsletters and blogs and have an opportunity to buy from there. So there's an audience there if you're out there doing stuff that you like to do, because I didn't join these urban gardens to sell anything. I joined these things to give, and it turns that I might have something that they would like to buy. So it kind of self-perpetuated itself.
Tania Marien:
I only ask because at some point, you transition from being a volunteer to managing something that will allow you to do what you do again.
Bruce Glick:
Yes, yes.
Tania Marien:
So at some point, it needs to make it possible for you to do that so that you can introduce more families to birds-
Bruce Glick:
Oh, I see what you're saying.
Tania Marien:
... bring more conversation around birds and native plants and paint the big picture, again, to new people.
Bruce Glick:
Yes.
Tania Marien:
For a lot of folks in this line of work, in environmental education, natural resources, there is that transition where you go from volunteer to wanting to do something that you get to do over and over again, and to be able to do it over and over again, it has to sustain itself in some way.
Bruce Glick:
Yes. Yep.
Tania Marien:
Sometimes educators aren't ... Oh, how do I say this? Aren't the best businesspeople.
Bruce Glick:
No, we don't ask.
Tania Marien:
Yeah.
Bruce Glick:
Can't make the ask. Yeah, you've got to be able to make the ask at some point. At some point, it's got to be, "Okay, I've been a volunteer, and now I've got something that I'd like to sell you." So you have to ask. But if you've got something that's valuable and you know it's valuable and you're not asking a year's wage, it's not like you're asking them to commit to this huge thing. It's a very small thing that ends up bringing joy that they can do again and again and again. They then come to ask me. That's the whole idea, is that they ask me, "Hey, can you do this again?" Then I can say, "Sure, not a problem. I can do this again and again and again, and so can you," and give them that confidence and ability that they can and let them get in as deep as they want to get or as shallow as they want to be. Doesn't matter. Either way is good.
Bruce Glick:
But it's something that I've found, especially with birds, is that it's not something that people do once and then stop. I've tried. I can't. I feel guilty. "Oh, the birds are out there. They don't have food. Oh, they're asking me for food." It's hilarious.
Tania Marien:
Do you see an app in your future, considering the amount of time people spend on their phones and gadgets? Earlier, you mentioned that you think it's a misnomer that people these days have shorter and shorter attention spans. Okay. But in the book Deep Work, one of the lines that was really memorable for me is the line, "If you can't stand in line without pulling out your phone, you're not capable of deep work."
Bruce Glick:
Well, I won't develop an app, because there are so many wonderful apps out there for birding. They're great for beginners trying to learn sounds. They're wonderful for that. I advocate a field guide, just because it's better. It's better than an app. There's not an app out there that's better than a field guide, and there's not a learning tool out there better than a nature journal. There's just not. If you can draw it, you will own it. If you can describe it on paper, in words, you will own it. The bird songs that I know, I can speak them, and I had to write them down first to know what they were. Yeah, I've got a journal. I've got a little nature journal. I've got bunches of them. They're not great. I mean, they're not great art, but they make you really think about what you're doing and where you are and writing down those things. Where am I? What time is it? What time of year is it? "I saw this marsh wren for the first time in this kayak in Henry County at the water department," or whatever. You remember those things.
Bruce Glick:
You see it on an app, it's not for remembering. It's for right then, right there. If you hear something you don't know, you can pull it up on your app and try to find that sound, and when you do, it goes into your journal or it goes into your head, one of the two. You don't have to have a journal. You don't have to be a birder. You don't have to know them all. But if you're interested, yeah, you need to be able to describe it in words, on paper, because then it will come back out, and people will appreciate it, too, the people you speak with, because you'll remember those things.
Bruce Glick:
That's something that I think with this digital age really has limited us in remembering, in memory. I remember having to call my dad if I didn't know something, right? Well, now I can just look it up on Google. Yeah? Well, it doesn't have the impact that memory does, and that's what's important. Apps are great. Apps are fun. They work, but they only work fleetingly. If you want to keep it, you have to be able to remember it, and the way you remember things is by drawing them or by writing them.
Tania Marien:
What would you suggest to someone who's also borderline between full-time career and entering the freelance world?
Bruce Glick:
I would pick what I like to do. Find something you really like to do. Find something you're going to do whether you make money out of it or not, because you're going to do it, anyway. You're doing it in your free time, something you do in your free time. You're spending money on it, and you're having fun with it. There's got to be other people out there doing the same thing with it. Explore that. See what that's about. Find someone to do it with. You might find a friend to do it with, or you might find a seminar to do it in, especially if you get serious about it. Seth Goden's seminar, the marketing seminar, is ... It was phenomenal for me. I don't think I'd be this far along or this serious if I hadn't had done that. Quite frankly, I did it once and didn't finish it. I just didn't have it in me and went back and did it again. It helped me clarify a lot of things.
Bruce Glick:
If it's good work, it's good work, and you'll hear it. A lot of doubts went away when I did that. That's what happened. A lot of doubts went away, because there are a lot of people, well-meaning people, that have told me, "You're really spending a lot of time on this when you could be doing something else. You could be fishing. You could be off doing something else." They meant well, but I'm glad I did it. I'm glad I spent the time doing that, because it has solidified. A lot of doubts just went away, gave me confidence, and it's something I'm going to do, anyway, and I like.
Bruce Glick:
So that's what I would say to people. I would say do what you like. Do what you love. Like my dad said, the money will come if you do what you love, because it'll show. If you're really serious about it, then find someone to help you on that journey, on that path, like Seth's marking seminar did for me. He might not be for you, but there's somebody else that is.
Tania Marien:
Thank you, Bruce, for your time.
Bruce Glick:
Well, thank you for having me. I really appreciated it and had a good time. Thanks.
Tania Marien:
To learn more about the Audubon Society, the marketing seminar, and the other resources that were mentioned, see the show notes for this episode at talaterra.com.