Jennifer Bristol has spent much of her life finding ways to connect people with nature—and helping them discover that getting outside doesn't have to be complicated.

In Part One of their conversation, Romey and Jennifer trace her own path into the natural world and the experiences that eventually shaped a career centered on helping children and families get outdoors. From her early work as a park ranger to her leadership in the children-and-nature movement, Jennifer has repeatedly returned to a simple idea: meaningful connections with nature often begin when someone makes it easier to take that first step.

Birding became one of those pathways. Romey and Jennifer talk about birds as an accessible gateway to curiosity, discovery, community, and a deeper relationship with the places around us—a passion that would eventually lead Jennifer to author two books about birding in Texas.

Along the way, two longtime friends talk conservation, careers, family, friendship, and the experiences that turn an interest in nature into something that can shape a life.

This is Part One of Romey's conversation with birder, conservationist, author, and friend Jennifer Bristol.

Chapters:

• 01:29 - Origins: Jennifer Bristol’s Path to Birding and Conservation
• 12:05 - Growing Up Near Glacier: A Childhood Lesson on Access to Nature
• 24:16 - Investing in Texas-Based Research on Children and Nature
• 31:08 - Discovering Birding
• 41:31 - Competitive Birding: The Big Week
• 45:00 - More Than a Contest: Fundraising and Conservation Impact
• 52:42 - Part Two: Becoming a Writer

Jennifer's Books:

• Parking Lot Birding
• Cemetary Birding
• Wild Women for Good

About Modern Texas Naturalist

Modern Texas Naturalist is a podcast about curiosity, the natural world, and the people whose lives have been shaped by exploring, understanding, and caring for it.

Hosted by wildlife biologist and conservationist Romey Swanson.

Edited by Dell Little.

New conversations every other Wednesday.

Welcome to the modern Texas Naturalist.

I'm Romy Swanson.

Pull up a chair and join me in conversations with people who spend their.

Lives exploring, understanding and caring for the.

Natural world, who might just inspire the.

Rest of us to look a little closer.

Let's see what we can discover together.

Jennifer Bristol and I have known each other for a long time.

We first crossed paths through conservation work in Central Texas.

But somewhere along the way, professional colleagues became birding competitors, collaborators and sounding boards, and most importantly, true friends.

Jenna spent much of her career thinking about a question that sits pretty close to the heart of this show.

How do we help more people build a meaningful relationship with the natural world?

She's worked as a park ranger, led Texas Children in nature, helped families and communities find their way outside, and became one of Texas most recognizable voices for birding in nature.

And she has a particular gift for making the invitation feel simple.

You don't need to know everything.

You don't need to travel somewhere exotic.

Sometimes you just simply need to walk outside and start looking.

Where even ordinary places can present extraordinary opportunities.

In this first part of our conversation, we talk about where that began for Jen, the people and the experiences that shaped her birding conservation, and what happens when we make nature accessible enough for more people to find their way into it.

This is my friend, Jennifer Bristol.

Jennifer Bristol, thank you for being here today.

I'm super excited for this opportunity.

You're not only a wonderful friend, but you're someone I look up to in a number of ways, not least because of your birding, your birding abilities, and how you've whipped up on me and some of my teams over the years.

And we'll talk more about that in a few minutes.

But I'm looking back, we've been friends for quite a while, a number of years, maybe getting on to 10.

Not quite 10, but, like, we're getting there.

Oh, yeah, 10.

And we have some lore.

Like, there's some lore, there's some shared experiences and some history here, but I was like, man, the origins to me were a little foggy, and I had an idea, but I was wondering if you could maybe remind me where we met.

And I don't know.

I really don't.

I think it was like, some outreach when I was at Hill Country Conservancy or.

No, no, no, no.

So, yeah, I vividly remember where we met.

It was at the Great Texas Birding Classic awards ceremony in San Antonio.

Of course.

This makes so much sense.

Yeah.

2014.

And you came up to me, you said, man, I so want to do a week long birding classic one year.

And we just started talking.

We were talking about birding.

We were just talking really about travel and, you know, seeing Texas and kind of seeing it through the lens of, you know, birding.

And then the award ceremony started and that was it.

That was our connection.

So our connection was under the tent of birding and competition.

So through lines.

Yeah, now that you're saying it, I do remember this.

That was the first one I'd ever attended.

And lo and behold, the celebrity that I was kind of tracking was in the audience and, you know, just the kind of person I am, where I was in my career.

I'm going to go meet people that I look up to or know of that, you know, to expand the network.

But also that had those shared interests.

And birding was a big, big.

And still is.

Yeah, obviously for you too, I hear.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

I want to dive into birding, competitive birding a bit.

But since we're talking about our origins, but also your origins, and I want to know when and where and what was your first sort of connection to nature and observing.

And I know that the way you were brought up, it was probably right there.

But like, tell me about when you really started to feel it inside of you and knew that this was going to be a part of your life.

Yes, I was brought up with, you know, two parents who later in life, you know, became quite the conservationist.

But really, I think that connection came from my grandfather who realized from an early age that I had a lot of energy and I needed to burn that energy out somewhere.

And what better place than to just take me outside and let me run around on the trails, which were game trails.

They weren't like made up trails, foot trails or anything.

Yeah, I mean, you know, here's a deer trail run down and I would chase the deer, I would chase the rabbits and run and finally come back tired.

And that was his goal.

But in doing that, you know, he knew all the plants, all the trees and different things and, you know, so he's telling me these things, but I'm four or five years old, I'm not really picking them up, but it's there, it's somebody who knows these things and it's like, huh, interesting.

But yeah, I mean, for me, early days with my participation in nature was always, you know, it was a place to exercise, it was a place to escape.

You know, I had a horse from age 6.

I could ride it wherever I wanted, you know, that was right at the intersection of Loop360 and Bee Caves Road, riding down to the Wild Basin, which wasn't the Wild basin yet.

Loop360 was just being blasted out right here in Austin.

It's just, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

And, I mean, I could ride down to Barton Creek, Barton Springs, you know, I could swim my horse in Barton Creek.

It was a magical, magical time.

And thankfully, I had, from age 12 on, a best friend that was willing to do all that with me and that sense of adventure and, you know, let's get out and explore and just.

And see the world.

And when you're riding your horse, especially at early age, you've got to have a cognitive map of the world and make sure you can get home, because you go kind of far.

Of course, the horse is eventually going to get you back to the barn.

But when you ride all the way, you know, miles and miles and miles, and you're down in the Barton Creek Wilderness, and you have to remember, oh, yeah, I gotta turn here.

Okay, at this tree, because there's not really a trail.

Not like it is now.

You know, there was some, you know, some trails here and there, but I could talk a long time about how much that whole ecosystem has changed down there, you know, from when I was a kid.

But, yeah, so you just begin to notice your world in a very different way.

You know, when you're an outdoor kid,.

You're describing an area where you grew up that is completely different than what it was like then.

And we're seeing that all over the place, particularly in Texas, particularly along the I35 corridor, the Texas Triangle.

I kind of describe my journey as the creek, which was the place I ran feral, was almost like a best friend growing up.

I was that close to it.

And when you described escaping, I didn't have a ton of friends.

I didn't have access to a ton of friends.

And so nature really kind of filled a little bit of that need in that area of my life.

It sounds like you maybe have had kind of a similar experience there.

Sure.

Well, when was the moment where all of these formative years in nature kind of transitioned from an escape and a friend, in a way, a teacher, and you started to realize it's going to become more than all of that, and you've brought it into your life, your purpose, and your career?

Like, when did that moment occur?

Like many people in our career, it was very circuitous in getting there.

I worked in the Texas film industry for seven years.

You know, which went against all of my environmental fortitude.

It's not exactly a very environmentally friendly industry, and I did things really backwards.

When I graduated from high school, both my brothers and my mom were all in college.

And so there really wasn't the place for me to really get right into college right away.

Took some courses and then started working in the film industry.

Bought my house first, then went back to college, then.

Then started a career in something that I really and truly wanted.

By the time I'm graduated from college, my friends are getting married and having kids.

And, you know, it was quite the opposite of their trajectory, which I think allowed me a lot of freedom to really think about what I really wanted to do.

And I knew kind of somewhere along the way that I wanted to merge what I was doing sort of in my volunteer life, which was volunteering for different outdoor things.

I served on the board of national board of Directors for American Youth Hostel, which was getting kids, you know, young people traveling in maybe kind of an unconventional way.

And a lot of times that also connected them with the outdoors through the American Youth Hostel, you know, association.

So I was like, okay, I'm getting closer.

And then I opened a little store in Bastrop, Texas.

I can see I'm blowing your mind a little bit over here.

But I did.

One of my other passions is being creative.

And I opened a little store.

It was a crafting store.

Like, you know, you could come in and work on your scrapbook, or you can come in and make jewelry.

It's called Wild horse Creations.

And while I was out there, I volunteered for quite a bit of stuff again to get people outdoors.

I was really, you know, starting to realize, like, that was my passion, that was my jam, because there was sort of this big disconnect between the state park and what was also then happening in town.

And I could see that right away.

And I decided I needed to make a career change pretty quick.

And so I closed the store, and I got a job at Bastrop State Park.

Okay, I got.

Yeah, welcome to my mind.

Okay, you saw me.

I'm writing down a couple of notes.

I'm smiling.

I'm like, dude, I'm finding out some things I thought I knew.

So the wild horse creation, did that align with your kind of personal pull towards getting people connected to nature?

Was that creative space through their creativity and their crafts in the store, or.

No, not really.

I was really interested in business, you know, kind of stretching.

Stretching my wings of my Entrepreneurship, But I also really like helping people be creative and creating that space for them that allowed me to do it.

I mean, it was a beautiful store.

I wish you could have seen it.

And so, like I said, I was already volunteering in that space.

Quite a bit of getting people outdoors and making that connection.

And so when I saw, you know, this job opportunity at the state park, I said, yeah, let me go for it.

Let me have some health insurance.

Yeah, yeah.

I can certainly understand how that math adds up.

So I've had an observation, and I think that a lot of folks that I visit with share it.

I'm wondering if life started, you're an adult and then you're like, golly gee, I really kind of want to get back to this nature based gig.

I want to connect people to nature.

I feel like I can do this.

And I'm also hearing, I heard the community of Bastrop and Bastrop State park, and there was kind of a disconnection.

And what I believe I observe in a lot of places when I travel is that the community that hosts this wonderful amenity, whether it's a state park or a national park or anything like that, are often the same communities that are the most distant from it.

I'm hearing it kind of as part of the pull towards your next step from the shop to the state park.

And I'll share this too with you.

Between ages 8 and 9, we lived in Whitefish, Montana, because my dad loved Montana and wanted to take a year off and be up there and write and do other things.

When we were up there, my mom was volunteering at school and she learned that the schools from Whitefish never took a field trip to Glacier national park, which is.

Whitefish is one of the gateway towns to Glacier national park, one of the most beautiful ports of the world.

And so she organized the trip to go to Glacier national park.

And that was the first time most of those kids had ever been.

And she really made a point to invite the whole family, like get the parents there, the ones that could come.

And I remember her talking about that, that she was just perplexed that so many of these families had never been to Glacier National Park.

And here they live on the perimeter of it.

You know, you could ride up to the top of Big Mountain, the ski mountain, and look into Glacier national park.

And they'd never done that either.

Yeah, I mean, there is this disconnect.

And so when I started experiencing that in Bastrop, I was like, ah, I see it here.

And then especially when I Went to work for the park.

I really saw it especially in our, like, interpretation and education.

We were relying on people to come to the park and then we could tell them about the park.

Instead of us going out into the community and getting people excited about the park and to understand the natural assets and the beautiful lost pines ecosystem and, you know, what are some of the wildlife that lives there and what trails are best to hike on different times of year.

Whatever it was, you know, we just didn't have that outreach component.

And things were starting to change.

In order to get to the Internet, we all had to go up to the office and plug into the wall.

You know, we were still there.

And by the second year I was there, we actually had wi Fi, and it was huge.

And the change of being able to start communicating, connecting with people in a massive way through the Internet was.

I was sort of standing on the precipice of that, you know, but it still took that personal invitation, come do this with us.

Come enjoy.

Come take a walk, Come learn.

And sometimes that wasn't just sitting in your office making that invitation.

It meant going out to the community and getting people to come in.

I love this because it resonates with me.

I had my big epiphany about this inclusivity when I realized that simply being open to anybody, participating in these activities that you like, and you being welcoming and open to sharing that with them, helping them comfortably access it, the expectation that they come find you, is maybe not a great perspective in that.

It's not just about being open.

It's about being inviting and going to someone, a community, whatever that is, and demonstrating that openness.

Not just, you know, we put it in a newsletter and nobody shows up.

That's just not how you're going to help folks get out of a trench that they felt they've been in for a long time.

And I'll even take that one step further, because early days for me was I kind of thought, oh, I'll go out and talk to people in the community and get them to come later.

Especially when I was working for Texas Children in Nature, I realized I had to go to the community and ask them first, what are their barriers for coming?

Why aren't they coming?

Is there a fear?

Is there a general bad perception?

What is it?

Just being completely open to whatever that answer might be and then help them overcome that.

Is there a way to overcome it?

Or just to say, gosh, I am sorry you had that experience, and then kind of figure out what your next steps are, but really help bring down those barriers.

And then ask them, well, if you did come, what do you want to do when you get there?

And if you don't know, well, if I rain something, would that be of interest to you?

It's always a question back to them to make sure that they're on board with coming.

Because if you just kind of go and say, hey, I planned this for you to do and I hope you want to come again, if it's not something that resonates with them, they're probably not going to do it.

It has to be at their level and it has to be something that they have some buy in to.

I'll be honest, it kind of took me a while to figure that out.

And thankfully with Texas Children in Nature, because it was such a collaborative effort and I had so many great mentors within that, and I could see how they were doing things and what really worked.

And that's finally when I was like, ah, this, you know, this is the path that I want to follow in order to bring more people in.

Well, I don't want to gloss over Bastrop State park and your time there, but I am interested in your next step.

Was you jumped into Texas Children in Nature and you were the executive director for a period of time.

Can you walk me through the process of your role at Bastrop that leads you to this and how those two roles were kind of similar and fed to one another?

Yeah.

So, you know, at Bastrop State park, even though I was the natural resource manager, a lot of my time was spent managing the swimming pool, you know, this giant swimming pool that was.

Yeah.

Which, you know, I mean, someday I'll write a whole book just on those experiences.

The rest of the time of the year, when the pool wasn't open, I was doing different things.

And some of that was trying to get people like I described out to the park and stuff.

And then I read Last Child in the woods by Richard Louv, and I was like, wow, this resonates with me because of my own childhood, because of those feelings, those good feelings of being outdoors.

Then that feeling of we've gotta do more to get people outside and we've gotta meet them where they are.

And so actually, I didn't go directly from Bastrop State Park.

Texas Children, nature wasn't a thing yet.

It was just starting.

So I went to work for Campfire Central Texas program director there and had an amazing mentor there, Rebecca Benz.

I loved Rebecca because she always asked the right questions.

It started making me ask Questions of myself and a purpose before doing each action, which was really useful to me.

We were talking about structure and process earlier.

Like, she really helped me with structure and process, whether it was writing a grant or creating a program or whatever it was, you know.

And so we pushed our programs out into after school programs.

So we were at 36 different schools taking conservation education out to the schools.

They were all Title 1 schools.

I felt like that really served an amazing purpose as we took all those different skill sets out to the kids and they were learning every, you know, I was literally writing the programs as fast as I could and filling up these teacher trunks.

I would get one done and it would go out the door.

Get one done, go out the door, you know, and everything from bat conservation to we did a whole night skies theme, light pollution and bat conservation, astronomy and fireflies and anything that we could think of that would be captivating to children.

That was the outdoors and something they might not otherwise kind of think about right then.

We also had the traditional things of teaching them how to set up a tent and how to build a campfire, which the fire programs were always a big hit at the school schools, as you can imagine.

We had birds and water conservation.

I really got to stretch my, like dig deeper into conservation at that point.

I was educating myself as I'm writing these programs, you know, and getting them out the door.

Then I'm out with the kids and I'm out also then with the parents and the teachers.

And I'm looking at all these touch points of where is this disconnect happening from?

And newsflash, it ain't the kids.

The kids want to be outside.

You know, they like being outside.

They're curious.

And the outdoors stimulates that curiosity.

They see it a place of being social and having friends and getting to make their own decisions and, you know, or a place to be quiet and reflective.

All the things you and I just talked about too, that kids innately see it.

It's the adults that I began to realize, like, this is where we get jammed up.

We've got teachers that are pressed for time for all the different tests.

Parents are, especially at these Title 1 schools.

They're working so hard, sometimes they have two jobs.

A lot of times maybe the grandparents or an aunt and uncle are picking them up for school.

They arrive at school early, they stay at school all day, and then they're on an after school program.

You think about how long of a day that is for a child.

Yeah, it's really extensive, but that's what we have to do in order for a family to be able to go to work the whole time.

You know, I could really start seeing again that pattern of, okay, where do we need to shift the education?

And so then when I saw this opportunity to apply for this brand new position, it was.

They were creating it out of thin air for Texas children in nature to be, you know, the director of that program and work with the conservation education team at Texas Parks and Wildlife.

I just, I jumped on it and I kind of thought, they're going to pick somebody else, you know.

Right, right.

I was like, I don't know.

Got my application in.

It was a very extensive application process and it was a part time job in the beginning.

And I remember sitting in the interview, there was like seven or eight people on the interview panel, and it was really intense and.

But I was really loving it at the same time because I was enjoying the questions and I was really enjoying, like getting the vibe off the people in the room.

And then like a month went by before I found out if I got it or not, you know, So I was like, oh, I didn't get this, you know, and then I remember getting the phone call from Nancy Heron and again, another great mentor.

She was like, yeah, can you start like, right away?

And I was like, yeah, okay.

Because right away meant the first week that I was there, I went to this kind of kickoff for what's called the environmental literacy.

It had another name after it, but.

And Laura Bush was the one kicking it off, you know, so it was like, okay, I'm onto something kind of cool here.

All right, let's do this, you know?

And then the next thing I went to was with Richard Louvre.

I was like, yeah, all right, I think I'm gonna like this.

Okay.

And then there I could really start creating this formula of like, yes, we want to connect more children, the outdoors, but we also need to help the adults figure out how to do that first.

Right.

But like, also, like, parents aren't dumb.

They know their children and they know their children have.

There's an appeal to nature just being able to make a fire.

Yeah.

But there's so many competing priorities, especially in modern society, especially for parents.

So many pools for time.

And, you know, how do you look at something that doesn't necessarily have immediately quantifiable benefits, Although there are plenty and we know them.

We'll dig into that.

How do you elevate this to a priority?

That's a difficult thing to navigate.

And I'm assuming that's something that you did work through in your time, throughout your career, but specifically with children in nature.

Yeah.

So a couple of touch points.

So, thankfully, early on, Nancy Herron had convinced Texas Parks and Wildlife to really invest in some of the research being done so that we could have Texas based research.

Texans like Texas based research.

End of story.

Doesn't matter what it is, right?

Talking about birds or kids, it doesn't matter.

We had that.

And so then we could have this, like, top 10 things that are positive outcomes for children when they spend more time outdoors.

Because the scary statistic was that children were spending between 7 and 11 hours indoors per day with media sedentary, and only minutes per day playing outdoors.

And that is still true in a lot of ways.

Covid changed a lot of that, though, you know, so our job was to get out there and talk about the benefits, talk about the benefits, talk about the benefits.

Whether that was parents or to educators.

Parents were like, okay, all right, yeah, I get it.

You know, I know I need to get my kids outdoors, but I'm not really sure what to do when I get there, you know?

And so we did another huge research study called the Nature of Americans, and that was in partnership with Yale University and Texas Parks and Wildlife and a number of other entities.

And that really came to the top was parents saying, I know I need to get to a park.

I know I need to get my kids outdoors.

I have no idea what to do when it's just a big green space.

What do I do here?

If I take him for a walk on the trail, are we gonna get lost?

I don't know how to set up a tent.

I don't really know how to bait a fishing line, all of these things.

And so thankfully, Texas Parks and Wildlife took that and really started some cool programs to say, we need to start at the basics.

Prior to that, they'd already started the outdoor camping program for families.

You know, then we're taking that out to all the different nonprofits, and we're saying, hey, you know what?

Write your grants for programming to get kids outdoors.

Here's this whole amazing research study that's going to help you write your grants.

And that was kind of part of my job, too, was to show the nonprofits where are the different pots of money and how can you access those, Again, helping the adults on the side of things, because we realize, again, I mean, you can't even imagine how much research is out there to show that, hey, kids actually like nature and it's good for them.

You know, it's like, yeah, we kind of know that like, don't we?

Because we are animals.

Right.

But you know, in order to make that case for schools, we really had to do that, sort of breaking down those barriers and again, going back to different communities and saying, what's scary?

Why aren't you getting outdoors?

What is prohibitive?

One super cool thing I got to do during that process of the grant, they had focus groups.

I don't know if you've ever been in a focus group or.

Oh, no, Sort of once.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, it's cool as that's all I can say.

Especially if you get to sit behind the glass and you just get to watch.

Oh yeah, I never got to do that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So they have this amazing facilitator walking them through the process of what does nature mean to you?

And the first answers that people gave was really telling.

And so they over sampled in Houston, Dallas, the Rio Grande Valley and San Antonio.

And so the first groups would be mix of race, age, gender, all that.

Then the next one would be just of a particular ethnicity with a mix of gender in there.

They never broke it down to just one gender specific.

I wish that they would have because I think the answers also would have been quite different for that.

But money and time, right?

Yeah.

So I had like six journals of information that I came back with that I'm just writing it down.

It was just like a sponge.

I was just listening and listening and listening and absorbing and thinking about like all of these touch points that they're telling us.

Like we're afraid of these things.

You know, even thinking about historically, you know, how were African Americans treated at parks?

How were Hispanics treated at parks?

How were Asian Americans treated at parks?

You know, are all that kind of racism still there?

Is there like a lingering effect from that that is precluding today?

Yeah.

And the first answer that they gave when asked, you know, what do you think about when you think of nature?

The majority of the time it was a faraway place.

It was the mountains, it was the ocean, it was the rainforest.

It was a memory of like being at a grandparents farm or something like that.

It was something unobtainable.

And then by the end of the two hour conversation it was, oh, I love seeing the birds at my bird feeder.

I have a bird feeder in my backyard.

I love driving down this one particular road when I go to work because the trees just create this tunnel around it and they start to see nature as something that's nearby and close by and tactile and with them every Single day.

But it wasn't their first thought.

And I found that fascinating.

Absolutely fascinating, because it's like, well, how do you bridge that?

I mean, you and I would answer that right away in a very different way, because we live it, we breathe it, we're actively out saying, hey, come with us, you know, but for people in our everyday life, it's not at their top of their mind.

It's work and surviving, basically.

You know, you got to go to work, you got to get food, you got to get shelter.

You got to get all those things taken care of first.

And then, oh, yeah, maybe I should get outdoors.

Now, I will say Covid changed a lot of that, but we can get to that some other time.

So I'm listening to this, and you're validating what I assumed, and that there's this really wonderful through line throughout your life where you're exposing that extraordinary opportunities can come from ordinary places.

Absolutely.

And we have as a culture and as a society, and I think it's evolving kind of in a negative way with further division and separation.

This idea that nature is out there and we are apart from it instead of it is right out your front door, in your backyard, literally.

Doesn't matter if you're in the cookie cutter neighborhood like I live here in South Austin.

Nature is in your backyard.

It is the most accessible thing.

And you talked about birds.

And there's not another character in nature that I can think of that is more inclusive and inviting.

Because birds aren't just at mountains and beaches.

They're literally right all around us all the time.

The wildlife that's around us all day, every day.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I'm going to move us kind of along a little bit here.

I want to ask you a quick question.

When did your connection to birds specifically start?

Because birds is a big part of your life.

Big part of my life.

And this is all taking place simultaneously now.

All in.

So we're talking concurrent.

So as I'm doing the research studies and I'm working for Texas children nature, I was also still in my own head that nature was a place that I exercised, that I did things.

It was a place of intense activity.

One of those intense activities was riding my horse.

Still.

I had a mustang at the time.

You know, you're over 40 now.

I can say this with deep authority.

If you're over the age of 40, you should not own a mustang.

And that's not the car.

That's the horse.

Probably not the car either.

But I mean, you know, Exactly.

But so I got bucked off my horse.

Bucking off is very different than falling off.

Falling off, you're like, oops, I'm on the ground.

You know, you don't really have time to react or anything.

You're on a bucking mustang.

You try really hard to stay on.

And I tried too hard to stay on, and then I finally had to bail.

Even as I talk about this, I can still see his hoof coming, like, right past my head, like, in front of my face where my helmet wasn't.

And I'm thinking, well, I'm glad that didn't happen.

And then I'm on the ground.

I realized right away, like, this is going to hurt when I stand up.

This is.

This isn't good.

So I had a pretty serious back injury, and not being 20, I was pissed on day three when I wasn't better.

Yeah.

I was like, what the heck?

Little slower recovery.

Yeah, yeah, it hurt.

And my husband was like, well, let's go on a photo safari.

I was like, all right.

And so, you know, we got the gear.

I didn't even have binoculars at the time.

I didn't have a great camera lens or anything.

But he did.

I mean, he was a birder.

And so we went out, we went on this little photo safari, and I started taking pictures of the birds, and I started looking at the birds, and that was it.

I mean, it was.

I was all in.

You know, I went down the hall the next day at work, Texas Parks and Wildlife.

I'm like, where are the birding books?

Hooked me up.

I'm like, oh, you've got these birding trail maps.

Great.

Let me get a set of those.

It was like that.

It wasn't, like a transition.

It was like, one night you went to bed and you were like, I'm aware that birds exist.

And the next morning you woke up and, like, I am going to know every one of these birds.

I love them, and they're going to be a major part of my life from now on.

That's pretty much how it went.

And it was in part due to your mustang accident.

I would say 100%.

100%?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because I had to slow down.

I had to slow down, and I had to notice nature in a different way.

I love it.

And my mom was a big birder, my husband.

I mean, they were, like, giddy that I was finally coming to the birding world.

I don't think they realized the intensity that they were about to get wrapped up in.

Yeah, okay.

I got bucked off my horse in the fall, and then registration for the great Texas birding classic happens in the spring.

And I was like, great, we're gonna do this birding competition.

And they're like, great.

You know, what are we doing?

Big sit, big day.

Nope, we're gonna do the six day.

So, Romy, that's where I was at.

Like, that's where the level went to.

I mean, it was zero to 60.

You know, what happened was, like, you just described your accident as like, it caused you to slow down and spend a little more time observing.

And birds was that thing that caught you in that moment.

But it sounds like you return to something that you had.

We all.

We didn't want it when we had it, and now we can think about it.

40 Something years old is how much I wish I had it.

And you got that opportunity because of an accident that required you to slow down.

You'd been hustling.

Yeah.

You owned your own business.

You went and worked for the state park.

You had a transition period.

It's kind of interesting to know that, like, a somewhat traumatic event kind of gave you an opportunity.

Like, we always look back and see silver linings.

So I'm interested.

Okay.

You describe, like, all right, I'm all in birding.

The great Texas Birding Classic, which is a competitive birding thing.

It's usually friendly the way we, most of us do it.

Okay, okay.

All right.

Tell me about how your family reacted and responded to you getting into this.

They're excited, but, like, in the moment that they're excited for you, they probably didn't realize how much they're about to get pulled into this world.

Yeah, they were excited, and we even roped an uncle in on this.

Early days.

Early days.

It was fun.

I mean, it's still a great, great time, and we have a blast.

But we still had this mentality that in order to see the birds, you had to hike all the trails, you had to do all the things.

At every single location that we went to.

We got a lot of steps in.

Yeah.

Lot of steps in.

In those early days.

Didn't miss your step goals those days.

No, we did not.

We did not.

But we didn't see.

I mean, our bird counts were abysmal.

I mean, just abysmal.

Your skill needed to catch up to your passion.

Over six days, we barely broke 100 birds, you know, and we would get to the ceremony, the one like, where I met you, and these people that are winning, they're at 300 or plus species.

300 Species in a week.

In a week.

And I'm like, well, gosh, you know.

And I thought, well, I'll never be there, but we're sure having fun.

Let's keep doing it.

And I go on a couple big sets with what I would call some more competent birders than myself.

And I was like, huh?

You know, they really can identify a lot by ear.

I think I got to nail down my hearing game.

I would just, at night, I would listen to different birds on my phone.

Because now we're also in the age of, like, apps were just starting to come out where I could listen to things.

They had good quality, you know, old school.

You had to go get some tapes and a tape player, and it wasn't really that great.

I mean, birding by ear is hard.

I will say that.

I mean, it's not like you just learn it and boom.

It's because you have to relearn it every year because birds go quiet during the fall and during the winter, and then they start singing again, and the migration starts happening, and it's like your brain has to turn back on to what?

Oh, what was that?

Oh, okay, that's subtly different.

Is that a Hudson Vireo or is that a Bells?

Like you're trying to pull those things apart.

I mean, the way that I think about it, it's like listening to a radio station that plays, like, a mix of everything, Right.

You're not really sure what's gonna come on, but you have to figure out, okay, that's George Strait's voice, and he sounds like this.

And then, oh, okay, that's Beyonce, and she sounds like that.

But then here's these other two bands that kind of sound really similar, and you have to sort of pull.

Pull all those things apart.

And once I started figuring out how to do that, I think my game got a lot better in the bird world.

You know, I just kept studying the birds.

Where are they?

What's the habitat?

For me, it's habitat, habitat, habitat.

Like, where are they going to be?

What's beautiful is that sometimes that habitat is right around a parking lot.

I love it.

We're going to jump into that.

You said you almost have to kind of relearn your bird songs, but, like, once the spring breeders are gone for the winter, that muscle memory kind of forgets.

Yeah, it's there.

You know them, they're buried.

The recall takes you a lot longer the next season.

Yeah.

Until you get primed back up.

And so I always call it a ram issue.

It's like my ram's clogged I can't immediately access.

I know them, I know all these birds.

I just can't remember this one right now.

But it will come back.

Well, and it's hard too because you know a, you're learning them again for the spring.

But then, for example, like on the Great Texas Birding Classic, starting in West Texas and then you're out on the coast and you're in all these different areas too where there's different bird sounds.

Yeah.

In each one of those zones.

Yeah.

I mean, it's hard, but it's good and it's necessary.

If you're going to bird places like East Texas where it's so thick you can't see the birds.

What you're describing is like, this is one of the great things about being a strong naturalist and birder is that we have 600 something species of birds in Texas.

That's probably too many to try to memorize every song and every sound that they make.

But through the power of naturalist deduction, you're in West Texas so you can just go ahead and eliminate half of the birds or something like that.

I'm in a mountain canyon so I'm not going to be listening beach birds or whatever.

So you start through deduction, limiting, reducing the size of your possibilities.

And then from that you're like, wait a minute, that's not going to be a red eyed vireo.

It's going to be a plumbus vireo because we're in this habitat.

And so even though the songs are very similar, you can, through the power of deduction figure it out and be a very confident birder.

And you're right 99% of the times.

Are you right?

99%?

No, no, I'm more of like a 62.4, something like that.

You know, I just find when you say it confidently then it can be.

And then I'm like looking things up.

You're checking yourself when nobody else is looking over your shoulder.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, I can't let the audience leave thinking that I haven't experienced the, the wrath of Team Bristol whipping me in various ways.

You know, necessarily me specifically.

You're not trying to beat me up.

You're trying to be the competitive spark that makes me get better at what I can do.

But when you were telling us about your accident on the mustang, finding birding, talking to your family about it, and the next thing you know you're on a week long road trip with family members looking for all the birds in the world and there's a journey there because at first you described it originally as we were lucky to cross the hundred species threshold while watching others cross 300 species.

We just finished a great Texas birding classic season.

We had the week long deal, and I think you sent me a note saying that you definitely cracked over 300 and that you were going for number one.

We won't bury the lead.

You didn't get number one this year.

I did not get number one.

But you got dang close.

Real close.

Real close.

And so I'm hoping, tell us a little bit about birding competitively.

The big week through the most recent lens.

And if you want to tell any stories about whipping your host here today, you go.

You feel free to jump into that.

Well, Romy, you might recall that I don't.

Travis Audubon used to have a competition.

Unfortunately, they don't do anymore because I loved it.

Called the Birding Brawl.

The Birding Brawl.

Birding Brawl was fantastic.

And it was, you know, one team against the other on the same day to try to see as many species as you could on that day.

And.

And you and I were against each other.

We're never against each other, but we.

Were competing against each other.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so you had Rich on your team.

I had my mom on my team.

And let's just face it, I'm not gonna lie.

I thought, okay, your mom's pushing.

She's 85.

Yeah.

So I was like, yeah, I think, I think, Rich.

I think you thought you had this.

In the background, Rich.

And I was like, I mean, you.

Got two incredible birders.

You're both biologists.

You both do bird surveys for people.

I mean, let's get real.

You're an incredible birder, but I beat the pants off you that day.

Not just a little bit.

A good amount.

A good amount.

Yeah.

Like, I mean, it was close, but it wasn't really that close.

It wasn't really that close.

And I think that y' all stopped to maybe look at one too many snakes or something.

I don't know.

I don't know.

But we did spend some time photographing a cottonmouth.

I do remember that.

Yeah, I, you know, I was.

I was pushing my mom from pre dawn until after dark.

And she, you know, she's such a trooper.

I mean, and she just loves it, you know, She's a darn good birder, too.

She's a really good spotter.

She can't really hear anything anymore, but she's spotting, you know, left and right.

And I mean, it's good to have that Healthy competition.

Yeah.

And it's really.

You know what I liked about that one too is it was just in Central Texas.

And so we had.

We're on our home turf, so we're like looking at birds here, which sometimes for the Great Texas Birding Classic, it's all over the state.

So it was fun to just be like, oh, all right, let's test this right here.

So I'm sorry that you didn't win on that day.

I want you to continue with the week long versions of these too.

But I want to mention to you that I was licking my wounds for so long after that.

I haven't really birded competitively because my ego was so bruised and it was a good lesson in humility and I only recently got it renewed.

We competed in the Great Texas Birding Classic this year.

My friend Crystal Adesma and Danny Kelleher formed a team and we birded only ranches along the Devil's river in the western one day, the big day thing.

And man, I don't know that them getting me back into competitive birding is what they wanted because I might have been a little bit of a nightmare teammate.

I'm like, we're gonna go find.

We're going to go to all these places.

I was really kind of rigid about things.

I was rigid in the sense that I wanted to do it only in the Devil's Basin.

Whereas we could have been a little bit more competitive possibly if we would have expanded it.

But next year I'm like, oh, we might expand it because we're going to win.

Yeah.

I'm like, it came back and I'm like, dang it, man, that was competitive burning.

And the other thing I wanted to mention was both the great.

Look at you light up when you're talking about.

I'm smiling pretty big.

And we, I mean, we did well.

I mean, we found 114 spots species on the Devil's river, which is like, that's enormous.

But the other thing I want to mention about this competitive earnings.

It's not just a competition, it's a fundraiser.

It's.

It brings resources and attention and fun and people like watching it.

And the real winner is not the team Bristol.

It's the Travis Audubon who was able to raise money off of this effort to support their programming, which benefits birds and people's accessibility to birds.

Exactly.

And same thing with great Texas birding class.

Exactly.

Run through Texas Parks and Wildlife and then they take all the entrance fees and they issue conservation grants.

And so, you know, that's really beautiful, too.

They're giving back to the community.

And these have to be, you know, bird specific projects.

So.

Yes.

I mean, it has a mission and a cause behind it.

Have you ever won the opportunity to give one of those grants?

Oh, many times.

So.

And that's.

And that's another cool part about the program is that it raises a bunch of money through entry fees, sponsorships, et cetera.

Then the winners are not only winning and having the pride of winning, but they also get to point a $5,000 grant, and they get a list of grantors to choose from.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's what I really.

I've only ever won once and had that opportunity.

We've won, but, like, every category that wins doesn't get to a point of grant.

But the year that we did get to a point of grant, it was an awesome feeling.

Forget the plaque or the, you know, the award.

That $5,000 award to that entity.

Well, and it's cool, too, because you get a list of all these projects that are going on around the state, and then you're, you know, you're invested and you're interested in those things.

And then for us, we've been able to award several of those.

It's like, I feel really attached to those projects, you know, I mean, I've called up the nonprofit.

I'm like, hey, can I come see these?

I want to walk around the area.

I want to see how the project's going to.

I mean, I feel very, you know, connected to those things.

And that's great, too.

Yeah.

So it is a lot more than just winning.

I hate to say it like that,.

But, you know, you're scratching that competition itch.

It is.

You know, and I, you know, I used to run triathlons and stuff, so it's.

The competition is there.

It's just ingrained.

Never went away.

It never went away.

And it just needed that slower space to do it in.

Need a new outlet.

And it found it.

Yeah, you do.

And it enjoys it a lot.

Well, like I said, you're scratching a competition itch, but you're doing it also.

Like, it's charitable.

Wild women are good.

You're doing good through participating in it.

You're learning, too.

I mean, that's the thing, too.

You're a lifelong learner, and that's a commonality between a lot of people I like to hang out with, is that we're all interested, we're all curious, we're trying to learn, and we never stop.

Like, some of us kind of get close to mastery.

But we also know.

But the closer you get to mastery, the better you understand that you're never going to be complete.

And it's always an ongoing journey.

And that's what I really enjoy is when we bird.

Even when we're really good birders and ear birders, we're always like, I can tweak.

I can learn more.

You know, oh, for sure.

Or I like to kind of predict those next vagrant or rarities, like things that are close to Texas, that through whatever reasons, climate change, other weather patterns a hurricane moves through, what might show up and where.

And then when it happens, you feel really cool.

And when it doesn't happen, you still feel cool because you at least think about cool things.

I mean, Romy, we've got an El Nino coming on.

I know it's gonna happen.

My prediction is, I think this winter and then the spring is gonna be a rarity bonanza.

You think so?

I think so.

I think there.

Absolutely.

You heard it here, folks.

I know for the folks that aren't quite birders, now might be the time to do it.

If you wanna see crazy, weird bird bear things.

Yeah.

You know, as far as the lifelong learning.

Absolutely.

I mean, and I think that's why it's really fun to go on these trips with my mom and my husband is they're also interested in Texas history and in habitat and landscapes.

And when you're out there, you're looking at Texas through the lens of birds and habitat, but you can't get away from, oh, let's stop at this historical marker.

What happened here?

What is this place?

You know, you're just learning so much.

As we move along from on the six days.

And it's intense.

I mean, it's an intense six days.

I'm not gonna lie to anybody.

You know, you were up before dawn.

Now, granted, we travel with my mom, but I say this, but I'm kind of to the point too, where it's like, I don't wanna stay up super late.

Right.

I mean, our owl count, you know, this is where we need you.

We need you to come join us.

We need to help.

Need some owl.

We need some owl.

And I need the motivation to say, okay, you know what?

We're gonna go out with Romy tonight and we're gonna get some owls.

You know, let me tell you something real quick.

Yeah.

One of the things and the reason I think I've kind of started leaning into the owl world as a kind of a niche, you know, I'm a Herper, too.

A lot of herping is done at night, and it lends, like, when you're also a birder.

Like, those two things don't go well together.

Early mornings and late nights just don't pair well.

You're burning.

Truly burning a candle at both ends.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that's been a major reason why I kind of leaned back into the owls, because they were.

Not everybody will do that.

Yeah.

And most in, like, birders specifically.

And I was already attuned to kind of staying up a little later, although I'm a morning person now in this part of my life.

But that's how owls kind of.

Okay.

It's a natural progression.

It's interesting.

It's not.

Makes sense.

Not nothing necessarily special.

It's just the logistics of my life and the way my activity works.

So y' all did get second place in the category this.

This year, right?

That's right.

Romy.

We got second place.

How's that feel?

And hard.

I mean, seriously, I look involved with winning, and we talked about all the good stuff, but there's also this trophy, and it's gorgeous.

And it's this big silver heron.

It looks like the Stanley Cup.

I mean, it's just absolutely gorgeous.

And there's all these little plaques with the different team names, although they're not different.

Romy, it's the Same name for 20 years.

Are you serious?

Dead serious.

So I feel like that needs to be shaken up a little bit, you know?

You know, we got a different name on there, whether it's mine or somebody else's.

Well, I was gonna say time for a new dynasty.

Time for a new dynasty.

Yeah.

You know, they got 365 birds.

We got 340.

And I think to myself, where on earth did they find those other birds?

Because, I mean, I was maxed out.

And we drove from the Rio Grande Valley to High island because the winds were shifting, the weather was changing, and we knew, okay, we've just got to do this, you know, if we're going to be competitive.

And I'm glad that we did, because it was the right choice, even though it was thundering and lightning and storming all around us and everything.

But I think to myself, there's not another place that I felt like if we lingered a little bit longer, we would have seen more.

But those birds had to be there, and I just wasn't seeing them.

And that kind of is, like, infuriating.

But it also makes me think, okay, I just gotta do a little bit better.

One bird per stop would put me at 365.

Oh, there you go.

That's the way I've thought about it.

That's a manageable amount.

That's a manageable amount.

Just like writing a page a day, you're done in a year.

I love this accountability, accountability and making it doable.

And that's where we'll leave part one of my conversation with Jennifer Brown Bristol.

But there's another part of Jen's story we haven't really gotten to yet, because somewhere along the way, all that birding and exploring and teaching and paying attention also turned Jen into a writer.

In part two, we'll talk about that journey, about books, storytelling, the places we sometimes overlook, and what happens when you start putting the things you've noticed out into the world for others to discover.

So come back next Wednesday for part part two of my conversation with Jennifer Bristol.

Until then, stay curious.

Sam.