PRESIDIO — Presidio High School graduate Fabiola Baeza Tarin recently made her National Geographic debut in The Little Brown Bird, a documentary about North America’s most endangered avians and the unlikely coalition of people working to bring them back from the brink. The short and sweet film dropped last week on streaming and is currently free to watch on YouTube.
Baeza went to school to study biology, not to portray a captivating heroine on the silver screen — but viewers might be fooled into thinking the opposite, thanks to breathtaking shots and tender storytelling served up by director KT Bryden and a team of producers from Wildpath and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
The budding biologist’s interest in creatures large and small was a natural extension of her childhood on a ranch in Ojinaga. In the documentary, she remembers her father’s motto: “lo que es bueno para el pájaro es bueno para el ganado,” or in English, “What’s good for the bird is good for the herd.” From a young age, she learned that all living things are connected, and even small losses in the ecosystem can have devastating impacts on the survivors.
Baeza developed a passion for protecting grassland birds working in the field at Sul Ross State University — a passion that’s sustained her for the better part of a decade. Learning about birds in the Trans-Pecos eventually led her to join a team making groundbreaking strides in protecting the Florida grasshopper sparrow, a stubborn little bird from the dry prairies of the Sunshine State that has had 90% of its natural habitat destroyed by development.
As of last summer, 1,000 Florida grasshopper sparrows have been reintroduced to the wild as a part of this project, supported by unlikely partners including the United States Air Force and a local ranching family. With those numbers, every bird matters, and learning their unique habits turned out to be equal parts frustrating and rewarding. “I’ve developed a bond with every single one of them, even the ones I don’t like,” Baeza jokes in the film.
Making it from a small town to the big screen would be an accomplishment for anyone, but Baeza had to bust down barriers and stereotypes along the way. In 2022, a Pew research study found that just 3% of Latinos in the workforce are women in STEM.
Over the documentary’s runtime, Baeza’s big heart and tenacity as a researcher shine through — and after watching her wrestle a stubborn trailer jack in a muddy field, it’s clear that women from the rancho are a natural fit in wildlife conservation.
The Sentinel caught up with Baeza over the phone on her way home from an early morning in the field.
I’m sure you get asked this question all the time, but how did you get interested in birds?
I was born in Ojinaga and grew up with my siblings on my dad’s ranch. We learned to love and appreciate the land from a very young age — the land gave us what we needed to sustain ourselves because my dad was a cattle rancher, but I was always interested in all sorts of wildlife.
It didn’t click right away that it was my calling to be a wildlife biologist. It wasn’t until my senior year of my bachelor’s that I was falling behind because I thought I wanted to do something in the medical field, but I couldn’t get into a radiology program in El Paso that I wanted. Then I transferred to Sul Ross, and I thought I wanted to do the nursing program, but at that time it was in a period of transition, so they were like, “Well, you can just take biology classes and it’ll help with your curriculum.”
I think the class that did it for me was herpetology, which is reptiles and amphibians. I had this professor that was very passionate about conservation, and he would take us on field trips and show us survey methods. I realized that I really liked it.
Entering this super technical, academic field, what are some of the advantages and disadvantages of being from Presidio and Ojinaga?
I had no knowledge that this kind of career existed. At the time that I was in school, there was nobody to show me that there was something in that field that was possible, especially for a brown girl from Mexico.
I want to say that one of the big advantages of being from Presidio is that we are in one of the most diverse regions of Texas. It’s one of the most remote, and you get a lot of raw ecosystem that a lot of people never see. Some people have to travel a long way to observe wildlife, and we have it right at our back door — Big Bend Ranch State Park, the National Park, Fort Davis. Anywhere we go, we’re out there and we’re experiencing it.
I want to talk about the term “little brown bird,” which I learned out here and associate with Chihuahuan Desert grasslands. Can you tell me how our local little brown birds and the Floridian little brown bird in the film are connected?
I actually did my master’s on grassland birds out in Marfa, and I worked on overwintering habitat of grasshopper sparrows and Baird sparrows. The Florida grasshopper sparrow is a subspecies of the grasshopper sparrow we have in Marfa and Presidio and all the desert grasslands, but the difference is that the Florida grasshopper sparrow is a subspecies that is geographically restricted to Florida, which means that it doesn’t migrate. The grasshopper sparrows that we have around Marfa spend their wintering season there, and then during the breeding season, they migrate north to the Great Plains.
Grasslands are one of the most imperiled ecosystems on Earth because they’re just so easy to transform, compared to something like a forest, for example. You can just clear grassland right away and build on it or do agriculture. The presence of grassland birds is an indicator of ecosystem health because if you do any sort of habitat change — like overgrazing or the introduction of invasive species — the birds get displaced because they’re such grassland specialists.
What are some of the other messages you hope folks take away from the film?
One of the things I like to say is that as a species, humans are weird in the sense that we feel like we want to dominate everything. We see something and we just want to clear it and build a supermarket on it. But I think that it’s very important for us to understand that we are part of a bigger ecosystem, and whatever we do to the land we’re going to get the same thing in return. What we decide to protect today is going to be very telling for what future generations are going to have.