Odd Lots - How to Put a Price on a Bird: the Forgotten Science of Economic Ornithology

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

This episode is for the birds — and one bird in particular. Flaco, an Eurasian eagle-owl, escaped from the Central Park Zoo last year and went on to become a local celebrity, delighting New Yorkers with his feathered adventures across Manhattan. Late last month, however, Flaco died after an apparent collision with a building. Obviously, Flaco's death is a sad event for many reasons, but it got us thinking about the role of birds in the wider world. Not only are they an important part of the natural ecosystem, but they can also contribute to agriculture (or quality of life in the city) by eating bugs, rats and other pests. So can you put an exact dollar amount on the value of a bird and what it does for the world? It turns out that for many decades, some economists were devoted to exactly this question. In this episode, we speak with Robert Francis, the author of the Bird History Substack, about the largely forgotten science of economic ornithology and historic attempts to figure out exactly how much a bird is worth. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Thanks for listening to OddLots. Follow the show on Amazon Music for more future episodes or just ask Alexa, play the podcast, OddLots on Amazon Music. Today's show is brought to you by Vanguard. To all the financial advisors listening, let's talk bonds for a minute. Capturing value and fixed income is not easy. Bond markets are massive, murky, and let's be real. Lots of firms throw a couple flashy funds your way and call it a day. But not Vanguard. At Vanguard, institutional quality isn't a tagline. It's a lot. It's a firm. It's a few. It's a few. a commitment to your clients. We're talking top grade products across the board of over 80 bond funds, actively managed by a 200-person global squad of sector specialists, analysts, and traders. These folks live and breathe fixed income. So if you're looking to give your clients consistent results year in and year out, go see the record for yourself at vanguard.com

slash audio. That's vanguard.com slash audio. All investing is subject to risk vanguard marketing corporation distributor. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts Radio News. Hello and welcome to another episode of the All Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Wisenthal. Joe, did you hear the sad news? Okay. Yes. I know the sad news you are talking about.

I have to say I was a little surprised to get a push alert that an owl had died. I know for some people it was a really big deal. That is such shade. That is such shade against Flacco the Ow. I can't believe you're saying that. I'm trying to, like, be diplomatic. Some people seem to be, like, really torn up. I was like, oh, I'm a little surprised that the death of an owl made it to a push alert, but nonetheless, yes, I know where you're going with this. Okay. So for those people who don't know, maybe they don't follow local New York news as much.

Maybe they're just heartless New Yorkers like Joe. They don't care about the animals. Flacco the owl died recently. We're recording this on February 27th. He died over the weekend. Apparently, he flew into a building, although we're still waiting for the toxicology report, I think. But the reason everyone was so interested in the fate and fortunes of this owl is because he was actually a Eurasian eagle owl who had escaped from the zoo, although actually, I think Vandals basically broke into his exhibit and let him out. And he's been flying

around the city ever since. He was sort of a symbol of survivalism. in the urban jungle. People didn't expect him to be able to make it. Yeah. So there were a bunch of spottings, right, in Central Park and elsewhere. Yeah. There are photos of him. He would perch on air conditioners and sort of peek into people's windows at odd times of the day and night.

Kind of wild that in a city this big, like a single bird could just be spotted all over the place for the wild. People would note it's like, oh, this is that bird. Like, that's pretty cool. Well, he stood out, right? He's not native. Again, the clue is in the name. you're raised an eagle owl. But I have to ask, how much do you think an owl like flaco is worth? Oh, wow. Huh. That's a good question. I don't know. Like, how much would it cost if I wanted

to acquire one? Like, are you thinking that like on the open market? Yeah, this kind of gets into the issue, right? What would the basis of that valuation actually be? So you can imagine there's probably a market price that zoos or even black market collectors would pay for an Eurasian eagle owl. There's probably a replacement value for insurance for a viable male that could produce chicks. But maybe Flacco has value in other ways. So people were clearly happy to see him flying around the city. We know that he was eating rats at certain points. So maybe he was valuable as someone killing rats and other pets. But on the other hand, you know, what if he ate someone's backyard chicken? Then would he have negative value? He's destroying public property or

private property. What if it was a buff Orpington, a really nice show Orpington? And now someone has to replace their fancy chicken. I have a lot of thoughts on this show. I'm sorry to regale you with them at like nine in the morning. No, I, you know, look, clearly the dead. of flacco meant more to you than me, but just objectively, listening to you're like, wow, there's some really interesting questions here that I just would never have thought about at all in terms of the connection between, yeah, there must be some dollar value. There must be, there is some economic value associated with the bird that people love that is rare. That would have been difficult for a zoo to acquire. That would be difficult for a zoo to secure. There's a cost

to, as you said, the insurance. So interesting questions that I had certainly never once thought about up until one minute ago in my life. You know what, Joe, we don't even have to speculate about this. Okay. We don't have to. Why do we have the answer? Well, it turns out there is actually a whole body of economics that deals with exactly this topic.

It is economic or nithology. Can I just say something, Tracy? Yes. I think you're more interested in this topic than any other episode we've done in about a year. This is my revenge for like the Celsius episodes where not only do I have to talk about Celsius for 30 minutes. but I also have to drink it while we're talking.

Yeah, okay, fair. I should have brought a bird for us to look at while we're here. No, okay. Economic ornithology. So the idea here is to actually attach an estimated value to birds and their role in the ecosystem of eating bugs and rodents and other things that might be considered pests either in New York City or in farmland and the agricultural industry.

So this is a thing that exists, and I think we should talk about it. Let's do it. Okay. I'm very, very happy. Joe less so. But I'm happy to say we do in fact have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Robert Francis. He is the author of the bird history substack. And he wrote a really great piece about economic ornithology. So Robert, thank you so much for coming on all thoughts. Thanks for having me. Joe clearly is a little incredulous that this is something that exists. How did you start writing about economic ornithology? How did you discover? this topic. Sure. So I'm working on a book about how the relationship between birds and people has changed over the course of America's history. And when you're looking at the progressive era,

so from the 1890s to the 1930s, you really can't miss the way that people talk about birds in economic terms. They talk about birds in their relation to agriculture. And as friends to farmers as playing a really important role in protecting crops from agricultural pests. And this isn't just farmers talking about it. You read people talking about birds like this in the Saturday evening post in Harper's Weekly. You hear sportsmen talking about it. You read in school manuals that children are getting problems about how to calculate how many destructive bugs each individual bird might eat over the course of, you know, several months. So it's really something that's, you know, throughout society that people are thinking about birds in this way. And the force behind this

is a government bureau called the Bureau of Biological Survey that was established in 1885 to study this question, to help farmers understand how they should feel about birds and what the impact of birds are or could be on their crops. So, all right, this is already fascinating. I didn't know that there was a Bureau of Biological Survey, but that is really cool. You mentioned, children's problems about, okay, how many bugs would eat? What are some of the other ways? When you talk about this language of talking of birds in economic language, what do we talk about? What does it sound like? How are they describing these birds? Sure. So they're talking about birds as protecting crops from destructive bugs. They're talking about hawks and eagles and owls protecting crops from

mice and rats and other things might eat grain or might destroy, might affect like the orchard. or things like that. And it's really looking at birds at an individual level. So they're thinking about, you know, their main way that they study, that they study birds and their impact on crops is by cutting open their stomachs and counting how many, how many bugs of each different species, how many little, you know, broken up pieces of bugs that they find in their stomachs. And comparing that to how many seeds from wheat that they might find, how much, you know, little pieces of apples that they see in and comparing it and saying, what are they doing that's helpful? How many destructive bugs are they eating? How many harmful bugs are they eating compared to how many helpful things to the farmer are they eating? And where does the balance lie? Are they help are they more helpful to farmers or are they more harmful? So birds can be good or bad for crops. They can eat your strawberries and I speak from personal experience here. But they can also eat the Japanese beetles on your rose bushes. And again, I'm speaking from personal experience. And Japanese beetles.

are my arch enemy now. But anyway, how do you come up with the net calculation for something like that? And how precise can you get with that? Can you get it all the way down to dollars and cents? So, you know, this Robin is worth like $853 to me in terms of crop protection every year. Yeah. And, you know, the economic ornithologists of this period certainly tried. And you look at the figures that they put out and it makes it seem very, very precise. And so it can, you know, calculation might be okay. So a mouse might eat two cents of grain over the course of a year and a single hawk based on finding, you know, how many mice that they find in a dissected hawk stomach, a single hawk might eat a thousand mice over the course of a year. So, you know, you do that arithmetic and you see

that this hawk saves a farmer $20 worth of grain. Of course, the same hawk might also eat six chickens over the course of a year, and each chicken might be worth 50 cents to a farmer. So, you know, it does $20 worth of benefit to the farmer and $3 worth of harm. So this hawk, according to these economic ornithologists, they would tell farmers, this hawk is worth $17 to you. So, and the reason that they were sharing this information is to try to affect farmers' behaviors. They're trying to get farmers to stop killing these hawks. So they would tell a farmer, you know, you might save yourself $3, by killing this hawk that occasionally eats your chickens, but you're actually costing yourself $20 by, you know, and lost grain.

So is basically a hawk eating a chicken is a very visible thing. The hawk eat my chicken. I mean, there's just sort of like almost Econ 101, the scene and the unseen little bit. But it's like what they probably, the hawk eating the mouse, which would is a grain is just not something that would be as front of mind for the Yep, exactly. And so, you know, this bureau that was established in 1885 is looking at, you know, all of these birds that have these reputations as pests, crows that will eat your corn, robins that will packet your apples, and that farmers had traditionally killed. And they were trying to act as almost like judges on behalf of these birds and look at all of them and say, okay, for each of these birds that farmers complain about, are these birds actually more helpful or harmful? And in almost every case, they came back and said, you know, even these birds that, like a crow, that people have

traditionally thought of as pests, they actually do, they actually have a net positive impact on agriculture by eating harmful bugs, by eating mice, you know, and that impact is, is greater than the harm that they caused by, you know, opening up the occasional year of corn. Today's show is brought to you by Vanguard. To all the financial advisors listening, let's talk bonds for a minute. Capturing value and fixed income is not easy. bond markets are massive, murky, and let's be real. Lots of firms throw a couple flashy funds your way and call it a day. But not Vanguard. At Vanguard, institutional quality isn't a tagline. It's a commitment to your clients. We're talking top-grade products across the board of over 80 bond funds, actively managed by a 200-person global squad of sector specialists, analysts, and traders. These folks live and breathe fixed income. So if you're looking to give your clients consistent results year in and year out, Go see the record for yourself at vanguard.com slash audio.

That's vanguard.com slash audio. All investing is subject to risk Vanguard Marketing Corporation distributor. Eating well shouldn't be complicated, but somehow it turns into recipes, prep, cleanup, and half your Sunday gone. Factors solves all that. These are fresh, ready-to-eat meals designed by dietitians, delivered to your door, and ready in just minutes. No prep, no cleanup, no excuses. And it's not just about convenience. You're getting real food, balanced nutrition, and zero artificial stuff.

Meals that help you stay on track for all of your goals without the grind of doing it all yourself. Grilled chicken, roasted veggies, steak plates, postables. They taste like something you get in a restaurant, but they come out of your microwave in two minutes flat. If time, cost, or effort have been holding you back from eating better, Factor just took those off the table. Right now, get 11 meals, free shipping, and free sides for life. Hurry, this offer won't last long. Go to factormeals.ca and use code fit. That's 11 meals, free shipping and free size for life, but only with the code fit at factormeals.

Factor, Canada's number one ready-to-eat meal delivery service. So you touched on this earlier, the idea of, you know, kids in school rooms maybe trying to do these calculations, but talked us a little bit more about how widespread this knowledge was. So if I was a farmer in Iowa in the early 1900s and I was, you know, sat on my front porch watching sparrows eat my grain, would I be sat there thinking, like, it's okay, they're also eating like some weed seeds and some harmful bugs, so that's all good. Like, how much was this embedded in the popular consciousness at the time? You know, at the end of the 1800s, I would say not very much. Again, there was this tradition.

I mean, there were a lot of states, for example, that offered bounties for crows, for sparrows, for sparrows, for birds that were perceived as harmful. So states would pay farmers to kill crows that sometimes pay farmers to kill hawks. So, you know, it was pretty, it was pretty well accepted that there were some birds that were harmful for crops, and it was better for everyone if we killed them. As this Bureau went, you know, over time pushing out information about the positive impact that birds had on agriculture, and it became much more accepted and much more popular to think of birds as helpful to agriculture. You know, you saw the end of these bounty laws. You saw these publications that I referenced in the Saturday Evening Post and in, you know, just like popular magazines

talking about the importance of birds. You also had publications in something called the Farmers Bulletin that went out to farmers that they could read, you know, to learn about how, how to improve their crop yields. And, you know, alongside articles about, you know, best practices with like planting and tilling, you had these articles about building birdhouses to a tree. certain kinds of birds. Something about economics, the phenomenon, is economists sometimes arrive at conclusions about things that feel intuitively wrong. In fact, often economists love that about themselves, like, you think this is good for the

economy, but actually you're really harming. You know, this is like they sort of, and I have to wonder, so like I'm looking at your substack and there's this picture of economic or an ornithologist, and they seem to be wearing three-piece suits and these like very fancy silk ties in the photo. And I wonder if like the farmers out in the middle of the country, you know, they have these notions like, oh, this bird's good. They're like grumbling about the economists in their white towers. Yeah, exactly. And then the economists and their three pet suits are like, well, actually, this bird is good for you.

And I'm curious if there's like a sort of, you know, today people don't like hearing from economists often because economists say this is actually good for you and you thought it was bad. And like, look, I know, I don't need to listen to you. I know what's good and bad. I'm curious if that sort of culture clash was evident even back then if like these economists from the bureau came trying to tell farmers what they should and shouldn't kill. Totally. And, you know, I haven't seen instances where there was like actually that conflict. But in a lot of cases, they were fighting an uphill battle.

I think there were certainly a lot of farmers that adopted some of these practices. And you saw like a decrease in the number of of hawks that were killed. But at the same time, like while most birds received federal protection in 1918, some hawks and some owls didn't receive the same level of production until the 70s. Throughout this entire time, there were still a lot of farmers that would keep killing the birds that they saw eating, eating their crops. And, you know, some of this tension still exists today. Like, there's still a lot of birds that are considered by farmers and by, like, the Department of Agriculture. They're still considered pests. This idea that birds can be harmful to crops and are sometimes harmful

to crops has not completely disappeared. So on that note, I know the book you're working on is primarily focused on the relationship between birds and people in America. But maybe it might be helpful to contrast it with the most famous example of people getting the economic value of birds wrong, which is what happened in China under the four pests campaign, where people were encouraged to go out and kill a bunch of different pests, sparrows included. And then it backfired horribly. And you got a bunch more insects. I think it was mostly locusts. And then a lot of fewer crops and then a great famine in the late 50s, early 60s. But I think when people think about the economic or agricultural value of birds, that's probably one of the prime examples that springs

to mind. Sure. And I think we haven't seen something like that in the United States in recent years. So I would say that isn't so much top of mind. But you can look at more recent research that's come out about the impact of birds on crops. And, you know, we can maybe talk in a moment about kind of some of the methodological limitations of these progressive era economic ornithologists, but more recent research that, you know, makes use of things like randomized control trials and takes a more ecological approach has shown pretty convincingly that birds have a very positive impact on agriculture and, you know, that when you have insectivorous birds hanging around your orchard yields for apples and for orchard crops improve. The same thing is true for field crops.

when you have birds that eat bugs, like you do see improvements in your yields. But this is something that these economic ornithologists weren't able to show as well with the methods that they used back in the 20s and 30s. So you mentioned in your piece that economic ornithology sort of fell out of favor in, I guess, it's traditional sense. And part of the reason was because of the use of pesticides. So if you're spraying all your crops for bugs, you don't really need as many birds to eat those bugs. and so their usefulness kind of declines.

Talk to us about that transition and then, again, coming back up to speed to modern day, like what evidence do we have of the usefulness of birds in modern agriculture now? Sure, right. So there were a handful of reasons why economic ornithology disappeared in the 1930s and the 1940s. And as you mentioned, a big one is that with the rise of effective and affordable pesticides and insecticides, farmers had much more control over the pests in their field. Before you had these pesticides, birds were kind of the best option that farmers had. And they, you know, they had to rely on these almost natural methods of pest control. But that wasn't the only reason that this field

kind of disappeared. There were also some pretty significant methodological limitations. So first of all, it was not much of an applied science. They could show how many harmful bugs an individual bird might eat. but they didn't have reliable methods to show that if you do, if you build a birdhouse, you know, you'll be able to expect a 10% increase in yields on certain crops. Or if you plant certain types of shrubs to attract birds that you'll have, you'll be able to see specific impacts on, on your crop yields. The second limitation is that they weren't really taking an ecological approach. They were looking at individual birds and how many bugs they might eat.

And they were comparing kind of two facts that seem. that seem intuitive. On one hand, you know, in the 1920s, there were every year bugs destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars of crops. And economists estimate that between 10 and 20 percent of crop yields every year were destroyed by insects. On the other hand, you have data on these birds that, you know, one single bird every day might eat 1,200 cinch bugs, for example, and these are major pest for crops. And so you compare those things and you say, well, intuitively, more birds, eating more bugs would mean that crop yields would improve. There is data now showing that birds do actually keep past under control. But at the time, these economists weren't able to show that relationship.

They weren't able to show that like baseline level of bugs would decrease when you had more, more birds. There were critics. A lot of them were entomologists studying, studying bugs that said, like, you know, if a bird is hanging around on your farm, you can actually prove that the bird is eating bugs on the farm. You know, they observe birds flying over to the river to eat bugs and coming back and the ornithologist would, you know, shoot this bird and dissect its stomach and say, okay, it's eating all of these bugs, but they're not actually bugs that are preying on crops. So they weren't able to establish that relationship at an end of the level of individual birds and bugs. Oh, yeah. So I have a neighbor who is a reasonably,

famous ornithologist actually. And the way he explained it to me was that when pests have population outbreak. So if there's a big infestation of locusts or something, birds can't actually respond fast enough to really affect the numbers. But during non-outbreak years, they can. So they decrease the baseline, as you'd mentioned. Yep, that's totally correct. So, and there's been a lot of recent research showing that birds do actually keep bug populations in check. And they keep them at a manageable level. So they prevent these massive outbreaks of bugs that are what is really, really destructive to farmers' crops. Something I'm interested in here is thinking about the timelines, the late 1800s.

Can you situate a little bit further, like how bird, economic or nithology and this idea of, well, let's study this by counting. Let's just look. We're going to get a, we're going to have an eagle. We're going to dissect it. We're going to count the number of mycinate over its lifetime somehow based on what's in there, like how it fit into sort of broader philosophies of government and management, because, you know, there were a lot of things also going around that time. And obviously there's the rise of,

like, Henry Ford and new ideas about managing a factory floor. And so it seemed to be, you know, an era of counting things and trying to apply scientific methods to things that maybe prior to that people just had intuitions for. Can you talk a little bit more about the sort of like the ideological era in which this field emerged? Yeah, for sure. So I might mention what. kind of came before the attitudes that came before economic or nithology. And during that time, or before this bureau develops, so, you know, and you read about this in attitudes and as far back as the 1840s, 1850s, people had this idea that either through divine design or through providence, all of nature kind of existed in this balance where, you know, bugs kept plant

populations in check, birds kept bug populations in check, other predators, had bird populations in check. And when nature was in this like state of balance, you wouldn't have these massive infestations of bugs. You know, things would be stable. But with kind of the settlement of the country and, you know, clearing forests to make fields, humans had thrown off this balance. And birds were the only force keeping bug populations in check. And so you have this scientific field of economic ornithology that develops in the 18th. 80s. It's not contesting these previous ideas. Instead, it's using these kind of like modern statistical scientific methods to kind of demonstrate that they're correct. Eating well shouldn't

be complicated, but somehow it turns into recipes, prep, cleanup, and half your Sunday gone. Factor solves all that. These are fresh, ready-to-eat meals designed by dieticians, delivered to your door and ready in just minutes. No prep, no cleanup, no excuses. And it's a lot of It's not just about convenience. You're getting real food, balanced nutrition, and zero artificial stuff. Meals that help you stay on track for all of your goals without the grind of doing it all yourself. Grilled chicken, roasted veggies, steak plates, postables. They taste like something you get in a restaurant, but they come out of your microwave in two minutes flat.

If time, cost, or effort have been holding you back from eating better, Factor just took those off the table. Right now, get 11 meals, free shipping, and free sides for life. Hurry, this offer won't last long. Go to Factor Meals.C.A. and use code fit. That's 11 meals, free shipping and free size for life, but only with the code fit at factormeals. Factor, Canada's number one ready-to-eat meal delivery service. Bell Pure Fiber Internet? It's fast, like really fast. And the offer, it's good, like really good.

Switch to Bell Pure Fiber, Canada's fastest internet awarded by Ucla, with plans starting at $60 a month with auto pay credit. whichever two-year term plan you choose, the price is guaranteed for two years. Fast internet, long ad. What's so worth it? Visit bell.ca for more details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. So I think there's a tendency when we read about economic ornithology to think that, you know, this is something that was popular in the late 1800s, early 1900s.

It's kind of fallen out of favor for the reasons we've discussed. But in some ways, you do see a revival of the more generalist, of attaching economic value to animals in modern day conservation. And shout out to another podcast here, but Radio Lab did a fantastic episode on this where they talked about, I think it was back in like 2014 or something. There was a hunter that paid $350,000 to go to Namibia and shoot a lion. And there was a huge uproar about whether or not that should be allowed. But one of the arguments for allowing that kind of sport of hunting where people can pay to go kill animals was, well, if you can put an actual monetary amount on the life of this particular animal,

then it gives people incentive to protect it. So there is still like an element of that theme running through some modern day conservation work, it feels. Right. And I think that's a really interesting question, and it's not an easy one. I think there's a lot of debate among conservationists about, you know, whether this is appropriate, whether this is more helpful than it is harmful. I think that there's a lot of different ways of trying to assign value to wildlife. I mean, I think the way that you mentioned where there's a specific price placed on, you know, the head of an individual animal is one way. And I think it's interesting that that's kind of related to almost consumption. Like you put a price on its head and what that lets you do is kill it, right? You kind of almost have this like ownership over this animal. But there's a lot of other ways of kind of establishing value or pricing wildlife that they kind of, you know, look at it from a different direction. So, so one way that ecologists assign value to wildlife is through something that they call ecosystem services. And that's related to, you know, it's kind of a similar line of thinking as economic ornithology where it's like you look at all of the different ways that animals and wildlife,

contribute value to humans. So sometimes it's through agriculture, sometimes it's through tourism and things like birdwatching. Like I'm a big birdwatcher and I've spent a lot of money on traveling to see birds and, you know, buying binoculars and things like that. So, you know, they, wildlife in that way contributes to the economy. Another way that they've, that some have suggested for putting a value on wildlife is through something that they call existence value. Like, you know, I've never seen a polar bear. I don't know if I ever will, but it's worth something to me to know that they exist. And, you know, so if it's worth $50, say, to all of us to know that polar bears are out there and to, you know, to just like appreciate that, you know, polar bears individually or as a species

are worth quite a bit to us. And I think your example of flaco is really interesting. This individual bird, you know, is worth, was worth quite a bit to the city alive. You know, there was a lot of, a lot of people went out and looked for it. People traveled from outside of the city to come find this famous owl. There's a lot written about it. And so it brought a lot of value, both kind of economic and, you know, sentimental to the city. I was going to say that there were polar bears at the Central Park Zoo, but apparently not. And I guess there was one that was euthanized due to an inoperable thyroid tumor at age 27 in year 2013. I feel like I saw I had a, no, I feel like I, Gus. I think I saw Gus years ago. But anyway, I guess the polar.

bear isn't there. So could you put a dollar value on, have people made attempts to put a dollar value on Flacco the owl? None that I've seen. Have you seen any Tracy? I haven't. I did look a little bit beforehand to see if I could see something like in terms of insurance. But I have a slightly different question. If Flacco was worth, if we could find a dollar amount for him and say like, well, he's worth a million dollars. Let's say the insurance company says he's worth a million dollars. Would he still be alive today? I don't know that that would have protected Flaco from flying into a building. Well, this is actually another debate within New York City is like what accommodation should be made so that birds are no longer flying into all these skyscrapers that we have.

Totally. And I think that there are effective protections for birds. There's bird safe glass. You can put stickers on windows to make sure that birds can see them and don't fly into them. But all of this, you know, carries a cost to the developer or to the city to incentivize it. And, you know, it has like a very real impact on the number of birds that are killed by flying into windows. There are around 600 million birds that are killed every year by flying into windows. And talking about value to the value of birds, like this is a pretty significant value across the continent to have these birds alive. It's hard to see that value if, you know, you just like live in a house and one or two birds hits your window every year. year. But thinking about birds as something that carries, you know, like an innate value that we can appreciate, but also like an economic value to our, you know, to agriculture and kind of that

shift and mentality, I think, can help individuals and help cities and help the country do things to protect birds. How concerned are you about the expansion of wind power and how big of a deal is that? I think that's an interesting question. The number of birds that are killed every year by flying into wind towers, you know, is around 150,000. end. The number of birds killed by flying into windows is 600 million. The number of birds killed by cats is about 2.4 billion. I was about to ask this question while staring. Wind is like hardly anything compared to these other categories. No. And I think it's a distraction. Interesting. Okay. I was about to ask the cat question while staring at our cat owning producers in the window.

Should we get rid of all the outdoor cats to save the birds? Should we put in restrictions? I'm going to take this very delightful sort of conversation, make angry half the population by one answer to another, turn into something controversial. It is a controversial question. It's been a controversial question for more than 100 years. I think if you want to protect birds, you can't have cats outside. And there's a lot of debates about the best way to keep cats outside and eliminate outdoor cats. And you look at how people talked about this question, again, 100 years ago when they were thinking of birds as protecting

our national security by ensuring our food supply. You know, they talked about it as a question of self-preservation, you know, whether we keep cats or not, because cats killed birds and birds protect our crops. As people said it 100 years ago, it's a question of cat preservation or bird preservation. I still don't get there. Just fly. Cats can't fly. Well, there's a lot of birds, you know, a lot of the birds that cats kill are baby birds. You know, they climb up the tree, they raid the nest, and they take out an entire bird family. Also, birds. Also, birds. Birds are, I mean, some birds specifically are kind of dumber than you would think. So my 13-year-old cat.

I won't try birds for just flying away. My 13-year-old cat many, many years ago, and he had like a whole bunch of health problems. He had, you know, hyperthyroidism and a heart murmur. He managed to catch a turtle dove, which admittedly is one of the dumbest birds in the world. They're the ones that, like, when you're driving down the street, they're in the middle of the road and they will not move until the last second. But yeah, even that cat managed to catch a bird once. All right, Robert Francis, author of the Bird History Substack, thank you so much for coming on all thoughts.

Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. Joe, I really enjoyed that conversation. Have I, are you interested in birds now? I am, I really enjoyed that. Am I interested in birds? I don't know. Do you want to come to my place and look at the birds?

We saw a bald eagle in our garden the other day. I do like seeing rare birds. And so I would like to see a bald eagle. No, I really enjoyed that conversation. You know what I was thinking about, you know, the field that we discussed, it's pretty incredible that economic ornithology was a respected field. It almost feels like it should be called like ornithologic accounting or something like that. I always sort of think that like accounting is a more legitimate form of economics than economics is. Oh, that's good line.

Yeah, a little spicy take for you there. But it seems like there's a lot to be said for fields where the primary method is like we're just going to count things. and we're going to count the number of birds, we're going to open up their stomachs, and we're going to count the number of mice, and we're going to count the number of grains that a typical mice eats, and then we're going to tally up the cost on one side and tally up the cost on the other side and see which is higher. Like, I find that to be a very interesting sort of like form of practice. I do also think that you can quibble with the methodology for some of this stuff

and talk about whether economic ornithologists were over. confident in the values that they were estimating. But it does help to focus people's minds and attitudes on the benefits of wildlife when you start actually attaching values to it. And I think we've seen instances of this over and over again, the vultures in India being another one. There was a mass dieout of vultures in India. And that ended up being extremely problematic and expensive. And before that, people hadn't really thought about, well, what is the value of these vultures. So I do think it's useful in that sense to like sit and think through all these different connections in the ecosystem and the value you're deriving from it, whether it's

in actual farming and growing things or, as Robert was saying, just in the idea that you get to enjoy the birds. You get to see Flacco flying high above the sky, although not anymore. RIP FACO. RIP FLACO, indeed. You know, I'm also just interested in this sort of U.S. government history. And this time when in the 1800s and then all through the 1900s where a lot of government bureaus and divisions and divisions of bureaus, et cetera, were about assisting this great process of turning the West, turning the land, whether it's agricultural land, into something

useful. And so you end up with things like the division of economic ornithology to help farmers and various bureaus that did or, you know, all the various bureaus that help build dams and build canals and turn the rivers into for irrigation and things like that. It's interesting to find all these little niches within the expansion of government that really were like providing these services, whether information services or sort of infrastructure services to the people are sort of like figuring out how to use the land. I like how you've come around to this because it's basically industrial policy. Yeah, right.

Yes, you get it. All right. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Wisenthal.

You can follow me at the stalwart. Follow our guest Robert Francis at RBFRNCS and check out his substack bird history. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armin, Dashel Bennett at Dashbot and Kel Brooks at Kail Brooks and thank you to our producer, Moses, Andam. For more OddLod's content, go to Bloomberg.com slash OddLots, where we have transcripts, a blog, and a newsletter, and go check out the Discord and chat with fellow listeners 247,

discord.g.g. And if you enjoy OddLots, if you like it when we do Natural History episodes like us, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes. Absolutely add free. Just connect your Bloomberg account to Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening. The news doesn't stop on the weekends. Context changes constantly. And now Bloomberg is the place to stay on top of it all.

Hi, I'm David Gura. Join us every Saturday and Sunday for the new Bloomberg this weekend. I'm Christina Ruffini. We'll bring you the latest headlines, in-depth analysis, and big interviews. All the stories that hit home on your days off. And I'm Lisa Mateo. and listen to Bloomberg this weekend for thoughtful, enlightening conversations about business, lifestyle, people, and culture. On Saturday mornings, we put the past week's events into context, examining what happened in the markets and the world. That on Sundays, we speak with journalists, columnists, and key political figures to prepare you for the week ahead. Join us as soon as you wake up and bring us with you wherever your weekend plans take you. Watch us on Bloomberg television.

Listen on Bloomberg Radio, stream the show live on the Bloomberg business app, or listen to the podcast. That's Bloomberg this weekend. Saturdays and Sundays starting at 7 a.m. Eastern. Make us part of your weekend routine on Bloomberg television, radio, and wherever you get your podcasts. What separates good leaders from transformational ones? I'm Jessica Chen, and in season two of Leading By Example, we'll sit down with executives like Grace Chen of Bertie Gray to find out. It's important to understand where you spike, but also really acknowledge where you don't and find people who can fill those gaps. Listen to leading by example executives making an impact on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.