Ologies with Alie Ward - Ornithology (BIRDS) Encore Presentation with James Maley

Episode Date: December 25, 2018

Birds! Horned screamers! Winged pirates! Just in time for the Audubon's winter Christmas Bird Count (which goes until Jan. 5) here is an encore presentation of an early episode. Professional bird-person and all around cool dude James Maley joins Alie to talk about bird mating, monogamy, the cult of ornithology, absurd birds, parrots that are smarter than your friends' kids, a surprising fact about owl ears and history's most tragically zealous bird nerds. If you love birds, you'll be at home. If a bird did you dirty, you'll open your heart and learn to love again.Moore Lab of Zoology on Instagram @mlzbirdsJames Maley on Twitter More links at www.alieward.comBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologiesOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter or InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter or InstagramTheme song by Nick ThorburnSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh hey, it's your little brother who gets up at 4.30 a.m. on Christmas and jumps on your face until you're awake because it's time to unwrap Tonka trucks and drink swiss mess with dehydrated marshmallows, alley ward, and it's the holidays kiddos so after asking Twitter if I should take a week off or not a lot of you said no bitch get to work I need a new app and I respect that but others convince me to just be like an alive human and hang out with my family and rest for a week so you're getting an encore episode of burbs now some of you might even be listening to this to pregame for the annual Autobahn

Society's Christmas bird count which great news I just found out goes until January 5th so if you're inspired after this episode to do some bird counting a little bird watching look up the Christmas bird count and join a group in your area you can do that you can meet new bird friends and if you don't think you care enough about birds yet to go outdoors in head to toe fleece in the winter just give me an hour give me one hour this episode's gonna make a bird nerd out of you just wait okay so this was recorded last year and compared to newer episodes it has way fewer bells and whistles and by that I mean DJ

horns but the passion is all there it has some bananas information you do not want to miss holy turkey butts I loved recording it but first a few things I just want to say up top a quick thank you to everyone who's been listening and sharing allergies and gramming and tweeting about it thank you to patrons at patreon.com slash allergies for supporting the show submitting questions you can join that club for a dollar a month thank you to anyone getting shirts and hats and totes at allergies merch.com and thank you for rating and subscribing thank you for the reviews on iTunes like a bird spotter hiding in the

bushes with binoculars I just delight in encountering your reviews and I read you a new one each week John Lamers thanks for saying Ali Ward is largely responsible for the strange looks I get walking to work I hope and bonus the pins in the merch section of the site are a great way of silently self-identifying as someone looking for this super nerdy conversation at your next social gathering thanks for that John Lamers okay on to the episode ornithology birds for birds birds birds boys chirpy chirps flabby flappers now the etymology of ornithology comes from the Greek ornice for bird pretty straight

forward now I don't know how you feel about birds I've always had kind of like a distant wonder about them I don't know if birds would let me pet them I'm like birds do you even like me and it turns out yes birds can think you're cool which was a surprise to me and maybe to you too okay here's last year's birds so listeners you send in questions before I record and I was shocked that a lot of the questions were like why is insert species such a dick and why do birds poop on me and what did I ever do to birds was essentially the gist of a lot of the questions so we definitely have a PR problem here and this episode I think

is going to turn you around because birds are yes they are insane and they have weird buttholes stay tuned and they can mock your voice and one of them can mimic the sound of a chainsaw also they're dinosaurs that are alive now if you're a bird publicist you'd be like I don't even know where to start with your personal brand what what is your deal so let's let an ornithologist speak for them if you will now I've been aware of the more lab of zoology on the occidental college campus p.s. obama went there for a few years and I was

really stoked to get a green light for a really last minute visit last week with the collections manager at the lab who oversees some really really rare specimens they date back some of them as far as the 1790s and it's down to earth dryly funny he was sporting a baseball cap and a plaid shirt and a beard he's like a mellow guy in a beef jerky commercial and he's so passionate and knowledgeable about birds I could have filled up three episodes just answering your questions but we chatted for a bit

and I asked all I could and I feel a kinship with birds that makes me want to wink at them and say hey man we're cool so please enjoy james mailie tell me what you ate for breakfast I'll check your levels I had some tater tots eggs and bacon that sounds like a dope breakfast and you are technically an ornithologist correct right yes so when did james become a card-carrying ornithologist versus a bird thirsty fanboy since I believe the summer of 2001

is when I started getting paid to conduct research on birds which I technically think is when you become an ornithologist is when they pay you or when you get a certain certification when you get paid okay yeah the first dollar exchanges and then you change your business card yeah have you been a burger for a long time side note I edit from transcripts of interviews done by artificial intelligence and this transcribed to have you been a burger for a long time uh yeah I've been a burger for a long

time I was super into birds when I was a little kid and then I didn't think birds were cool enough so I didn't pay attention to birds for a while then I got back into birds in high school and then in college I went full in you went full bird nerd yep yep so like there was a period in junior high where you were like birds know I like Miami Vice yeah exactly birds are like whatever we'll see you in a couple years yep um why why did you start liking birds

when you were a kid uh I my parents had feeders in the backyard and I would just spend hours staring out the window at the birds I I was like two oh so I was just really really into them I loved seeing the colors and just what they were doing and I actually memorized all the birds that came into the feeder and I tricked my parents into thinking I knew how to read because they would point to a bird in the field guide and I would say what it was but I couldn't read yet how old were you I don't know like two

something so you were like a mini bird genius yeah James's uncle is a big birder and his dad is into birds too I think they just thought it was natural to be into birds do you think it's in your jeans yeah I think so what what does it mean to be a birder because I'm not hip with like bird culture but I understand it is like the cult of ornithology like birders they're out there with the binoculars they count how many species they see per year like

what is that like how do you how do you get jumped into that gang so there's a whole range of birders um there's casual birders who just like birds and they'll have feeders up in their yard or not and just look at birds and appreciate them and not even really care that much about what they're seeing and how many they're seeing and then there's the other extreme which are listers okay so listers love numbers they really focus on seeing as many species as they can in a given place at a given time and for some reason

during this part I couldn't stop gasping because this whole subculture just totally delights and baffles me like I used to be a goth in college and every once in a while we take someone who was not goth to a club and they would be like what is happening we're like oh that guy smoking a cigarette out of a cigarette holder he fashioned from computer parts oh he's just a cyber goth like oh that's a Victorian goth over there so my introduction to this bird world is like if you took

a jock and ducked him into a basement at a gothic industrial dungeon and we're just like oh yeah there's a lot to learn and so anytime a rare bird shows up they'll chase it so they get in their car or get in a plane and fly there and try to see it and there's people that have done that for the world a big year for the world I think the record was just broke and it was like 6 000 something species it was just insane so they'll hear like a duck billed spoon bill

that is probably not a real bird is like was seen in Monterey and then they'll go try to see if they can catch that one before it flies somewhere else that's like the Dave Matthews band people or like fish people you know what i mean ph fish people none yeah i mean right no one follows schools so have you ever been have you ever been kind of like embedded with a group of of really zealous birders or would you say your work is kind of like being a professional lister I am not I don't keep a list

I keep track of the birds that I see generally and I know the ones I've seen and haven't seen I really enjoy birds and I just like watching them all the time but I generally don't chase okay so who has seen the most bird zizzes right now the record seems to be one John Hornbuckle who himself sounds like a type of bird like a Hornbuckle John boy anyway of the approximately 10,000 known species of birds John Hornbuckle has seen

9600 according to a master list at surfbirds.com I also find it really curious in looking this list that he's like the top birder in the world but he's very blasé and his name is an all lowercase everyone else's name upper lowercase umlats hyphens he's just got one lowercase like he entered it well he was on his phone like in line to the post office so casual he describes himself as a victim of an obsession for birding like most addictions

it has its dangers some of which I have fallen foul of but it has given me much pleasure and purpose to life I imagine John Hornbuckle standing in a window cupping a mug of hot herbal tea with these words running in a voiceover like a pharmaceutical ad now as I started getting deeper into the cult of birding research one story donkey kicked me right in the heart the record for one lister lifelong top birder belonged to a middle-aged woman named Phoebe Snetsinger who

was diagnosed with a fatal cancer and so she turned her attention toward birding to lift her spirits get this her cancer went into remission but she had developed a birding addiction that compelled her to travel around the world at times in severe peril she was attacked by five men with machetes and survived I won't even go into the details and she continued her treks she kept going she missed her mother's funeral she missed her daughter's wedding

in a quest to see more birds and cancer never took her life rather Phoebe was killed in a car crash in Madagascar while birding oh man whoo oh what's my point uh people love birds people love birds which leads me to realize birds are very lovable this is such a silly question I'm sure you get asked this a million times all the time do you have a favorite bird no okay I don't dang it um I have some birds that I'm particularly like fond of and mostly it's the birds that I've studied

that I've gotten to know really really well so there's these birds in California called Ridgeways Rail um they're only found in salt marshes in San Francisco LA and San Diego and a few places in between so obviously they're not doing great um they're endangered James studied the Ridgeway Rail for his dissertation and baller alert and actually I named them that you did yeah that was pretty cool me and my advisor did okay what was the what was the white board like when you're coming up with

brainstorming names to get to name a bird well so the scientific name was already decided because um that takes priority but if there's no standardized common name you can come up with whatever standard English name you want to the scientific name is railis obsoletus whoa so I didn't want to go with obsolete rail because that's a little too dark yeah um it's a little insulting yeah yeah I'm right here I know but they're almost gone so maybe um and I went with Ridgeways Rail which

is a mouthful people complain about it because it's hard to say but a lot of bird names are hard to say so yeah get over it it's just because they're not used to it right now Ridgeways Rail is I by the way I've said Ridgeways Rail Ridgeway rails Ridgeway rails wrong several times Ridgeways Rail is it's cute as hell it's like this chicken-sized bird it looks kind of like a cross between a duck and a pigeon and it's the color of like if you were holding a yam and dropped it in potting soil it's cute

and Robert Ridgeway was this really influential and amazing ornithologist he was responsible for understanding a lot of avian diversity he was the dude and he has no bird in the us named after him so I wanted to pay homage to him and he described um the first rails out here did you hear from his family at all I haven't no do they know maybe I don't know shoot him a tweet yeah I should I should try I really really wanted the Ridgeway family to know about this bird so

I took a research tangent and I found out Robert Ridgeway had one child named Autobahn and yes he named his child after a bird painter and Autobahn himself an ornithologist sadly died young in his 20s no kids so he had no grandkids so then I dove deeper and I found out that Robert Ridgeway's brother was also a bird painter who worked at the LA County Natural History Museum John Ridgeway lived in Glendale so at 9 p.m on a Friday night

I started to gently stalk anyone with the last name Ridgeway from Glendale California and I sent a few Facebook messages and friend requests saying hey I don't know if you're related to these ornithologists but I have some information about a bird that was named after them I even sent one message via LinkedIn none of my messages were returned but I tried I was starting to watch the people related to the bird watcher than a bird watcher I know anyway would you say that he's kind of your ornithological hero

a little bit yeah I mean he was doing ornithology at a time that was really really different but he has eye for subtle differences and different populations and understanding like how birds live in this world it was just amazing yeah I think about studying birds and what you do and I just can't imagine how big of a challenge it is when you see something and it'll just a light on a branch and then be gone does is that like a fun game to you or do you ever get frustrated by that I definitely get frustrated

sometimes but when you're when you bird as much as I do there's not you don't encounter that many birds that you can't identify pretty quickly from sight and or sound and so even if a bird lights on a branch for a second if I get a good look at it there's a pretty good chance I'll know what it is you know what's up yeah have you been through so many different pairs of binoculars to find the best kind I actually don't own a pair of binoculars at the moment yeah how is that possible you're an ornithologist

it's ridiculous okay listen up this is crazy so my first pair of binoculars I really loved those they they lasted for 10 years and I was robbed at gunpoint in Honduras and they stole it stole my pair so I lost my original pair oh my god and then I was given a pair by somebody else and I left those on a table at the San Diego Zoo not as dramatic a story but then we have binoculars here at the moral lab that I'd use that I just use what about that was so in

Honduras that was doing fieldwork it was yeah is that probably I'm sure that's the most dramatic thing that's happened right or I mean the fieldwork must take you all over the all over the globe right it does yeah I've spent quite a bit of time in Peru Panama Costa Rica Honduras and Mexico those are the main places I've been and a lot of time in Alaska all over the state when you're doing fieldwork what's a typical day like for you when you're not getting robbed at gunpoint

which by the way I'm so sorry that happened that's horrifying it was a while ago yeah fieldwork for ornithologists can involve danger clearly and it sounds otherwise kind of like camping but also carrying so much equipment and well-taking notes on everything and data and observations and you don't get much sleep so on a recent expedition in Mexico yeah we we were usually just exhausted and we'll just build a campfire and you know grab some tequila and just

chill out for an hour or two yeah so what is it about ornithology why do people go so crazy for birds well some social psychology studies point to perhaps like a holdover instinct in humans just to hunt stuff I get it I get it I've spent long hours late nights on amazon just looking up shit people go on ebay to buy old vhs tapes other people twitch for birds makes sense do you as an ornithologist have a favorite movie about birds

or at least favorite movie about birds I honestly generally don't watch movies about birds because it's usually so wrong like I've never seen the movie the big year um which is all about birds oh is it I don't know that yeah it's with Jack Black and Steve Martin and Owen Wilson and it's all about these three birders who are trying to break the record for most species seen in the US in one year her in ABA area in one year and you're just like no you got so much wrong uh I don't know I just don't you know it's like I don't even want to look

because I'm like one of those I'm one of those people who when I'm watching a movie and the wrong bird call is in the background I get super annoyed so a lot of movies for me I have to like just pretend that they're getting it right like the bald eagle yeah that's a classic one these are red tailed hawks screech yeah instead of well bald eagle sound pretty stupid so what do they sound like um they kind of sound like high pitched and squealing how do you feel about the bald eagle being our national bird rather than the

turkey was it ben franklin that said let's make the turkey our national bird that's my understanding although I don't really know if that's true but that's what I've always understood is that he wanted the wild turkey to be the national bird I would actually rather be the wild turkey honestly because turkeys are super smart um they might not seem it but they are they're very good at like outwitting us and you know people go to great lengths to shoot them um because they're so smart

and they have super good vision I lived in Alaska for long enough to see kind of what bald eagles really are yeah oh no which if you ever go to home or Alaska I've been there I've been there did you look at the dumpster behind the mcdonald's because it was probably full of eagles no but no I have to go back yeah they're really scavengers they oh my god they're sort of um there are some birds that only steal from other birds and other things they're called kleptoparasites

but bald eagles are not kleptoparasites they can catch their own food but more often than not I've seen them steal food and um like I saw one steal a flounder from a river otter and it's like come on the river otter's just finally caught his dinner and you steal it it's just rude that is a pretty American tradition I suppose so yeah yeah in terms of that Ben Franklin story okay so we were both a little bit wrong about this he didn't push for the turkey to be the national bird he just said later he threw a bunch of shade at it

in a private letter to his daughter he said for my own part I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as representative of our country he said he's a bird of bad moral character and he does not get his living honestly Ben Franklin also said that you know the turkey is a much more respectable bird it's a little vain and silly but it's a bird of courage so then I typed bald eagle plus dumpster into google and sure enough I found this look at these all these eagles I don't know what's going on in this dumpster

today something struck me as kind of eerily familiar about the voice and then I realized it was just the honey tones of an Alaskan who goes by Pam Oz a US and she had a video that went viral a few years ago of a bald eagle in a fox chilling on her porch I highly recommend just brewing yourself some decaf cozying up to her channel because it is like weird bald eagle diaries it feels like you accidentally fell into someone else's dream are there any myths or misconceptions

about birds that you're like I gotta go straight in there and and bust that that one bird brains is really aggravating because birds are incredibly smart I mean they're you know that smart on a level that we don't really appreciate I feel like so magpies can recognize themselves in a mirror for more on this mirror self-recognition test and its history and which animals look in it and aren't like hey I'm looking good listen to the episode on primates

there's not very many organisms that can do that right I mean cats dogs we think of them as kind of smart right but they can't figure that out but birds can their tool users I mean parrots are just unbelievably smart the most famous one is a parrot that was studied by Irene Pepperburg who studied this really beautiful African gray parrot and just incredible research done with that bird look this up and whoa oh shit y'all okay the Wikipedia for this bird just says alex in parentheses parrot he just has one name he's known like he's

Adele or Madonna so alex was an African gray parrot and researchers said his name stood for avian learning experiment so also when an acronym is is like made to spell a word by the way that's called a bacronym which delights me because I always wondered when you see an acronym that's like kind of like okay I guess that works that there's actually word for that bacronyms are sometimes created to name laws and the official title of the USA patriot act

from 2001 is uniting and strengthening America by providing appropriate tools required to intercept and obstruct terrorism it spells USA patriot okay this is a stretch so alex was said to have a 100 word vocabulary this parrot and the intelligence of a five-year-old human so what they say was really exceptional is that he appeared to understand what he said so he could describe a key as a key no matter what color or size it was he's like I know it's a key guys

you put a key in front of me I'm able to say that's a key I also find this adorable alex called an apple a binary which one linguist thinks is a combination of banana and cherry which are two fruits he was down with so he was in that lab making up portmanteaus and I I think frankly that makes him a poet uh he was also a bitch when he needed to be if he said want a banana and someone's like okay here's a nut he quote stared in silence asked for the banana again or took the nut

and threw it at the researcher or otherwise displayed annoyance before requesting the item again he's salty with those nuts man now alex died really young for a parrot he was only 31 years old and he died suddenly of heart trouble they think and a lot of well cared for african greys live like into their 60s if you get an african gray parrot you're you're gonna die with that parrot they live kind of forever so this is so precious just grab onto your hearts you guys alex's last words were you be good see you tomorrow

I love you and they were the same words he would say every night when Irene pepperburg left the lab feelings speaking of birds speaking are there any birds that in the wild have the most beautiful call to you I would say the one that I'm most commonly heard is sandhill cranes if you've ever been where there's big flocks of sandhill cranes they have this incredible trumpeting sound that they do in the air and they'll form these huge flocks in the winter they would come through fairbanks in the

fall and their calls just I don't know it's haunting it's really beautiful yeah how about when and I'm forgetting the name is it a murmur of birds murmuration murmuration can you explain at all how a murmuration works a murmuration is a flock of birds like starlings in these liquid looking formations they're just they're bogglingly gorgeous to watch it's so weird look it up it's like a living lava lamp in fast motion it's like a screen saver someone would stare at in college while being on drugs in the dorms or

something but like birds because I look at it I'm like oh that's that's like witchcraft like what is that's so beautiful and crazy is it fluid dynamics is it is it like crowdthink how do they do that I have no idea okay next question I could make something up but a little info on that so murmurations tend to happen when there's a predator around and the birds are evading it and this is really cool it doesn't matter the size of the flock

each bird is reacting not to the size of a huge flock but just the seven birds around it they calculated this they used physics I don't know some Italian researchers came up with it so it's like you're super in tune with your little posse and then a bunch of little posse make up this one big swirling diving massive monster posse I mean it's incredible I know I've loved watching it it's amazing I've seen it so many times and I've never seen them like crash did you care about dinosaurs when you were a kid or do you care about the link

that birds are dinosaurs or do you are you like dinosaurs can take it a hike take a hike don't care I love dinosaurs when I was a little kid oh really it was super into dinosaurs and I didn't make the connection between birds and dinosaurs and I don't think scientists had solidified that until I had gotten super into birds I like to remind myself every now and again that I'm going dinosaur watching you're going dinosaur yeah um correct me if I'm wrong

I feel like if Steve Jobs had to design an orifice it would be a cloaca so simple it's one thing so a cloaca is like the home button on an iphone it's really all you need it's a one-stop shop for liquid waste solid waste and then as bonus it's also a sex portal so birds get it on via what is called no joke a cloacal kiss they just smooch butts sometimes only for a few seconds now if you've heard gossip about like duck mating well a lot of it might be true

waterfowl gonads google it or you can go straight to an article on that geo called duck penises grow bigger among rivals which was written by a friend of mine jason goldman who's a wildlife journalist great icebreaker topics he covers some good ones now back to cloacas why is it reptiles and birds are just like I got a single port here don't worry about it they have a whole different physiological mechanism for waste excretion than we do and reproduction so yeah they

they all have internal gonads too which it would be weird if they didn't yeah that would be yeah but they have a really different sort of kidney system than we do and so they are able to produce their waste sort of as one product and shoot it out it's much more efficient they're not as good at excreting salt from their blood with their kidneys as much as we are but a lot of birds have a salt gland in their head well they have two salt glands in their head so it isn't all out of one so they excrete salt from a gland in their head

they do it's nothing crazy and weird about that or anything nope yeah they're these like little mini kidneys that rest on the top of their skull and they filter salt out of the blood it's super high efficiency so that they can drink seawater so like seabirds can drink the ocean water and it's no problem but if you're ever on the beach and you see a gull with a with a droplet dripping off at the tip of its bill that's salt water that's excreted from their salt gland so it comes out the nostrils and

drips down the off the hook of the bill so there they have a nass hole i guess yeah so they're peeing out of their face pretty much no big deal yeah um i wonder if they'll ever study that that method of excretion in terms of like a desalination you know like will they ever look at that like a maybe we can attach that as a backpack so yeah see fairers can i don't know i'm applying for a patent moving on i have a question about male and female birds okay why is it that at least in the human

species ladies or paint our faces we're dressing up men are like whatever i'm wearing beige again why is it in birds the men are very decked out and fancy and the ladies are like i'm a little bit bigger and i'm beige so that's not always the case in birds um there are some species in which the females are much brighter than the males yeah and they have a different mating system so in the vast majority of birds about 90 of species they're monogamous

and in a lot of those they're you can't tell males and females apart at all oh but in situations where there's a really strong sexual selection on males that's put on them by females um and in a lot of those situations it's a um there's a like a resource involved so there's like resource defense polygyny is one system where a male with a like really bright ornament who's like the strongest male defends a resource and all the females that come in can like mate with him

is that that's polygyny that's the opposite of monogamy yep polygyny is one male multiple females okay got it polyandry is uh one female multiple males oh and in those birds the females are brighter than the males really yep so whoever is kind of attracting the most mates is going to be as decked out mm-hmm yeah and the birds that have probably the craziest like difference between males and females are these birds that do a thing called lecking uh if you don't know what lecking

is it's no pretty fantastic so what happens is these males they all gather together and display they're not displaying to each other they're displaying to any female that will come in what you know how sometimes it's secretly awesome to have a cold because you're in quarantine you're not allowed to breathe on anyone so you can just sit alone and watch weird videos for like a week so i just sampled a few minutes of lecking videos it's le-k-k-i-n-g and i want to go lick some doorknobs

i just want to get up in some nyquil and some of these videos oh they're so good and so they just do all these crazy elaborate displays and the one who's looking the best and is displaying the best gets the females it's a miss universe pageant but with male birds pretty much yep it's really incredible do you have a favorite documentary about birds life of birds yeah yeah the whole thing yeah is it a series yeah it's a six part series by bbc nice narrated by david attenborough of

course um i watched planet earth the albatross portion where he was waiting for his mate to come back i was like should i be crying right now because i am yeah you should be okay yeah how did you feel about portlandia sketch about put a bird on it i loved it i agree if you put a bird on it people will buy it i'm the same way it doesn't matter like if i see a product with a bird on it that will buy it do people give you a lot of birdie gifts yes all birds yeah yeah books everything

do you ever get sick of it or are you like bring it on yeah i'm fine with it yeah it makes it easier yeah and everybody who would get me anything knows that just get him something with a bird he'll be thrilled okay i have some questions from listeners are you ready yep warning some of these might be very stupid okay those are the best kind all right we're gonna start with um patreon listeners they get first crack okay but before we take questions from you our beloved listeners we're gonna take a quick break for sponsors of the show sponsors why sponsors you know what

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to them so thanks for listening and thanks sponsors okay your questions and john worster wants to know how fast do hummingbirds beat their wings and how many calories a day do they need i don't know the question the answer to either of those questions okay i'll look it up i could google it all right john i looked it up here's the deal the fastest recorded rate is about 80 beats per second but the average is around 53 beats per second and these tiny birds consume between 3.1 4 and 7.6 calories a day which

totally non scientific estimate i think that's like a sip of soda but i know that so hummingbirds the smallest hummingbird on earth the bee hummingbird in cuba has a heart rate of 1200 beats per minute so super high metabolism and they have to drink some nectar like pretty much as soon as they wake up so i have hummingbird feeders at my house and they're out there well before dawn the feeder's covered um if they don't get some sugar water after a long night

they're they're they're dead they're chasing that dragon but they're also on a constant sugar high no wonder why their heart rate so high yep at least at least it's not caffeinated at least it's not like a monster energy drink in your bird feeder that would be insane um jordan s wants to know why do australian magpies attack people during swooping season so i'm not familiar with australian magpies but um i'm guessing that that's when they're nesting and they want you to get away from their nest or they're

young i mean that's usually the answer to why a bird is swooping at you that means get away from my babies yep okay so get away from their babies yeah that's how you stop that exactly um paul handley wants to know what's the deal with uh vo swifts and chimneys swifts and chimneys do you know anything about this i do well first of all it's vox's swift oh thank you it was it was v a u x and i went for the fancy pronunciation everybody does sorry but the guy's last name was vox who it's named after um gosh you got i i tried i overshot that one yeah no it's

okay it's common very very common um they're super similar but they're basically just eastern and western replacements for one another so vox's are only in the west and chimneys are only in the east you can tell them apart but you almost never find them together so you can pretty much know which one you're looking at depending on where you are zoe wants to know is bird watching a gateway drug to ornithology it can be okay yeah so watch yourself unless you want to become an ornithologist and start getting paid for it don't get into birding it's not a bad gig

michael um said imbaga said how smart are crows because they definitely seem like they're watching me plotting something crows are incredibly smart and they are watching and plotting something so they can recognize faces of people they all also have their own dialect so they have their own voices and they can recognize each other by voice they all sound the same to us but they're not there's some really really cool studies that people have done especially in seattle like using masks to like see if crows really can recognize individual faces and they can oh my god so they might be like oh i know that guy comes out

with uh with some leftover fritos after lunch you might be like i hate that guy he's always by my nest yep totally so don't fuck with a crow no no don't do it they know you yep like oh that guy blake hawkins wants to know is there any hierarchy of intelligence of birds is there one species that extremely intelligent and others that are maybe not so much yes that's definitely true um so the corvids which are the crows ravens and jays magpies those are among the smartest they're probably the smartest um songbirds so passerines and then parrots are incredibly smart birds like american coots uh just the

fact that it's called an american coot it's a coot i know so if you ever look at a coot and they're very common and most people just don't pay any attention to them they have a huge body and a tiny head they're just they're cute but they're really stupid they sound like your drunk uncle at the holidays who makes sexist remarks that everyone ignores american coot pretty much okay this next question is from the facebook group can owls really turn their heads 180 degrees yes okay why uh they have really flexible necks okay yeah but they're also really adapted at so owls have um ears at different heights on their head oh one's over here one's over there yeah so one's higher than the other and that way they can like more they can better get sound

they can like triangulate sound so that if they hear like a little mouse that's running behind them they turn their head all the way around then they can hear exactly where the mouse is and go get it they don't look wonky no they don't you know they don't look like like sloth from goonies or anything right if you open but if you have a dead one um we had one that just got hit by a car not too long ago well a couple years ago but and if you open it up yeah you could see the the flaps on either side or on completely different heights yeah that's neat oh i had no idea um what's the most absurd bird ever i think the most absurd bird and also a little bit scary is called a horned screamer it's a great name um and i would i would recommend everybody to look it up there's some great

youtube videos of horned screamers screaming a horned screamer sounds like the worst guy to frat party yeah seriously you would not want to go dressed up as a horned screamer to a halloween party um but they have a giant bony feather coming out of their head so they're sort of like a unicorn in that respect but they're related to geese sort of but they have a bill like a vulture and their feet aren't webbed oh no then it's and they scream you can hear them for over a mile um oh my god and they're super territorial so they have these huge wingspers on their wings that they like try to kill each other with okay hell yes i look this up are you kidding me so the visual of this is like two angry uh hairy toddlers screaming at each other honking like ping-pong back and forth

but each with a single bouncing like a needle-like spike emerging from the top of their heads so whatever you're picturing in your mind trust me the reality is is weirder you have you must get up in this um i'm gonna get a big horned screamer tattoo right across my back and shoulders lily masa wants to know why do we call people chickens when chickens are actually mean and cocky as fuck that's a good question i don't know chickens are kind of scared generally i mean they're a little flighty maybe that's why they're so mean is because they're scared well i would say roosters are mean yeah it hands not so much okay yeah i'll look into that all right i looked into chicken etymology and i didn't come up with much but i did find

so many entries on english as a second language forums asking if i make one directly i would like to know that what is meaning don't be chicken and how can use it it's a good question now to be fair i'm not a french as a first language speaker and i have always wondered why if someone is mad at you in france they call you a duck because can canard in french is duck and my mom always told me if someone calls you a duck in french you're really you're in some hot water now i just round out at looking at this that non-french speakers often mishear that and what they're really being called is a conard which in english does not mean duck it is more uh it's more akin to uh cloica is what that means i think we should start calling people cloicas oh this is so sad um still ryan

wants to know there are some birds the partner for life say one of them dies does a surviving bird repartner and is there like a tender for birds the surviving partner does re oh it finds a new mate okay yeah so um they're you know it's all driven by the desire to reproduce and so you're not gonna have a bird that suddenly turns that off even though it's mate died and a lot of birds seem like they made for life but they don't they actually switch partners every year yeah so we've been led wrong like i i've heard that penguins are maybe not as monogamous yeah so most monogamous birds are not fully monogamous their most most of them are promiscuous so they're socially monogamous but they're promiscuous um there's some birds that do this to

an absolute extreme there's some fairy rinds in australia uh i think they're called superb fairy rinds side note the bird names are killing me um it's so out of control that sometimes not a single egg in a female's nest was laid by her or was sired by her partner so that every single egg that's in her nest she copulated with another male get a girl and but it looks as though she is partnering with and rearing them with one male yeah um does the male know about this i mean he must because he's he's doing it too yeah he's doing it too with every other female in the area so it's kind of like a like a new age we're together but we're not shackled to one another exactly do you think the people use birds and their monogamy or lack of monogamy to justify

their own behaviors definitely okay yeah uh heather ennis wants to know why do i always see pigeons with one clubbed stumpy foot i think maybe that that isn't an accurate sample population uh it's for a couple reasons i'd love that he has an answer for this so often they'll get something stuck on their foot like spoiler alert it was a tangly hair ball no so we caught it and pulled the hair ball off it but i think that's it they their feet they're all they're always walking around on the ground yeah getting into things and so i think yeah they just get into something that tangles on their foot and then they lose it street birds man yeah samara wants to know are bird cages cruel and should we give them big avarice or just not have them as pets i think we

should just not have them as pets yeah um bird cages are are cruel birds meant to live and fly around the world it's like we saw something that has evolved to fly and decided they shouldn't anymore and keep them in our house it's just kind of rude i used to go on this walk beautiful house beautiful neighborhood and it had this one circular window up on the top floor and there was a bird cage next to it and i for like a year or two i walked past and i was like man what's that bird thinking that bird's like come on man like in a mansion granted but in a cage behind this circular like porthole window and i was like man then one day i walked by and there was a the window was open and there was a note taped to the gate that said lost bird oh that was like well the bird made it

yeah like hell yeah man that bird was like waiting for these wings to grow back i'm out of here and i got like kind of happy and i was like dude you're never getting your bird back ginger larson wants to know what can we learn from birds uh so much i mean there's so many they can do so many incredible things that we're not even close to being able to do like fly for example with their arms yeah like fly and they can migrate these incredible distances they can navigate using the stars i mean there's so many things that they have learned how to do and evolved to be able to do that we can't and you know we rely on these various systems to be able to do what we can right cough the internet and cell phones cough but they can fly way better than we can so yeah yeah so we can learn we've

already learned so much about aviation from birds i mean hello every time you get an airplane you're like hi it's a big metal bird yep everything from the two wheels at the bottom to like the wings we've just made a big bird allison um throckmorton wants to know does rice make some bird stomachs explode no oh okay that is a myth oh it is a lot of birds eat rice huh yeah so if you're having a wedding you can still get pelted with rice yes oh who started that i don't know i mean we can eat dried rice and it doesn't make our stomach explode they don't have like a crop or something where it expands or i mean they birds can eat like bones so they're they can handle some rice okay that's good to know yeah this question was asked by darin fiturelli fiturelli darin fiturelli

sorry sorry what is the worst bird and why is it a canada goose i feel like they came into this with an agenda they really did and i completely understand canada geese are just so mean they're really really mean um but canadians are so nice canadians are nice it's not their fault that the geese are so mean the geese they're just really protective and then they have adapted to us by nesting in all these parks and um are they just entitled yeah they have they have their park to themselves and they don't want you messing with it and they're they're gonna bite you and hiss at you and chase you two last questions what is one thing about your job that you don't like the worst part of your job and then we'll ask with your favorite part or your favorite moment

on your job has been what's the shittiest thing about being an ornithologist is it getting pooped on no okay i don't mind that at all okay i would say the worst part is when i find um an abedal infestation in the collection oh there's nothing that makes me feel worse than that it's like when i go out in the collection and i find damaged specimens kind of regardless of how they're damaged it just makes me so mad and it just ruins like my week i get so angry i like tell john and john is another ornithologist and an evolutionary biologist that you will meet in a few episodes very cool dude he gets angry and yeah so it's that that is by far the worst and that's sort of like a minor thing it doesn't happen a lot but it really is like my job as a collections manager is

to like maintain the integrity of this collection and like that's the job yeah and when i find that that's not taking place it just makes me so angry so then i dump a bunch of mothballs in there and freeze all the birds so they kill everything but you're just like it's like hulk turn into hulk yeah i mean i basically should just leave because i'm just going to be such a grouch for the rest of the day and then what about the your favorite thing about what you do i think the favorite my favorite thing about what i do is i get paid to study birds i mean just to be able to do that and like get paid to do it it's incredible especially since some people are spending literally their retirement chasing birds around the globe and you're like negative

i'm getting the money yeah i would do this i do this in my free time like i actually get to get paid for it's great don't tell your bosses that well they do it too so it's okay so if you're like listening to this is a bus stop and you see a bird just say to it hey man i know more about your butt and your brain than i ever thought i would and birds they're pretty cool little muffins so to watch any of the links that i mentioned you can go to alleyword.com where i kind of like flaccidly post a blog a lot of links up there hopefully it'll be up at the time you're listening to this i don't know guys it's my birthday and i'm i'm recording this outro in my closet because the sound is good here i just i want to get this episode up that's so that sounds so pathetic but

i'm having a pretty good time um what was i gonna say oh yeah also you can see inside the more lab of zoology on instagram their account is mlzbirds and they sometimes give tours of a lab they're doing one through atlas obscura november 11th here in la if there's still tickets left get on it um if you ever want to submit questions for upcoming oligists patrons on patreon get first crack so you can support there you can also join the oligies podcast group on facebook it's a good group of people so if you're a dick don't don't join but if you're but if you're not then hop into it because it's a party um i'm alley ward or oligies pod on twitter uh i'm also on instagram at oligies and alley ward so stay tuned for next week i'm not quite sure what episode it's gonna be yet

i'll figure that out later but um it'll probably be full of stupid questions for smart people because honestly i kind of think that they secretly like it and i don't want to know if that's not true to be honest all right oligites bye i guess this was before i started saying bye