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

Episode Date: November 7, 2017

Birds! Horned screamers! Winged pirates! 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.Follow Moore Lab of Zoology on InstagramMore episode resources and linksBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Hey, so I just wanted to say really quick, cool merch announcement. If anyone needs totes, and mugs, and hats, and all kinds of cool stuff, my friends Shannon Feltis and her sister Bonnie Dutch have been awesome at helping me set up a merch site. It's at oligiesmerch.com, and this week we just put them up, limited edition enamel oligies pins. In a pack of five, the first four episodes are each represented in this little cool pin, and then there's an oligies logo pin also. So they're super awesome, they're limited edition, so if you want them, get them.

Just wanted to tell you up top. Okay, on to the episode. Birds, birds, birds, birds, birds, birds, birds. Burbs, burbs, boids, chirpy chirps, flappy flappers. Last week I covered death and dying, and it was enlightening and shockingly not a bummer, but I wanted to get into birds to just kind of shake off that October mist. Just talk about birds. So I don't know how you feel about birds.

I've always had kind of a distant wonder about them, but I'm also like birds, you would never let me pet you, any of you, which is kind of a really bitchy way to evaluate an animal. It's like, can I pet it? No, I don't care. That's about to change. So listeners, you sent 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're insane. I mean, they fly first off, which is something that only superheroes and people on Angel Dust can do, 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, and their knees are sometimes backwards. So if you're a bird publicist, you'd be like, I don't even know where to start with your personal brand.

What is your deal? So let's let an ornithologist speak for them, if you will. Now I've been aware of the Moore lab of zoology on the Occidental College campus. PS 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. I just recorded this a few days ago 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.

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 Maley. Tell me what you ate for breakfast, I'll check your levels.

I had some tater tots, eggs, and bacon. Dude, 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 birder for a long time?

Side note, I edit from transcripts of interviews done by Artificial Intelligence, and this transcribed to, have you been a birger for a long time? Yeah, I've been a birger 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.

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. Why did you start liking birds when you were a kid? My parents had feeders in the backyard, and I would just spend hours staring out the window at the birds. 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 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' 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 genes? Yeah, I think so. What does it mean to be a birder? Because I'm not hip with 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. What is that like? How do you get jumped into that gang? So there's a whole range of birders. 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'd 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 any time a rare bird shows up, they'll chase it. So they'd 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 broken. 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. It's not a bird. It's 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 are like fish people. You know what I mean? PH fish people. I mean, no one follows schools. So have you ever been kind of like embedded with a group of really zealous birders? What do 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. 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 at 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. Umlaut's hyphens.

He's just got one lowercase. Like he entered it while he was on his phone. Like in line of 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. Oh, what's my point? 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. I have some birds that I'm particularly 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 Ridgway's Rail. They're only found in Salt Marshes in San Francisco, L.A. and San Diego and a few places in between. So obviously they're not doing great. They're endangered. James studied the Ridgway 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 whiteboard like when you were coming up with brainstorming names to get to name a bird? Well, so the scientific name was already decided because 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 Raylus obselitus.

Whoa. So I didn't want to go with obsolete rail because that's a little too dark. Yeah. It's a little insulting. Yeah. It's like, I'm right here. I know, but they're almost gone. So maybe.

And I went with Ridgway's 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. Yeah. Get over it. It's just because they're not used to it. Right. Now Ridgway's rail is, by the way, I've said Ridgway's rail. Ridgway rails.

Ridgway rails wrong several times. Ridgway's rail is, it's cute as hell. It's like this chicken size 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 Ridgway 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 U.S. named after him. So I wanted to pay homage to him and he described 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 Ridgway family to know about this bird. So I took a research tangent and I found out Robert Ridgway had one child named Audubon. And yes, he named his child after a bird painter. And Audubon, 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 Ridgway's brother was also a bird painter who worked at the L.A. County Natural History Museum. John Ridgway lived in Glendale. So at 9 p.m. on a Friday night, I started to gently stalk anyone with the last name Ridgway 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 his eye for subtle differences and different populations and understanding how birds live in this world was just amazing. 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 alight on a branch and then be gone. Is that like a fun game to you or do you ever get frustrated by that? I definitely get frustrated sometimes, but 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.

You've 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. What? Yeah. How is that possible? You're an ornithologist. I know. That's ridiculous.

Okay, listen up. This is crazy. So my first pair of binoculars, I really loved those. They lasted for 10 years and then 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 traumatic a story, but then we have binoculars here at the moral lab that I just use. What about the, so in Honduras that was doing field work? It was. Yeah. Is that probably, I'm sure that's the most dramatic thing that's happened, right? Or, I mean, the field work 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 in a lot of time in Alaska, all over the state. When you're doing field work, 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. Yeah. Yeah. Field work for ornithologists can involve danger, clearly.

And it sounds otherwise, kind of like camping, but also carrying so much equipment and while taking notes on everything and data and observations and you don't get much sleep. So on a recent expedition in Mexico. Yeah. 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, which is all about birds. Oh, is it? I don't know that movie. It's with Jack Black and Steve Martin and Owen Wilson.

It's all about these three birders who are trying to break the record for most species seen in the U.S. in one year, her and ABA area in one year. And you're just like, no, you got so much wrong. I don't know. I just don't want to, 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. Well, Bald Eagle sound pretty stupid. What do they sound like? 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?

You've been 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 it be the wild turkey, honestly, because turkeys are super smart. 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 because they're so smart and they have super good vision. I've lived in Alaska for long enough to see kind of what Bald Eagles really are.

Yeah, oh no. Which if you ever go to Homer, Alaska. I've been there. You've been there? Yes. Did you look at the dumpster behind the McDonald's because it was probably full of Eagles. No, I have to go back. Yeah, they're really scavengers.

Oh my God. 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. I saw one steal a flounder from a river otter and it's like, come on. The river otter is just finely caught as dinner and you steal it. It's just rude. That is a pretty American tradition.

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 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 Oss, a U.S. And she had a video that went viral a few years ago of a Bald Eagle and a fox chilling on her porch. I highly recommend just bring 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 got to go straight in there 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. They're 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 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 think frankly that makes him a poet. 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 great parrot, you're going to 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, that was 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? Mermoration. Mermoration. 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 screensaver someone would stare at in college while being on drugs in the dorms or something, but like birds. Because I look at it and 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 crowd think? How do they do that?

I have no idea. Okay. And next question. I could make something up. 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 to 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's 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. You know dinosaurs when I was a little kid.

Oh, really? I 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. 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 all have internal gonads too, which it would be weird if they didn't. Yeah, that would be. 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. There's nothing crazy and weird about that or anything? Nope. Yeah, there are these like little mini kidneys that rest on the top of their skull and they filter salt out of the blood at 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 droplet dripping off 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 off the hook of the bill. So they have a nass hole, I guess. So they're peeing out of their face. Pretty much. No big deal.

I wonder if they'll ever study that method of excretion in terms of like a desalination. Will they ever look at that like maybe we can attach that as a backpack so human seafarers 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 wear painter 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. 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 really strong sexual selection on males, that's put on them by females.

And in a lot of those situations, it's a, there's 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? Yeah. Polygyny is one male multiple females. Okay.

Got it. Polyandry is 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. Yeah.

And the birds that have probably the craziest like difference between males and females are these birds that do a thing called lecking. If you don't know what lecking is, it's 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 L-E-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. Married by David Attenborough, of course. 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. How did you feel about Portlandia's 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. Yep. Do you ever get sick of it or are you like bring it on?

No, I'm fine with it. Yeah. It makes it easier. Yeah. And everybody who would get me anything knows that just get them something with a bird. You'll be thrilled. Okay. I have some questions from listeners.

Okay. Are you ready? Yep. Warning. Some of these might be very stupid. Okay. Those are the best kind. All right.

We're going to start with Patreon listeners. They get first crack. Okay. But before we take questions from you, our beloved listeners, we're going to take a quick break for sponsors of the show. Sponsors. Why sponsors? You know what they do?

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So thanks for listening and thanks sponsors. Okay. Your questions. And John Worcester wants to know how fast do hummingbirds beat their wings and how many calories a day do they need? I don't know 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 and 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 feeders covered. If they don't get some sugar water after a long night, they're dead. They're chasing that dragon.

But they're also on a constant sugar high. No wonder why their heart rate is so high. At least it's not caffeinated. At least it's not like a monster energy drink in your bird feeder. That would be insane. Jordan S. wants to know, why do Australian magpies attack people during swooping season? So I'm not familiar with Australian magpies, but 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. Paul Hanley wants to know, what's the deal with vo-swifts and chimneys?

Swifts and chimneys. Do you know anything about this? I do. Well, first of all, it's Vox's Swift. Thank you. It was V-A-U-X and I went for the fancy pronunciation. I know. Everybody does.

Sorry. But the guy's last name was Vox, who it's named after. Gosh. I tried. I overshot that one. Yeah. No, it's okay. It's common.

Very, very common. 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. Yeah. You can tell them apart, but you almost never find them together. 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, 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 dialects. 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, he comes out with some leftover Fritos after lunch. He 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. Like, oh, that guy. Blake Hawkins wants to know, is there any hierarchy of intelligence of birds? Is there one species that are extremely intelligent and others that are maybe not so much? Yes, that's definitely true.

So the corvids, which are the crows, ravens and jays, magpies, those are among the smartest. They're probably the smartest songbirds, so passerines. And then parrots are incredibly smart. Birds like American coots. 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. No. Okay, this next question is from the Facebook group. Can owls really turn their heads 180 degrees? Yes.

Okay. Why? They have really flexible necks. Okay. Yeah, but they're also really adapted at. So owls have 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 sloth from Goonies or anything. Right.

If you open, but if you have a dead one, 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 flaps on either side or completely different heights. Wow. Yeah, it's neat. Oh, I had no idea. 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 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 at a frat party. Yeah, seriously. You would not want to go dressed up as a horned screamer to a Halloween party, 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. And they scream. You can hear them for over a mile and they're super territorial. So they have these huge wings spurs on their wings that they like try to kill each other with. Okay. Hell yes. What's up?

Are you kidding me? So the visual of this is like two angry, 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 weirder. You must get up in this. I'm going to 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. Yeah. 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, but it hens not so much. Okay. Yeah. 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 may quote 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 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 found out 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, it's more akin to a cloaca is what that means.

I think we should start calling people cloacas. Oh, this is so sad. Still, Ryan wants to know there are some birds that partner for life. Say one of them dies. Does the surviving bird re-partner and is there like a tinder for birds? The surviving partner does re, it finds a new mate. Okay. Yeah.

So they're, you know, it's all driven by the desire to reproduce. And so you're not going to 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've heard that penguins are maybe not as monogamous. Yeah.

So most monogamous birds are not fully monogamous. They're most, most of them are promiscuous. So they're socially monogamous, but they're promiscuous. There's some birds that do this to the, to an absolute extreme. There's some fairy wrens in Australia. They're, I think they're called superb fairy wrens. Side note, the bird names are killing me. 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 cause 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 of reasons. I 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 hairball.

No. So we caught it and pulled the hairball 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. Yep. Samara wants to know our 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 always 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 tape to the gate that said lost bird. And that was like, well, the bird made it. Yeah. I was like, hell yeah, man. That bird was like waiting for these wings to grow back. I'm out of here. 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? 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. 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. Everything from the two wheels at the bottom to like the wings. We've just made a big bird. Allison Throckmorton wants to know, does rice make some bird's stomachs explode? No. Oh, OK.

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. OK, that's good to know. Yeah. This question was asked by Darren Ficcarelli.

Ficcarelli, Darren Ficcarelli. 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.

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. Are they just entitled? Yeah, they have their park to themselves and they don't want you messing with it. And they're they're going to bite you and his 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, I don't mind that at all. OK, I would say the worst part is when I find. And a beetle infestation in the collection.

There's nothing that makes me feel worse than that is 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 to tell John and John is another ornithologist and an evolutionary biologist that you will meet in a few episodes. Very cool, dude, even when 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. 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 turned 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 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. It's like, I would do this. I do this in my free time. Like I actually get to get paid for it. It's great. Don't tell your bosses that. Well, they do it too.

So it's OK. So if you're like listening to this at the 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 alleyward.com slash allergies, 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. What was I going to say? Oh, yeah, also, you can see inside the more lab of zoology on Instagram. Their account is M L Z birds 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 and get on it. Um, if you ever want to submit questions for upcoming allergists, patrons on Patreon get first crack. So you can support there. You can also join the allergies 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.

I'm Ali Ward or allergies pod on Twitter. I'm also on Instagram at allergies and Ali Ward. So stay tuned for next week. I'm not quite sure what episode it's going to 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, allergites.

Bye. Nephology, serology, terminology.