Science Friday - Nuclear Plant Decommissioning, Fauci Kid’s Book, Pigeon Vs Shoebill. Sept 24, 2021, Part 2

Episode Date: September 24, 2021

Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant To Say Goodbye To Its Radioactive Waste Just before Thanksgiving, the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant in Plymouth is expected to reach a historic milestone. All the radioactive fuel that generated electricity—and controversy—for nearly half a century will finally be removed from the reactor building. It will be stored outside in special steel and cement casks. The rare occasion will be celebrated by both supporters and opponents of the plant. But as the decommissioning of Pilgrim proceeds, concern over the long-term safety of the highly radioactive waste continues. Even though Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant stopped producing electricity two years ago, there are still armed guards in watchtowers, surveillance cameras spread over the site, mazes of barbed wire fences and concrete vehicle barriers.  Bruce Gellerman, a senior reporter at WBUR in Boston, Massachusetts, explains what the decommissioning process has been like and the future of nuclear power in the Northeast.     Dr. Fauci’s Life Illustrated In A New Book For Kids Dr. Anthony Fauci became a household name at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, he’s the subject of a children’s book too: Dr: Fauci: How a Boy From Brooklyn Became America’s Doctor. The book takes us back to Fauci’s childhood filled with games of baseball in the streets of Brooklyn, bike rides to deliver medications for his family’s pharmacy, and his long history of asking questions about how the world works. Author Kate Messner talks to Ira about the surprises she found in Fauci’s life story, the value of showing kids that scientists were once children too, and why curiosity is such an important value to teach children.     A Charismatic Match-up Between Two Feathered Friends It’s the third and final matchup of this fall’s Charismatic Creature Carnival, our celebration of six overlooked, and often unfairly maligned, species that deserve a chance under the spotlight. Our audience submitted the carnival candidates, but only one will be crowned the very first inductee into the Charismatic Creature Corner Hall of Fame. This week, our match-up is between two fabulous, feathered creatures: the pigeon and the shoebill stork. Defending the pigeon is Elizabeth Carlen, postdoctoral research fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. Representing the shoebill stork is Judith Mirembe, shoebill researcher and chair of Uganda Women Birders based in Kampala, Uganda.  Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour, we'll talk about a new book about the pandemic aimed at young readers, and we'll consider the pigeon and shoebill stork in our charismatic creature carnival. But first, it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KER News. St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance.

The Pilgrim nuclear power plant in Plymouth, Massachusetts, is nearly half a century old. It's also been powered down for more than two years. By Thanksgiving, the plant will reach a milestone. All the radioactive fuel that remains inside will finally be removed, and that is a win for both opponents and supporters of nuclear power in the region. But this is highly radioactive waste, after all, and concerns continue over the long-term safety of the materials. Bruce Gellerman, senior reporter at WBUR in Boston, takes us inside the decommissioning of a nuclear power plant. The Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant stopped producing electricity two years ago, but there are still armed guards in watchtowers, surveillance cameras everywhere, and mazes of barbed wire fences, and you're questioned, inspected,

and scanned repeatedly before you enter Pilgrim's Inner Sanctum, the reactor. So we're going to go through the primary radiological checkpoint to get into the, radiologically controlled area. David Noyes knows Pilgrim inside and out. He worked here for 32 years and came out of retirement to lead the cleanup. A lot of us have stepped up to the challenge to decommission the site. We made a commitment when we were operating that it would be our responsibility to see this through, and that's really what we're working toward now.

Pilgrim had a troubled 47-year-long history. Several times, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission called it the worst-run reactor in the nation. When it shut down in 2019, Holtek International bought it reportedly for $1,000. In exchange, Holtek got access to a billion-dollar decommissioning trust fund paid for by utility customers. Now the plant is being dismantled. This is the reactive vessel head that was on top of the reactive vessel. The reactor vessel was that small? Yes.

The fuel was very densely packed inside of it. It's not very large. Uranium pellets packed into bundles called fuel assemblies powered the reactor. Each pellet, the size of a pencil eraser, generated the energy equivalent of a ton of coal, without the carbon emissions. In the reactor, the fuel produced enough electricity to power 700,000 homes, but became intensely hot and radioactive, deadly for tens of thousands of years. Spent fuel assemblies were removed and submerged in a deep pool above the reactor to cool,

says Holtek spokesman Pat O'Brien. You know, before they were ever irradiated, once they went in the pool, that was the last time they saw the light of day. You know, they were just into the reactor, and then once their service life has ended, they went into the pool. The pool stored over 4,000 spent fuel assemblies, five times more than it was designed to hold. There was no place else for them to go.

For decades, the Department of Energy has failed to make good on its legal obligation to bury the waste from the nation's commercial nuclear power plants. So for the past year, technicians and special jumpsuits have been removing the Pilgrim's highly radioactive assemblies from the pool and putting them into special concrete storage casks. David Noyes describes the choreographed procedure. The operator on the refuel bridge has a grapple and it goes down into the spent fuel pool and it grapples an individual fuel assembly. You can see right here in the picture there's a fuel assembly being loaded into the spent fuel pool and it goes down into the spent fuel pool. the multi-purpose canister. That's all happening underneath 16 feet of water.

Each stainless steel canister holds 68 fuel assemblies. It takes about three days to load a canister into a huge concrete cask. In all, there'll be 62 casks, each weighing more than 350,000 pounds. Holtek makes the canisters in casks. The company owns five shut down nuclear reactors, but never decommissioned one. And during a dry run, at Pilgrim, it hit a snag when a dummy assembly didn't fit into a cask. That problem was solved, but there was one major hurdle Pilgrim hadn't planned for, moving the megaton casks outside. Down to this level of detail that was not considered at that time. So David Noyes says workers had a jerry-rig a solution. It was never the intention to have to move fuel out of the reactor

building, so all this rail system was designed after the fact. The rail carries casks to a huge door leading outside. A heavy lift device moves them to a special storage pad nearby, but the pad can hold just 40 casks. You can see that we've almost used up all the site that we have available on this first pad. You can see that it's almost full. That's where the Goldhofer comes in. It's a huge 80-wheel flatbed transport vehicle.

It crawls at half a mile and a half. hour. Actually, it demonstrates the pace for decommissioning Pilgrim is picking up speed. The Goldhofer carries casks to a new bigger pad further away from the rising tide of Cape Cod Bay. The independent spent fuel storage facility is the size of a high school gym, a gym covered in concrete, three feet thick. So far, half a dozen casks have been moved there. The name of the game now, says David Noyes is cask consolidation. So we will eventually shrink it down to just the pad that has the fuel assemblies on it. And then the other areas of the plant while we decommission will be essentially an industrial security operation. Massachusetts Attorney General got Holtec to agree to

agree to stricter cleanup standards than the feds require. And the company has to keep a quarter of the billion dollars from the decommissioning trust fund and reserve. Just in case it runs out of money before the job is done. Pilgrim had 600 workers. Now they're about 160 decommissioning the plant. After decommissioning, there'll be just 60 security workers guarding the storage pad indefinitely. David Noyes says barbed wire fences and vehicle barriers are all part of the security plan. So the longer it takes for a bad guy to get to an area where they might be able to do radiological sabotage, the more efficient we can be at deploying. the security of force to deal with that, whatever the threat might be.

A hawk circles high above the new cast storage pad. Federal law prohibits low-flying drones over the site, but airplanes are allowed. The thinking airport security should prevent attacks. Holtak's Pat O'Brien says specific threat scenarios are secret, but the steel and concrete casks guaranteed for 25 years can protect the radioactive waste for a century if need be. We have simulations where we've flown missiles into these. It does not breach the internal canister. We have scenarios where you would take an F-16 loaded with fuel and fly it into it,

and they do not breach a canister. But critics charge the casks aren't secure. The storage pad is near a public road in plain sight. If I can eyeball those casks, somebody with malicious intent could do some serious damage. Activist Diane Turco, founder and executive director of Cape Downwinders, has opposed Pilgrim for nearly four decades. She says she's repeatedly gone on the Pilgrim property and near the storage pads undetected. And I was there for more than, well, about a half an hour, and nobody ever came out.

Terco is a board member of a community advisory group that meets regularly with Holtec and the NRC. Another long-time anti-nuclear activist is Mary Lampert. She's head of Pilgrim Watch and a member of the board of a community advisory group that meets regularly with Holtec and the NRC. Lampert says she recently received an email from a pilgrim whistleblower. A security worker on site told the NRC that there are not enough security workers there now and have not done the training that they claim to have done. That is what the worker said. The NRC in Massachusetts Attorney General say they're reviewing the whistleblower's claims.

Haltek says the charges aren't true. Legally, the company has until 2068 to decommission Pilgrim, but Holtek plans to finish the job in just five years. By then, it hopes regulators will allow it to build an interim storage facility in New Mexico, where spent fuel from Pilgrim and other old nuclear reactors can be stored for a century or longer until a final disposal site is found. Meanwhile, at the new storage pad at Pilgrim, the plant's radioactive legacy that generated so much of our electricity stands sealed in giant

stainless steel and concrete casks waiting for that day. That story was by Bruce Gellerman, senior reporter at WBUR in Boston. And Bruce joins us now to answer some of the questions that remain as the Pilgrim Nuclear Plan continues its decommission. Hi, Bruce. Nice to have you with us today. Thank you very much for having me. Let's talk about this. Now this nuclear waste is being put into casks, but then what?

I mean, what happens for the long term? Well, it has been a long term. I mean, it goes into these things, as you say, these dry cast storage things. They're giant soup can looking devices that are supposed to be keeping this stuff basically safe and isolated from the rest of humanity for an indefinite period of time. You know, we've been in this nuclear era for, you know, 70 years. And all the waste has been going. from these commercial reactors, at least, has been going into these giant soup cans.

It's been a game of, I guess you'd call it, you know, kick the storage cask down the road because they've been sitting on all of the nuclear reactors that have been decommissioned so far. So we've got like, 67 sites and 34 states with these things just sitting there. So this isn't just a problem at the Pilgrim plant, it sounds like. Yeah, you know, all the plants have to keep their waste because the federal government, didn't make good on their promise to collect all this stuff, take it off site, and put it someplace permanent. It was supposed to go to Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Ah, yes, I remember that.

I'll bet you do. You know, it turns out to be a $19 billion hole in the ground that's been closed up because of political and technological difficulties. And now they don't have any idea of where to put this stuff. Yeah. And of course, they're talking about storage for tens or hundreds of years, but we know that those weights are going to be a around for tens of thousands of years? Yeah, this stuff. I mean, you've got plutonium 237, 239. This stuff has a half-life of 24,000 years. We're talking essentially forever. So how is the region then replacing the nuclear power? What are they substituting swapping in? Well, that's a really good question, because these things were really powerful reactors. Even the small ones like Pilgrim, Pilgrim powered like

700, 700,000 homes. You pull the plug on one of those babies, and you, and you, you, you, you're got a problem, we have a problem. You know, we only have three reactors left in New England. They produce 25% of our energy, and all of that is carbon-free energy. So we've really got to grow very, very, very quickly, renewables, offshore wind and solar. Okay, well, we'll follow you, Bruce, and see how things work out there. Thanks for taking time to be with us today. You bet. Take care, Ira. Bruce Kellerman, senior reporter at WBUR in Boston. We have to take a break. And when we come back, What's it like to write a kid's book about a famous scientist when he was a boy? We talked to the author of a new biography of Dr. Anthony Fauci.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Long before he was a doctor making weekly press briefings about a strange new virus called COVID-19. Anthony Fauci was a kid, just like any other. He wrote his bike. He played sports with his friends. and he asked a lot of questions. The childhood of the boy who would grow up to become known as Dr. Fauci is the subject of a new book for children. The book traces how young Anthony learned to be a curious and patient problem solver

and how he used those skills in his life as a doctor and later as a sleuth of infectious diseases like AIDS, Ebola, and COVID-19. Children's book author Kate Messner is with me. The book is called Dr. Fauci, how a boy from Brooklyn became America's doctor. Welcome, Kate. Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here with you. Tell me how you chose Dr. Fauci as a subject for a book. Well, to be honest with you, I was working on a completely different book in spring of 2020, called The Next Scientist, all about what the childhoods were like for people who grew up to make contributions in science and public health. So as part of the research for that book, I had sent emails to a number of living scientists. asking about their upbringing, and Dr. Fauci was among those. And what he wrote to me was, I was not thinking very much about science as a young boy. I mostly played a lot of sports,

stickball and other fun games in the streets of Brooklyn where my family lived. I was a pretty good athlete and loved baseball and basketball. My interest in science and health came about when I was delivering prescriptions for my father's pharmacy. I would deliver medicines to people on my Schwinn bike. And in doing so, I became aware of illness, the need for medications, and the fact that people needed such medical help, and those impressions stuck with me. And then he went on to talk about, you know, playing basketball, being the captain of the basketball team in high school and eventually finding his way to medicine. But that story of a young Tony Fauci, you know, playing stickball in the streets of Brooklyn and riding around the neighborhood at nine or ten years old on his Schwinn bicycle delivering prescriptions. As a children's book author, I could immediately see the illustrations that might go with that story.

And I realized, because I do a lot of Zoom visits with classrooms and libraries and talk with a lot of kids, that they were very curious about this man that they saw on the news every single night in the early days of the pandemic. He'd be offering, you know, facts and comfort at a time when those things were hard to find. And so that was what made me think that there could be a separate book just about Dr. Fauci's life, mostly for the purpose of inspiring kids who might want to be our science. scientists and problem solvers of tomorrow. Could you give us a little sample? Could you read a bit for us from the book? Sure. Let me read you the first pages here.

Anthony Fauci was always asking questions, wondering about the world, from the tropical fish in his bedroom aquarium, to the vast oceans of sea life, the blazing stars and spinning planets in the pictures of his encyclopedias. How did it all work? With a wide open mind, Anthony searched. for answers. His family encouraged that curiosity. When the nuns at his school said you had to go to mass each week in order to get into heaven, Anthony wondered about his grandfather, an Italian immigrant who spent his Sundays over steaming pots of pasta and bubbling red sauce. Anthony asked his grandfather

why he didn't go to church. When I make you all the good food, that's my mass, his grandfather answered. So don't worry about me. I'm going to be fine. Anthony's dad ran a drugstore. While his mom and older sisters served customers at the cash register, Anthony zipped around the neighborhood on his Schwinn bicycle, delivering prescriptions. Sometimes he'd get a nickel for a tip. Anytime Anthony struggled with homework, his father reminded him that every problem has a solution.

Don't get discouraged. Don't run away because you don't understand the problem. Think about it carefully. and try to work it out. Anthony learned to start with wondering, then gather evidence and keep an open mind. So those are the opening pages of the book. And it's interesting that last page, his advice from his dad, is something that a number of educators have emailed me about saying, can we get a poster of this? I, you know, I copied that page and put it up on my classroom because it's such a model for problem solving of any kind. So it's been really great to see the way young readers have responded to this.

Yeah. The fact that the title includes him becoming America's Doctor, I would assume that the title, America's Doctor, sits okay with him. Would that be too presumptuous? You know, we asked about that, to be honest with you. We brainstormed a whole lot of different titles. You know, that wasn't the original title for the book. One was, you know, a solution to every problem. when you're brainstorming titles for a kid's book, you end up with a list of about 50 titles. And we tossed around a lot of things. But this one was the one that resonated, particularly just because, you know, Dr. Fauci is what would capture people's attention. He's been in the news, you know, since day one of this pandemic and before then as well. But even more so since the COVID-19 pandemic began. And, you know, love him or not love him, he's on everybody's radar.

So we wanted to make sure his name was in the title. You know, I think that phrase America's doctor does imply the sense of trust that many people have in Dr. Fauci. You know, somebody who would level with you and say, this is how things are right now. They might change. You know, we might have to change our response based on the science. I think people found that very comforting. I think that's probably where that, you know, nickname came from. I know he's a really hard worker.

I've been talking with him for over 40 years since the AIDS crisis. when I first met him when he was assigned as a scientist. You write about his life from childhood through the AIDS crisis into this pandemic. What do you hope that young readers take or learn from the story of his life? You know, I think the biggest thing I hope young readers will take away from this book is that science is something that's accessible to everybody, right? They can do science too. They can serve in public health the way Dr. Fauci has.

I think sometimes kids see this guy on the news. And, you know, when you see Dr. Fauci on nightly news, he's got his suit on, he's standing at this podium next to the president looking very serious. And I don't think kids necessarily make the connection to understand that this is somebody who was once just a curious kid, just like they are, you know, playing baseball and, you know, doing school sports and riding his bike around. And I think that can be really powerful to see how someone grew into a job like that of public service. So that's the biggest thing I hope they'll take away. But also, another really important thing is the idea that science is a process. And Dr. Fauci is very open and talking about that and talking about how, you know, it's a fluid thing, right? As we learn more, as we gather more data, our recommendations change and our understanding of things are constantly changing. Science never stands still. And so when you're doing science, you're going to make mistakes and you're going to change. And you're going to change. And you're going to change. change your ideas based on new information. And that's a concept that some adults aren't very comfortable with. But I think it's really important for kids who want to be scientists to understand that. And Dr. Fauci wrote tips for future scientists for this book of yours. And one of them was about failure and not being afraid. Yeah. For the book's back matter, we really thought it would be great if kids could hear directly from Dr. Fauci and hear his advice for future scientists. And so, you know, among those five tips, he, you know, talked about keeping an open mind and said,

don't be afraid to fail. In science, you fail more often than you succeed. So don't get discouraged by something that doesn't work. Ultimately, that's what science is all about. It's step by step learning with a lot of missteps along the way. And then one of the other tips he gave was, remember that science is self-correcting. There may be something you think is one way, but if you really delve into it, you may reveal that it's another way. And so just, again, speaks to that idea of keeping an open mind and being open to new information, which is, you know, so relevant right now when we're dealing with a virus that we're still trying to figure out. We've been working for the last 18 months to explain COVID-19 to adults. Can you read us the part of the book where you describe

this pandemic? Yeah, absolutely. And that's always one of the challenges. And this is kind of one of my things as an author is I do tend to tackle topics that not everybody's excited to talk about with kids, right? Because kids recognize that there are things going on in the world around them that are not great, whether that's, you know, the COVID-19 pandemic or opioid addiction or 9-11. And I think when we refuse to talk with kids about those things and say, oh, that's too sad or that's too scary for kids, we're not really doing them a service. We're just kind of leaving them in the dark. So one of the challenges with a book like this is to explain something as universal and huge as the COVID-19 pandemic in a way that makes sense to kids and isn't too scary and relates to their

experiences. So as the book talks about Dr. Fauci's career at the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease, we discuss the infectious diseases that he's dealt with from AIDS, HIV, to Ebola and SARS and West Nile. And then the book reads, every new disease was a mystery to wonder about, a problem to solve. Where had it come from? How did it spread?

How could it be prevented until researchers found a cure or a vaccine? One of Dr. Fauci's biggest challenges came when a new disease appeared at the end of 2019. COVID-19, caused by a coronavirus. Within weeks, the virus spread around the disease. globe. Hospitals were overwhelmed. Doctors and nurses worked around the clock. Stores and gyms and

theaters shut down. People had to work and learn from home. A virus too tiny to see had stopped the whole world in its tracks. Where had it come from? Why was it spreading so quickly? How could anyone stay safe? People wanted answers. And at first, Dr. Fauci simply didn't have them. More and more people got sick, but there had to be a solution. Don't get discouraged. Think about it carefully. Try to work it out. And from there, the book goes on to talk about, you know, Dr. Fauci's collaboration and the work of scientists around the world who listened to one another and gathered evidence, searching for solutions, how they shared ideas, they discovered new information, revised those ideas, and taught people simple ways to be safe while researchers worked on medicines and the

vaccines that we have now. Now, I know that this isn't your first biography of someone famous, and you've already told us that one of your ideas is to talk to other scientists. How much does it impact kids do you think to see that well-known people, scientists, and so on, were once kids, too? Oh, I know that it's huge because I talk with, you know, hundreds and hundreds of kids every year and when I visit schools and these days do Zoom visits to schools and libraries. And when I get email from kids and letters from kids, they always talk about, you know, I'm really glad you talked about what he was like as a kid because, you know, kids sometimes see the people on the news as different from them, you know, oh, those are people who are richer

than I am or who have, you know, who are smarter than I am or they know important people. And when you hear the stories, when kids hear those stories, they come to realize that, no, really curiosity is at the heart of all of this. And that's something that, you know, kids have in abundance. So that's really their superpower. And I love for kids to recognize that. But there must be a balance, I would imagine, in writing kids' books about public fingers in that you don't want to put them on too high a pedestal because we're all human at the end of the day, right? Sure. And that's one of the reasons in this book about Dr. Fauci's life. We focus on You know, not just the, yay, we got this vaccine, but that, you know, difficult time when people wanted answers and there were no answers.

You know, the idea that that science is a process. You know, failure is such an essential part of the scientific process. You can read about any development in science, any breakthrough, any invention. And before that moment of success, you're going to read about, you know, dozens, often hundreds, sometimes thousands of failures along the way. It's so much about revising ideas and gathering more data that we really, I talked with my editor about this when we were, you know, working on the book and fine-tuning things. We really wanted that to be a centerpiece of this story. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios talking to children's book author Kate Messner about her biography of Dr. Anthony Fauci. It's so interesting that you're writing about COVID-19, like you're describing it for an audience that,

hasn't yet arrived. How do you think today's kids are going to remember this pandemic? Well, that was a really interesting element, an interesting challenge when I was working on the book because I was really writing it for two audiences. I was writing it for kids who lived through it and had questions and are still living through it. The students who are reading this book with their teachers in school this fall are kids who are pointing to the scene, you know, in that spread where I read about how hospitals were overwhelmed and stores and gyms and theaters shut down. People had to work and learn from home. On that page, there's a picture of this family all crowded into one room, all on their individual devices, trying to get their work done. You know, the mom's on the phone,

the kids on an iPad, two other kids are on laptops. They're all fighting for the same limited wireless, you know, bandwidth. You know, every kid who reads that is pointing to that page saying, hey, that's me. That's me. I'm part of this story. So in one sense, it's for that audience, for this audience of kids who are living through this part of history right now. But it also needed to be a book that would explain this time period to kids who are born later on. So yeah, that was a really interesting balancing act. And then the other issue was writing history, of course, that is still in progress, right? We can't write a story about the end of this pandemic because we're not there yet. And so,

the development of vaccines and that moment where people were vaccinated and they were able to see friends and family that they hadn't spent time with in a long time was the moment we chose for the sort of ending of this story, even though the pandemic isn't over. You know, my experience of interviewing kids is that they have a way of seeing simple truths that escape their parents or that escape adults. And in this case, I would be thinking, hey, we know what, you know, it's right to wear masks. We know how to avoid this disease. What's all the fuss that you're all making about this?

Did you find that also? Yeah, I found that to be very much the case. When I talk to kids, you know, when I zoom into a classroom, if the kids are in school, they all have their masks on. You know, and we talk about that. I'll often start the Zoom visit with my mask on, too, even though I'm in my office by myself and saying, oh, I just wanted to match you for a minute, but I'm going to take this off because I'm all alone in my own.

office. And kids are great about that. You know, one of the the real values that kids have, I find, almost universally, is that they're very good at taking care of one another. And they see that as a real responsibility and a joy, right? And they, you know, we do this because we all want to be in school. And we want everybody to be healthy. And it becomes this really great team effort. You know, and I know not all the parents, not all the families are on board with that. But in my experience, the young people that I've talked to have been absolutely phenomenal. You know, it's about taking care of one another. It's not about politics or anything other than taking care of one another and gives me a lot of hope. Well, hope is a good place to end our conversation, Kate. It's a

wonderful book. I hope it has great success. Thank you so much. Kate Messner is the author of Dr. Fauci, how a boy from Brooklyn became America's Doctor. And you can see an excerpt from the book with the illustrations, some really good ones. It's up on our website, sciencefriiday.com slash DR. Fauci. We have to take a break and when we come back, we're wrapping up our charismatic creature carnival with two feathery friends, the pigeon and the shoebill stork. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. And it's time once again for our charismatic

creature carnival. I love that. music. It never gets old. No, and joining me today, as always, is our charismatic creature correspondent, producer Kathleen Davis. Hi, Kathleen. Hey, there, Ira. Glad to be back.

Now, I'm sad to say that this is what our last matchup for the carnival this fall? It sure is. If you are just learning about SciFri's Charismatic Creature Carnival, over the last month we've been celebrating six underappreciated and perhaps unconventional creatures. And because we love a little competition, we've been doing these headings. to head matches between two of them to determine our semifinalists. Next week, our listeners will vote for their favorite of the semifinalists, and we will have our first ever audience chosen entry of our charismatic Creature Corner Hall of Fame.

Whoa, Creature Corner Hall of Fame. I can't wait for that one. And I hear that we also have an update about last week. Tell us. Yes. So if you remember, last week's matchup was between the opossum and the I-I. Our listeners went to Science Friday.com slash carnival to vote for their favorite. I'm going to be honest. People felt very strongly about this matchup one way or another, but the votes don't lie. And we do have a winner, Ira. So I would like a drum roll, please. Here we go the best I can. Crawling into our second semi-finalist spot to join the mantis shrimp as a charismatic creature carnival semifinalist. The people's choice is the opossum.

I have to say this is kind of surprising. But Cypri listeners love the opossum I've learned. Wow. Okay. So who are our charismatic creature candidates for this week? So this is our last matchup of the carnival, so really soak it in Ira. We're celebrating our feathered friends this week. So our first creature, joining us from your nearest city, perhaps even the fire escape outside your window, the ever-present yet mystifying pigeon. The pigeon was nominated by listener Greg from Spring, Texas. Greg calls himself Your Friendly Neighborhood Pigeon Man.

That is his name on Twitter. And he left us this message on our SciFri Vox Pop app. I nominated the pigeon for the charismatic creature carnival because they are the most overlooked animal on the planet. They are actually one of the most intelligent birds and one of the most intelligent animals around. and they can recognize words, and they recognize themselves in the mirror. And they have an incredible homing ability, and I hope they win.

You know, I would not have picked a pigeon to be a charismatic creature candidate. So, okay, Greg is making sort of a, he's opened the argument. Yes, so representing the pigeon in the charismatic creature carnival is Dr. Elizabeth Carlin, postdoctoral research fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. Welcome, Elizabeth. Thank you so much for having me. And facing off against the pigeon, a truly incomparable and mysterious creature you would be lucky to see for yourself. It is the one and the only shoe bill stork.

A couple of people nominated the shoe bill stork for our carnival, including listener Eric. He wrote us an email and said, the shoe bill stork is, in my opinion, the most charismatic and weird bird that's living on the planet. It kind of looks like a dinosaur and clacks its beak to make a very strange. noise. And it looks a little bit out of time with how big and awkward they are. They are amazing, says Eric. Yeah, well, let's see how amazing and impressive they are. So let's see what happens. Representing the shoe bill stork in our carnival is Judith Morembae, shoe bill researcher and chair of Uganda women birders based in Kampala, Uganda. Welcome, Judith. Hey, I'm glad to be here. I'm so excited. Well, we're very excited to have both of you here to help us wrap

up the carnival. Just a quick note, this segment was recorded in front of a live Zoom audience, and for more information about how to join a future live recording, go to sciencefriady.com slash live stream. Okay, enough with the preliminaries. Let the competition begin. Okay, let's start with the basics here. That's what we always do with our carnival. Elizabeth, this might be a silly question, but as a radio show, we have to ask you. please describe the pigeon for us. So pigeons are a medium-sized bird. They're about the size of a football.

And they are found all across the world, except for Antarctica, every continent. They are usually often the kind of default is gray with two black bars on their wings. However, there's a whole variety of colors. and you might see some red pigeons or some all white pigeons. And that's kind of one of the interesting things I think about them is just that massive variety in plumage color or feather color. And you probably see them walking along the street quite a bit. They're maybe not always up in the air.

I've seen pigeons taking the steps very civilized. So they're one of these kind of very, to me, special creatures that lives in the air. the city alongside us. Okay, so much for the description of the pigeon. Judith, give us a good description of a shoe bill stork. So the shoe bill is a, it's a large gray bird with a shoe shape bill from where the name is derived from. So if you see anything that has a bill that looks like a shoe and you find it in Africa, you just know that it's a shoe bill. So they are quite large with a height of about 110, 140 centimeters. The wingspan is almost twice the height.

They live in wetland habitats, freshwater wetlands. In Africa, you will not find them elsewhere outside Africa, except in a zoo. So in Africa, you'll find them in Uganda, Botswana, in Rwanda, Ethiopia, southern Sudan, currently has the highest population. you'll find them in Zambia, in the Republic of Congo, Central African Republic. Some people think it is a stork because of their appearance, but the closest relatives are the pelicans. So for our American audiences, when I look at a picture of a shoebill stork, to me it looks a lot like big bird from Sesame Street. Our listener, Eric, said in his nomination that he thinks it looks a little bit like a dinosaur.

I mean, Judith, what is it like to see a shoebill stork in the wild? The first time you see it, the reaction is always, wow, the size. It's very large and definitely looks like a dinosaur, something you've never seen before. The cryptic color of the feathers among the papyrus strands and other wetland vegetation make it hard to see. So by the time you see it, you get astonished, you get surprised, and you just love what you. you see because of the size. So when you, the first encounter what usually is done on a boat, on a canoe to wad through the wetland. So you can get very close. And when you get very close, it's always astonishing to see it in the floating vegetation despite the size. Wow, that's a

great description. Elizabeth, I know that pigeons are found, what, just about everywhere you see them in large urban cities. You see them all over the places. Why are they so adaptable? What makes them so adaptable? Diggins have been evolving alongside humans for the past five to 10,000 years. They are native to North Africa and Southern Europe and the Middle East where we started farming grains and they started living alongside humans. And because of that, that, that close relationship with humans. They've moved with us. We have brought pigeons with us as we colonized every kind of part of this world. And what do we do in New York with our trash? We put it out on the street. And that makes this perfect buffet for pigeons and rats. But for pigeons to kind of eat this food,

have access to this food. And then we build these tall buildings, which mimic the clinton. sides that they lived on in their natural habitat, in their native habitat. We also, there's something about feeding a pigeon that is very communal, that dropping a couple of chips and feeding this bird is, I think, something that we all connect with. If you think back to movies like Mary Poppins or Home Alone, there's some joy in feeding these pigeons because it connects us with this nature. Okay. Great, great answer. Let's go to folks out in the audience. Let's go to Susan from Tracy, California,

who has a question about how shoebills see, right, Susan? Go ahead. Hi, yeah, I've looked at some images on the Internet of shoebills, and I always notice that their eyes are so emotional, just arresting, almost give you a sense that they're sad or they're, I don't know, they're enchanting. So what do we know of? about the vision of the shoe bill?

Yes. So the shoe bill uses a binocular vision. And most of the times they'll stand still and motionless for 20 or more minutes or even an hour. So when they're hunting, they keep a stair. So the stair is intense when you look at them in the eyes. So when they're hunting, they'll either stand and wait for the prey and then they strike. and then they strike, or they will wad and walk slowly within the same area as they wait for prey to strike at the right time.

I wouldn't say it's something intimidating or such, but it's probably the way they were created and the intense stare also works largely as a defense mechanism. So if you encountered someone for the first time and they gave you such eyes, and you are the bad guy, you definitely work away. That's what I do to Ira when he gets too off topic during an interview. That's right. So we've been hearing about how patient a bird the shoebill stork is, you know, in their interesting hunting behavior that Judith was telling us about.

Perhaps the opposite of a patient bird may be the pigeon, just based on walking through a park in New York City in seeing them swarm a person who is eating a sandwich. But what they lack in manners may be remedied by the fact that I think they might be a little bit smarter than people realize. Our nominator Greg said that they're, in his opinion, one of the most intelligent animals on the planet. I don't know if that is exactly true, but that's a pretty good argument.

And he said that they can recognize words and themselves in a mirror. I mean, Elizabeth, are pigeons smarter than we give them credit for? I think they're definitely smarter than we give them credit. for. Intelligence is obviously a complicated question and things are evolved to be best suited for their environment. Brain tissue takes up all this energy. And so you could be smart in the sense that if I don't have a complex habitat, I don't need to waste energy on building all this brain tissue. In terms of pigeons, they have some pretty incredible abilities. There's been research showing that they can recognize artwork or different paintings by different artists. There's been some research

showing that they may be able to recognize cancer in photographs. And they have this incredible homing sense that we don't quite understand how they're able to do this. So we know that there's these stories of pigeons kind of being these war heroes and bringing messages back to base during World War II. So how were they able to do that? How are they able to deliver these messages back? And how are they able to find their way home? If you put me in a dark box and drove me for a couple hours and spun me around and then said, go home, I would absolutely not be able to find my way home. But these pigeons can do that. And so they have this incredible homing sense. where no matter kind of where they're brought, they can return back to that natal area where they're nesting.

Just a quick note that I'm Kathleen Davis, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Unfortunately, we are about out of time here, so it's time for both of you to give your final arguments for why your creature is the most charismatic of the day. Elizabeth, let's start with you. Why do you love pigeons so much? Why are they the most charismatic creature of this matchup? For me, pigeons are this great model for evolution. We've been studying them since Darwin. They help Darwin kind of understand selection.

And for those of you out there that haven't Googled curly pigeons, please do go and look at what a curly pigeon looks like. They're these really fascinating curly feathers all over the pigeon. I think they're this animal that lives alongside us. And while many might consider them a pest, I think we would be sad if they disappeared from our cities. I think back to TV shows, whenever they want to show urbanization, they'll show a flock of pigeons taking off as the little bumper in between scenes. And so they really are this symbol of human community. community and togetherness. We release pigeons at weddings. We release these white pigeons at weddings to

celebrate love. And they are this giant group of really charismatic, happy individuals. Wow, that's some defense, Judith. You're going to have to be able to match that for your final defense of the shoebill stork. Tell us about why you think the shoe bill stork should win this competition. What is it about the bird that you love so much? So I just love the shoe bill. So the shoe bill is the most charismatic of them all because it is big. It is the only member of its family in Balia Niseptidi.

So if we lost a shoe bill, that is losing a whole family. So the shoe bill is globally threatened all over the world. because it is faced by many threats, majorly brought about by human disturbance, such as habitat laws, fishing, hunting for pets and zoo trade. A shoe bill can cost up to $20,000 US dollars for someone purchasing it simply to put it in a zoo

or keep it for their own entertainment. So, yeah, we cannot lose the shoe bill or else we'll never see a comparison of a dinosaur Since the dinosaur is gone, we have to keep the shoe bill. Okay, Ira, we're out of time here. Do you think our listeners have enough information to make a decision about which creature they think is the most charismatic? I think they do. So let's explain how people vote.

Our listeners can go to sciencefriiday.com slash carnival, sciencefriiday.com slash carnival to cast your vote. You have until next Wednesday at 10 a.m. Eastern Time to choose your favorite in this. match up. Will the shoe bill stork or the pigeon come out on top? That is up to you, the listeners. And I don't think there's any way we can predict how our listeners vote if we take our history as any case, right? Thank you, Judith Marembay, Shoe Bill researcher and chair of Uganda women birders based in Kampala, Uganda. Also, Elizabeth Carlin, postdoctoral research fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. Thank you for making some great arguments for your birds.

Thank you for joining us today. Thank you so much for having us. It's been a pleasure joining you. Thank you. SciFri producer Kathleen Davis. Thanks for being our carnival ringleader once again. Thanks, Ira. I'll be back next week to cap off the carnival.

And that just about does it for this hour. If you missed any part of the program or you would like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.