SciShow Tangents - Birds of Prey

Episode Date: January 25, 2022

The pointiest birds in the wild blue yonder finally get their due! Join us to learn all of these lethal birds killer secrets, and to discover their hidden softer sides. Some use teamwork! Some keep pets! Head to https://www.patreon.com/SciShowTangents to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter!And go to https://store.dftba.com/collections/scishow-tangents to buy your very own, genuine SciShow Tangents sticker!A big thank you to Patreon subscriber Garth Riley for helping to make the show possible!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @im_sam_schultz Hank: @hankgreen [Definition]https://bioone.org/journals/journal-of-raptor-research/volume-53/issue-4/0892-1016-53.4.419/Commentary-Defining-Raptors-and-Birds-of-Prey/10.3356/0892-1016-53.4.419.full  [Trivia Question]Alkyl mercury in goshawkshttps://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10646-013-1128-zhttps://www.jstor.org/stable/4312117?casa_token=3PPQWWTwiYAAAAAA%3A7giiI7DEJGZCee8kh5vBBGP51efUFHyxLFdfDGHESY1plAdhTZLY8F5sua8iP5JMNYzhZaNZRjWpC9gYSiKEeZo5sU_BxcEbUk38ZTwCEA37g9mOpHo&seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents[Fact Off]Bald eagle cyanobacteria toxin mysteryhttps://www.livescience.com/eagle-killing-mystery-disease-solved.htmlhttps://www.inverse.com/science/mystery-behind-mass-bald-eagle-deaths-solvedScreech owls & threadsnakeshttps://www.audubon.org/news/what-would-screech-owl-want-blind-snakehttps://www.jstor.org/stable/4218201?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contentshttps://landscapeipm.tamu.edu/what-is-ipm/ipm-concepts/pest-identification/good-bug-bad-bug/neither/texas-blind-snake/http://www.digimorph.org/specimens/Leptotyphlops_dulcis/https://www.audubon.org/field-guide/bird/eastern-screech-owl[Ask the Science Couch]Harris’s hawks (social raptors)https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Harriss_Hawk/overviewhttps://www.audubon.org/field-guide/bird/harriss-hawkhttps://bioone.org/journals/the-auk/volume-130/issue-3/auk.2013.120063/Reexamining-Cooperative-Hunting-in-Harriss-Hawk-Parabuteo-unicinctus--Large/10.1525/auk.2013.120063.full[Butt One More Thing]Anthrax in raptor cloacashttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17347404/ 

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the likely competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your Hank Green, your host. And joining me as always this week is a science expert, Sari Reilly. Hi, I'm your Hank. I'm your Hank Green, your host. And joining me as always this week is a science expert, Sari Riley. Hi, I'm your Sari Riley. And our resident everyman, Samuel Schultz. And I'm your Samuel Schultz. I want to know about your pets from when you were children, if you had one of those. I think this might be boring because me and Sari had the same pet. Yeah. Not literally the same pet. That would be a huge piece of news that you are in fact brother and sister.

And we're raised in the same home. Yeah, if I moved my camera over, she's just standing right next to me. We still live with our parents. But I had a beagle named Crunchy. Crunchy is such a great name. We stole it from my uncle who had a dog named crunchy but he his dog named crunchy had been murdered so our dog was in memoriam for how murdered i think his neighbor killed his dog this does happen was it a montana thing oh yeah yeah

this is like a rural a rural rural montana Yeah. A place where dogs are dropping like flies if they cross the wrong territory. I've been surprised by the occurrence of these occurrences. There's not a thing that happened in Florida. Well, an alligator ate your dog in Florida. This is true. And I did know dogs that went that way. But yeah, Crunchy, good boy. He lived long enough that it wasn't really that sad that he died.

He was a big stinky boy by the end. And I didn't't live at home so i didn't actually have to go through the emotional turmoil of it that also happened with my dog red green um yeah my parents didn't even tell me what had happened that's a little sad yeah uh so you also had a beagle siri yes i also had a beagle uh hence the beagle howl that I did for a Tangents bonus episode. Her name was Taffy. She also lived a very long and storied life. Crunchy and Taffy. And a food name.

Yeah, it's all about tooth sensations with you guys and your beagles. We had some toothsome dogs. Yeah, she was also a really good girl. She loved sleeping and eating and recently died last year. And I was told about it. I was called in via FaceTime to her funeral, which was very sad. Yes. Because I hadn't seen her in a couple of years.

Yeah. Yeah, but she also lived a really long life. Yeah. In my head, my parents at one point said, we've given red, which was the name of my dachshund, we've given red to a place for elderly dachshunds. And in the moment I was like, that's definitely, we just put red to sleep and we didn't want to talk to you about it. But now I think maybe they actually did that and they just were really tired of taking care of them. And they like found a real, because it's Florida.

There's dachshund farms. It's like, you know, there's something for everybody in central Florida. So maybe that's what happened. And we just never found out what happened to Red. Alligator food farms. That's what they really are. Was Red a good dog? No. No, one of the worst worst one of the worst of all times he literally pooped inside of a nintendo once no which kind one of the original nintendo entertainment systems with

the flip up lid how did he open the lid there are many people who believe that red was not responsible for the insertion of the poop into the Nintendo. Oh. It was always believed, and I have always believed, that Red was the one who figured. I think he could figure it out. Yeah. One time I locked Red in my parents' bedroom for like half the day, and I opened up the door, and I was like, oh, Red, I'm sorry I locked you in here. And he looked at me in the eyes, and he lifted up his leg and peed. So he had sinister intent. lifted up his leg and peed.

So he had sinister intent. He was like, I held it so that I could pee when you opened the door. I didn't want to pee before this. I wanted you to know the situation that we were all in. Anyway, every week here on Tangents, we get together to try to one-up, amaze, and delight each other with science facts while also trying to stay on topic. Our panelists, Sari and Sam, are playing for Glory and for Hank Bucks, which I will be awarding as we play. And at the end of the episode, one of them will be crowned the winner. And now, as always, it is time to introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from me.

If I had not been there, how would it have gone? The eagle had been trolling up and down the coast since dawn. The coot was on its own. It took a risk, I'm pretty sure, because all its little friends had long since left the shore. But when it saw me walking, it saw me as a threat. I wasn't, but I didn't have a way to tell it that. It left the shore and headed to the flock out on the lake, and I felt it was my story too, so I couldn't look away. The eagle had been trolling up and down the coast since dawn if i had not been there how would it have gone a hungry eagle hungrier one coot still swimming on if i had not been there how would it have gone that's my poem about the coot that i saw get eaten by an

eagle uh on flathead lake this weekend and it was your fault i think it was yeah i mean i think the coot probably could have figured it out if it had been a little bit cleverer but it didn't maybe it didn't have a deep enough place to dive uh which is usually what a coot will do when an eagle is pooping down on it but it did not do that i think the coolest part of this is like the eagle snatched the coot right off the top of the water flew flew away. And then suddenly out of the tree line of the forest, three immature bald eagles suddenly flew out and started to follow the eagle, either because they're trying to steal some of the food

or because my guess is that they are the eagle's offspring. That's their mom. They're learning. Yeah. That was a beautiful poem also. Thanks. It's about an eagle that eat a coot. But it's really about so much more, isn't it?

That's right. You have to think of that stuff later though. Yeah. After you've written it. I leave that up to you. What's it about? You'd figure it out. We'll do the textual analysis now, line by line.

Yeah. Someone will ask you a question at a reading and you'll be like, yeah, that's what it's about. Got it. So the topic of today's uh episode of psychotangents is birds of prey uh an eagle is one of those birds of prey i i'm gonna take a shot in the dark birds that eat meat i don't think that's right is it it's contentious this one the jury's out uh so if you want to go strictly by birds of prey, then it's any bird that hunts stuff that preys on other living animals. But that would mean most birds.

Like a chicken could be a bird of prey in that case, right? Because they eat a bug. Yeah. Yeah. And like all the things that eat fish and whatnot are generally not considered birds of prey. Sure. And whatnot are generally not considered birds of prey. So I found this, a very good commentary paper published in 2019 where scientists, a bunch of scientists got together and were like, guys, we've got to define birds of prey because we refer to them by so many different things. It's been a few hundred years, so it's time.

Yeah. time yeah yeah and specifically birds of prey are treated as synonymous with raptors but also those two terms are used to refer to slightly different things as well so typically ornithologists or scientists or people consider raptors or bird of prey as something with taloned feet for grabbing things and killing things so like the eagle grabbing the coot uh hooked beaks for tearing flesh and eat like vertebrates that are relatively big but in those definitions uh a lot of lines have been blurred because it's like well then our water birds who eat fish raptors are shrikes who like impale their prey on spikes raptors are corvids like ravens and crows. Raptors.

This commentary argues no. It recommends defining raptors as species within orders of birds that evolved from raptorial land birds. So doing some taxonomy in there in which most of the species maintained raptorial lifestyles so if there's like one bird that's an exception in the way that a shrike is an exception yeah then you can't call them all raptors don't don't lump them in this is the way of it with science things isn't it where we're like look we've created this definition it's a paragraph long because we got tired of not having a definition that actually worked. But these are always definitions

that like if like evolution had gone a little bit differently, it would have broken it anyway. So basically what I'm hearing is birds of prey don't exist. If they pass the vibe check, they're a raptor. Yeah.

The birds that pass the vibe check, hawks and eagles, falcons, owls, vultures of a wide variety. I saw vultures a lot when i was researching too and i was that one would not one i would have thought of really they're too ugly they're not cool they're not cool enough yeah they have to look like they can go pew really fast yeah uh there are some like the secretary bird, like that group of birds, which I think are screamers or something like that. But yeah, there are some terrestrial birds that are considered birds of prey because they still have like the strong talons, the really high pressure.

When you say terrestrial, do you mean they don't fly? They can fly. So like secretary birds, they're the ones with the really pretty eyelashes. They can fly fly but they don't necessarily like glide and then they don't like to okay do you have any etymologies for us i do for raptor so that is derived from latin verb rapio which means to seize or plunder and so it's in reference to their hunting strategy and that they like tackle, grab and run. And that's the same root word as things like rapid.

Harpy is also from that, like the mythical beast, the harpy bird. And then I guess kind of obviously the word rape is also from that etymological root. So any sort of like violent behavior is what what these majestic birds are associated with their deadly actions oh god well that sounds like we know what we're talking about now which means it's time to move on to the quiz portion of our show this week we're going to do a truth it's going to be a truth or fail about birds of prey because they get much of their reputation from their incredible hunting talents. But at the end of the day, even bloodthirsty predators need a comfortable place to keep their families safe and snug.

So which of the following three stories about birds of prey and their nests is true? Because two of them are false. Round number one, fake branches versus science. Fake branches versus science. This fact says to monitor vulture nests in India, scientists have been adding fake branches that are equipped with sensors and a wireless transmitter to report environmental conditions like temperature in the nest. Back to scientists. That's your first fact. You got fake branches for science. Or it could be fact number two, multifamily nesting. In the U.S., bald eagles can build giant nests with other pairs,

and then they expand their territory over the top of trees to create these giant nests that have different compartments to house different bird families. Or it could be fact number three. In the U.S., goshawk nests form a protective shield for another bird, the hummingbird, which like to build their nests close to the hawk's nests form a protective shield for another bird, the hummingbird, which like to build their nests close to the hawk's nests so that they are protected from other predatory birds that are afraid to get too close to the goshawk. So you either have fact number one, fake branches for science, fact two, multifamily nesting, or fact number three, hummingbird shields. What do you guys think? Fake branches seem so unreliable. Do they seem unsturdy or bad at measuring?

Like if they fell out of the nest, then you just have to be like, ugh, now I gotta go all the way back out there, put the stick back in there. Because birds know stuff like that. They'd be like, eh, I don't think I put that stick there. That's my thought on it, at least.

I feel like nests are surprisingly sturdy. Those sticks are always sticking around. That's why they call them sticks. That's true. That could be why they call them sticks. And the bald eagle one just seems like, well, I would have heard about that. Great. Bald eagle apartment buildings up in the sky.

That one, I feel like, rings vaguely true in that a lot of animals form little social colonies like not always they so the ones that we see photographed are mostly solo nests but i think a lot of species are surprisingly social when it comes down to it it's like oh let's just pool our resources you already have sticks i'm gonna add some sticks to those sticks i got sticks yeah so that one it has the kind of like grainy truthness that feels wrong to me like it's based on a fact that i've heard sounds like what spiders do right like

there's the spiders that are social spiders that do that thing yeah there's that one specific spider almost all spiders are solitary but there's one specific social colony spider, which is very upsetting because their nests can be very big. Yeah, they shouldn't do that. They can't be friends. The hummingbird one, though. Yeah, birds eat other birds, though.

And a hummingbird would be just a nice little snack, wouldn't it? Nope. Yeah, especially after that poem. All I'm thinking about is how you protect the hummingbirds, and then you're like, actually, I'm a little peckish. I'm a little hungry.

You know, when you're like, I had a big meal like four hours ago, but like dinner is in two hours. Yeah, and they're probably sweet too because they eat so many flowers. Yeah, I think I might eat a hummingbird. It's like a candy. Yeah. And they're probably sweet too because they eat so many flowers. Yeah.

I think I might eat a hummingbird. It's like a candy. Yeah. I'm going to guess the eagle one because sometimes I psych myself out. But I'm going to say there's a group nest somewhere. I just can't believe it. I think you've psyched yourself in this time. You're going to mess you up in a whole different way.

Wow. Confident Sam. I'm going to go with hummingbird shields. I think they're going to risk it. And I think they're going to, it's a high risk, high reward situation. Well, Sam Schultz, congratulations on guessing the right true fact. In Arizona, scientists observed that hummingbirds seem to be building their nests in clusters near goshawk and Cooper's hawks nests. So that might seem like a dangerous place to have a hummingbird uh but it turns out they're just too small for the hawks to care about but there are other birds that eat hummingbirds like for example i think it was called the mexican jay yeah it predates upon

hummingbirds and their eggs and babies no so this way that the the adult hummingbirds can leave the nest and the jays will be like, ah, that's particularly frightening, especially in areas underneath the nest. So where a hawk could basically just like swoop right down and grab the jay. So it's basically like a cone of hummingbird nests around the Cooper's hawk and goshawks nests that like go down and taper. nests that go down and taper because once you get a certain distance away in both horizontal and vertical direction, the jays continue to predate. And they did some science on this and they figured out that the hummingbirds that had their nests around hawk nests definitely were more effective at raising young and having those young survive. Wild.

That's very cute. Yeah. So congratulations to the little cuties on their innovation. Fake branches for science, no. But basically, very similarly, scientists have used fake eggs. So that's super cool. The Center for Birds and Prey in the UK has developed a fake microduino egg that it can sense things like how often it's rotated and moved, the temperature and the humidity. And that helps scientists understand how the birds work with their eggs. And I guess at the end of the season, the egg just doesn't hatch and the vulture is like, eh. of the season, the egg just doesn't hatch and the vulture is like, eh.

And then no bald eagles only do single family nests. Other birds do multifamily nests, but bald eagle nests usually are about four to five feet wide, two to four feet deep. But the biggest one ever recorded was found in Florida with a diameter

of 9.5 feet and a depth of 20 feet. It weighed almost 6,000 pounds. Why is that so deep? I don't know. You think the little baby of 20 feet and weighed almost 6,000 pounds. Why is that so deep? I don't know. You think like the little baby eagles in there would be like, I can't.

Well, I'm at the bottom of a well. Florida man builds massive nests. Yeah. Yeah, they were like, write articles about this stupid eagle. Stupid eagle, yeah. And Florida, they're like,

can you believe he did this? He built such a stupidly huge nest. His eagle McMansion. Next up, we're going to take a short break, and then it will be time for the Fact Off. All right. Welcome back, everybody. We've got our scores thus far. Sam is at one and Sari's at zero.

And it is time for Sari to see if she can pull it out at the fact off. Our panelists have brought science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind after they have presented their facts. I will pick which one is going to make a better TikTok and then I'll reward it as the winner and then I will make a TikTok about it. Who goes first, though? We decide that with a trivia question.

Here it is. The feathers of local birds can tell us a lot about environmental contamination. For example, birds in Sweden, like the goshawk, maintained constant mercury levels in their feathers until people started to put

alkyl mercury compounds in seed dressing. After that ingredient, goshawk feathers had nine times higher mercury concentrations. And it stayed like that until Sweden outlawed

the use of alkyl mercury in its dressing. And then mercury concentrations in the feathers dropped. So here's a thing for you to guess blindly. When did Sweden outlaw alkyl mercury additions to seed dressing? What is seed dressing? Yeah. It's a treatment on a seed. So when you're planting seeds, you treat the seeds so that when it's overwintering it doesn't get like a fungal infection or something so you just like spray this stuff on a seed to keep the seeds from going bad before you plant them for the next season got it i'm gonna guess two thousand and three okay see i feel like we got a lot of stuff done in the 70s, maybe. Like the late

70s, we were like, let's care about planet Earth for a few years. Is that when they got rid of the BMPs or whatever? DDT? Yeah. You know, the BMPs, the bad metal poisonings.

That's when they switched over to JPEGs. So I'm going to say 1979. You are the winner because it was 1966. Congratulations, Sam. You get to decide who goes first. I think I'm going to go first. Okay. Bald eagles, like every other bird of prey, are usually the ones doing the killing.

But in the mid-90s, this proud symbol of America found itself on the wrong end of a mysterious and invisible murderer. It all started in 1994 when the bodies of 30 bald eagles were discovered in the vicinity of a lake in Arkansas. Soon, eagles were found dead in six different states under similar circumstances and many other were observed acting erratically like they were missing tree branches when they were trying to land or they were flying straight into cliff faces so then other birds started acting strangely and dying but bald eagles were the ones mainly that this was happening to so clearly something strange was afoot and scientists were on the case. The researchers named the disease, which caused blindness, paralysis, and seizure

in its victims before killing them, vacuolar myelinopathy, or VM, which is easier for me to say. And autopsies of the eagles revealed that the only physical sign of the disease were gross on the brain and spinal cord. So they had to chop them open to see if that's what they were dying from. Eventually, they identified one pattern.

Every body of water around which the dead eagles were being found was full of an invasive aquatic plant species called Hydrilla verticillate, I think, which is a popular type of aquarium plant. However, the plant themselves weren't harmful to eagles. And that is where, in the 90s, the investigation stopped for a very long time. So eagles kept dying. People kept not knowing why until 2015, when scientists uncovered another piece of evidence in the cold case. In these bodies of water lurked a silent killer, a type of cyanobacteria that loved to grow on the hydrilla plant, which cyanobacteria, maybe not

the scariest killer, but still a killer. However, this cyanobacteria had a very good alibi. No matter how much of it they fed to chickens in lab conditions, they couldn't get the damn chickens to die. So they didn't have shit on the cyanobacteria and they couldn't press any

charges and they had to let them go. I can't kill a chicken. Poor scientists. Just completely unable to kill a chicken. Yeah. So flash forward to 2021 when a new study that was published last year, the same team that identified the cyanobacteria found its murder weapon, a neurotoxin that it could produce only when exposed to the chemical bromide. But these cyanobacteria couldn't just go out and buy their own bromide and eat it and turn deadly. They needed the help of an accomplice.

It was me in middle school. I poisoned the eagles. You found me out. It was you and me and Sari and Tuna. The whole human race. So there's bromide in nature, like in the ocean, but people use it for stuff like road salt and herbicide, including herbicide used to try to kill the invasive aquarium plants

that started this whole mess in the first place. So much like the murder on the Orient Express, the murder turned out to have been carried out by multiple perpetrators. Human dumped the plants in the water. Cyanobacteria grew on the plants. Bromide ended up in the water, somehow causing the cyanobacteria to produce neurotoxin that other animals would then eat and they would get the disease. Then the eagles would eat them and the eagles would get an even worse version because they

were eating so many animals that had it inside of them. So as it stands, 130 eagles were confirmed to have died from VM. But the only ways to stop the deaths basically involve either completely eliminating a nigh-unkillable invasive species or getting bromide out of the water. And I didn't read about any plans to do either of those things.

So I guess that they're just still dying is what it seems like. Also, unlike the murder on the Orient Express where everyone did just little enough that it was hard to say who was guilty, the conspirators in this murder were humans and plants. So I think it's pretty safe to say that we are guilty and you should lock us all up. That's very weird. I love all of the sort of bricks that lean upon each other.

I didn't know about this, but then I forgot about it. So thank you for reminding me. Great. I knew you knew about it and I knew you'd forget about it. Um, cuz wow. I mean, it's wild that it took us that it, it has taken us that long to figure that out. But also we are okay. We, I think we can, we can do stuff to prevent the release of bromine into these places.

Yeah. I think so too. We probably have other stuff that can melt salt and we just won't put it in the water anymore to kill the plants. What I liked about this is how much, I've been watching a lot of Star Trek Next Generation lately, but I love that it's like,

they don't know what this mystery is. And then it's like some small little tiny piece of the puzzle. Like it must've been so satisfying to be like, aha, that's it. Yeah. Probably such a good feeling. After all these it. Yeah. Probably such a good feeling. After all these years.

Yeah. And the same people too. And then they're like, now we can kill the shit out of some chickens. All the chickens are, I love that they just stuffed these chickens full of cyanobacteria and the chickens were like, yes, thank you, Mar.

This is delightful. Yes. Has this earthy taste, watery taste watery taste yeah that's kind of terrifying as well that like something that's completely innocuous has something that's completely innocuous on it everybody's like all this stuff is completely innocuous and then suddenly just like add a single element in and everybody dies yeah they're studying, since people eat ducks and stuff like that, they're studying if we can get it too right now. Sari, what do you got for us?

So eastern screech owls are all the ferocity of a bird of prey in a pint-sized package, like 16 to 25 centimeters or 6 to 10 inches tall. So they're nocturnal, and they have the same noise-reducing feathers as other owls, so they can hunt pretty much silently, catching mice, shrews, small birds, small reptiles, insects, and basically anything edible that enters their tree cavities or lives in wooded areas. Like many raptors, owls have extremely strong talons and either stomp or squeeze their prey to death. So when parent screech owls go out hunting, by the time they bring food back to their babies in a nest, it's dead and ready to be picked apart or gobbled down.

But sometimes screech owls find some teeny tiny reptiles called slender blind snakes, thread snakes, or worm snakes. Those are all three names for the same thing. These are ugly guys, look kind of like earthworms, and are like 10 to 25 centimeters long. But they are in fact taxonomically snakes just with very smooth scales tiny non-functional eyes and just a few teeth on their lower jaws oh what do they okay i guess they'll tell us what they do yeah yeah

it's the only thing they do anything live a simple life in their dirt uh using chemoreception to find small invertebrates like ants and termites to eat. And once they find food, either alone or in a colony, the food is either alone or in a colony, they use their lower jaw to scoop and shove the bugs down their throats. Kind of like a hungry, hungry hippo, if you've ever played that,

but lower jaw instead of upper jaw. Just goes, Everybody could picture that perfectly, I think. effects um now eastern screech owls can slurp down these snakes easily but here's the weird thing researchers have observed them bringing living texas thread snakes back to their nests unlike any other prey and rather than getting eaten quite a few of these thread snakes end up burrowing in the poop and vomited up owl pellets and decomposing stuff at the bottom of the nest because nests are gross. And specifically, from 1975 to 1986, a team of researchers at Baylor University monitored 77 successful screech owl nests as the babies grew up.

And the nestlings that had little thread snake companions grew faster and died less than the snakeless ones and that's probably because the snakes eat insect larvae that would otherwise parasitize the nestlings or compete for food so not only are eastern screech owls tiny ferocious and cute they keep even tinier snakes as pets and the snakes are just like whatever there's food here too i guess that's really good snakes are a lovely pet uh they are beautiful i these snakes are not particularly beautiful they're beautiful they're so beautiful they're little worms they look like worms yeah with little little beady eyes they They're just- Ew, they're gross. They're cute.

So if the worm made its way to the nest and ate up the stuff, I'd be like, wow, that's very cool. They have this mutualistic relationship. But the screech owl is catching a snake and not eating it, despite the fact that it is made of food. And they're like small owls. So this is like a substantial amount of food for them. They deny the temptation and then they plant it in their nest to just be like a friend that helps their babies survive. It seems impossible. I love that.

Yeah, it's like, oh, I found my son's a pet. And then they just carry it back and are like here you go so sari is gonna win the fact off but i'm gonna make it a tie for the episode because sam won the first round oh that's nice and i thought sam's fact was really good and sam mentioned it that he thought he heard sari's fact uh beforehand and thought it was gonna blow him out of the water i don't think it blew you out of the water because I think that your fact was very, very good too. Well, thank you. And now it's time to ask the science couch. We've got a listener question for our virtual couch

of finally honed scientific minds. Remember when our couch was real? Adorable. Very vaguely. This is from Flying Penguin on Discord who asks, oh, also, and at I may be human on Twitter. They both asked, I generally have always thought of birds of prey as pretty solitary hunters. Are there birds of prey that work together or hunt as a group? I, before Sarah gets a crack at this, I know that there are. My favorite is the ones that will stand on top of each other so that they can see farther. Oh, yeah.

That is the one I'm talking about. Yeah, all right. they're the best of them uh they are called harris's hawks which is a horrible name i'm gonna say objectively i'm gonna call them piggyback hawks because i think that's really cute um because that's one of the things they do. So groups vary from two to nine from what I found scouring the literature. Some places say seven, some places say five, some places say three.

We've found many different size groups of them. But one of their unusual behaviors is called backstanding, which is what Hank was describing, where two or three hawks will stand on each other and not like dig their talons in. So they try and be gentle, but that way they can stand a little bit taller on a short shrub or tree

and have a little bit better vantage point for the prey that they're looking for. What makes them so unique is because they hunt in shrub lands like a pack of wolves almost. Like they have a really interesting hierarchy like social hierarchy within the bird colonies and not only um hunt socially but oftentimes also like live socially as a as a consequence of that and so like the way that they hunt in a packs they have different roles based on their status

or their strengths, and researchers aren't entirely sure what categorizes it. But some are like the prey spotters. Some of them are like the chasers, of like the central chasers of chasing after a jackrabbit, and it has wingmen on its side that like corner it in. Some of them flush out prey. Like if a rabbit or something ducks under brush, then some of them, their only job is to not catch it. It's to like scare the rabbit so that a faster hawk can swoop in and catch it.

And their teamwork always ends, as far as researchers can tell with sharing the catch so there's never observed selfish behavior in these birds we're like thanks for letting me catch this i'm gonna take it and you can't have any nice and so it's like they're after all this behavior of like flushing something out or blocking a hole from a prairie dog popping back down, they get part of the catch too. And as to why, this is such like a complex, weird behavior in raptors, which are normally solitary animals, like the question said, that we don't really know. There are a couple different hypotheses. One of them is just with a group, they can get bigger stuff. So it's like a chonkier rabbit that one maybe couldn't take down on its own. If multiple are attacking it, then they can get it.

It could be because of the habitat. So like the habitat is so sparse and has a lot of hiding spots. Like they just wouldn't be able to survive as efficiently if they were on their own. And then there are other things too. Like they all kind of entangle with each other where it's like it's better for the group if they collaborate so if someone is there to guard the dead animal then no other animals like it'll all go to hawks that way and so like their colony will succeed or they get to teach their young

how to do it by hunting in a pack and then the young can join that pack as opposed to like having to learn on its own right or it helps them uh target in on the small slice of daytime where their prey is awake in these sort of habitats where it's really hot and dry and like hard for other animals to survive. So there's like a small window of opportunity that they can hunt in. And this way they can make use of that time the most efficiently. And scientists just kind of like threw all these ideas out there and are like, but they're really cool. And we like them. And people are really interested in raptors. So I'm assuming that like research on them is continuing to this day.

But most of the papers I found published that cite this behavior are older and like lay the groundwork of these behaviors. Cool. If you want to ask the Science Couch your question, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents, where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every single week. Or you can join the SciShow Tangents Patreon

and ask us on our Discord. Thank you to Scythe, at Zeru, Sophie, and everybody else who asked us your questions for this episode. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's really easy to do that. First, you can go to patreon.com slash scishowtangents to become a patron and get access to things

like our newsletter and our bonus episodes and our Cars 2 commentary. We did it. It was delightful. I was thinking about it for like two days afterward. It was very fun. Oh, I don't remember what it was, but I said something extremely embarrassing around like maybe like one and a half hour mark. Do you remember what the embarrassing thing was?

I like said something wrong about a country or like something very, very basic. It was during the end credits was when this happened. Yes, it was a little embarrassing, I remember. That's when I was trying to cue Time Travel Mater, so I didn't even hear it. It was about a landmark, and I said it very wrong. I did hear that because Hank laughed at you so hard. If you'd like to hear what we're talking about, listen to two hours of us talking about cars. It's pretty good. You don't have to.

It's not a requirement. You can also leave us a review wherever you listen or rate us. If you're on Spotify, they have ratings now. That helps us know what you like about the show. It helps other people know that we have a great show so that we can continue making SciShow Tangents. Finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents,

just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Sam Schultz, who edits a lot of these episodes, along with Hiroko Matsushima. Our story editor is Alex Billow. Our social media organizer is Paola Garcia Prieto.

Our editorial assistants are Devoki Chagravarti and Emma Douster. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish. Our executive producers are Caitlin Hoffmeister and Hank Green. And we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you. And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. So you know how we take COVID tests by cotton swabbing our nostrils? I do. Well, birds need to have anthrax tests done to them,

and it is done by cotton swabbing their butts. Of course. So it's a very similar procedure, but, you know, like in the cloaca or whatever. They have cloacas, right? Why are they testing for anthrax in these birds? Because raptors can contract anthrax, even though I don't think it makes them sick. I think they just carry it around with them. And they poop out spores

into watering holes and they pass it on to other animals. So you gotta know where your anthrax is flying around. So kudos to all the brave researchers out there swabbing wild raptor butts for the good of us all. How do you hold a bird down when you need to put a Q-tip up its butt? I guess just real careful with them big gloves. Full body smothering.

Yeah, wrap them in a towel. Catherine used to work at a wildlife uh rehab place and there's lots of wrapping birds in towels yes and this looks very cute

except they want you to die laughs laughs laughs