The Blindboy Podcast - A 19th century volcanic eruption resulted in people training Falcons to have sex with their heads

Episode Date: April 29, 2025

How a 19th century volcanic eruption caused people to train Falcons to have sex with their heads 150 years later  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do a jobby on God's Brawley you swampy Cosbys. Welcome to the Blind By podcast. It's late evening here in Limerick City. I'm watching a blood red sun winking at me. Winking at me as it dips over the mountains. I'm going to be recording this one late night because the weather has been spectacular. Today it's been a real fucking summer's day and my air conditioner's not working in my office and I'm up at the very top.

It's fucking roasting. It's 30 degrees. So I'm waiting for that sun to go down. Ah, it's fucking gorgeous. It's pink and red. What a pleasure to be able to look at that. But I'm waiting for the sun to go down and for the air to cool and for some air to come in my window because I've no fucking AC it's roasting. And what do I see in the distance I believe someone is burning out a car the unmistakable thick white plumes of a burnt out car in the

distance or maybe benefit of the doubt actually tomorrow tomorrow is bonfire night, April 30th. Sometimes people light bonfires. It's April 29th as I record this. Maybe it's a little practice bonfire. Bonfire night there, harking back to the Irish pre-Christian tradition of Beáilda na. The festival where we welcome in the summer. This weekend in Limerick we're going to have a thing called Riverfest, which is always wonderful crack.

There's an international barbecue competition. It's just Limerick is going to be wonderful this weekend. The weather will be cracking and there'll be tons of people out, out on the street enjoying the place. I'm seeing more and more travel vloggers, travel vloggers coming to Limerick, visiting Limerick and spending a weekend here and having a wonderful time.

Lots of them are coming here because of my podcast. I've been tagged in like three videos the past few weeks of travel vloggers who've come to Limerick specifically because they heard about the place in my podcast and that does, that fills me with fucking pride. It really does because we've got a reputation problem in Limerick we have had for some time. We're called Stab City. People think that Limerick is a very violent place where you get stabbed or shot or where

gangs run rampant. That's not true. There were gang problems maybe 20 years ago. But the story is too good. The name Stab City is too good. A myth, a narrative emerged all over Ireland that go anywhere but Limerick. Don't go to Limerick, it's too dangerous.

And that is genuinely, that's had a really negative impact on the city. Tourists just don't come here. They're actively encouraged not to come here. And that's changing. That's flipping. And like even if there's any Limerick people listening, I suppose there is Limerick people listening to the fucking podcast because I sold out the Limerick concert hall there last week, which I wasn't expecting at all. Couldn't believe I did that. So I guess I do have listeners

in Limerick City. I thought I was more of an outside Limerick City thing. But all Limerick people are, we're very aware that the city has an image problem. And any Limerick, if you're a Limerick person and you're on a night out and you're in a pub and you meet someone who's here on a visit, we go out of our way to be really nice and friendly to those people because we're conscious of the bullshit, unfair reputation that we have. So it's been incredible to see vloggers from like America and Canada and England coming to Limerick recording little videos and all of them are just like

holy fuck this place is amazing. We have a gorgeous river, huge Shannon River with buildings that look on to it. We're very unique as an Irish city in that a lot of Limerick was designed on a grid, on a grid system. In fact an engineer called Christopher Coles who in the 1700s I believe, he designed an area of Limerick City on the grid system before he then moved to America to work on the grid system in New York. So I love Limerick, that's why I live here, it's my home, and we love it. We love it when people come here to visit and have a bit of crack because our city, the city centre is kind of, it can get a bit empty in the evening times. It can

get a bit empty. Hopefully that's going to change now. There's this new initiative just launched today. The government launched it. It's called Twilight Thursdays and Limerick has been chosen as a city for this, where basically, on the last Thursday of every month, there's gonna be live events, restaurants, food. They'll be incentivizing restaurants to stay open later. I think there's 40% off taxis. There's this huge initiative to bring people into the city center in the evenings on Thursdays

and I'm looking forward to that because Limerick City, I'm looking at it right now at my window. Limerick fucking city as the sun is going down on a summer's evening is stunning. A coffee or a pint as the sun is going down on Limerick City looking on the river. It's one of my favourite places to be in the world. The only shitty thing about it is that no one's around. Now if I'm giving you the horn for Limerick, this weekend is a good time to visit. The Maybank holiday weekend, Riverfest is going to be cracking. And in Limerick Riverfest usually, it heralds the arrival of summer.

As soon as Riverfest happens, we know that it's summer in Limerick. But for me, summer happens in Limerick when the Starlings arrive back to the Bardshit district. If you're a new listener, maybe go back to an earlier episode to familiarise yourself with the lore of this podcast. But if you're a 10-foot Declan or a steaming Cuiva, you know what the Bairdshit District is. It's a street in Limerick City called Bedford Row. It's a pedestrianised street, beautiful street, where we have restaurants and cafes. And the sun sets down at it's fucking gorgeous. And it's lined with trees that are absolutely beautiful when they have leaves on them.

But in the summer months, it's invaded by starlings. In the evening time, a gigantic flock of maybe 10,000 starlings, they go into the trees in the birdshit district. And they shit violently. They shit violently and aggressively. That's why it's called the Birdshit District. I did a podcast about this back in 2023, I believe. The podcast name is called An In-Depth Thesis About Birdshit, where I basically go into

the history of birdshit, fascinating, a fascinating substance, And I make the case that bird shit is the reason that the earth has a population of 8 billion people. And it's a strong thesis. But this street in Limerick Bedford Row... So the starlings, the starlings gathering in the trees at about 7pm, they haven't started yet. They're gonna arrive! They're in Eastern Europe right now. And they're flying back. They're on their way back.

They're migratory birds. They're on their way back to Limerick and I'm expecting them. Probably this time next week, this time next week, they'll be in Limerick City. But they're on their way back now. And the whole summer, every single night, they go into the trees, they chat, and about ten thousands of them, that they shit, they shit, they shit so much that when you walk down the street, you can hear shitting. But then what happens is they're shitting on pavement and the ground becomes grey and slippery with litres and

litres of bird shit. And then the stink, the smell of this street is unlike anything you've ever smelled because you're not supposed to smell that volume of bird shit. And this wonderful paved street that we have in Limerick where our restaurants are supposed to be, you fucking can't walk down it in the summertime. People have their... People literally put their t-shirts up over their mouths

because the smell of bird shit is so intense. And you can slip on the bird shit. And then every morning Limerick Council has to come out in these machines to try and remove the bird shit. And then every morning, Limerick Council has to come out in these machines to try and remove the bird shit. But anyway, the Limerick City Council, they hate it when I draw attention to this. They speak about it in council meetings. It's been communicated to me privately

that I should shut the fuck up about it. No, I won't. During the year, a member of Limerick City Council pretended he'd never heard of me. Limerick City Councilor. Someone brought up in a council meeting my name, blind by, and this Limerick City Councilor pretended to have never heard of me. He said that he was too old, he was too old to keep up with these young influencers. This man was born

in 1990. He was being performative. He was pretending, passive aggressive. He was pretending he'd never heard of me. And it was so ridiculous it made it into the paper that it... A Limerick City councillor was pretending he'd never heard of the one man in Limerick who is known outside of Limerick for wearing a plastic bag on his head, which is just ridiculous. You don't have to listen to the podcast, but most people in Limerick are aware that there's a man who wears a plastic bag on his head. But anyway, you will not believe what they've done in the Bardshit district over the past couple of weeks. You're not going to believe this. So one of the things

I adore about Limerick is this is a very surreal place. There's a madness here. There's a surreal madness in Limerick, which isn't deliberate. It just floats in the ether. My favorite example, and I've spoken about this a good few times, but during COVID, during the fucking pandemic, when all the restaurants were shut down

for like three months, and then they were reopening the restaurants and we had to do outdoor dining. Like I don't know if you remember that but in Ireland we used to not have an outdoor dining culture because the place was fucking freezing. Then the pandemic hit and we had to suddenly have outdoor dining. So Limerick City Council, they were trying to get everybody in Limerick. We'd had like three months of lockdown, right? We've all forgotten about it.

The whole thing was way too traumatizing. We don't like to think about the pandemic. We don't like to talk about it. It's a very strange thing, but we've all collectively, me included, we've collectively forgotten the pain of that. But the first lockdown, we were locked inside for about two months and then all of a sudden it's like restaurants are going to open but you're going to have to eat outside. So Limerick City Council instead of providing people with actual

outdoor seats instead instead of providing people with actual seats to sit outside restaurants, they built one giant seat and a giant table. I'm not joking you, I'm talking a hundred feet tall. They built... I'd forgotten about this. They built a giant seat and a giant table as an art installation. And then they got giant forks and giant spoons, like I'm talking about six feet tall. And they hung them off all the lampposts. No knives,

because you can't have giant knives in Limerick City, because it's called Stab City. So they put giant forks and spoons and a giant table and a giant chair, but no actual human-sized chairs that you could sit on. And everyone just went out into the streets going, this is great, what's the fucking point of this? What's the point of this? Where's the outdoor dining? There is none. There's an art installation instead. And it was nuts. It was just deeply surreal. It was a deeply surreal moment. Well guess what they've done now. So this street, the Bardshit District, where Limerick City Council are like don't call it the Bardshit District. district, where Limerick City Council are like, don't call it the bird shit district. Don't speak about the bird shit problem. We're trying to pretend it doesn't exist.

We go out every morning at 7 and we wipe the bird shit away. Don't speak about the bird shit problem. Do you know what they've done? There's now a giant 60 foot mural of a starling in the bird shit district. And I don't think it's intentional. I don't think they're being ironic. It's like there's one street in the city where there's so much bird shit you're gonna slip and it stinks and we're trying to play it down.

I know. Let's put a giant 60 foot mural of a fucking starling in the middle of it. It's like, it's like they've given up. It's like they've given up and said look the birds have won, the starlings have won. Let's now worship the starling. Now it's a gorgeous mural. It's beautiful. It's made by a local artist by the name of Oni Ono.

It's this incredibly detailed, well-painted, beautiful piece of public art, like, on the side of a building. On the side of a building that was just a blank facade. Now you've got this wonderful painting of a starling. But in a way, it is the giant tables and chairs all over again. Like, if you're visiting Limerick, and you go up this thoroughfare, it's the evening like you're gonna notice holy fuck this place is dripping with bird shit and it stinks of bird shit and there's a hundred thousand birds screaming and I can't even talk because there's so many birds on this street and then you look up and there's a giant mural of a bird there's a mural of the bird that's doing all the shitting.

Now I love it. I love it. I love calling the place the bird shit district. And I love the giant mural in the bird shit district because it's very pagan now. It's a very pagan thing. It's like nature worship. We're in the temple of the birds where they all shit on the ground and you respect this space. But like, I'm also aware that I'm a fucking fruitcake. Like I'm autistic, but I'm aware that I wear a fucking plastic bag on my head. I'm here trying to present a serious podcast about a plastic bag on my head, so it's not calling the kettle black shit when it comes to Limerick City Council. But most people, most people don't want a street full of barred shit with a giant barred mural in it. Most people don't want that. They'd prefer

just wine bars and restaurants and things like that. Here's the fucking problem. You can't, so it's hard to enjoy the restaurants and the wine bars on the street in a summer evening. Such is the stench of bird shit. It's that bad that you actually can't even have a pint and you sure as fuck can't eat a dinner. You cannot eat a dinner when six feet away from you. It sounds like it's raining. It sounds like it's raining bard shit. From about seven in the evening until nine in the evening, it sounds like it's raining bard shit on this street.

So I'm stunned with the giant bard mural. I cannot believe they've done it. What I've always said before about Limerick City Council, no disrespect, but what I've always said is you're never worried about whether or not they're gonna fuck something up. You know that they're gonna fuck it up. That's a guarantee. That's just guaranteed.

You know they're gonna fuck it up. But what they surprise you with is how they fuck it up. That's not just the Limerick thing. That's not just Limerick City Council. That's an Irish thing. That's any, that's an Irish government type of thing. That's not just Limerick City Council. That's an Irish thing. That's any... that's an Irish government type of thing. Again I've done a podcast on that called It'll Be Grand. I have a theory, it's a post-colonial theory, that in Ireland

we've got a phrase. The phrase is, ah it'll be grand. It'll be grand. It tends to mean, ah fucking chill out. Don't take it too seriously, things will work themselves out, things will work themselves out. And it's a wonderful phrase that we have in Ireland. And it's, it's very lighthearted. It creates quite a, a stress free environment. I love it'll be grand. Now, like speak to people, people who are not from Ireland, who come here to work, especially if they're from like a diligent culture. So people may be from, from Northern Europe, where things are done precisely and on time. They come to Ireland and they work in a fucking, in a business and then Irish people are talking about this ah it'll be grand it'll be grand it'll be grand it can cause a huge amount of anxiety for

German people for instance they're like what the fuck do you mean it'll be grand like it'll be grand is the reason our buses don't arrive on time like in Ireland buses don't arrive on time that's just how it is there's nothing wrong nothing's broken buses don't arrive on time that's just how it is. There's nothing wrong, nothing's broken, buses don't arrive on time. Why don't buses arrive on time? Because it'll be grand. The bus is gonna be here, it's probably gonna be here but it's not gonna be on time because it'll be grand. Like I was once on a bus to the airport and the fucking bus driver stopped the bus so that he could get off and go into a bookies and place a bed on a horse and then came back out and drove the bus.

Chaos. But it's also one of those things I do like about Ireland. But my theory is that it'll be grand tends to be fine on an individual basis, but when a group of Irish people collectively together say it'll be grand, then you end up with fucking chaos. Then you have an environment where nobody's taking accountability and it's how you end up with giant furniture or a gigantic painting of a starling on a street where they're trying to downplay the starling shit problem.

Nobody's being clever there, I promise you. I promise you, nobody's being clever. Nobody's trying to ironically subvert the starling shit problem there. They just didn't think about it. So for this week's podcast, I want to follow a thread on some of the themes I'm speaking about. Kinda like a part two, almost like a part two, to that podcast I made three years ago called An In-Depth Thesis About Birdshit.

I want to use the birdshit on this street as a starting point. On the other podcast from a few years back, I basically told the story of fertilizer. Bird shit as a source of nitrogen. For this podcast, I've got a theory that a volcanic eruption that happened in the 1800s led to people training falcons to have sex with their heads, and it all ties back to the birdshit district. Hear me out. So why are there so many starlings in Limerick City? Why is this one street inundated with starlings every summer?

Starlings, they're migratory birds. They're native birds, but they, I think our starlings, they fly off to Eastern Europe, then they come back. Starlings are fascinating. So this is what, you might have starlings in your city. Starlings are the ones You might have starlings in your city. Starlings are the ones who go up into the sky and they fly as one and they dance in a pattern in the sky in the evenings, right? Those are starlings. So what happens in Limerick City with the starlings is you'd be down by the river, like I said, at twilight, having your pint or having your coffee, looking down on the river. And without fail, every night, at about twilight,

when the sun's gone down and it's slanty and peachy, you look out above the Shannon River and there's your starlings. And they're flying in the air together as one unified shape, right? That's known as a marmoration. Why do starlings do this? They're trying to frighten off predators, specifically birds of prey. If you look at those starlings moving together like a shawl of fish in the sky,

sometimes they even look like a giant bird. It's phenomenal. But they are literally doing that to freak out any falcons or hawks or buzzards that are thinking of eating them. They're freaking them out. Then once the starlings do that evening dance in the sky, when the sun goes down and the starlings are comfortable that they frightened off any hawks or any Falcons. Then the starlings come down and they rest in the trees and in Limerick they do this on this Bedford Row Street the Bardshit district and thousands of them go into the leaves of the trees, and they talk and talk and shit and talk and shit. Scientists reckon they're literally communicating about where to get the best food that day,

but they're not just talking about food. In their droppings are seeds from plants that they've eaten that day. So like a starling marmoration going into trees and shitting on the ground, that's essential for the health of meadows and forests. But here in Limerick City, it's just paving. There's nothing there. But the starlings don't know. They think that they're in a concrete forest.

Now there's a possibility that these starlings, because there's loads of them, there's a possibility that there's too many starlings because they don't have natural predators anymore. Even though they go up into the sky to do their marmoration, their dance to frighten off their predators, the falcons and the hawks, even though they do that, the falcons and hawks, they're not insufficient numbers to eat the starlings. And that's important.

This is an ecosystem. Starlings are indigenous birds and there's birds of prey that are indigenous birds. And nature is cruel sometimes. But predators prey on flocks of animals and it benefits the entire ecosystem. But the starlings

don't have predators anymore. So maybe there's too many starlings or maybe they're a little bit too relaxed. Maybe what's needed in Limerick City is a few fucking falcons, a few falcons and a few hawks that can prey upon the starlings and restore a sense of balance. And when I was thinking about that this week and researching it, I went down a fucking mad rabbit hole. So I started to ask myself the question of,

you know, where the fuck are the hawks? Where are the hawks and the falcons and the buzzards? Why did these animals almost go fucking extinct? Why did they almost go extinct? Why do we have to put such great effort into reintroducing birds of prey specifically? Well I want to begin by talking about a volcanic eruption in 1816. Actually before I do that, because I don't want to interrupt myself, let's have a little ocarina pause.

Don't have an ocarina, what have I got here? Scissors. I'm going to clip this scissors here and you're're gonna hear an advert for something, okay? Jesus Christ, this is a very strange podcast this week. God help anyone who's a new listener. I'm not even gonna explain why I'm doing this. Okay, you'd have heard an advert there for some bullshit. This podcast is supported by you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast. If you enjoy this podcast, if it brings you mirth, merriment, distraction, whatever the fuck has you listening to this podcast, please consider paying me

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Do it on a browser or on a browser on your phone. Upcoming gigs. My tour of England and Scotland there in June. That's only a month away now. I can't wait to do that. Bristol, Cornwall, Sheffield, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, York, London, East Sussex and Norwich. I'm coming, doing some wonderful live podcasts with cracking guests. There are going to be magnificent gigs. Come out ye cracking tens, and come

to my live podcasts in June. And then after that, what the fuck have we got? Derry, there in September on the 19th, Derry's gonna be good fun, and then there is a Vicar Street I believe, also in Dublin Dublin in September so come along for that too. I hope I'm able to record my fucking podcast now when I'm on the road in England and Scotland. It's an intense tour, a very intense tour and it's like three weeks so hopefully I'll be able to get my shit out.

So I want to talk about the disappearance of birds of prey, specifically falcons, because all around the world, their numbers diminished. So insects and parasites, fleas, ticks, these used to be a huge problem in human society. Even a hundred years ago, less, up until the 1940s, human beings would have nits in their hair, fleas would be biting them, parasites. A lot of us really take for granted today that we don't really have to think about fleas and gnits and ticks as part of our daily life. We don't have to think about these things. They're not around anymore. Like disease too.

The fucking plague, the plague that killed millions in 1816 there was this volcano in Indonesia called Mount Tambora and it erupted and it was a fucking huge eruption, massive, and it spread an ash cloud into the air that was so high that 1816 was known as the year without a summer. Europe did not have a summer in 1816. The sun was blocked out from this fucking volcano that erupted. The river Thames froze over. And in Ireland, if you think of, first off there was famines all over fucking Europe because people weren't able to grow crops that year, because it was winter all year because of this volcano but also what it did was it forced people indoors so people stayed indoors all year they stayed in cramped spaces it was damp and wet because it was winter all year in ireland you had extreme poverty So you had these really poor people with no means, cramped in small spaces

all year, staying indoors, trying to stay warm, wearing the exact same clothes every single day because it's freezing all year round, there's no fucking summer. And this led to an outbreak of fleas. So fleas had the perfect conditions that year to explode in population. And it led to an epidemic in Ireland of a disease called typhus. Typhus, again, it's one of these diseases. You tend not to hear of typhus in the global north anymore. It's an extreme fever and sickness that you can get from flea bites,

from infected flea bites, and it kills people. And in 18, between 1816 and 1817 in Ireland, 65,000 people died from typhus, and I think close to a million were infected because of this explosion in the flea population. Because there was no summer, and it wasn't just Ireland, all over Europe, flea populations exploded unnaturally because the year without a summer, it created perfect conditions for these fleas to breed. Now we don't really

worry about fleas today or parasites of any description because we've got access to hot water, we can bathe ourselves frequently, we've got access to cheap clothing, we can change our clothes frequently, we have access to, we can wash our clothes with hot water and detergent. We've got plumbing. General improvements in sanitation means that us in the global north, we're not really thinking about fleas. We're not thinking, and because we're not thinking about fleas, we're not worrying about bubonic plague. Bubonic plague, like the plague that killed millions of people throughout Europe. We're not worrying about plague.

We're not worrying about typhus. These diseases don't exist for us in the global north because of sanitation. But typhus, it became a huge problem. It was exacerbated by that volcano but throughout the 1800s and into the early 20th century, especially anytime you had a war. If you had a war and you had a lot of soldiers, and we're talking hundreds of thousands of soldiers in battle, and they can't, they're huddled together, they can't wash their clothes, they're not bathing. Those soldiers had to worry about not just getting killed, but an outbreak of typhus,

this fever caused by fleas that could knock an entire fucking army. So armies used to, they used to spray their soldiers and where soldiers were with insecticide, but in the 1800s, soldiers were with insecticide. But in the 1800s, insecticide didn't really exist, not as we know it today. There was a natural insecticide called parithrum. It came from flowers that were very similar to daisies, but it was a limited resource and controlled by the colonial powers. This parithrum, the daisy that this natural insecticide came from, it was grown by the British in Kenya and I think parts of India and also Japan. So killing parasites and insects that can cause these huge plagues and pandemics, this was really fucking difficult and there was a there was limited resources so

even while World War one is happening and World War two the world doesn't really have a reliable insecticide until 1939 so in 1874 this Austrian chemist he found a substance called DDT and in 1939 another scientist figured holy fuck this is an insecticide. Not only is this an insecticide but this is highly effective and it's pretty much unlimited. So now the world goes from having a limited amount of insecticide to unlimited insecticide. So during World War II, the allied forces, they start spraying this chemical DDT fucking everywhere, and it kills insects. It's very, very effective at killing fleas, mites, ticks, all of these really dangerous

human parasites that can cause mass illness, now all of a sudden we're able to control this. Like you've got huge refugee populations during World War II and the likes of Italy. Incredibly poor, starving, huddled masses full of people living in an environment that historically there'd be an outbreak of typhus and they'd all die. Now they're not dying because this DDT insecticide chemical has been spread everywhere and people's lives are not only being changed, humanity is changing. For the first time ever,

soldiers and humans aren't worried about insect-borne plagues. The Black Plague, Bubonic Plague and fucking Typhus. Because this insecticide is just incredible and they can spray it everywhere. So World War II is ravishing the entire fucking world. Everywhere is affected by World War II. Everywhere you've got people displaced, poverty, poor sanitation, but this DDT shit that's being sprayed, it's killing all the disease carrying insects. Diseases like yellow fever, malaria. These things now aren't a problem. Tropical regions, fucking millions of people's lives are saved during World War II.

Mostly the displaced civilians. A lot more people should have died during World War II. A lot more people should have died if it wasn't for DDT, killing all the harmful insects and the human parasites. But the problem is, this is the world's first ever insecticide. We didn't understand insecticides. It starts to kill all the fucking insects. The DDT being sprayed around the world after World War II, it causes the biodiversity collapse that you and I live in today, like it's, it's unfathomable to imagine

what the world must have been like 150 years ago when it comes to animals and insects. It's unfathomable. I've told you myself, like I read a short story writer called Liam O'Flaherty who, he was from the Aran Islands in about 1910 and he used to write stories where he'd describe a lot of nature and when I read his stories it feels like he's lying. When he talks about how many fish and insects he would see I literally go this man is lying and it's like no there was a massive, massive abundance of living things about 150 years ago. Well DDT, this fucking insecticide after World War II, that really started to cause the biodiversity

collapse that you and I now just experience as normal, because it started to kill all the insects. And then it started to go into the soil and leach into the groundwater. Then it started to kill all the insects and then it started to go into the soil and leech into the groundwater then it started to kill fish. DDT was really really fucking bad but people didn't spot this and after World War 2 America having seen how effective DDT was in preventing the spread of typhus and malaria in a war zone, they now start to use this wide scale on civilian populations and the rest of the world followed. And just a mad example of how political ideology can end up in policy decisions in a way you wouldn't imagine. So one of the most destructive campaigns of spraying DDT everywhere was in the 1950s in America.

And this is, so there was this new, there was an invasive insect in America. It was an ant called the Red Imported Fire Ant. That was the name of the insect, the Red Imported Fire Ant. It came from South America and by the 1950s it had reached the United States. And it's a harmful enough invasive species. It is harmful. It eats crops. It's not indigenous and it definitely needs to be controlled and the red imported fire ant is a threat to biodiversity and food systems without a doubt. But the thing is, in

America in the 1950s, that was the height of the fucking Cold War. And America in the 1950s, that was the height of the fucking cold war. And America in the 1950s was terrified of Russia, and paranoid about Russia, and terrified and paranoid about communism. This period was known as the Reds Under the Bed period, where America had gotten itself into a moral panic where they believed that everybody was a communist. People were accusing their colleagues of being fucking communists. I mean, you look back at it and think, Jesus, that was mad.

It's not too different now to how, right now under Trump in America, the way that people are being treated. And college campuses campuses if they're opposing the genocide in Gaza or seeing people who are engaging in protest and activism and if they're if they're from a Middle Eastern country and they're engaging in protest and activism on American college campuses secret fucking American police are taking them away and deporting them. But in the 1950s, the moral panic was called Reds Under the Bed. And the people of America were terrified of communists, Reds, Soviets.

And the government policy was terrified of Reds. And this ant, the Red Imported Fire ant, because of its fucking name, because it just happened to be called the red imported fire ant, it meant that the US Department of Agriculture completely overestimated the threat of this ant because its name, because of the red imported fire ant, it sounded like a communist Soviet fucking spy.

Because it'd be like during 9-11 if there was a spider called the Bin Laden spider or the Jihadi spider. So the US embarked on this massive campaign of spraying DDT fucking everywhere. Over cities they covered the entire country in this incredibly harsh, dangerous insecticide so that they could kill the red imported fire ant, which itself was driven by ideological anti-communism which has fuck all to do with ants. America did massive damage. Massive, massive damage to its ecosystem by spraying this DDT everywhere. And then the rest of the world followed.

Now the positive side of this thing is... This is one of the reasons why you or I don't have to worry about typhus anymore. This is why you probably have never had fleas or nits in your lifetime. But it's also the reason the climate is collapsing. What the fuck does this have to do with Limerick City? Well those starlings, like I said, this flock of starlings, they're possibly...there's probably too many starlings in Limerick City because they don't have natural predators anymore.

Apex predators are keystone species and when you take them out you end up with some degree of collapse. What happened? What happened to the eagles, to the hawks, to the falcons? What happened to the birds of prey? Did people kill them because they were killing sheep? DDT. DDT is what happened to birds of prey. But it happened, it's a strange one. It happened through a process called biomagnification, right? So, the insects were the ones being killed by DDT, okay? So insects are getting killed by DDT. But then there's birds that eat the insects.

So DDT doesn't break down in the environment. It tends to stick around, right? So the insects are getting sprayed with the DDT. Then birds like starlings, starlings are eating the insects. But then the falcons and the hawks, they're eating the starlings. The DDT isn't breaking down. So it means that the animals that are at the top of the food chain end up accumulating more and more DDT in their systems.

Like this is the same reason that tuna has a lot of mercury in it. Like they say you shouldn't eat tuna more than three times a week. That the healthiest fish to eat are small fish like herring or mackerel. But fucking tuna, because tuna is gigantic, tuna is about the same size as a car. There's naturally occurring mercury in the oceans, it's not just because of pollution. So plankton, they absorb mercury from the oceans, then small fish eat the plankton they absorb mercury from the oceans then small fish eat the plankton and then the tuna eat the small fish and they're apex predators and they're large so tuna actually has quite a lot of mercury in it and then we eat the

tuna because we're the fucking top apex predator and you have to be careful about eating tuna and mercury but this bio, this is, we ended up by the 1960s. All around the world, all our birds of prey had massive amounts of DDT accumulated in their bodies. And the strange thing is, so the DDT, it didn't kill the birds of prey. So I'm talking falcons and hawks and eagles and buzzards. It didn't kill the birds of prey. So I'm talking falcons and hawks and eagles and buzzards. It didn't kill them. What it did is it fucked with their capacity to metabolize calcium. And calcium is what eggs are made out of.

So it led to a generation of birds of prey who were laying soft eggs of birds of prey who were laying soft eggs and then nothing was getting hatched. So by the 1970s birds of prey were almost f***ing extinct. Their numbers had gone very very small all around the world because of this DDT business. This is where it starts to get f*** fucking mad. So people who worked with birds of prey started to notice this collapse, this complete collapse of the bird of prey population and they started to figure out these eggs aren't right. There's something going on here with these eggs. So even though the birds of prey are having sex with each other and laying eggs, something's not

right here. So it was really bad. So by the 1960s, there was nothing. Let's just take America. There was no wild falcons east of the Rocky Mountains, only a handful. So you're talking birds of prey were almost gone. By the 1960s, they were almost gone. A memory like the fucking dinosaurs. And then a professor of ornithology called Tom Cade, he was the first one to go,

yeah, I think I know what's happening. I think this is DDT and I think it's getting to the eggs. So a small group of humans stepped up, they formed a thing called the Peregrine Fund, and they stepped up and they said, right, well, we're gonna have to get involved here, and we're gonna have to we're gonna have to get involved here and we're gonna have to save birds of prey specifically the peregrine falcon we're gonna have to fucking save them there were so few peregrine falcons left that they could not rely upon them to have sex with

each other in the wild and to procreate so this group like, okay we're gonna have to capture sperm from falcons and artificially inseminate eggs. We're gonna have to figure out how to wank a falcon, literally. How do we wank a falcon? And it was really difficult. First off, they've got really weird tiny cocks. And then they figured out it took three adult humans to wank off a falcon. And did they get the falcon horny? This was not working. They were really worried that we think this bird is going to go extinct because it takes three of us to wank him off and this is impossible. And then this lunatic comes along called Lester Boyd. And Lester Boyd is like, okay, this isn't working.

We have to, the Falcons are dying. We got, it takes three of us to rank off a Falcon. We can't do it. There needs to be a solution here. So Lester Bide, he raises baby Falcons, male Falcons from an egg, baby falcons, male falcons from an egg, and he grooms baby falcons to be sexually attracted to his head. I'm a hundred percent serious. He's raising, hatching male falcons and keeping them in isolation and training the falcons to identify his head as a sexual object.

And then he invents a hat. Called a falcon sex hat. It's a strange rubber hat. I reckon he designed it after a condom. It's... a condom. It's like a little hipster beanie on your head, right? But the hat is made out of rubber and it has tiny holes all over it, like a honeycomb. And literally, he would stand there with his rubber falcon hat on and the falcon would get horny and fuck his head. I'm dead serious. And then the falcon is having sex with his head and then ejaculating all over the hat.

But the hat has these tiny little holes in it, all over it, like these honeycomb holes. And now the falcon cum is being held in these little concaves in the hat. Now he's got a hat full of Falcon Cum and he's injecting it into eggs and they're artificially inseminating Falcon eggs and it worked, it worked. The wild population of falcons that have been decimated by DDT, it's started to be rebuilt. By these lads wearing hats and letting falcons fuck their heads, I'm dead serious. And there's entire falcon-grooming manuals available about what you need to do to raise a fucking peregrine falcon from a hatchling and how to make it sexually attracted to your head and for it to have sex with this rubber hat on your head it's still being done

i can go online and i can buy one you can you can go on to google and you can buy a falcon sex hat for 200 quid i'm dead serious most importantly this worked by 1990s, so that's 30 years later, by the 1990s wild falcon populations in America had stabilized and people stopped using DDT obviously. By the 1960s people figured out that this DDT was bad shit. Wasn't the first insecticide to destroy insect populations and destroy the environment. I mean, they replaced DDT with insecticides that were made from nicotine. Like nicotine that's in cigarettes. They replaced them with neonicotinoids. And these were sprayed throughout the 1990s thinking that these were safe These neonicotinoids this is what caused this way. There's no more fucking bees. This is they killed all the bees

They caused a colony collapse disorder. Someone needs to figure out how to train bees to have sex with their head now But as bizarre as it is the person who who invented the Falcon Sex Hat, they changed our world. We could be talking about the Falcon as if it is the dodo now, a wonderful bird of prey that no longer exists. It was on the brink and it was saved by a mad sex hat. So here's my proposal, and this is, I got this hot take this week when I was just thinking about the Bardshit district. Thinking about all the starlings. Thinking about all the shits that they do.

How they're an uncontrolled population. There's no one calling them. No natural calling. And I was thinking about this, and I went, yeah. A volcanic eruption in 1818 you can trace that directly to people training Falcons to have sex with their heads but I propose this as a solution for Limerick and I'd like Limerick City Council to listen these Falcon sex hats are only 200 quid online I I propose that we put a falcon sex hat on the

Terry Wogan statue that's at the very very bottom of Bedford Row, the bottom of the Birdshit district. We put a rubber falcon sex hat on the Terry Wogan statue. We hatch some Falcons and train them to have sex with his head, and then we artificially inseminate some local limerick falcons, and then eventually in about 10 years time they're going to cull the starling population. And that's the solution that I propose. And it might work. Fucking hell. Okay that's all I've got time for this week. In the Irish Examiner this week, my podcast was recommended as a cure

for toxic masculinity in centrist dads. Someone wrote an article and they recommended my podcast as a cure for toxic masculinity. And... There's a part of me that wanted to do the episode on this topic. Because I just know there's gonna be some man called Donald in his 50s who's gonna read that article and go, you know what, I'm gonna give the Blind By podcast, I'm gonna give that a chance.

I've heard that this podcast is really on point when it comes to issues of toxic masculinity. And I want them to listen to this episode. I want this to be the first one that they hear. I hope you enjoyed that, Donna. Okay that's all I have time for this week. I'll be back next week with another hot take, I don't know. In the meantime, rub a dog, wink at a swan, let a falcon have sex with your head. You know it's a strange one that I don't think the sex hat works with other. It only works with the falcon family because they're very highly trainable birds. I don't think it works with ospreys or buzzards or hawks.

It's just the falcon family. But anyway look I'll catch you next week. Dad bless. you Thank you.