The Science of Birds - Ask Me Anything About Birds - Summer 2025

Episode Date: July 29, 2025

👕 Bird Merch —  Get yourself some bird shirts!~~~In this episode—which is Number 120—Ivan answers questions sent in by listeners. So this is what we call an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) episode.The listeners who get to contribute questions for these Ask Me Anything episodes are members of the Science of Birds community on Patreon. There are several tiers of support that people can join, and at the Helpful Hornbill and Awesome Osprey level, one perk is getting to contribute questions for episodes like this one.So if you’d like to have Ivan answer your bird questions in a future episode, consider signing up on the Patreon page, and become a Helpful Hornbill or an Awesome Osprey. Support the show

Hello and welcome. This is the Science of Birds. I am your host, Ivan Philipson. The Science of Birds podcast is a lighthearted exploration of bird biology for lifelong learners. This episode, which is number 120, is an Ask Me Anything episode, or AMA. A little while ago, I invited the members of my Patreon community to send me their questions about birds.

I do this every so often, and they did a great job this time. They sent it a bunch of questions for this episode. It's always interesting to hear what people are curious about when it comes to birds. You guys often come up with questions that I've never even considered before. Some of them are kind of out of left field,

and I love that. So thank you to my supporters on Patreon. And if you would like to become a member and contribute questions to future episodes like this one, just check out my Patreon page over at patreon.com slash science of birds. And there's a support to show link somewhere in the show notes down at the bottom. So we've got a wide variety of fun topics to discuss today. And FYI, I'm still traveling in Japan. So, Konigua. Hello. I'm sitting here in my little hotel room, sipping my macha latte.

I'm in Tokyo. It's a nice sunny day out there. Anyway, unlike most of my full-length podcast episodes, I am not working off of a script today. I'm just freewheeling it using an outline. I will try not to be too rambling

and incoherent. Now, I've said this before, but I want to emphasize that I, Ivan Philipson, am not a walking, talking, ruggedly handsome dictionary of bird facts. Sure, I know a thing or two about birds, but to answer at least some of the questions in today's episode, I had to do a little research and some thinking first. It's not like I know all of this stuff off the top of my head.

So as usual, I am often learning alongside of you as I create these episodes, and that's one of the things I love about what I do. I too am a lifelong learner. There are a bunch of questions today, so by necessity to keep this episode at a reasonable length, I will not be spending lots of time answering any one question. We'll keep up a brisk pace if we can. Okay, so shall we get into it? We shall.

The first question comes from Taylor. I live in Memphis, Tennessee, and I'm in the process of buying a house with a decently sized backyard. How can I make my yard welcoming and enticing to the local birds? Well, first of all, congratulations, Taylor. That's exciting. And that's a great question. I'm glad you're thinking about creating an enticing yard for birds. So first and foremost, you want to think about native plants.

That's going to be your most important thing. And you're probably already aware of that. If you can recreate the local habitat in your backyard as much as possible, that's going to be great for birds. So you may have, there may be some books or websites about your region in terms of landscaping with native plants. That's the kind of thing I would be looking for because certain native plants are going to be easy to cultivate or propagate to establish in your yard. Others are going to be more difficult. And so if you learn the requirements for soil and sunlight and temperature and all that stuff, you can choose which plants are going to work best in your yard.

In any case, you're going to want plants of different sizes and heights. So ideally you'd have some trees, maybe larger trees and some smaller ones and some shrubs, some wildflowers, herbaceous plants, maybe even some grasses. Because a variety of plants like that create different structure, create different little microhabitats for birds. And regarding trees, I would say that sometimes people might get gung-ho and be like, oh, I've got to take out all the non-native plants. And even if you've got large established trees, someone might be motivated to take them out

if they're not native. But I think the usual advice is if you have large established trees that have been there probably for decades, you want to keep those there because they do provide structure. And it's probably better to have them than to take them out and start over again with native trees. Another thing would be to have some kind of water feature. Birds love water. They need water. So if you have something like at least a bird bath, if not maybe a little pond,

and if there's part of it that's flowing or bubbling, that might attract birds. It might be something they would recognize more readily than just still water. And I hope this goes without saying, but if you do have a cat, you're going to want to keep the kitty indoors because in making your yard enticing to birds, you definitely don't want to have a cat prowling around in those bushes. You won't be doing your birds any favors in that regard. Okay, next question. This one comes from Sam.

If you could bring back one species of extinct bird, which species would it be and why? Oh boy, so yeah, I wish we could bring them all back, right? At least the ones that have gone extinct in the last 500 years or so because of us. But without thinking about it for days, I came up with the Carolina parakeet, conneuropsis Carolinensis. This was America's best example of, or the best representative of the New World Parrot family, Satacity.

So in the eastern United States, in the Midwest and southeast, there used to be these large flocks of Carolina parakeets. They were beautiful birds with green, yellow, and orange plumage. They lived in cypress swamps and lowlands dominated by sycamore forest. And sadly, they've been gone. gone for a long time. They were, even though they were quite abundant, when Europeans first arrived on the continent, they were driven to extinction by people shooting them primarily. For a variety of reasons, I will at some point do an entire episode on this species. I think it would be a really

interesting episode. And so, yeah, I would like to see that. It would be really cool to have large flocks of parakeets flying around in the United States. That'd be pretty amazing. Okay, next question, sort of somewhat similar question in a way. This one comes from Owen. He asks, If you were reincarnated as a bird, which bird would you want to be reincarnated as? And, you know, not, I didn't do this intentionally, but I came up with another type of parrot, the rainbow lorikeet, trichoglossus molycanus. Now this one is in another family. It's in the old world parrot family, siticulity. So why did I pick this bird? Well, it's colorful. I like colorful birds. I would like to be a colorful bird, I suppose. And as a parrot, it's

intelligent, as most parrots are. I would like to think that if I was a bird, I could have, you know, a reasonable level of self-awareness and consciousness. And it's an Australian species. And Australia is one of my favorite places in the world. I would love to spend lots of time there flying around exploring a variety of habitats. And the rainbow lorikeet is found in a variety of habitats. So that would be great. And this is a very social bird, has lots of friends, unlike me in this life. So maybe if I was a rainbow lorkeet, I'd actually have a social life. So there you go. I'm sure there are many other birds I could have chosen, but that's the one I came up with without thinking about it too hard. The next question is from John. John says, having traveled to Malaysia and Indonesia numerous times

photographing birds, especially kingfishers, I've always wondered why this part of the world has the vast preponderance of immensely colorful kingfishers, far more than our hemisphere. Do you have any hunches? Yeah, interesting question, John. So when he says, our hemisphere, meaning the western hemisphere, I assume. So there's several things going on here. First of all, Kingfishers, the diversity of Kingfishers is not distributed evenly around the world. Most of their diversity is in the eastern hemisphere, the old world. So in Eurasia, Africa, Australasia. In the new world in the Americas, we have only six species of kingfishers. And on top of that, kingfishers tend to be concentrated in the tropical latitudes. So there are more species in the tropics.

And a third factor is that ornithologists are pretty sure that kingfishers originated in Southern Asia, in India or Malaysia, which is where John made this observation. And they originated there about 20 to 34 million years ago. And one common pattern we see in biogeography, not just in birds, but other organisms as well, is that there tends to be more diversity in species, more biodiversity in that group, wherever it happened to originate on the planet. So it's not surprising that there are more kingfisher species in Southern Asia, if that's where they originated. So regarding color being more colorful, so in 2022, there was a study in the journal, nature, ecology, and evolution that finally quantified the pattern that people had noticed

that birds in general seem more colorful as you get closer to the equator. And in this study, they looked at 140,000 museum specimens of birds, of passerine birds, and they quantified how colorful they were and where they're found geographically regarding their latitude. And yes, indeed, it turns out that birds are about 30% more colorful near the equator, relative to their temperate and polar relatives. So it's a real pattern. Birds are more colorful in the tropics in general.

Now, why are King Vizier's more colorful? Or why is this pattern exist at all among birds? Well, we don't know for sure. There are a variety of hypotheses to explain that. It could be that because there are lots of dark forests in the tropics, that being colorful is advantageous for signaling members of your own species or other species. just being more visible. It could have something to do with diet.

There might be more carotenoids available in the diets of tropical birds. So more yellows, oranges, and reds available. Another explanation could be that because there's lots of diversity in the tropics, more species in general, that birds need to be able to differentiate their own species from all those other species that are hanging out in the same habitat. So you want to have complex patterns, colorful patterns in your plumage, so that you can recognize each other.

And it might be that in tropical environments that are more stable, that birds can allocate more of their energy and their resources to being colorful for sexual selection for appealing to potential mates rather than spending energy on just surviving or being camouflaged to hide from predators. So again, we don't know for sure, but those are some of the possible explanations for why you might find more colorful kingfishers in that part of the world. The next few questions are related roughly to anatomy. And the first one comes from Susie.

She asks, How common are color abnormalities like albinism and lukism? I feel like I see tons of photos of birds with these conditions. Is it actually common or is this just because most birders have a camera now and get photos? Great question. First of all, I do plan to do an entire episode on this topic. the topic of these color abnormalities, albinism, lukism, melanism. I think that'll be really fun. So first of all, let's define these terms, right? So albinism is when you have a complete

absence of melanin in the plumage or in the skin of a bird. And that is due to a genetic mutation that affects the production of melanin. So an albino bird is entirely white. It has pink eyes, pink legs, and a pink bill generally. Now, in terms of the frequency, like how rare is that condition, it's a little hard to say for sure. What I came up with just doing a little bit of online research is that the frequency of albinism is estimated somewhere between one in 2000 to one in 30,000 individuals. So pretty rare, pretty uncommon. Then we have lewkism, L-E-U-C-I-S-M, sometimes pronounced lewkism or leu-sism. This is a partial loss of pigmentation. So melanin is produced, but it's not necessarily deposited evenly throughout the body

or normally. It often affects the feathers, parts of the feathers or patches, but it doesn't affect the eyes or the skin, so those typically are normal-colored. This is more common than albinism, and the estimates here would range from one in 100 to one and a thousand birds. But, of course, that depends on the population, because both of these conditions are genetic. They result from mutations, so it depends on the frequency of that mutation in that particular species, in that particular population. At least with albinism, this tends to be a recessive mutation, so it only appears when you get two parents that carry that recessive allele or gene, and then some of their offspring are going

to be albinos. And yes, I think that there's definitely a bias that we're seeing because, yeah, those birds are unusual. So humans, photographers are going to take lots of pictures of them, post them on the internet, they're going to circulate on social media. So we're going to get this false sense of how common those conditions are. All right. Next question. It comes from Bruce and Bruce asks, do birds have eyelids? Yes, they do. But here's the thing. They have Normal eyelids like you and I do, upper eyelid and the lower eyelid, but they also have a third eyelid. I've talked about this before. The third eyelid in birds is called the nictitating membrane, and it moves across the eye in a horizontal direction rather than up and down.

And it's transparent, at least partially transparent. It shields the eye from debris, especially when a bird is flying or swimming. It helps to moisturize the eye, clean the eye, and yeah, it's almost like a pair of goggles that the bird can use when it needs to. So that's the nictitating membrane. So, you know, it's not, yes, it's a simple question. Do birds have eyelids? Yes, but they also have the nictitating membrane. The next question comes from Andrew and he asks, I always thought that birds had a contra-flow system of blood and airflow in their lungs, which would maximize the gas transfer. But recently, I've seen articles saying that it's actually cross-current. So their respiration is not as efficient as it

could be. Is this true? Also, there is a common statistic that our lungs transfer between a quarter and a fifth of the oxygen in the air. 21% oxygen in, 16% oxygen out. What about birds? There must be a greater oxygen transfer. All right, yeah, this is a pretty technical question. Very good, Andrew. And once again, I do plan to do an episode on the respiratory system in birds. Sorry, that's going to be just a common thing I'm going to say here. A lot of these topics are things that I am going to make episodes about, which is, I think, exciting. I'm looking forward to those. But that's correct.

Birds do not have a true countercurrent exchange system like you find in the gills of fish, for example. And that would be where the two fluids, so in the case of fish, it would be water, oxygen-rich water flowing past blood. They're flowing in opposite directions, that countercurrent. And that maximizes the opportunity for gas exchange between the two fluids. So birds have a cross-current exchange system where the capillaries are running perpendicular to the airflow.

So that's more efficient than in humans, but not quite as efficient as theoretical situation where there would be true countercurrent exchange. In bird lungs, air passes through in one direction during both the inhalation and exhalation through a complex system of air sacs. And that unidirectional flow ensures that fresh, high-oxygen air is almost always in contact with the respiratory surface. And Andrew, you're correct that birds do extract more oxygen out of the air they breathe than humans do.

So humans breathe in air that's 21% oxygen and then breathe out. 16%. That difference is about 25%. We extract about 25% of the oxygen in the air we breathe. In birds, however, the efficiency is higher. It's more like 30 to 60%. and that depends on the species, on what the bird is doing, on the altitude, and things like that. Cool. Okay. Our next question comes from Kiki. Kiki asks,

What's the deal with blue-footed booby's feet? I read a book called Around the World and 80 birds last year, and the section on the blue-footed boobie said that their feet are blue because of carotenoid pigments from their food. Everything else I found while skimming the internet says the same. So what is it about the blue-footed boobie that makes their carotenoid show up as blue pigment, while everyone else gets reds, oranges, and yellows. Right. So in the episode I did talking about plumage coloration, we talked a lot about carotenoids and how that's where those colors come from, the warm colors of red, orange, and yellow. And we talked about structural color, which is where blue comes from typically,

which is microscopic structure in the feathers or the skin that interact with wavelengths of light to give blue coloration. So it is true. that in blue-footed boobie's feet, there are carotenoids that are playing a major role. Those carotenoids come from the fish that the birds eat. But those carotenoids are not blue. The blue comes from the microscopic structure of the blue-footed boobie's skin that overlies that overlies the layer of the carotenoids. So the skin of the foot contains microscopic arrays of the protein collagen, and those scatter the shorter wavelengths of light, particularly blue, that's what meets our eyes. So we see blue and it's interacting. That structural blue is

interacting with the carotenoid pigments to give the particular color we're seeing. And depending on the concentration of the carotenoids, the color of a blue-footed booby's foot can be somewhere between vivid turquoise and a deep blue color. So it's the interaction of carotenoids with the structural color. The next question comes from June. Many of us have heard that city pigeons are extra dirty compared to typical birds. they live in cities and sometimes eat trash. But in one book, it said that the amount of germs and a pigeon is about the same as a typical bird.

When I looked this up, I couldn't find any scientific study to back this up. So are there any scientific studies that back up that, A, pigeons are more filthy than other birds, or B, they're all the same in terms of how many germs they have. Right, so poor pigeons. They get a lot of hate and love, too, from other people. but yeah, I think people, they like to call them sky rats or whatever. You know, people assume that because pigeons live in cities, that they are like vermin in a way

and somehow carrying lots of diseases and bacteria and germs. Now, it is true that pigeons do carry some pathogens that are zoonotic, ones that could potentially infect humans that we might be concerned about. But my understanding is that, as far as we know, it's very unlikely, very rare for any of those pathogens to infects. humans, even people that work pretty regularly with pigeons or around them. But it seems that, as far as I could tell, digging into the literature a little bit, it seems that there's no evidence that pigeons are somehow universally dirtier than other wild birds in terms of their microbial

populations. So in terms of the viruses and bacteria and parasites in their bodies. And of course, like so many things, there's variation, right? There might be certain populations of pigeons that are overcrowded and living in places that happen to be extra dirty. So yeah, maybe sometimes they are, but again, it's not a universal pattern that pigeons are any dirtier than other birds. I think it's fair to say that. Elena has our next question. She says, I recently moved to Sacramento, and frequently on my drive home from work, I see white-tailed kites hovering over the farmland while looking for prey. Are there other bird species that hover in mid-air like this? And are there any sort of adaptations in

the wings or body that are required for this movement? Cool. Well, first of all, that's lucky you, Elena, to see white-tailed kites on your commute. And yeah, there are other birds that do this, quite a few, actually. In terms of raptors, you know, the Osprey does this. I talked about that in the Osprey episode I did. The American Kestrel, other small falcons. And then, you know, in other types of birds, there's swallows, turns, kingfishers,

sunbirds, flycatchers, gnat catchers, warblers, and on and on. There are birds that do at least a little bit of hovering, and this is hovering that's usually no more than a second or two, you know, a few seconds of hovering. Hummingbirds are, of course, famous for hovering. They are masters at it. And they are actually the only birds that really can sustain hovering flight over a real length of time.

And the thing is, yes, it's energetically quite expensive for a bird to do this, And so it really is only efficient for small birds. And that's why hummingbirds are super, super tiny. And especially hummingbirds, they do have a lot of adaptations that allow them to do that. I talked about that in the hummingbird episode. They have, you know, the musculature, their flight muscles have special adaptations, their skeletons, the way that their wings move in a figure eight pattern that they were able to generate lift on both the downstroke and the upstroke. So yeah.

And why, you know, do any birds do this? It'd be for a variety of reasons, depending on the species. But at least with raptors, being able to hold your body stationary for even a little bit of time and then holding your head stationary as well allows you to spot prey more easily, right? I think about when I'm out birding and I'm walking along a trail in the forest. Sure, I might be able to catch some movement as I'm walking along, but it's much easier when I stop and stand still, it's much easier then to notice any movement.

So it's kind of like what the raptors are doing. They're trying to be stationary up high from a good vantage point so they can spot a small mammal or a fish or whatever it is down below. Some raptors do this just by riding wind currents and using aerodynamics, so something like a red-tailed hawk, so storing stationary using an updraft at the top of a hill. So we call that kiting where the bird is not actually flapping. it's just using aerodynamics, and in other cases like your white-tailed kite, that that bird is

actually flapping its wings and hovering that way. Next question. This one comes from candy. I often sit on my porch and listen to the night sounds. I often hear kill deer. I know there are nocturnal, diurnal, and crepuscular birds, but kill deer don't seem to fit any of those. Are they hunting? Is it an adaptation for safety? Ah, yes, the kill deer. Caradrius, Vosiferous, right? That species name there, vociferous, is related to the fact that we often hear kill deer. They're quite loud. They make one call that sounds like they're saying kill deer really loud. And yeah, this species is known to be active during the day and at night, kind of all the time. So it's not unusual to hear them at night. They like to hang around in Walmart parking lots, screaming loudly and maybe picking up some bugs that are attracted to the lights in the parking lot. So yeah, I guess you could say that the killdeer doesn't fit into our normal categories of strictly diurnal, nocturnal, or crepuscular. But in terms of what the bird is doing, yeah, probably, you know, as a visual hunter, they're probably feeding less at night, I would imagine, but otherwise maybe going about their

normal business. I couldn't find a lot of information about how they spend their time at night. But yeah, they would be protecting their chicks and everything and doing many of the things they would do during the day. And the thing is about sleep in birds. Remember, we did an episode on how birds sleep. They don't sleep the way we do. It's not like, oh, it's nighttime.

I'm a bird. I'm going to sleep for eight hours now and then get up tomorrow morning. Birds sleep in small little bursts. Or they just take short intervals of sleep. It might be even a few seconds or maybe 30 seconds, 90 seconds, and then they're awake again. And they just repeat that off and on throughout the night. So really, when birds, you know, birds that are diurnal at night,

they're just, they're inactive. and they're roosting, that doesn't mean they're sleeping all night long. And those same birds might get some sleep here and there, take little power naps throughout the day. So I suspect that's what the kill deer is doing, that even though they're active at night, they're probably also getting some sleep at night, as well as getting some sleep during the day.

Kalila asks the next question. Why do bower birds nest on the ground, where they can be predated upon easily, and what determines what they will select to decorate their nest, and why? Ah, yes, bowerbirds. These are the roughly 27 species in the family, telenorinkedy. And you know we'll be doing an episode on them at some point.

So this is, this question is coming off of a common misconception. So the bower that a male bower bird makes is not a nest. It's a display arena that the male builds to attract and impress females. Right? So he creates this structure and then decorates it with, usually colorful objects. A female comes along and if she's impressed by the bower, then she might mate with that male. And the structure of the bower and the objects used and the colors used vary from species to species. And why any one species chooses those particular objects or

colors, I don't think we know for sure. You know, there's some interplay of sexual selection that's been going on probably for millions of years. You know, once some female millions of years ago started showing a preference for red objects, let's say, then if she chose a male that used red objects and then their offspring had that same preference for red, and that just continued, that would amplify that instinct. And here we are. We're left with a bower bird species that prefers red, just in sort of simplistic terms. So again, the bower is not a nest. So these birds do build separate nests, and those nests are up in trees or in bushes, and they are in fact cryptic. They're hidden from predators from easy view. Our next question also has to do with

breeding. This one comes from Janet. She says, I'm still thinking of your episode on brood parasites from way back. Fascinating. Do any adults know the hatchlings are not theirs, but adopt them anyway? Or do adults adopt other chicks to raise, say, if their parent died? Okay, so there's sort of two questions here that are related, but separate. In the cases of brood parasitism, right? And this is where we have birds like cuckoos or cowbirds that, where a female lays her egg or eggs in the nest of a host species. And those hosts, if it all works out, they unwittingly raise that chick as their own. That's how brood parasitism works. So the cuckoo is the parasite, and the warbler or whatever is the host.

And the way this whole thing works is that typically the host species do not recognize the parasitic chick as something foreign. And quite often, the parasitic egg and chick mimic the look of the host's egg or chick. So there's sort of some camouflage going on there. But even when the parasitic chick gets really large and looks different, its behavior often triggers instincts in the host, such that they really just feel compelled to feed it and take care of it. So it's not like, it doesn't seem like birds are, they don't have the awareness like, oh, I think I'll, this, I recognize this is not my chick, but you know what? I'm just going to adopt it anyway and take care of it.

It's really, they're operating on a deeper level, a more instinctual level, not making a conscious decision like that. Now that said, some host birds can recognize the parasitic egg or chick, and they actually do kick them out of the nest. They'll roll the egg over the edge or they'll evict the chick. And in that case, brood parasitism has been thwarted. It failed. But other host species just get fooled time and time again.

Now, then the secondary part of the question here is that do birds in general, you know, is there adoption among birds sometimes? And yes, that does happen. So, you know, not talking about brood parasitism, just birds in general, there are situations where a lost or orphaned chick might be fed by nearby adults if the chick is begging strongly enough. Or in colonial species like, say, gulls or penguins, sometimes the adults will feed chicks that wander into their territory, even if it's not their own chick. But again, I think this is not involving a conscious decision to take care of a bird that's not

your own. It's not an altruistic decision. It's more instinctual. It's like, oh, here's this little baby thing that's really cute and it's begging really loudly and that triggers my drive to put food in its mouth. Julius asks our next question, how successful are birds in pairing up? How many individuals stay involuntarily single during a breeding period? This most likely varies wildly across different species, but maybe there are examples for certain species or families. In particular, the common nightingale prompts this question for me every year. Males arrive early, conquer their and start singing loudly during the night to attract females that fly over during the night. This always leaves me wondering, how many males and females stay single?

Yeah, this is an interesting question. And of course, it is going to vary by species and by population. But at least in the case of the common nightingale, Lucinia Megarincos, a member of the family Musca Capiti, the old world flycatchers, there have been some studies. and in one particularly well-studied population in France, it looks like about 50% of the territorial males remained unpaired throughout the breeding season.

So half of the males, even the ones that have a territory, ended up not breeding. Now, we know less about the females, but presumably the proportion of females that breed is higher. Sexually mature females are a limited resource. They tend to have no trouble finding a male to breed with them, whereas males, they have, a little harder time hooking up.

Now, in terms of birds more generally, you know, we'd have to go species by species or group by group, but there are some factors that are going to affect the proportion of at least males that breed. So, for example, if the habitat is really good and there are lots of resources, those resources are abundant, it might be that more males, a larger proportion of the males and maybe females would breed in that environment because there's enough resource. resources for them. Whereas in low-quality habitat, maybe a much smaller proportion are going to

breed. The females might be more choosy, for example, in that case, and only take the very best males that are able to secure the limited resources. Some populations just naturally have skewed sex ratios. So if there tend to be more males in the population than females, then that's likely that there are going to be more males that don't breed. And then you have species with the different mating systems. So if there are species with extra pair mating or polygyny, in those cases, maybe more males, like greater proportion of males, breed because many of the females are breeding with multiple males and vice versa. Because in those cases, maybe even males that don't have a territory, like floaters, we call them floaters or satellite males, they

might still be able to contribute to the breeding population. Okay, our next question comes from Steve, he asks, what is meant by New World species when you hear about orders or families? So, for example, New World Finches. Right, so I've already been using those terms in this episode, haven't I? New World Parrots, Old World Fly Catchers. So this one's pretty simple. We're just referring to the two halves of the planet, right? The Old World and New World, just like we talk about them in human history or human geography.

So a bird species or order or family that's old world, that means it is found in Eurasia, Africa, or Australasia, in the eastern hemisphere. New world species, on the other hand, new world birds are in the Americas. So it's just terms that are biased to human history because, you know, once upon a time, Europeans didn't know about the quote-unquote new world. And so when we arrived, we called it that. And the terms stuck. It's kind of silly, kind of sounds silly today using those terms a little bit, but so it goes. All right. So the next question is from Dan, and Dan says,

Hey, Ivan, here is a JFF just for fun question. You often will tell us which species of birds are close relatives of a species you are focusing on. But which two extant species of bird are the most distantly related evolutionarily? All right. Well, I agree, Dan. This is a fun question. This is the kind of thing I love. I love talking about evolutionary biology and the avian tree of life and all that jazz. So the short answer is we don't know exactly which two species are the most distantly related, but we can narrow it down to a couple different groups of birds that are the most distantly related. So if we imagine the avian tree of life, right, the base of the tree at the very bottom, those are the most ancient lineages. That represents the common ancestor of all birds at the base, and then the lowest branches are the ones that branched off first, many, many millions of years ago, and so those are the oldest, the oldest lineages, the most ancient. And then if we look at the top of the tree and the outermost tips of the branches, those are lineages that have evolved more recently.

And we often use a tree as a metaphor, but biologists also create phylogenetic trees to represent the real branching evolutionary pattern found in a group of organisms. And what we can do is we can consider the distances between any pair of branches, right? So we take a branch at the lower right side of the tree, for example, and measure the distance from there to the upper left branch of the tree, something like that. And if we make all pairwise measurements of every, from one branch to every other branch, and do that all across the tree, we can see a range of distances. and the greater the distance, the more evolutionary and genetic distance between those organisms.

So, looking at birds, some of the earliest diverging lineages were the paleognats, and that's the group that includes ostriches, casawares, emus, kiwis, reas, those guys, those flightless birds. Their branch originated sometime around 100 million years ago. And then, at the mortal at the top of the tree and the tips of the branches, we can look at very recently evolved families of birds, for example, and those would be pasterine birds, because pasterine birds in general are more recently evolved, and then among them, which are the most recently evolved, and that would be something like the family

calcareedi, the long spurs and snow buntings. Research indicates that a family like that originated maybe only four to six million years ago. Okay, so pretty new on the scene, calcareidae. So if we measure the distance from some representative paleognath like an ostrich, all the way up to something like a snow bunting, there you have a couple birds that are about as distantly related as you can be as birds. I think that's a reasonable answer. Okay, the next question comes from Sydney. Are there any bird species that show generally positive reactions to human music. I've seen videos of pet parrots dancing to music or mimicking it, but have there been any scientific studies conducted to explore the enjoyment of music from other bird species,

wild or domestic? Right. Interesting. I've seen a lot of those videos where you have something like a cockatoo bopping its head to music in time with the beat. They're pretty cute and pretty endearing. So it seems like what we know is that birds that rely on vocal learning, so birds like parrots, songbirds, hummingbirds, some of them show behaviors that suggest they are responding to human music. So like those cockatoos bopping to the beat, that is a behavior called beat induction. And outside of humans and other vocal learning species, that's a really rare thing in the world. So it's pretty special that some birds can do that. So again, it seems like if you're looking at all birds, the ones that have the capacity for this are the ones that tend to be

vocal learners. Many other birds produce their calls and songs just instinctively, right? They don't learn them. But then when we come to the enjoyment part, right? What does enjoyment mean for a bird? Like, are we able as human scientists to measure that? And I think that's going to be very difficult. Sure, the birds seem to be having a good time rocking out to Michael Jackson or whatever the song is. Another one bites the dust by Queen, maybe. But it seems like, you know, we have to just, it would be difficult to say scientifically that the birds are actually enjoying what they're doing. So yeah, unfortunately, that's probably all I can say about that. Cecilia asks our next question. I would like to know more about the vocalizations of

Osprey, specifically what each vocalization represents. Okay, cool. Yeah, so I did talk about their calls a little bit in that episode, and it's a little hard to describe them using words, the sounds, of course. I tried during that episode to find good recordings to represent each call, and I didn't have a lot of luck with that. So in general, ospreys are making these kind of non-musical sounds. They're not very complex, and we might describe them as kind of whistle sounds, sharp, repeated whistles, like cheap, cheap, or yuk-yuk. And so in terms of the different types, there's the alarm call, which could be given by young Osprey in the nest or ospreys, and this could also be given by breeding adults. They give this alarm call when there's a predator nearby at some distance,

so that's the main function of that call. And then there's the solicitation call, and that is given exclusively by the female, and she can vary her call in intensity, and it becomes its most intense when the male is returning to the nest with a fish, because this is a call where she's trying to get him to feed her. And then we have the guard call, and this one is given by both a male and female.

It's a series of slow whistled notes that fall rapidly in pitch. It's been described as sounding sort of like a kettle being removed from a stove. And this one is given, again, it's called a guard call. It's given when there is maybe another osprey encroaching on the territory. And that one, the guard call, might be followed by the excited call or the screaming call as the perceived threat or intruder if that situation intensifies. So the excited call, the pitch gets more intense and becomes more like a squeal. And then in the screaming call, well, I guess it sounds a bit more like screaming.

But the screaming call can also be given by the male during his sky dance sexual display. So it's not always in relation to an intruding osprey. It could be something given during courtship as well. So there you go. I wish I could have a beautiful recording for each of those calls for you, but that's the best I can do for now. The next question is also related to vocalizations in birds. It comes from AISA. Do birds have conversations with each other?

Like, how did your day go, Papa or Mama Bird? So what we know about calls and vocalizations in birds is that they do have different calls that mean different things, right? We just talked about that with the Osprey. There's alarm calls, contact calls, calls, territory defense, food location. Some species have a dozen or more different calls that each mean different things that convey different information. And then some birds, during courtship, paired birds will duet. They will sing together, and that may reinforce their pair bonds or their claim to territory. So yeah, so there's definitely meaning in these, and they are,

it is communication, but is it language? Are these birds having conversations? And as far as we know, No, no. Bird communication is complex and meaningful, but it doesn't necessarily satisfy all the linguistic criteria that would define language. Linguists have a number of core properties they've identified for language, and the sounds of birds are definitely missing some of those. All right, I think we did it. I think we had about 19 questions there, and we got through them. Again, I just think it's so cool what people come up with. There are just infinite possibilities of questions we could ask about birds. And sometimes we don't have an answer, right? And that's what's wonderful about the world of ornithology. We will always have more questions

and more things to learn about birds. Sometimes I get a feeling like, oh, you know, how much longer can I do this podcast? Will there be enough topics to cover? And all I have to do is think about it for a few seconds. I'm like, oh, yeah, totally. I could do this probably till, you know, if I live to be 100 years old. I could probably keep coming up with interesting episodes for you. There's just so much to talk about with birds. So that does it for our Ask Me Anything episode for this round in summer 2025. Before I go, I want to give a shout out to my newest wonderful patrons on Patreon, Pat Frey, Nancy, Jason Harrison, Karen Littick, Sue, Brandt Schurenberg, Joe Clark, Eugene Lerner, and L.E.H. Thank you all so much for becoming members of my Patreon community. Your support

is so helpful. All right. Well, uh, that does it for this episode. I will see you next time and I'm going to go out and walk around in Tokyo, Japan. Sayonara.