The Science of Birds - Fascinating Things We Learned About Birds Last Year

Episode Date: January 6, 2024

This is Episode 89. I’m publishing it right at the beginning of 2024, and it's a review of some fascinating things that happened in the world of ornithology and bird conservation over the last 12 months, in 2023.Naturally, this isn’t an exhaustive review of every scientific discovery about birds in 2023. That would be too much. An exhaustive review would be, well, exhausting. Maybe not for you, but definitely for me.Instead, I’ll tell you about a handful of studies and projects that I think you’ll find interesting. These gems were hand-selected by me for your educational pleasure.Links of InterestColossal BiosciencesBirds, Not MosquitoesHow Wolbachia Can Save Forest Birds [VIDEO]Puzzle-solving caracaras [VIDEO]~~ Leave me a review using Podchaser ~~Link to this episode on the Science of Birds website 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 is episode 89. I'm publishing it right at the beginning of 2024, and it's a review of some fascinating things that happened in the world of ornithology and bird conservation over the last 12 months in 2023. I've done a review episode like this every year since I started the podcast, and it's always a good time. Naturally, this isn't an exhaustive review of every scientific discovery about birds in 2023.

That would be too much. An exhaustive review would be, well, exhausting. Maybe not for you, but definitely for me. Instead, I'll tell you about a handful of studies and projects that I think you'll find interesting. These gems were hand-selected by me for your educational pleasure. So let's get on with it. I present to you the 2023 Annual Review episode. The first bit of bird biology news I want to tell you about has to do with space weather.

Did you know that there's weather in space? There is. But not like clouds and rain and boring stuff like that. No, space weather includes super cool things like solar flares, plasma eruptions, solar wind, and geomagnetic storms. Space weather, in our corner of the universe, results from radiation and charged particles blasting outward from the sun and then slamming into Earth's magnetic field. This solar wind from the sun can cause trouble for satellites, spaceships, and city power grids. It can cause trouble for birds, too. Maybe you remember that birds use the Earth's magnetic field to navigate during migration. So anything that throws the magnetic field out of whack has the potential to screw up the navigation systems of birds. One major thing that can disrupt the magnetic field is, that's right, solar wind.

So the background science here is that space weather is a thing, and that our planet's magnetic field, in its normal, undisturbed state, is important for birds as they navigate during migration. And this brings us to a study published in 2023 in the journal Scientific Reports. The researchers in this study stated that they wanted to investigate, quote, whether vagrancy in migratory land birds is associated with disturbances in the Earth's magnetic field and or with increased solar activity. End quote. Vagrancy.

What is that? A vagrant bird is one that shows up somewhere that is way outside of the normal range for its species. For example, some famous vagrant birds just this last year included ancient merlets swimming around in the Great Lakes and American flamingos showing up in places like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in the wake of Hurricane Edalia. And as an example from Europe,

a storm last September blew a bunch of North American songbirds over to Ireland and Great Britain. The list of vagrants there included American cliff swallow, Black Bernian Warbler, Black and White Warbler, Magnolia Warbler, and Alder Flycatcher. Hundreds, if not thousands of vagrant birds like this, get reported every year across the globe. Ornithologists have been keen to figure out the causes of vagrancy for a long time.

So the researchers in this study took a stab at finding an answer. They looked at a massive data set of bird-banding records from across North America. 2.2 million records collected over almost 60 years from 152 migratory species. Each of those 2.2 million records represented a single, banded bird being found at one place at one time. For each record, the researchers came up with a measure of how vagranty, how vagrantastic it was. They called this measure the vagrancy index. It reflects how far outside a bird was from its normal range in both space and time. Then the scientists looked for associations, in other words, correlations

between the vagrancy index of a record and both the geomagnetic disturbance and solar activity at the location and date of the record. The scientists crunched the numbers using lots of sophisticated statistics. And what did they discover? The researchers found that yes, it appears that space weather

that causes disruptions to the Earth's magnetic field can cause birds to become disorough. oriented and veer off course. If they get way off course, they end up as strangers in a strange land and we call them vagrants. The strongest effect found in this study was for increased vagrancy among land birds during their fall migrations. Now, the idea that space weather could throw birds off during migration is not new, but this study provided some great evidence in support of that idea, that hypothesis. An interesting and unexpected result the scientists found was a negative relationship with solar activity and vagrancy during fall migration. The number of sunspots

that occurred in a given time period was used as a measure of solar activity, as a proxy for solar activity. During fall migration, the analysis revealed that vagrancy decreased as the number of sunspots increased. So on the one hand, you've got geomagnetic disturbances throwing birds off course. But when the sun gets all worked up and throws out more electromagnetic energy and particles, that seems to actually be associated with fewer vagrants. What's going on here? Well, we don't know for sure. But the authors of this paper offer a hypothesis. They suggest that during periods of high solar activity, the ability of birds to detect the magnetic field gets messed up. And that means birds would be less sensitive to any geomagnetic disturbances happening at the same time. The little

internal magnetic compasses, the magnetoreceptors of the birds, are temporarily broken. Therefore, there's sort of a silver lining because those magnetoreceptors can't disorient birds, can't lead them astray. So during periods of high solar activity, birds might simply take a break during migration. Or, instead of using cues from the magnetic field, birds might switch to using other navigational methods to continue on their journeys. Because a bird has other tools in its toolbox for finding its way on migration. Besides the obvious scientific value, I think this study gives us another beautiful example of how everything is connected in the universe. The sun is over 91 million miles away, but of course life on Earth depends on the sun's light and heat.

And when the sun sends random blasts of solar wind and radiation across those millions of miles, migrating birds can be affected so much that they end up flying to the wrong continent. And then birders like me get all excited. We grab our binoculars and rush out of our houses to go see the latest vagrant birds that have arrived on our shores. The Dodo. Raphis Cuculated. an icon of man-made extinction in the modern era.

The last dodoes were seen on their island home of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, way back in the mid-1600s. But what if we could bring the dodo back? What if? This next thing I want to tell you about is not a published research paper, but more of an announcement. It was announced in 2023 that we're bringing the dodo back, baby. With science!

Now, that might not be as cool as Justin Timberlake bringing sexy back, but still, it's pretty exciting. If it works, that is. And if you don't have any ethical objections to humans resurrecting long-extinct species. Anyway, who was it that announced this ambitious project? It's a private bioengineering company called International Genetic Technologies, or InGen for short. Wait, wait, no, that's not right. I was thinking of Jurassic Park. The real company is called Colossil Biosciences.

Colossil plans to bring back the dodo using genetic engineering and introduce the bird to its former habitat in Mauritius. So it's a simple two-part process. Step one, de-extinct the do-do. Step two, rewild the do-do. Re-wild as in drop-kick your newly minted do-dos out into the wild in the same places where they used to roam naturally. Too easy, right? Why hasn't anyone thought of this before?

Well, in all seriousness, people have thought of this before. A lot. I refer you to my previous mention of Jurassic Park. but only recently has the technology become available to make de-extinction a real possibility. So how does colossal biosciences plan to bring the dodo back to life? One option would be to bury some dead dodoes in a pet cemetery and rely on mystical forces to resurrect them as evil versions of themselves. That would be the Stephen King technique.

Sure, it wouldn't cost much money, but it would be. be just too spooky. No thank you, Mr. King. Colossal biosciences, thankfully, opted to take a more scientific approach. It goes like this. First, they need to construct the full genome of the Dodo. That part is already done. Colossal announced last spring that the genome has been sequenced using DNA from a Dodo skull belonging to a museum specimen. Cool. So far so good. Next, the scientists will compare the Dodo genome to the genomes of its two closest relatives, the Rodriguez Island Solitaire and the Nicobar Pigeon. The Solitaire is, sadly, also extinct.

But the nicotine, I mean the Nicobar Pigeon, is still alive. It has beautiful greenish, iridescent plumage, and lives in Southeast Asia and Indonesia. By comparing the genomes of these three species, the researchers will hopefully be able to identify the genes that are unique to the dodo. They will then use cutting-edge bioengineering wizardry to create a sort of hybrid genome, one that combines genes from the dodo and the Nicobar Pigeon. This genome will include all the genes necessary to produce the physical traits of a dodo. The hybrid genome will then get injected into primordial germ cells from the Nicobar Pigeon. Primordial germ cells are highly specialized cells in embryos that eventually develop into sperm or eggs.

Next, those germ cells now containing the engineered hybrid DNA will be transferred to some surrogate parents. The species of those surrogates will be none other than the world's most numerous bird. the domestic chicken. The modified germ cells will be inserted into both female and male chickens. The hans and roosters mate, the hens lay some eggs, and with lots of luck, some baby dodoes come busting out of the shells. And there shall be much rejoicing! Pretty wild, right?

This is totally the stuff of science fiction. If it works, it will be an incredible. achievement. Not only will we get the Dodo back, there will be new technology for the potential de-extinction of other birds and wildlife. And if Dodo populations are re-established on the islands of Mauritius, they could help restore important ecological processes. For example, these birds were valuable as seed dispersers for many native plants in Mauritius. Colossal biosciences aren't just planning on bringing the dodo back and then calling it a day. No, they have big plans to bring back other extinct animals. They want to de-extinct the woolly mammoth and the thylacine,

a.k.a. the marsupial we call the Tasmanian tiger. So maybe Jurassic Park isn't going to happen, but we might get a Pleistocene park, or maybe a holocene park, a place filled with critters that went the way of the dodo sometime in the last 20,000 years? I don't know about you, but I'd pay good money to visit Pleistocene Park. And I have to admit, I'm pretty excited about this dodo project. I think there is some amazing potential there. But how do you feel about it? Do you think bringing back the dodo is a good idea or a bad idea?

This de-extinction concept certainly raises some interesting ethical. questions. One concern I do have is that if we know we can de-extinct species, maybe we won't work that hard to keep them from going extinct in the first place. It's like, you know how there are those personal locator beacons that use GPS technology? People who hike off into remote areas can carry one of these small devices in their packs. If they get lost or hurt, they can simply tap a button and then here comes the rescue team. I've wondered, does carrying one of those locator beacons make people act a little more carelessly out in the wilderness? Do the devices give us a sense of security, a safety net so that we feel like we can take more risks?

If technology exists to bring back a species that went extinct, we might be a bit more careless about how we treat the many species that need help today. Maybe, maybe not. Who knows? I'm just speculating here. Also, I want to point out that on the website for colossal biosciences, when they're talking about bringing the dodo back, there's a line that begins with, to speed up production of the dodo. To speed up production?

Well, now I can't help but imagine a dodo factory. There's an enormous machine in the factory, a rusty monstrosity made of pistons and gears. And on one end of the machine, there's a conveyor belt with dodo after dodo after dodo emerging at a steady rate. There's a manager guy on the factory floor yelling to all the workers. Okay, people, we got to speed this thing up. We need more dodoes. These birds aren't going to make themselves.

You're standing in a beautiful rainforest high in the mountains on the island of Kauai. This, of course, is one of the Hawaiian islands. Hopping around in the trees are some red and yellow birds. These are endemic Hawaiian honey creepers. The Ievi, Apapane, Anianiao, and Kauai Amakihi. Idyllic scenes like this are now very rare across the Hawaiian archipelago. ago. Many of the wonderful endemic birds there have been driven to extinction. Hawaii's birds have been hammered by several human-caused threats, including rampant deforestation.

But one of the biggest threats is mosquitoes. Mosquitoes are not native to Hawaii. They showed up as stowaways on ships starting about 200 years ago. These insects carry bird-specific diseases like avian malaria. The endemic birds of Hawaii did not evolve any natural resistance to these diseases, so their populations have been devastated throughout the islands. Just in 2023, eight of Hawaii's native birds were declared to be officially extinct by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Several of the remaining species are very close to extinction.

If something isn't done about the mosquito problem, those birds may also disappear. Now, there's a lot I could say about Hawaii's birds and the threats they face. I'll go into more detail about all of this in a future podcast episode. But today, I'll tell you about some exciting news from 2023 that has to do with bird conservation in Hawaii, something that should give us some hope. The organization called Birds, Not Mosquitoes, announced last spring that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had approved an ambitious plan to wipe out the invasive mosquitoes plaguing Hawaii's birds. This plan was approved by the EPA and was also approved by Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars. Wipe them out. All of them.

Well, actually, the Birds Not Mosquitoes plan isn't necessarily to wipe out the mosquitoes, but to at least greatly reduce the mosquito populations, specifically the ones in the high-elevation forests, the last refuges for Hawaii's forest birds. Birds Not Mosquitoes is actually a coalition of partners, including state and federal agencies, private entities, and nonprofit organizations. So how do they plan to do it? How are they going to suppress mosquito populations in Hawaii? They're using something called the incompatible insect technique. Here's how it works.

There's a type of bacteria called walbachia. It occurs naturally in many insect species around the world, including mosquitoes. Walbachia infect and live as symbiotes inside the cells of their insect hosts. Importantly, when a male mosquito with one type or strain of Wolbachia bacteria mates with a female that has a different, incompatible strain in her cells, well, that female lays eggs that never hatch. They aren't viable. So the Bird's Not Mosquitoes project is going to raise a bunch of male mosquitoes in the lab and infect them with a certain Wolbachia strain. Then, heaps and heaps and Heaps of those males, millions of them, will be released into the wild in carefully selected locations in Hawaii, places where the native birds are threatened by mosquito-borne diseases.

Those habitats will be flooded with lab-grown male mosquitoes. So the wild females will be way more likely to mate with lab-grown males than the wild uninfected males. The result should be that the local mosquito population will plummet. and there will be multiple waves of lab-raised males being released. In time, this should seriously knock down the mosquito population. And I should mention that the male mosquitoes from the lab are not dangerous to birds because they don't bite. They don't suck blood from avian hosts, and so they don't transmit avian diseases.

It's only female mosquitoes that bite birds, and us. This project may be a last-ditch, desperate effort to save a handful of critically endangered birds. But applications of the incompatible insect technique have already proven successful in reducing mosquitoes that carry human diseases. The project in Hawaii will be the first time it's been used to help birds. There's a real chance this technique could make a big difference in the fight to save Hawaii's endemic forest birds. So the Wolbachia bacteria is being used as mosquito birth control. It's used as a biocontrol agent. Maybe you're worried that this whole thing could go awry.

I mean, we've all heard of how some other attempts at biocontrol in Hawaii and elsewhere have gone terribly wrong. How about those mongooses and cane toads? That didn't go well. The good news is that this technique with Wolbachia is an environmental friendly and scientifically proven use of biocontrol. It shouldn't, shouldn't do any harm beyond reducing mosquito populations, and it's not dangerous to people. That's why the Environmental Protection Agency made an emergency exemption to allow the use of Wolbachia in Hawaii. However,

there are some critics that oppose this project. They list a few of what they think are potential risks to the birds, the environment, and to people. Well, we'll see, I guess, because this project got the green light and it's full steam ahead. The Birds Not Mosquitoes project will occur in multiple phases. As I understand, it began just recently with mosquitoes being released on the island of Maui. Kauai is next with the plan to eventually expand the Wolbachia project to all the main islands of Hawaii. I was working in Hawaii just a year ago, leading a birding tour, and I got to see some of those amazing endemic honey creepers. I'm really hoping this effort to save them pays off. Fingers crossed. But hey, if they do go extinct, no worries. We can just

call up colossal biosciences and hire them to de-extinct Hawaii's birds. They'll set up a factory to speed up production. They'll crank out those colorful little honey creepers by the thousands, and before you know it, Hawaii will be positively swarming with them again. Just kidding, of course. Sarcasm! Are you afraid of new things? Like, do you cringe in terror when your friend tries to show you their new iPhone, or maybe you break out in a cold sweat while looking at the list of new shows on Netflix or Disney Plus or whatever. If so, you might be a neophobe. However, if you're the opposite, if you're attracted to and fascinated by new things, that would make you a neophile. You're

neophilic. If the latter is true, it turns out you're in good company, because some birds are also neophiles. A neophilic bird has a natural curiosity that makes it want to investigate new things in its environment. The striated caracara, Daptreus Australis, is one such bird species. And side note, some ornithological authorities place this species not in the genus Daptreus, but in the genus falcobinus. In any case, the striated caracara is a dark brown or blackish raptor. It prowls along rocky coasts and open coastal habitats on the islands of extreme southern South America. Its range includes the Falkland Islands, which are known as the Islas Malinas to the good people of Argentina. On the Falklands, a nickname for the Caracara is

Johnny Rook. Seriously, Johnny Rook. Maybe that'll be my stage name when I become a famous Hollywood actor someday. Coming to theaters this summer, Mission Impossible 17, starring an 82-year-old Tom Cruise and the incomparable Johnny Rook as the villain. Johnny Rook, the bird, the striated Kara-Kara, is one of ten Kara-Kara species in the world. They're all members of the falconid family, falconadie. The diet of the striated Karakara is broad, since this is an opportunistic generalist. It eats dead mammals and birds, mostly dead seabirds and their chicks. It eats insects and other arthropods, and live, healthy birds are also on the menu. Stryated caracaras will sometimes gang up to attack geese or cormorants. And it doesn't end there, the caracaras like to

rob other birds of their food, and they scavenge from human garbage. They'll even eat sea lion poop. It's true. I watched a video of them doing just that, kind of by accident. And honestly, I wish I could unwatch that video. But the damage is already done. I'm scarred for life. With a crazy diet like that, it's not surprising that striated caracaras are naturally curious. Neophilic. They like to explore and poke at just about everything around them, probably to see if it's something they can eat. And that brings us, at last, to an interesting research project which was published in 2023 in the journal Current Biology. The research team was based at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna

and led by a postdoc named Katie Harrington. Harrington and company were interested in the behavior of the striated caracaras on the Falkland Islands. They wanted to test the bird's intelligence. So they made these puzzle boxes, or what the researchers called innovation boxes. These were constructed of transparent material and had eight sides or divisions. Each division contained a different puzzle or task. When Akara Kara solved one of the eight tasks, it got a little piece of tasty meat as a reward.

Here are a few examples of the puzzles. There was the seesaw task where the bird had to tip a seat. seesaw down to make the reward fall forward. Then there was the cup task, where the food reward was hidden under a cup. In the tear task, a karakara had to bust through a piece of paper to get at the meaty reward. But the one that seemed hardest to me was the differential equations task. In this one, the karakaras had to solve complex math problems using only a piece of paper and a pencil. They weren't allowed to use any calculators or smartphone apps. Brutal, man.

Similar innovation boxes have been used by these researchers to test the intelligence of birds like the Tanimbar Karela, also known as Goffin's cockatoo, a species known for its high intelligence. Anyway, in this 2023 study in the Falkland Islands, an innovation box was left out in the bird's natural habitat, and a researcher hiding nearby observed, how the birds behaved towards the box. Time after time, a striated caracara would arrive on the scene, and, driven by its insatiable neophilia,

it would run toward the box enthusiastically and start playing around with it. Using its beak and feet, the bird probed and explored the eight tasks slash puzzles. In the end, 15 individual Karakaras discovered the box and did their best to solve the test. Every bird solved at least one task, but amazingly, ten of the fifteen karakaras solved all of the tasks. Well, all of them except the differential equations task. That one was a bit too challenging, and also I made it up. The individual birds got faster at solving the tasks with repeat trials.

These striated karakaras, in some cases even outperformed Tanimbar Karela's. which again are known to be super-smart birds. This is a big deal because now we know that these falcons are among the few non-corvid and non-parate species to show such quick and innovative problem-solving skills in the wild. Corvids, as a reminder, are birds in the family corvety, crows, ravens, magpies, and the like. With the striated caracaras, the researchers were actually amazed at how, well the cheeky birds performed in solving the puzzles, and how eager they were to take on the challenge. Johnny Rooks are curious and playful, so much so that they can be destructive. They share

these traits with the Kia of New Zealand, that mountain-dwelling parrot species that's known to be highly intelligent and super-destructive to all things man-made. Anyway, it's looking like the striated Karakara might be a great new model species for studying intelligence and problem-solving in birds. And that's pretty cool. But the question remains, why is this species so intelligent? We don't know for sure yet. But Katie Harrington and her team suggest that the social and environmental challenges faced by these Karakaras might have, through natural selection, endowed them with their street smarts. The chilly, wind-blown Falkland Islands region is a tough place to live.

Being intelligent, neophilic, and flexible might have helped striated Caracaras survive and thrive in that environment. Space weather, screwing with bird navigation, bringing the sexy dodo back into existence, Wolbachia bacteria helping to save birds in Hawaii, and hyper-intelligent falcons in the Falklands. I hope you found those stories as interesting as I did. But of course, a lot more happened in 2023

regarding scientific research on birds and with bird conservation. So how about we keep this party going? It's time for the speed round. I'll tell you about a few more studies that were published in 2023, but we'll move through them at a crisp pace. I'm limiting myself to about 100 words to describe each of the following studies. Keeping it succinct like that is kind of a challenge for me. I like words and my normal mode is to jabber on and on. But all right, here we go. Strap in and get ready for some high-speed bird nerd action.

Some small fossilized bird feathers from 99 million years ago were discovered in a piece of amber. They belonged to a juvenile from a lineage called anantiornithes. This was a very diverse group of birds, until that is, every last one of them went extinct, on that fateful day 65 million years ago. the day some of us now celebrate as asteroid day. You know, the day that killed off the non-avian dinosaurs, wiping the slate clean, and giving our mammalian ancestors the chance to take over the world?

Anyway, these fossil feathers in that piece of amber, scientists could tell they had been molted all at once. This suggests that young an antioanathies rapidly shed all their body feathers simultaneously as they replaced their plumage. Being sort of naked for a time might have made these birds vulnerable to the cold conditions that followed in the asteroid's wake. And that might be why the anantiornithes went extinct. The first ever fossilized footprints of a terror bird were discovered in the Patagonia region of Argentina. The beautifully preserved tracks were made about 8 million years ago by a medium-sized

terror bird that weighed approximately 120 pounds or 55 kilograms. One of the surprising things about this discovery is that the bird was basically didactal. On each foot, its body weight was supported by only two toes, rather than three as scientists had previously suspected. The third toe was raised off the ground a bit and was tipped by a large wicked claw. Great for pinning down a struggling prey animal. More smart birds, Corvids in this case. Scientists studying wild Eurasian jackdaws, Corvus Monejula, wanted to see if these birds could keep track of which other jackdaws they interacted with in the past. And would they switch who they hang out with if it means they have a better chance to get a mealworm treat? An experiment proved that to be the

case. A Eurasian jackdaw will bail on a friend if chilling with that particular homie doesn't result in a tasty reward. The birds quickly learned to find the right other birds to be friends with in order to get a treat from the experimental apparatus. But, importantly, the birds often chose to go hungry rather than abandon their lifelong partners or their close relatives. Small birds are getting smaller. Well, at least that seems to be what's happening in North and South America. A study using body measurements for,

over 86,000 individuals from 129 species revealed a trend across 40 years of shrinking body size and increasing wing length. This effect is strongest for small birds. The best guess for what's happening is that this is a response to climate change. It's still uncertain, but maybe smaller bodies and longer wings offer advantages in a warming world. 120 million years ago, Australia was still attached to Antarctica. And that was a problem because, well, Antarctica is gross. And if you don't know why I would say that, just go back and listen to all of my previous podcast episodes, and then you'll get it. Anyway, the combined continental landmass was centered on the South Pole 120 million years ago.

And it seems birds had already evolved the behavior of migrating poleward during the sunny days of summer. Last year, the oldest ever fossilized bird tracks were discovered in Australia. They date to, that's right, 120 million years ago. The tracks represent at least eight different bird species. And it looks like the birds were hunting for invertebrate prey on a muddy river floodplain. Awesome. Even more smart birds. And in this case, very cheeky birds.

A study by researchers in the Netherlands found examples of birds making nests out of a highly unlikely material. Some carrion crows and Eurasian magpies, both corvids, by the way, have decided that using bird-deturring materials like anti-bird spikes for nest construction is a fabulous idea. The birds rip full strips of the spikes off of rooftops and railings to make their own little spiky roofs on their nests. Other pointy things like nails and used drug needles have been used in similar ways by innovative magapies. Maybe the birds use objects like this as a defensive perimeter to protect their eggs and nestlings. All right, so there you go, folks, some interesting research and news from the bird world over the last 12 months. How was your 2023? I really hope it was a good year for you.

More importantly, I hope you're doing great today. I can say that 2023 was pretty groovy for me overall. I had some major unexpected life changes, but I rolled with them well enough. One of the biggest changes for me was that I moved back to the city, to Portland, Oregon. For quite a long time before that, I was living out in the country. countryside, west of Portland, surrounded by forests and nature. My new digs are right in the

middle of the urban action. But there are still some good birds around. I've got California's scrub jays, lesser goldfinches, Anna's hummingbird, cedar wax wing, western tanager, red-breasted nut hatch, and so on. And hey, what I lost in bird species diversity by moving to the city, I gained in diversity of coffee shops, food trucks, and creative graffiti. So, yeah, life is good. The Science of Birds podcast reached the three-year mark a few months ago. I published 21 episodes last year and reached the milestone of 1 million downloads across all my episodes. That was a pretty amazing thing to see happen.

I'm super stoked about 2024. on the personal side I've got some new habits and goals like exercising and meditating regularly getting better sleep and using my phone a lot less and of course I have big plans for the science of birds I'll keep cranking out episodes as fast as I can like a factory cranking out dodoes and I have some more fun stuff coming down the pike later this year so stay tuned Thanks to everyone who has emailed me or written reviews for the show. You've said so many nice and heartfelt things. Your kind words have really touched me.

And I want to give an enormous, enthusiastic thank you to those of you who are helping me with support through Patreon. I could not have gotten this far without you, seriously. My newest wonderful patrons are Sonia S., Kyle Crawford, David Weeks, Steve Grace, and Ari Bizarari. You guys rock. I deeply appreciate the help. If you are not yet a supporter,

but you're thinking that becoming one might make you feel all fuzzy inside, you know, because you did a good thing, please go check out my Patreon page at patreon.com slash science of birds. There's also a link in the show notes that'll take you to the same place. You can shoot me an email

if you have something you'd like to share with me, maybe an insightful comment about the podcast. Whatever you'd like to write about, my email address is Ivan at Scienceofbirds.com. Now, I may be slow to respond, but I'm quick to anger. This is episode 89. You can check out the show notes for the episode along with some hand-cureated photos of birds I talked about today. All of that on the Science of Birds website, Science of Birds.com. This is Ivan Philipson. wishing you a lovely day and a lovely year ahead. Peace.